Music After the Fall: Modern Composition and Culture Since 1989

by Tim Rutherford-Johnson

Cultural history works in two directions: works of music, or any other art, are both products of their time and contributions toward it. That is to say, artists invent new things as much as they respond to existing ones.

Neo-tonality has been described as an “antimodernist” tendency,15 an attempt to restore the language and idiom—and presumably prestige and popularity—of nineteenth-century symphonism.