Listening to Music Since 1980

Alex Ross’s superb book The Rest is Noise has a great web­site adden­dum, full of lis­ten­ing exam­ples. Of par­tic­u­lar inter­est, see this page which fea­tures numer­ous sound exam­ples from music since 1980. I am espe­cially struck by the piece by Goli­jov, which hardly sounds like “clas­si­cal” music at all. The Ger­ard Grisey excerpt sounds as if it was lifted from the TV show “Lost,” which is not intended as faint praise! And I con­tinue to be excited by the music I hear from Sofia Gubaidulina.

The larger philo­soph­i­cal ques­tion, as you lis­ten: where’s the joy? Where’s the uptempo music?