Cardle beat Cage, but all is not lost

I assume that you all did your duty as responsible musical citizens to at least try to make the Christmas No 1 a world-changing moment of Cageian quietude, only to be trounced, alas, by the forces of Cardle-dom . So by way of an oblique pat on the heroic but ultimately doomed attempt to de-Cowell Christmas, something that might pique your interest in an idle moment over the festive season – whether you're stuck in Departures for your mini-break in Terminal 5 or holed up in a snowdrift on the hard shoulder of the M6. Here's the transcript of the lecture I gave at the excellent Sound festival in Aberdeen at the end of October. It's a reflection on the state of new music and its institutions, entitled So Long, and Thanks for All the Noise: 2010 and the End of Musical History. That deliberately post-millennial title hints at some of the things I touch on, including the idea that "new music" has been old for decades now, that we're in a time of musical mannerism, and that some composers and institutions are suffering from delusions of socio-political grandeur, imagining that the mere employment of certain kinds of stylistic tic (often with an attendant dash of pseudo-Marxist ideology) is enough to make them inherently "new", when those self-same markers of "newness" actually predate the development of the internal combustion engine. Well, almost. On the other side, there are those who confine themselves and their music to the aesthetic redundancy of self-referential coherence, which guarantees their music can only preach to their teachers and can never escape the new-music ghetto. So much for those trapped by different streams of "musical history", but if we chuck out some of the historical imperative and just think about music, there is, I think, real cause to be excited by what's happening now, and what might happen next – in 2011, for example. It is a thesis that's designed to provoke, agitate, and possibly even entertain over a glass of mulled wine, service station coffee, or the dregs of the very last cup of machine-tea doled out by BA staff in Heathrow. In any case, and wherever and whichever yuletide transport conundrum you find yourself ensnared in: Happy Christmas!