Overview_

Picture a composer and the image that comes to mind is likely someone dead: male, tormented, wearing lace. Composing is the artform we have most thoroughly consigned to the past – a museum of finished objects by absent authors. It is also, right now, one of the most alive. Contemporary composers are as likely to be found writing computer code, building their own instruments, or performing with turntables as they are to be composing for orchestra or making work for the operatic stage.

Built on a curated selection of more than one hundred in-depth interviews with composers – including George Benjamin, John Luther Adams, Shiva Feshareki, and Anna Thorvaldsdóttir – each of the book’s ten chapters gathers two to four composers around a single question: how has the internet reshaped listening? What can music do about the climate emergency? Is sincerity still possible? Whose voices can opera make heard?

This is a book about composers, but its subjects – the issues those composers are grappling with – extend much further. Above all, the book argues that at a moment when listening is fragmented and algorithmically mediated, this music asks something of its listener – attention, participation, laughter, sometimes discomfort – and gives back a sharper sense of how the world is, and how it might be.