Charles Wuorinen

In the text accompanying Charles Wuorinen's A Winter's Tale, Peter Paul Nash describes Wuorinen's transformation in the mid 70s to early 80s. While some American composers abandoned dissonance for romanticism, Wourinen's "transformation was more subtle and fundamental,originating in his discovery of the fractal geometry and chaos theory pioneered during the 1960s by Benoit Mandelbrot..." Fractal geometry "could be the most radical way of reconsidering the world since the great modernist and reductive theories of the early 20th century; since it is so anti-reductive, and admits the irregularities, proportionalities, hierarchies and sheer messiness of 'real life.' The implications for music are obvious. Indeed a succession of 'proto-fractal' composers can be traced back into the past: Sibelius, Beethoven, J. S. Bach, and even further back."

Here is the CD jacket for A Winter's Tale.