Mendes, Gilberto
Music should humbly try to give pleasure. Beauty should be sensitive; it should give us immediate enjoyment, it should wheedle its way into our minds without any effort. — Debussy
Is it possible to love contemporary music? Some years ago, a bunch of composers decided to rebound with the old concept of pleasure. Thanks to them, we can start loving contemporary music again.
This new alliance was not easy to achieve: since the Second World War, leading composers were attracted by intellectual compositional processes. Dodecaphonism and serial music expressed a rage to develop logical systems. The audience didn’t follow and contemporary music concerts became ghettos for a nomenklatura of commissioned composers. But classical music is a language, and any langage grows with evolution while it is killed with revolution.
For the new consonant composers, the problem of the kind of language is not a problem. The point is that music only requires the understanding of both musicians and listeners. This is what New Consonant Music is all about: if you have something to say, just say it!
Who are these composers? The pioneers are Henryk Mikolaj Gorecki, Steve Reich, Michael Nyman, John Adams or Phil Glass. But we want to make you discover many others like Frédéric Devreese, Dominique Dupraz, Piotr Lachert, Michel Lysight, Gilberto Mendes or Georgs Pelecis among many others.