The British School of emotionalism and metamodernism

Over the past decade, a new type of composition has arisen that feels markedly different from what came before. Unlike music defined by grand ambition or ironic detachment, this newer work occupies a register of its own. It is rich in affect and faintly uncanny, knowingly embracing sincerity while never fully abandoning irony. Documentary and autobiographical, playful and self-reflexive, it is musical metamodernism.

That, at least, is one of the terms attempting to define this new aesthetic, which is not limited to contemporary composition but has become ubiquitous across the arts. It is an expressive paradigm that responds to the post-truth era – shaped by ecological, financial, technological and military crises – via the primacy of felt experience, restlessly oscillating between high and low, melancholic and joyous, earnest and playful.

The question of nomenclature is important, not least because metamodernism – ‘meta’ in the sense of ‘after’ or ‘beyond’ – frames itself as an afterword to postmodernism. The ‘meta’ also recalls metaxy, a Platonic idea of being suspended between poles, always in motion.

Those who see postmodernism as merely an extension of the broader project of modernity are likely to be equally sceptical about the concept of metamodernism. Yet discussions of this sensibility are very much alive in 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 – which paired the sentimental kitsch of Barbie with the cerebral sophistication of Oppenheimer, released on the same date – have all been read through a metamodern lens. Nevertheless, such debates remain largely absent from musicology and sound studies.

My own writing on the subject has so far concerned British music. In 2023, I outlined emerging sensibilities in a new generation of composers – Oliver Leith, Robin Haigh and Alex Paxton – in a text titled ‘British School of Emotionalism’, focusing 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, I expanded the term to the ‘British School of Emotionalism and Metamodernism’ (BSEM) to reflect this research interest while providing a more academic framework.

The title had to reflect the spirit – half-joking, half-serious, holding both naïveté and knowingness – and was never meant to define a rigid school, since metamodern sensibilities, responding to the world of ‘too late capitalism’ (Anna Kornbluh), manifest across borders and continents.

A little bit of theory

The term ‘metamodernism’ first surfaced in 1975 in the writing of Mas’ud Zavarzadeh, reappearing in 1999 in the work of Moyo Okediji. But it was only after Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van den Akker’s influential 2010 essay ‘Notes on metamodernism’ that the concept began to attract sustained scholarly attention. Their text opened with a bold claim: ‘the postmodern years of plenty, pastiche, and parataxis are over’. Many academics and critics had long noted a broader cultural shift, linking it to the ecological, financial and technological upheavals of the noughties, the absorption of postmodern theory into mass culture, and changing approaches to identity politics, from queer theory to postcolonial thought.

In any case, Vermeulen and van den Akker insisted that history was already moving beyond Fukuyama’s prematurely announced end of history – a sentiment one hears left and right today. They described the rise of metamodernism as a sensibility emerging across architecture, art and film, exemplified by visual artists including Bas Jan Ader, David Thorpe and Kaye Donachie. Vermeulen and van den Akker’s summary of the idea has since become 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.

This might imply that metamodernism neatly blends the best of both worlds, which it sometimes does. But the oscillation at its heart is far messier. Rather than a stable middle, metamodernism behaves like a pendulum, swinging between two, three, five, or countless poles.

In 2015, Vermeulen introduced the notion of the ‘new depthiness’, drawing on Italian novelist Alessandro Baricco to articulate how some contemporary artists navigate ideas of depth. Whereas the modernist diver plunges towards a shipwreck and the postmodernist surfer rides across the surface, the metamodernist snorkeller drifts with the currents towards a school of fish, exploring the idea of depth without actually plunging into it. Vermeulen did not explicitly link this to metamodernism, yet the parallels are revealing in how these epistemes approach the search for meaning.

Another helpful approach came from Greg Dember, whose 2018 text ‘After postmodernism: Eleven metamodern methods in the Arts’ focused 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 of the methods illustrate this well. The first, ‘empathic reflexivity’, concerns an intensified looking back at the self – whether that of the author, the reader or the work itself. Whereas postmodern reflexivity tended to draw attention to the limits of autonomy and modernist self-evidence, this version foregrounds and elevates the author’s lived experience, making it vulnerable, open and inviting audiences into a space of recognition and connection.

