Abstract
During the second half of the 1970s and ’80s, a number of composers who had previously pursued what has sometimes been referred to as a ‘hard-line modernist stance’ began to ‘soften’. A well-known example is György Ligeti, whose music began to make reference to traditional tonality and Romantic gestures in works such as the Horn Trio of 1982 and the piano Preludes of 1985. Another example is Krzysztof Penderecki, who, as Adrian Thomas puts it in Grove Online, ‘relaxed his compositional language in the mid-1970s to give lyrical melody the central role in both his vocal and instrumental music’. In England Peter Maxwell Davies talked about a kind of tonal structuring in his music and began a series of symphonies, whilst in the late 1980s, at a Symposium of the International Musicological Society in Melbourne, another English composer, Jonathan Harvey, outlined his own newfound interest in writing melody, noting that this activity (even though it had nothing to do in his case with a return to traditional tonality or gestures associated with the past) would have been ideologically impossible for him before that point. The motivations of these composers and others like them were various and the musical results diverse, but the available documentary evidence (their writings and interviews with them) suggests that there was a general desire to increase the expressive range of their music and to communicate more directly with their audience.