21st-century classical music is art music in the contemporary classical tradition that has been produced since the year 2000. A loose and ongoing period, 21st-century classical music is defined entirely by the calendar and does not refer to a musical style in the sense of Baroque or Romantic music.
Many elements of the previous century have been retained, including postmodernism, polystylism, and eclecticism, which seek to incorporate elements of all styles of music irrespective of whether these are "classical" or not—these efforts represent a slackening differentiation between the various musical genres. Important influences include rock, pop, jazz, and the dance traditions associated with these. The combination of classical music and multimedia is another notable practice in the 21st century; the Internet and its related technology are important resources in this respect. Attitudes towards female composers are also changing. Artificial intelligence is also being used to create music.
Overview During the 20th century, composers started drawing on an ever wider range of sources for inspiration and developed a wide variety of techniques. Debussy became fascinated by the music of a Vietnamese theatre troupe and a Javanese gamelan ensemble, and composers were increasingly influenced by the musics of other cultures. Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School developed the dodecaphonic system and serialism. Varèse, Stockhausen, and Xenakis helped pioneer electronic music. Jazz and the popular music of the West became increasingly important—both as influences on art music and as genres of their own. La Monte Young experimented with performance art; John Cage applied the I Ching to his music; Reich and Glass developed minimalism. Music generally became more and more diverse in style as the century progressed.
This trend has continued into the 21st century: in 2009 BBC Music Magazine asked 10 composers, mostly British (John Adams, Julian Anderson, Henri Dutilleux, Brian Ferneyhough, Jonathan Harvey, James MacMillan, Michael Nyman, Roxanna Panufnik, Einojuhani Rautavaara, and John Tavener), to discuss the latest trends in western classical music. The consensus was that no particular style is favoured and that individuality is to be encouraged. The works of each of these composers represent different aspects of the music of this century, but these composers all came to the same basic conclusion: music is too diverse to categorise or limit. In his interview with the magazine, Dutilleux argued that "there is only good or bad music, whether serious or popular". The music of the 21st century is mostly post-modernist, drawing on many different styles and open to a great many influences. Yet it is still a struggle to encourage the public to listen to contemporary music. Dutilleux, Harvey, Rautavaara, and Tavener have since died.
Styles and influence Post-modernism continues to exert an influence on composers in the 21st century. Styles developed in the 20th century, such as minimalism (Philip Glass, Michael Nyman, Steve Reich), postminimalism (Louis Andriessen (died 2021), Gavin Bryars, John McGuire, Pauline Oliveros (died 2016), Julia Wolfe), New Complexity (James Dillon, Brian Ferneyhough), and New Simplicity (Wolfgang Rihm) continue to be developed.
Polystylism and musical eclecticism are growing trends in the 21st century. They combine elements of diverse musical genres and compositional techniques, often alien to the composers' own culture, into a unified and coherent body of works. Composers have often started their musical career in one discipline and have later migrated to or embraced others, while retaining important elements from the former discipline. In some cases, a composer now labelled "classical" may have started out in another discipline. For example, a specific label for John Zorn's music is difficult to choose: he started out as a performance artist and moved through various genres including jazz, hardcore punk, film music, and classical, and often embraces Jewish musical elements. All of these diverse styles appear in his works. Julian Anderson combines elements from many different musical genres and practices in his works. Elements of modernism, spectral music, and electronic music are combined with elements of the folk music of Eastern Europe and the resulting works are often influenced by the modality of Indian ragas. His large-scale Book of Hours for 20 players and live electronics premiered in 2005. Tansy Davies's music also fuses elements of pop and classical music. Prince and Iannis Xenakis are both major influences. Kati Agócs' work for chorus and orchestra The Debrecen Passion (2015) surrounds settings of poetry by Szilárd Borbély with mystical texts of Medieval Latin, Hungarian, and Georgian origin, as well as a Kabalistic prayer.
Composers are influenced from around the world. For example, in 2002, La Monte Young, along with Marian Zazeela and senior disciple Jung Hee Choi, founded the Just Alap Raga Ensemble which performs Indian classical music of the Kirana Gharana and merges the traditions of Western and Hindustani classical music, Young applying his own compositional approach to traditional raga performance, form, and technique.Young, L., & Zazeela, M. (2015). "The Just Alap Raga Ensemble, Pandit Pran Nath 97th Birthday Memorial Tribute, Three Evening Concerts of Raga Darbari". MELA Foundation, New York.
Other composers have also drawn upon diverse cultural and religious influences. For example, John Tavener (died 2013) drew his inspiration from eastern mysticism and the music of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and James MacMillan is influenced by both traditional Scottish music and his own Roman Catholic faith. In a more abstract manner, religious and mystical associations are also found in the works of Sofia Gubaidulina, a devout member of the Russian Orthodox church. The influence of electronic music, numerology, unusual instrumentation, and improvisational techniques are also apparent. Marxist songs serve as basic material for Konrad Boehmer in many works. Roman Turovsky-Savchuk is influenced by his Ukrainian heritage and Baroque music. He composes for the lute, orpharion, and torban, and is an advocate of musical historicism and has collaborated with Hans Kockelmans and the New York Bandura Ensemble led by Julian Kytasty. Tan Dun, best known for his scores for the movies Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and Hero, attempts to connect Buddhist, Christian and other cultures in his works. His works often incorporate audiovisual elements
Composers find inspiration from other sources, too. The music of John Luther Adams (an Alaskan environmentalist and no relation to the other John Adams discussed in this article) is informed by nature, especially that of his native Alaska. His Pulitzer Prize-winning symphony Become Ocean was inspired by climate change. Frank's House by Andrew Norman tries to evoke the architecture of Frank Gehry's house in Santa Monica.