The second method, which Dember calls ‘the tiny’, differs from both modernist and postmodern minimalism. Where modernism exposed the elementary organisation of things and postmodernism used minimalism to subvert the bigger, better, newer narratives of modernity, ‘the tiny’ narrows the frame even further. It leans into small detail to foster a sense of 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.

The faintly uncanny – Robin Haigh

Not every composer is keen to align themselves with a particular school or label, yet Robin Haigh does not object to ‘metamodernism’ as an exonym for his artistic practice. 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, transforming it into a fully-fledged concert piece.

If one knows that the piece is based on a transcription of a YouTube video, it is tempting to hear it through familiar postmodern lenses – quotation, intertextuality or pastiche – but that would miss the point. The underlying concept is funny, yes, but the quartet is not simply a joke. The music is beautiful and affecting, blending humour with an almost spiritual devotion in a way that feels faintly uncanny.

One of Dember’s eleven metamodern methods is what he calls ‘ironesty’: the intertwining of irony and earnestness within a single artistic expression. To my ear, this string quartet captures that balance convincingly. Alternatively, the work can be approached through Raoul Eshelman’s notion of performatism, where the outer frame – the dogs forming a barbershop quartet – is sufficiently absurd to allow full engagement with the music’s emotional depth. In either case, the piece’s unabashed emotive quality sets it apart from a postmodernist reading.

Like much of Haigh’s work, String Quartet No. 1: Samoyeds abounds in 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’. To me, Haigh’s hazy, faintly unsettling gestures echo today’s sociopolitical disorientation, where so little feels stable.

The same techniques play a central role in LUCK: Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra, alongside a distinctive approach to pastiche. While postmodern pastiche often exposed the assumptions underpinning each style, in metamodernism 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, constructive pastiche unfolds through unexpected juxtapositions. The first movement opens with high strings evoking Dua Lipa-style disco music, overlaid with brass and woodwinds sliding 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 coloured by the harmonic world of Stevie Wonder’s Isn’t She Lovely.

These contrasts aren’t parodic; instead, they create a distinctive musical universe, akin to a personal playlist freely mixing eras and styles. Haigh’s soundworld evokes a wistful sense of the past – what Dember calls ‘meta-cute’, or what Haigh himself has dubbed ‘millennial nostalgia’. To me, his music offers a gentle invitation to revisit the safest haven of all – childhood. Or at least spaces with childhood-like qualities, such as Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel.

The poetics of the mundane – Francesca Fargion

Metamodern sensibilities flourish in the music of London-based composer-performer Francesca Fargion. Simple, dreamlike and tenderly absurd, her songs are not merely emotional; they take emotion itself – and the confusion that so often surrounds it – as their subject and infuse it with heightened theatricality. Full of understated melodrama, these pieces elevate the poetics of the mundane – the evanescent, banal everyday.

Another notable feature of Fargion’s musical storytelling is her turn to the autobiographical and documentary. Often, personal source materials form the core of her works. Diary Songs sets to music diary entries she wrote at the age of twelve, while 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 may be Fargion’s most characteristic song cycle to date. Dreamy and surreal, the mostly diatonic songs explore three themes: nature and the seasons, human emotions and child-parent relationships – the last avoiding the familiar metamodern trope of intergenerational trauma.

Let’s consider three songs from Dear Luna to get a taste of Fargion’s metamodern oscillation between earnestness and irony. The first, ‘Rush River’ (from the 8:39 mark), evokes a pastoral scene with driving arpeggios, melismatic lines and a restless flow, mirroring the river itself. To my ear, it is wholly earnest, with little trace of irony. In keeping with Romantic tradition, it simply invites us to reconnect with nature.

The oscillation-as-a-technique becomes oscillation-as-a-trope in the ballad ‘My Heart’ (from the 10:43 mark). The repeated words ‘happy’ and ‘sad’ signal emotional ambiguity, yet the circle progression renders the overall effect inescapably sorrowful. If the British School of Emotionalism and Metamodernism had an anthem, this song would surely be it.

