Postmodernism In Music

What is postmodernism? How does it relate to music? This introduction clarifies the concept, providing ways of interpreting postmodern music.

What is postmodern music and how does it differ from earlier styles, including modernist music? What roles have electronic technologies and sound production played in defining postmodern music? Has postmodern music blurred the lines between high and popular music? Addressing these and other questions, this ground-breaking collection gathers together for the first time essays on postmodernism and music written primarily by musicologists, covering a wide range of musical styles including concert music, jazz, film music, and popular music. Topics include: the importance of technology and marketing in postmodern music; the appropriation and reworking of Western music by non-Western bands; postmodern characteristics in the music of Górecki, Rochberg, Zorn, and Bolcom, as well as Björk and Wu Tang Clan; issues of music and race in such films as The Bridges of Madison County, Batman, Bullworth, and He Got Game; and comparisons of postmodern architecture to postmodern music. Also includes 20 musical examples.

A leading cultural theorist and musicologist opens up new possibilities for understanding mainstream Western art music—the "classical" music composed between the eighteenth and early twentieth centuries that is, for many, losing both its prestige and its appeal. When this music is regarded esoterically, removed from real-world interests, it increasingly sounds more evasive than transcendent. Now Lawrence Kramer shows how classical music can take on new meaning and new life when approached from postmodernist standpoints. Kramer draws out the musical implications of contemporary efforts to understand reason, language, and subjectivity in relation to concrete human activities rather than to universal principles. Extending the rethinking of musical expression begun in his earlier Music as Cultural Practice, he regards music not only as an object that invites aesthetic reception but also as an activity that vitally shapes the personal, social, and cultural identities of its listeners. In language accessible to nonspecialists but informative to specialists, Kramer provides an original account of the postmodernist ethos, explains its relationship to music, and explores that relationship in a series of case studies ranging from Haydn and Mendelssohn to Ives and Ravel.

Kramer was one of the most visionary musical thinkers of the second half of the 20th century. In his The Time of Music, he approached the idea of the many different ways that time itself is articulated musically. This book has become influential among composers, theorists, and aestheticians. Now, in his almost completed text written before his untimely death in 2004, he examines the concept of postmodernism in music. Kramer created a series of markers by which we can identify postmodern works. He suggests that the postmodern project actually creates a radically different relationship between the composer and listener. Written with wit, precision, and at times playfully subverting traditional tropes to make a very serious point about this difference, Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening leads us to a strongly grounded intellectual basis for stylistic description and an intuitive sensibility of what postmodernism in music entails. Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening is an examination of how musical postmodernism is not just a style or movement, but a fundamental shift in the relationship between composer and listener. The result is a multifaceted and provocative look at a critical turning point in music history, one whose implications we are only just beginning to understand.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Music, along with other disciplines such as art, literature and drama, has defined periods such as Baroque, Impressionistic, Romantic and Modern. These styles and defined time periods capture a set of qualities that are manifested in the works of various authors, artists, and composers. In the mid Twentieth-Century, the genre of Postmodernism develops with its own artistic traits that are recognized and defined in many fields within the humanities. Today, there are many different opinions as to the definition of Postmodernism music or a Postmodern composer. Researching the disciplines that have a defined Postmodern aesthetic along with a historiographical examination of the discipline of history during the same time period, this paper will explore the elements of Modernism and Postmodernism and apply these findings to confirm Postmodern qualities in classical music, including the earliest examples found in the works of John Cage.

Demonstrates how theories of postmodernism as 'incredulity toward grand narrative' speak to musical history and aesthetics. This book illustrates how music has figured centrally in poststructuralist theory and can itself open up fresh perspectives for reassessing that theory.