Music in the 21st century

The BBC Music Magazine asked 10 composers for its October 2009 edition, mostly British, to discuss the latest trends in Western Classical music. The consensus was that no particular style is favoured and that individuality is to be encouraged. The magazine interviewed Brian Ferneyhough, Michael Nyman, Einojuhani Rautavaara, Henri Dutilleux, John Adams, James MacMillan, Jonathan Harvey, Julian Anderson, John Tavener, and Roxanna Panufnik. The works of each of these composers represent different aspects of the music of this century but these composers all came to the same basic conclusion: music is too diverse to categorise or limit. In his interview with the magazine, Dutilleux argued that "there is only good or bad music, whether serious or popular".

Anderson, a British composer, uses popular "house music" or "club music" as the basis for many of his compositions. Indeed works such as Khorovod (1994) seem to anticipate the modern trend. His music combines the music of traditional cultures from outside the Western concert tradition with elements of modernism, spectral music and electronic music. His large-scale Book of Hours for 20 players and live electronics was premiered in 2005.
Tavener, another British composer, draws his inspiration from eastern mysticism and the music of the Orthodox Church .

Nyman is an English Minimalist best known for his film score for The Piano. He often borrows from Baroque music and is an acclaimed composer of operas, including (in this century) Facing Goya and Sparkie. The latter work draws its inspiration from a talking budgie. His shorter works often written for his own Michael Nyman Band.
Often styled the "Father of New Complexity", English composer Brian Ferneyhough has recently started writing works which reference those of past composers. His Dum transisset are based on Elizabethan composer Christopher Tye's works for viol; the fourth string quartet references Schönberg. His opera, Shadowtime (libretto by Charles Bernstein), is based on the life of the German philosopher Walter Benjamin. It was premiered in Munich on 25 May 2004.

Rautavaara is a Finnish composer writing in a variety of forms and styles. His opera Rasputin was premiered in 2003 and he has written a large—and rapidly growing—body of orchestral and chamber works.

Active since the mid-1940s, the French composer Dutilleux follows the Impressionist and Neoclassical tradition of Maurice Ravel, Claude Debussy, and Albert Roussel. His latest works include Correspondances and Le Temps L'Horloge, both of which are song cycles.

Adams is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer with strong roots in Minimalism. His best-known recent works include On the Transmigration of Souls (2002), a choral piece commemorating the victims of the 11 September 2001 attacks (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2003) and Doctor Atomic (2005), which covers Robert Oppenheimer, the Manhattan Project, and the building of the first atomic bomb. In October 2008, Adams told BBC Radio 3 that he had been blacklisted by the U.S. Homeland Security department and immigration services.

MacMillan is a Scottish composer and conductor influenced by both traditional Scottish music and his own Roman Catholic faith. His most recent works include operas (The Sacrifice premiered in 2007) and a St John Passion (2008).

Harvey, a British composer, was Composer-in-Association with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra from 2005-2008. His works this century include the large-scale cantata, Mothers shall not Cry (2000) written for the BBC Proms Millennium, and the orchestral works Body Mandala (2006) and Speakings (2008).
Polish composer Roxanna Panufnik is one of the growing number of important female composers working in the 21st-century and is the daughter of Sir Andrzej Panufnik. Her output includes operas, ballets, music theatre, choral works, chamber music, and music for film and television. Her most widely performed works include Westminster Mass, commissioned for Westminster Cathedral Choir on the occasion of Cardinal Hume's 75th birthday, The Music Programme, an opera for Polish National Opera's millennium season which received its UK premiere at the BOC Covent Garden Festival, and settings for solo voices and orchestra of Vikram Seth's Beastly Tales - the first of which was commissioned by the BBC for Patricia Rozario and City of London Sinfonia. The 2008/9 season has seen no less than 18 premieres of her works in nine different countries, performed by such diverse artists such as the Mobius Ensemble, Tasmin Little with the Orchestra of the Swan, The Sixteen, the Dante Quartet , the Choir of King's College Cambridge, and Valery Gergiev conducting the World Orchestra for Peace.