The highest degree of ironic detachment appears in ‘welcome to the world’ (from the 5:31 mark). It opens with fanfare-like chords framing the lyric: ‘congratulations to the world unless you hate it let’s have a party’. To this already absurd atmosphere, Fargion adds subtle disruptions of natural prosody – rhythm, stress and intonation – creating a self-aware sense that something is slightly off, harking back to de Somogyi’s ‘metamodern uncanny valley’.

A formative influence on Fargion was the Lieder tradition she first encountered in her late teens. ‘Dear Luna’ loosely draws on Goethe’s poem ‘An den Mond’, also set by Schubert. The introductory notes to the video recording signal core metamodern traits even before one hears the music, using terms like ‘naively Romantic’, ‘more direct’, ‘simple tone’ and ‘ambiguity’:

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. I wanted each song to retain a kind of ambiguity, as if you’re peering into a window and witnessing fragments of something without knowing all the information.

Romanticism’s strong ties with metamodernism were noted early on. Vermeulen and van den Akker wrote in 2010 that the metamodern is ‘most clearly, yet not exclusively, expressed by the neoromantic turn of late’. It is the words ‘not exclusively’ that merit attention. As metamodern works of art have continued to emerge since the term’s popularisation in 2010, it has become increasingly clear that their engagement with Romantic tropes – such as an interest in nature, national identity or the occult – varies considerably. Nor is the presence of these themes a prerequisite for a work to be considered metamodern. Romanticism was a full stylistic movement, while metamodern echoes – tonal harmony and simple cantabile melodies – remain partial. Further research and historical distance may be needed to determine whether musical metamodernism involves specific techniques or is simply an overarching sensibility.

Arguably, much of contemporary composition still favours calculated structures and meticulous complexity. But Fargion’s songs, while carefully shaped, stand apart from this modernist-Romantic lineage. They embrace simplicity and immediacy through straightforward harmonies, clear melodies and unpretentious subjects – sometimes with a knowing wink. By telling stories that verge on the absurd, the music constructs an outer frame that signals the joke while allowing the listener to fully engage with its emotional depth. Eshelman’s notion of performatism is perceptible in these works too.

To be or not to be metamodern?

Where do these musical examples leave us? To me, they suggest that the postmodern spirit, marked by irony and intellectual distance, has been fading for some time, ushering in a renewed emphasis on faith and sincerity. This shift was perhaps most clearly epitomised by the optimism of the 2010s – think of Barack Obama’s ‘yes, we can’ slogan – though it often carried a self-aware wink acknowledging its naive idealism.

The question whether metamodernism offers a valid description of our present is, of course, debatable, as is the question whether these sensibilities continue to shape artistic practice in the 2020s. Metamodernism is far from the only response to the postmodern ethos. It exists alongside Mikhail Epstein’s ‘trans-postmodernism’, Alan Kirby’s ‘digimodernism’, Nicolas Bourriaud’s ‘altermodernism’, to name just a few such responses. If metamodernism is viable, will it stand as a distinct category alongside modernism and postmodernism, or will it ultimately be subsumed within a broader framework of modernity?

When it comes to specific compositional techniques, the picture is less clear than with the broader aesthetic categories. We can certainly point to tonal materials, ‘simpler’ melodies, microtonality and the influence of pop and non-classical styles – but do these constitute the full picture? Is Romanticism a useful parallel, or rather a dead end? Does musical metamodernism invite forms and techniques that are entirely its own?

Whatever the answers might be, my own listening and engagement have revealed an unmistakable set of new aesthetic traits emerging across nations and generations. Despite the individuality of each composer’s style, these sensibilities surface, to varying degrees, in the compositions of Jennifer Walshe, Alex Paxton, Simon Steen-Andersen, Cassandra Miller, Oliver Leith, Øyvind Torvund, Natacha Diels, Matthew Shlomowitz, Laurence Crane, Maddie Ashman, Neil Luck, Bastard Assignments, Ben Nobuto, Matthew Grouse and many more. Their music suggests that, while varied and evolving, metamodern sensibilities have become a quietly persistent undercurrent in contemporary composition.

A YouTube playlist of metamodern music

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