Composers are increasingly interested in going beyond what we habitually call classical music. We talked about the conventionality and unreliability of the boundary between classical and non-classical at the beginning of this book. Works that play with alien material and patterns of language appear on both sides of the imaginary boundary between the academic and the popular.

Experiments that produce music that is "no longer popular but not yet academic" and vice versa constitute an entire musical scene-a large and extremely fascinating one. Listen to Gabriel Prokofiev's (b. 1975) famous Concerto for DJ and Symphony Orchestra. Or the splashing energy and madness of Anna Meredith (b. 1978), who sits between ritualistic minimalism and rock.

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On the more "academic" side is the already mentioned Dutch post-minimalist Louis Andriessen: the combative energy of his music - left-leaning, noisy, mechanistic - comes from jazz big bands. Andriessen also often writes music for instrumental ensembles that include electric guitars, and as a result immediately evoke rock music. German composer Alexander Schubert (b. 1979) borrows features from club dance electronica - particularly techno, based on the cold machine sound and continuous pulsation of a simple hypnotizing rhythm. Leaving intact the recognizable sonic coloration of techno - beats, clangs, bangs - Schubert distorts, compresses, stretches, chops the smooth beat inherent to techno music in a complex way. The result is a spooky, excitingly avant-garde disco.

Austrian composer Bernhard Lang (b. 1957) works in a "patchwork" technique, also associated with different areas of non-academic music - EDM (electronic dance music - commercial dance electronics), techno, rock, punk, etc. He explores the effect of persistent repetition and mutation of the brief musical cell. American Julia Wolfe (b. 1958) is one of the important names of postminimalism, but the stormy drive and sonic power of her compositions undoubtedly come from rock music. One of the most hit classics of recent decades is "Asyla" (1997) by English public favorite Thomas Ades (b. 1971). This is a surrealistic "symphony," one part of which is a kind of symphonic techno. Dmitry Kurlyandsky (1976), one of the most interesting contemporary Russian authors, defined his acclaimed work Riot of Spring (2014) as "techno-ballet" or "electro-ballet. Kurlyandsky draws a parallel between pagan ritual and the collective ecstasy of the rave.

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Music will remember the past