Books in the Elements in Music since 1945 series

This Element considers intersections of ambiguity, authority, and identity in works with open notations, where performers play a radical and active role as co-creators. Tristan McKay develops a semiotic approach to open notation analysis and demonstrates it with in-depth analyses of works by Earle Brown, Will Redman, and Leah Asher.

This Element offers a critique of empathy's ethical imperative of radical openness and positions the acknowledgement of moral responsibility as a fundamental component of music's capacity to transform conflict through case studies of music and conflict transformation in Australia and Canada.

After 1951, the discourse surrounding both the Darmstadt courses in particular and European New Music more broadly shifted away from a dodecaphonic vocabulary in favour of concepts such as 'punctual music', 'post-Webern music', and 'static music', all collected under the newly-christened unity of the Darmstadt School. This study proposes a genealogy of the Darmstadt School through the institutional influence and writings of Herbert Eimert. It demonstrates that Eimert's understanding of music history - whereby technical procedures are universalised as the acme of historical progress - was adopted as the institutional discourse of New Music in Europe, and remains central to both textbook and critical scholarly accounts which attempt to make sense of the avant-garde after World War II.