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Classical music
Definition Compositional styles, composers, and
works of art music
The 1990’s generally saw its core audience in America con-
tinue to age. Live performance continued to enjoy sustain-
able levels of support, with the rash of orchestra bankrupt-
cies that plagued the 1980’s abating during the economic
boom of the middle and late 1990’s.
While the classical artist was not hit as hard economi-
cally by Internet downloading as the popular music
field, this situation reflects an aging demographic
for classical music less likely to use the Internet and
the fact that classical music sales were already small
in scope as the decade began.
Some professional organizations for classical mu-
sic performance considered interesting new ap-
proaches to attract a younger audience. The Los
Angeles Philharmonic, for example, employed mav-
erick stage director Peter Sellars to coordinate per-
formances of orchestral music early in the decade
with the intent of inviting a more diverse and youth-
ful audience to a reinvented concert. This effort and
others like it met with relative success. The vast ma-
jority in the field of classical music performance,
however, chose to follow a more traditional path and
continue to concertize along traditional lines.
Asia, long a growing player in both classical mu-
sic production and consumption, provided hope
for sustained interest and economic vigor for the
field. Asian students increased per capita in Ameri-
can schools of music, including and perhaps espe-
cially at the most elite conservatories. Asian cities
and populations of Asian immigrants in the United
States became a key new market for Western classi-
cal music.New Developments in Composition The 1990’s saw
the tendency of postmodernity influencing musical
composition increase enormously. Postmodernity in
music often takes the form of privileging processes
over final products and play over purpose, using his-
tory through appropriations of past musical works
and styles, blurring boundaries between popular
and classical, and often moving irony to the fore-
ground of works.
John Adams’s postmodernism was thoroughly re-
vealed during the 1980’s in his critically and artisti-
cally successful operaNixon in China(1986). It was
difficult for audiences to see a Richard Nixon look-
alike singing an opera aria without enjoying the
irony. Adams continued to work in this area with
The Death of Klinghoffer(1991), an opera about the
1984 hijacking of an Italian cruise ship by Palestin-
ian terrorists. WhileNixon in Chinahad been ironic,
the serious tone ofThe Death of Klinghofferbrought
controversy along with its difficult subject matter.
The American premiere took place in San Francisco
and was met with protests. The Los Angeles Civic
Center Opera, a co-commissioning company, can-
celed its premiere. The work falls well into the ideals
of postmodern music for blending past approaches,
such as Johann Sebastian Bach cantatas, with later
procedures in harmony. Adams met more success
with works on less controversial subjects, such as his
vast and haunting Naïve and Sentimental Music
(1998).
By placing a premium on melody, Adams contin-
ued to distance himself from the serious academic
music that dominated the new music scene from the
1950’s through the early 1980’s. Stylistically, Adams
rifled the past, juxtaposing materials from such dis-
parate styles as American minimalism and late nine-
teenth century chromatic harmony. These elements
seemed to have nothing in common, but in Adams’s
hands both lost their original purpose and playfully
united to provide a clever and winning synthesis.
While Adams approached classical music as an in-
sider thoroughly and rigorously trained at Harvard
University and for many years a professor of music at
the San Francisco Conservatory, his postmodern
colleague John Zorn, a proud college dropout, came
to music from a radically different background. As a186 Classical music The Nineties in America