«New dilettantism» like one of the strategies of metamodern music

The article proposes the term «new dilettantism», which defines one of the dominant strategies in music of recent decades: it manifests itself in the use of average, commonly used, predicable intonations, the poetics of the insignificant, the preference for the slow and quiet over the fast and loud, the idea of an «imperfect opus», and finally, in the erosion boundaries between «professional» and «non-professional». «New dilettantism» is one of the facets of musical metamodernism – a direction that offers simplicity instead of complexity, work with «banal» material instead of searching an individual composer’s language, semantic oscillation instead of technical centrism. In the broad sense, the field of «new dilettantism» can include such phenomena as the music and views of Morton Feldman, who openly criticized complex music, the Wandelweiser group, which introduced quiet sonorities into academic music, not held together by a formal idea, as well as radically simplified works of Russian composers Sergei Zagniy and Kirill Shirokov in their own language. To derive general patterns that allow us to talk about new amateurism, the cultural-historical method and the method of holistic analysis are used: each of the mentioned works is considered in the broadest cultural context.The main conclusions of the study are the following: the trends of metamodern art of recent decades allow us to speak of “new amateurism” (new dilettantism), as the most important creative strategy; “new amateurism” (new dilettantism), in the broadest sense is opposed to the “technocentrism” characteristic of music in the second half of the twentieth century; works of the “new amateurism” appeal to “childish”, “weak” and “banal” material, contrasting it with the “well-developed”, “complex”, “perfect” material of the era of the second avant-garde.

new dilettantism, new music, banal material, metamodern, imperfect opus, weak style, poetics of the insignificant, Feldman, Zagny, Shirokov