Eleanor Selfridge-Field and Edmund Correia, Jr.
© 1994 Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities
Reproduced by the IEEE Technical Committee on Computer Generated Music by permission


Category 6. Recent Music

Much music written since 1950 has attempted to break out of the bounds imposed by traditional notation. Durations may be somewhat discretionary. Numbers of repetitions may be the same. Pitches may slide or bend rather than progress by step. Traditional notation is poorly suited to the needs of both avant garde music composed for natural instruments and for electronic music. It is impossible to cover the topic at all adequately here. The number of idiosyncrasies is very great, there is as little standardization of their notation as there was in the Middle Ages, and copyright problems put almost everything that is in print out of bounds with explicit permission required to reproduce it.

To give the flavor of recent music, however, we provide this very limited set of examples.


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