Postmodern music
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Postmodern music may refer to a musical style, a musical condition, or a musical attitude. As a musical style, postmodern music might be characterised in similar ways to postmodern art, being both a break from and in some ways an extension of aesthetic modernism (see Modernism in Music). Like modernist music, postmodern composers tend to favor eclecticism in musical form and musical genre, and often combine characteristics from different genres, or employ jump-cut sectionalization (such as blocks). But unlike modernism, there tends to be a self-referential and ironic stance, and a more pronounced blurring of traditional boundaries between "high art" and kitsch. Daniel Albright summarizes the traits of the postmodern style as bricolage, polystylism, and randomness (Albright 2004,[citation needed]).
As a musical condition, postmodern music is simply the state of music in postmodernity, music after modernity. In this sense, postmodern music does not have any one particular style or characteristic, and is not necessarily postmodern in style or technique.
Postmodern music is not simply what people listen to after the modern era, a common misconception, but a style of music that keeps to the common themes of the post-modern movement in general.
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[edit] The postmodern musical style
[edit] Modernist influences and postmodern philosophy
In the modern period, recording of music was seen as a way of transcribing an external event, as a photograph is supposed to record a moment in time. However, with the introduction of magnetic tape in the 1940s, the ability to directly edit a recording, and create a result which did not actually occur, made it possible for a recording to be viewed as the end product of artistic work itself. Through the 1950s, most music, even popular music, presented itself as the capturing of a performance, even if that performance utilized amplification to facilitate the hearing of different parts.[citation needed]
Antecedents to this process can be found dating back to the late 1940s. From this point onwards composers in the classical music world, including such diverse personalities as Edgard Varèse, Pierre Schaeffer, Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage, created musical compositions that existed only as recordings, using such techniques as multi-channel recording, editing and varying the speed of recorded sounds as means to create music that could not be played by conventional instruments, that could only exist as a tape recording.
The same techniques were used in popular music at the same time (e.g., Les Paul's 1947 "Lover (When You're Near Me)"), and would eventually become common. The elaborate multi-tracked recordings of the Beatles' later output (such as the "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album) bore little relationship to what the four Beatles could perform live on a stage.[citation needed]
The rise of popular music led to another strand of post-modernity, namely the desire to create a large audience for works.[citation needed] In the Modernist view,[weasel words] such a connection was unnecessary—"serious" music was the place where serious ideas could be presented in musical form unfettered by the need to flatter or patronize an audience.[citation needed] "Popular" music was seen,[weasel words] as the Victorians had seen it, as subsidiary to the more "weighty" genres. As with Post-modern philosophy, post-modern music questioned whether this hierarchy of "high" and "low" culture was correct or appropriate.[citation needed]
A third strand of post-modern music is a change in the fundamental idea of what music is supposed to be "about". As the period wore on, the idea that "music is mainly about itself", became more and more firmly entrenched.[citation needed] Reference was not merely a technique, but the substance of music. Musical works allude to other musical works, not because they can, but because they must.[citation needed] This is part of the general change from Modernism which saw the basic subject of art being the most pure elements of musical technique—whether intervals, motivic fragments or rhythms—to Postmodernism which sees the basic subject of art being the stream of media, manufactured objects, and genre materials.[citation needed] In other words, post-modernity views the role of art to be commenting on the consumer society and its products, where as modernism sought to convey the "reality" of the universe in its most fundamental form.[citation needed]
[edit] Postmodern techniques and their application
The ability to record and mix, and later sample, would feed into this idea,[vague] with the inclusion of "found sounds", snippets of other recordings, spoken voices, noises, and sampled tableux into music. Pioneers include Edgard Varèse, who began to experiment with the possibilities of new electronic instruments, using synthesizers and tape loops.[citation needed] John Cage used tapes, radios, and record players to reproduce prerecorded sounds in a wide variety of ways in works such as the series "Imaginary Landscape" and "Europera."[citation needed] Early examples in popular music include many songs by Les Paul (starting in 1947 with "Lover (When You're Near Me)"), Abbey Road, Pink Floyd's Meddle and the "dub" style of music of Lee 'Scratch' Perry. As digital technology has made sampling easy, it has become very common in hip hop, and is taken to its extreme in Bastard pop.
As composers became interested in incorporating pre-existing sounds, they also looked to emulate the effect using only conventional instruments, by extensive quotation from pre-existing material. Quotation and reference to earlier work in principle was not new, as composers such as Richard Strauss and Charles Ives are famous for its use in their tone poems and symphonies nearly a century before, and it is essentially the basis behind organum, parody mass, and other early musical genres. However, the completeness of the collage or thorough use of a pre-existing piece went far beyond earlier composers' brief quotations or use of a cantus firmus. George Rochberg has used pieces from the classical repertoire as the basis for many of his compositions, essentially composing a frequently ironic commentary on an earlier work. Olivier Messiaen's "Oiseaux Exotiques" and "Catalogue d'Oiseaux" are collages of bird songs, precisely notated by species in the score, gathered together in a musical form.
