21st century classical music

21st-century classical music is art music, in the contemporary classical tradition, that has been produced since the year 2000.

Some 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, alongside its related technology, are important resources in this respect. Attitudes towards female composers are also changing.

Like the term 20th-century classical music, "21st-century classical music" does not refer to a historical style period in music—in the sense that Baroque and Romantic do—but rather to all art music produced since the year 2000. Musicologists generally say that we are in the contemporary music period—a term which covers art music written from around 1975 or 1945, depending on the historian's perspective.

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; Reich and Glass developed minimalism; Varèse, , 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; and music generally became more and more diverse in style as the century progressed.

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