A new emotional music school takes over

musical metamodernism – A decade-long shift in contemporary composition is being argued into focus: musicians increasingly write with felt sincerity and a faintly uncanny sense of dislocation, even as they keep one foot in irony. “Metamodernism” is the term trying to name the moment—

For a new generation of composers, sincerity no longer arrives as a confident flag. It comes with a twitch—affect rich, a little uncanny, documentary and autobiographical, playful and self-reflexive all at once. The music sounds like it knows the post-truth era is watching. It also sounds like it refuses to stop feeling.

Over the past decade, that kind of composition has become harder to ignore. It’s been described as musical metamodernism: an expressive paradigm that embraces the primacy of felt experience while restlessly oscillating between high and low. melancholic and joyous. earnest and playful. The world it responds to—post-truth culture shaped by ecological. financial. technological and military crises—has no shortage of reasons to be unsettled.

The debate over what to call it is part of the story. “Metamodernism” frames itself as an afterword to postmodernism. with “meta” understood as “after” or “beyond.” The term also gestures toward metaxy. a Platonic idea of being suspended between poles. always in motion. And even among those who accept a new aesthetic is underway. there is skepticism—particularly from those who see postmodernism as simply an extension of the broader project of modernity.

Yet conversations about this sensibility are active across visual art, literature, theatre, cinema, critical theory and philosophy. Films such as The Grand Budapest Hotel. Everything Everywhere All at Once. and the ‘Barbenheimer’ phenomenon—pairing the sentimental kitsch of Barbie with the cerebral sophistication of Oppenheimer. released on the same date—have all been read through a metamodern lens. In musicology and sound studies. though. those debates have largely been absent. leaving the question of how contemporary music fits the picture hanging in the air.

The attempt to nail it down has come from British music research. In 2023. a text titled ‘British School of Emotionalism’ outlined emerging sensibilities in a new generation of composers: Oliver Leith. Robin Haigh and Alex Paxton. The focus was on how their music engages with post-patriarchal masculinity. revives the spirit of Romanticism. and blends emotional vulnerability with diatonic melodies and pop idioms. In 2024. the terminology expanded into the ‘British School of Emotionalism and Metamodernism’ (BSEM). broadening the framework while keeping the research interest intact.

The title itself was described as half-joking and half-serious—meant to hold both naïveté and knowingness—rather than define a rigid school. Metamodern sensibilities, it argues, respond to the world of ‘too late capitalism’ (Anna Kornbluh) and appear across borders and continents.

A little bit of theory has been circulating for decades before it reached this music-focused corner. The term ‘metamodernism’ first surfaced in 1975 in the writing of Mas’ud Zavarzadeh and reappeared in 1999 in the work of Moyo Okediji. But it was after Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker’s influential 2010 essay ‘Notes on metamodernism’ that sustained scholarly attention began. Their essay opened with a bold claim: ‘the postmodern years of plenty, pastiche, and parataxis are over’.

The argument is that history is moving beyond Fukuyama’s prematurely announced end of history—an sentiment echoed left and right today. Vermeulen and van den Akker describe metamodernism as a sensibility emerging across architecture. art and film. exemplified by visual artists including Bas Jan Ader. David Thorpe and Kaye Donachie. They also offer a summary that has since been widely quoted:.

“Ontologically, metamodernism oscillates between the modern and the postmodern. It oscillates between a modern enthusiasm and a postmodern irony, between hope and melancholy, between naïveté and knowingness, empathy and apathy, unity and plurality, totality and fragmentation, purity and ambiguity.”

That sounds tidy until you remember the oscillation is described as messier than a neat blend. Metamodernism, it’s argued, behaves like a pendulum swinging between two, three, five, or countless poles rather than staying in a stable middle.

In 2015, Vermeulen introduced the notion of the ‘new depthiness’, drawing on Italian novelist Alessandro Baricco. In that picture, the modernist diver plunges toward a shipwreck while the postmodernist surfer rides across the surface. The metamodernist snorkeller, by contrast, drifts with the currents towards a school of fish—exploring depth without plunging into it. The parallels matter because they change how artists approach meaning.

Then there’s Greg Dember’s 2018 text ‘After postmodernism: Eleven metamodern methods in the Arts’, centered on ‘metamodern methods’. For Dember. ‘the central motivation of metamodernism is to protect interior. subjective Felt Experience from the ironic distance of postmodernism. the scientific reductionism of modernism. and the pre-personal inertia of tradition’.

