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A snapshot of the Pierrot ensemble today

This statement is included to assist the reviewer in understanding the ways in which this article departs from my other published research in this area.

In this article, I build on my research into the Pierrot ensembles, here focussing on twenty-first-century repertoire – a period I dealt with only briefly in the Epilogue to The Pierrot Ensembles. In this context, the article discusses the music of many composers with a particular focus on three: John Zorn, Mercedes Zavala and Tansy Davies. Their case studies are recognisably derived from the forces of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire¬, yet their heritage and individual approaches to the line-up are each very different. My analysis suggests that specific, localized traditions of composition and performance have grown around the ensemble since the late twentieth century. As such, my article refines the Pierrot ensembles’ subcategories and updates their content. It also introduces more recent, related research on the ensemble, in scholarship and of the blogosphere, that has come to the fore since The Pierrot Ensembles was published.