What is new music?

Post-modernism is held to by many critics to be a strong influence in contemporary classical music. While explanations of what post-modernism is, and why it is influential vary widely, and responses to whether post-modernism is "good" for music, or even a good in and of itself - there is a wide agreement that instrumental concert music, and "art music" has absorbed ideas and influences from the wider culture, and that the results of these influences, for better and for worse, can be detected in musical results. Examples include polystylism, bricolage and collage, pop music references, the use of fragments, found sounds and incorporated voices, the shift from increasingly chromatic surfaces to more triadic ones, juxatposition of genres, the use of new instrumental combinations which take instruments from several different cultures, and the combining of composition with video and other media images. Key composers include the Scottish composer, James MacMillan (who draws on sources as diverse as plainchant, South American Liberation Theology and Polish avant-garde techniques of the 1960s), the American Michael Torke (drawing on classical tradition, minimalism and popular music) and Mark-Anthony Turnage from the UK (drawing from jazz, English pastoralism and the avant-garde).