Two methods in particular shape how the argument lands in music. One is ‘empathic reflexivity’: an intensified looking back at the self—whether that of the author. the reader or the work itself. Postmodern reflexivity, in this framing, tended to stress the limits of autonomy and modernist self-evidence. Metamodern reflexivity. instead. elevates the author’s lived experience and makes it vulnerable. open. and inviting audiences into recognition and connection.

The second method is ‘the tiny’. Where modernism exposed elementary organisation and postmodernism used minimalism to undercut bigger narratives of modernity. ‘the tiny’ narrows the frame further. It leans into small detail to foster closeness and immediacy—for example. through the hushed. breath-on-the-mic intimacy of Billie Eilish. or the quiet. close-captured soundworlds championed by the UK label Another Timbre.

If the theory sounds abstract, composers have been asked to do something else entirely: make it audible.

Robin Haigh. for instance. has not objected to ‘metamodernism’ as an exonym for his practice. even if not every composer wants to align with a label. Among his most performed works is String Quartet No. 1: Samoyeds, named after Siberian herding dogs distinguished by their lush white fur. Haigh transcribed a YouTube video of the dogs singing and howling together into a fully-fledged concert piece.

The temptation is to hear it through familiar postmodern lenses—quotation, intertextuality or pastiche. But the point, in this account, is different. The underlying concept may be funny, yet the quartet isn’t treated as a joke. The music is described as beautiful and affecting, blending humour with an almost spiritual devotion that feels faintly uncanny.

Dember’s ‘ironesty’—the intertwining of irony and earnestness within a single artistic expression—is presented as a match for what this quartet achieves. Another route is Raoul Eshelman’s notion of performatism. where an absurd outer frame can allow full engagement with emotional depth. In either case, the quartet’s emotive quality is said to set it apart from a strictly postmodern reading.

Haigh’s string writing leans on glissandi and microtonality. As Zygmund de Somogyi. a scholar of musical metamodernism. has noted. these techniques ‘serve the uncanny’. letting you know ‘something is just off’. The effect, in this telling, echoes a wider sociopolitical disorientation: so little feels stable.

That same toolkit shows up in LUCK: Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra, alongside a distinctive approach to pastiche. In this metamodern framing, pastiche doesn’t just expose the assumptions inside each style. It serves a different function. Dember’s term for this. ‘constructive pastiche’. describes a process that ‘combines disparate elements in order to build a space inhabited by a felt experience that is not at home in either element on its own’.

In LUCK, those juxtapositions are mapped movement by movement. The first movement opens with high strings evoking Dua Lipa-style disco music while brass and woodwinds slide like out-of-tune video game synths. Midway. a lively jig bursts in. drawing on the orchestral light music of mid-century BBC radio shows. as Haigh has explained. The fourth movement is colored by the harmonic world of Stevie Wonder’s Isn’t She Lovely.

The account insists these contrasts aren’t parodic. Instead, they create a distinctive musical universe—compared to a personal playlist freely mixing eras and styles. Haigh’s soundworld. we’re told. evokes a wistful sense of the past: Dember’s ‘meta-cute’. or what Haigh calls ‘millennial nostalgia’. The emotional destination is gentle—an invitation to revisit the safest haven of all. childhood—or spaces with childhood-like qualities. such as Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Across London, Francesca Fargion is described as another place where metamodern sensibilities flourish. Simple. dreamlike and tenderly absurd. her songs are portrayed not only as emotional but as taking emotion itself—along with the confusion that often surrounds it—as subject matter. Understated melodrama becomes theatricality. and the result is a poetics of the mundane: the evanescent. banal everyday raised into something staged.

Fargion’s storytelling also turns repeatedly toward autobiographical and documentary material. Diary Songs sets to music diary entries she wrote at the age of twelve. Together with the rest recounts her Italian grandparents’ immigration to the UK, using sentences and intonations she recorded from them.

Written in 2024 for chamber ensemble. choir and singing pianist. Dear Luna is presented as her most characteristic song cycle to date. Dreamy and surreal. mostly diatonic songs explore three themes: nature and the seasons. human emotions. and child-parent relationships—explicitly avoiding the familiar metamodern trope of intergenerational trauma.

To show how earnestness and irony can trade places. three songs from Dear Luna are taken as examples. with marked starting points in performance. ‘Rush River’ (from the 8:39 mark) evokes a pastoral scene through driving arpeggios. melismatic lines and a restless flow. mirroring the river itself. It’s described as wholly earnest, with little trace of irony, inviting reconnection with nature in a Romantic tradition.

