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John Harbison - Twilight Music (1984)
If the rise of the postwar avant-garde doused a nascent school of American symphonic and chamber music, probably no composer has labored more than John Harbison to revive the flame. It is perhaps telling that his most important accolades started to pile up in the mid-1980's, when Harbison was nearly fifty. This was the decade when the musical establishment began seriously to doubt the wisdom of doubling down exclusively on the extreme atonalism of composers such as Pierre Boulez and turned instead to music that communicated more directly with its lay audiences.
Robert Patterson