Speaking clearly

Four Decades of New Music—from the perspective of a composer who not only writes what he hears, but also examines his own thinking as he writes.

In *Speaking Clearly: Writing About Music, 1985–2026*, Christopher Fox brings together selected essays spanning more than four decades. These essays take readers deep into the history of new and experimental music: to Christian Wolff and John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Morton Feldman, Mauricio Kagel and Walter Zimmermann, to Darmstadt, and into the debates surrounding serialism, the avant-garde, open form, electronic music, opera, and performance practice.

Fox does not write from the detached perspective of a chronicler. He writes as a composer, musician, and participant. His essays combine precise musical observation with personal experience, historical awareness, and a strong willingness to challenge the status quo. Time and again, individual works and composers lead to broader questions: How do aesthetic orthodoxies arise? What role do institutions and cultural policy play? How does contemporary music reach its audience? And how are technology, gender, resources, and sustainability changing the conditions of musical production?

For this edition, Fox has reread his earlier writings. He has paired each one with a newly written retrospective. In these, he reconstructs the original context, reexamines his earlier positions, and asks what has changed since then—both in music and in his own thinking.

This creates an unusual dialogue between the past and the present. *Speaking Clearly* is at once a personal history of contemporary music, a self-portrait of the composer as a critical listener, and a reflection on the value of writing about and debating music.

For everyone who views contemporary music not as a self-contained, specialized world, but as part of the aesthetic, political, and social debates of its time.

The book will be released in English on October 15 and is now available for pre-order!