Then ‘My Heart’ (from the 10:43 mark) is where oscillation becomes trope. The repeated words ‘happy’ and ‘sad’ point toward emotional ambiguity, while a circle progression makes the overall effect inescapably sorrowful. If there were an anthem for the British School of Emotionalism and Metamodernism, this song would be it.

The clearest detachment arrives with ‘welcome to the world’ (from the 5:31 mark). It opens with fanfare-like chords framing lyrics: ‘congratulations to the world unless you hate it let’s have a party’. Subtle disruptions of natural prosody—rhythm. stress and intonation—create a self-aware sense that something is slightly off. echoing de Somogyi’s ‘metamodern uncanny valley’.

Behind Fargion’s approach sits the Lieder tradition she encountered in her late teens. Dear Luna loosely draws on Goethe’s poem ‘An den Mond’, also set by Schubert. The introductory notes to a video recording spell out key traits before the listener even arrives: the songs are ‘naively Romantic’. retaining themes of the original—with close connection to the natural world. tragedy and love—but spoken in a ‘more direct. simple tone’. Each song aims to retain a kind of ambiguity ‘as if you’re peering into a window and witnessing fragments of something without knowing all the information.’.

The relationship between Romanticism and metamodernism has been recognized early. In 2010. Vermeulen and van den Akker wrote that the metamodern is ‘most clearly. yet not exclusively. expressed by the neoromantic turn of late’. The emphasis on ‘not exclusively’ matters in this telling: Romantic tropes—interest in nature. national identity or the occult—can vary wildly. and their presence isn’t a prerequisite for a work to be considered metamodern. Romanticism was a full stylistic movement; metamodern echoes like tonal harmony and simple cantabile melodies remain partial. Further research. this account says. may be needed to determine whether musical metamodernism involves specific techniques or is simply an overarching sensibility.

So where does all this land for contemporary composition?. The picture is described as less clear at the level of technique than at the level of categories. Yes, tonal materials, ‘simpler’ melodies, microtonality, and the influence of pop and non-classical styles are named. But the questions remain open: whether those are enough to define the full picture. whether Romanticism is a useful parallel or a dead end. and whether musical metamodernism invites entirely new forms and techniques.

Still, the listening at the heart of this argument claims something unmistakable. Across nations and generations, an “unmistakable set of new aesthetic traits” is said to keep showing up. Despite each composer’s individuality, metamodern sensibilities are described as a quietly persistent undercurrent in contemporary composition.

The scope is widened with a YouTube playlist of metamodern music, anchored by composers and specific works. Matthew Shlomowitz and Jennifer Walshe – The Church Won’t Let You Do Exorcisms Anymore. Alex Paxton – Scrunchy Munchy. Simon Steen-Andersen – Difficulties putting it into practice. Cassandra Miller – Duet for Cello and Orchestra. Oliver Leith – good day good day bad day bad day. Øyvind Torvund – Plans for Future Operas. Natacha Diels – Beautiful Trouble. Laurence Crane – Natural World. Maddie Ashman – Dark. Neil Luck – Regretfully Yours, Ongoing. Bastard Assignments – Thick & Tight: Woking. Ben Nobuto – Hallelujah Sim. Matthew Grouse – We’re Pleased To Meet Us.

It’s a list that reads like evidence, not a manifesto. Whether metamodernism is the right name for the present is still debatable. and whether it continues to shape the 2020s remains contested. But the impulse described here—the fading of the postmodern spirit marked by irony and intellectual distance. and a renewed emphasis on faith and sincerity—feels less like a theory than a shift in listening habits.

That shift is imagined as epitomised by the optimism of the 2010s. including Barack Obama’s ‘yes. we can’ slogan—optimism with a self-aware wink acknowledging naïve idealism. And for now. that’s the emotional engineering at the center of the debate: sincerity that doesn’t stop to assure you it’s safe. irony that doesn’t quite leave the room. and a kind of musical pendulum that keeps moving.

Whether this amounts to a distinct category alongside modernism and postmodernism—or ends up absorbed into a broader framework of modernity—may take more time than a decade. But the music already feels like it has started to answer the question in public: it wants to be taken seriously. and it knows exactly what that seriousness costs.

metamodernism British School of Emotionalism and Metamodernism contemporary composition Robin Haigh Francesca Fargion microtonality constructive pastiche ironesty ironessy Another Timbre Billie Eilish Zygmund de Somogyi Timotheus Vermeulen Robin van den Akker