Péter Eötvös employed a variety of timbres and sound-worlds within his music. Extended techniques such as over-pressure bowings coexist with lyrical folk songs and synthesized sounds. He died in 2024.
Composers have even created mashups, more commonly found in pop music. Jeremy Sams' The Enchanted Island is one example: he draws from Handel, Vivaldi, Rameau, and other Baroque composers to create a combination of pasticcio and musical collage, which also combines the baroque and the modern in its staging and costume. According to A History of Western Music, "it calls into question ideas of authorship and originality, making it a thoroughly postmodern work".
The music of Osvaldo Golijov often combines the classical, modern, and popular traditions within a single work juxtaposing contrasting styles—an important trend in the music of the 1960s onward.
Genre developments Opera John Adams, George Benjamin, Osvaldo Golijov, Cristóbal Halffter (died 2021), James MacMillan, Einojuhani Rautavaara (died 2016), Kaija Saariaho (died 2023), Karlheinz Stockhausen (died 2007), and Judith Weir have all made important contributions in this field: Licht, Stockhausen's cycle of seven operas, begun in 1977, was completed in 2003 with the opera Sonntag aus Licht. Weir's opera Armida was premiered on television, rather than on stage. Channel 4 commissioned the work in 2005. The libretto, also written by Weir, updates Torquato Tasso's 1581 epic poem, La Gerusalemme liberata, setting it in a modern Middle-East conflict which alludes to but never specifically mentions the Iraq War. Weir's opera calls for props that could not be used practically in an opera house, such as a helicopter. Doctor Atomic by Adams (which covers Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project, and the building of the first atomic bomb). Oppenheimer's aria Batter my heart blends post-minimalist techniques with an expressive vocal line recalling 19th-century opera. In October 2008, just before the premiere, Adams told BBC Radio 3 that he had been blacklisted by the U.S. Homeland Security department and immigration services, probably because of controversy surrounding his 1991 opera The Death of Klinghoffer, which was based on the hijacking of the passenger liner Achille Lauro by the Palestinian Liberation Front in 1985 and the hijackers' murder of disabled 69-year-old Jewish-American passenger Leon Klinghoffer. Saariaho's L'amour de loin uses her spectralist-influenced orchestral style to tell the story of 12th-century troubadour Jaufré Rudel. In the last tableau of Act IV, the modernist technique of cells based on arrays of semitones and tritones within perfect fifths is applied to the melodic material, while troubadour songs are evoked in the patterns of repeating phrases and the melodic style of short phrases focussed around certain pitches. Thus, 12th- and 20th-century musical ideas are fused in a unique manner. The Spanish composer Halffter wrote his second and third operas, Lazarus (2008) and Schachnovelle (2013), both for the Kiel Opera House. In 2023, Canadian composer Airat Ichmouratov, composed an opera The Man Who Laughs to a libretto in french by poet Bertrand Laverdure, adapted from an eponymous novel. Commissioned by Festival Classica, it was premiered on May 31, 2023, in Montreal, Canada Golijov's Grammy-award winning Ainadamar (2005) is about the murder in 1936 of Spanish poet Federico García Lorca by the Fascists. The score combines computer music, musique concrète and modernist dissonance with elements from Flamenco music, Latin American popular music and Cuban rhythms. Written on Skin by Benjamin, The Sacrifice by MacMillan and Rasputin by Rautavaara are other representative works. Animal Farm is a 2023 English-language opera by Russian composer Alexander Raskatov based on George Orwell's 1944 novella of the same name. Mináǧi kiŋ dowáŋ: A Zitkála-Šá Opera (English: My Spirit Sings) is a 2022 operatic film about the life and work of Yankton Dakota author and activist Zitkála-Šá. It is considered by some to be the first opera that uses Dakota language. The opera was composed by Lyz Jaakola (Fond du Lac Anishinaabe), directed by Sequoia Hauck (Anishinaabe, Hupa), and produced by Kelly Turpin of An Opera Theater (AOT). Jaysalynn Western Boy is one of four actors to play Zitkála-Šá. It premiered October 12, 2022 at Water Works Park in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Chamber opera is an important type of opera developed in the mid-twentieth century. They use smaller scale forces than regular operas. Examples from the 21st century include Pauline by Tobin Stokes (libretto by Margaret Atwood), The Corridor by Harrison Birtwistle, El Caballero de la triste figura by Tomás Marco and The Sound of a Voice by Philip Glass.
Ballet