Another often-cited post-modern musical collage is the third movement of Luciano Berio's "Sinfonia", which uses the scherzo of Gustav Mahler's "Resurrection Symphony" as a musical foundation, and text from Samuel Beckett's "The Unnameable," but adds quotations spanning the classical repertory, as though they were sampled or found haphazardly by spinning a radio dial.[citation needed] Berio himself, though, rejects and distances himself from notions of "collage," arguing that each reference is hardly haphazard; rather, each quotation carefully evokes the context of its original work, creating an open web, but an open web with highly specific referents and a vigorously defined, if self-proliferating, signifier-signified relationship (Varga and Dalmonte 1985,[citation needed]). "I'm not interested in collages, and they amuse me only when I'm doing them with my children: then they become an exercise in relativizing and 'decontextualizing' images, an elementary exercise whose healthy cynicism won't do anyone any harm,"[cite this quote] Berio tells interviewer Rossana Dalmonte, in what reads like Berio attempting to distance himself from composers like John Zorn or Uri Caine,[neutrality disputed] for whom juxtaposition itself can provide meaning. Berio's self-distinction, while it does not need to be believed by analysts or musicians, nevertheless runs counter to the later postmodern practice of mixing "high" and "low" found objects "haphazardly" or without regard to an affirmative or negative sense of constructive quality.[citation needed] In other words, it is not only the composition of the "collage" that conveys meaning; it is the particular composition of the component "sound-image" that conveys meaning.[citation needed] (And in the sense Berio clings to the notion of music conveying an affirmative, even extra-musical, meaning, perhaps he, or other composers like Messiaen or Stockhausen, is not so postmodern in the sense that it is, for better or worse, used in current critical circles to convey some sort of eternal, neutral equivocation between musical texts.[citation needed]) In some sense,[weasel words] Berio's third movement in the "Sinfonia" is more closely linked to Roland Barthes's semiology (semiotics) and European poststructuralist thinking than later postmodern practices.[citation needed]
A related aspect of post-modern classical music was an interest in reducing the role of a composer in musical composition, not by the use of pre-composed material, but instead by the use of random procedures in composition and performance.[citation needed] This began as a reaction to elements of late modernism, specifically the modernist project of atonality, begun by Arnold Schoenberg, which had been taken to its logical conclusion, total serialism, by such late-modernist composers as Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and others.[citation needed] A group of composers, including Boulez, Stockhausen, and especially John Cage began introducing elements of 'chance' in their music to create aleatory music.[when?] Cage is famous for using the I Ching to direct his compositions, essentially removing himself from the compositional procedure.[citation needed] On the other hand, his piece 4'33" is performed by a silent pianist, and is said[weasel words] to consist entirely of environmental noise. Aleatory music began to blur the boundaries between the composer and the audience, and between the musician and the environment,[citation needed] which was a postmodern trend.
At the same time,[when?] there was also a new interest in non-Western music, early music (typically meaning pre-Baroque), and popular music.[who?] This attention to all musical traditions is a general post-modern feature; for them the division between "high" and "low art" is illusory.[citation needed] György Ligeti found rhythmic elements of Pygmy song that fit his own sensibilities, and they influenced his later compositions.[citation needed] Olivier Messiaen studied Indian music and medieval music thoroughly, and some of his scores make reference to Indian tala or plainchant.[citation needed] Tan Dun, born in China, has sought ways in his compositions to unite the Chinese and Western strands of music.[citation needed] Steve Reich studied West African drumming, Indonesian gamelan, and Hebrew cantillation, and his works are sometimes compared[weasel words] to Pérotin or rock music. Further eroding the wall between "art music" and "popular music," a number of DJs have remixed his work on the album Reich Remixed.[citation needed] Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham have worked with rock musicians and combined the techniques of classical and popular music.[citation needed]
The approach of post-modern and modern composers with regard to foreign, obsolete, or popular musical idioms differs substantially from the "exotic" references of earlier composers. One key difference is the thoroughness of the study.[citation needed] Mozart's "Rondo alla Turca" is supposedly influenced by Turkish music, but it is a superficial and stereotypical reference imposed in a pure classical form.[citation needed] Post-modern composers[weasel words] have continued the modern trend begun by Béla Bartók in making systematic studies, and have generally sought in earnest to understand the underlying principles of exotic music by years of study or performance in the idiom.[citation needed] The result is often more subtly incorporated into the composer's vocabulary, so much that one may not imagine the source of the foreign elements until they are pointed out.[citation needed]
[edit] The emergence of postmodern styles
In classical music, minimalism is usually regarded as the first "post-modern" style.[citation needed] Minimalism was in part a reaction to the perceived inaccessibility and sterility of modernist classical music of such composers in the tradition of Arnold Schoenberg, Pierre Boulez, the early John Cage, and others among the avant-garde.[citation needed] The earliest minimalist composers included LaMonte Young, who had studied under Schoenberg and incorporated elements of serialism in his early minimalist works, and Terry Riley, who was largely influenced in his composition by the repetitiveness of Indian music and rock music.
Minimalism and related postmodern musical styles laid the groundwork for re-integrating popular and "highbrow" music, which had been separated since the rise of modernism.[citation needed] By the 1970s, avant-garde rock and pop musicians had become interested in electronic instrumentation, the use of Eastern rhythms and unconventional instruments (for example the use of the sitar by the Beatles) and drone-like or repetitive music, stylistically similar to minimalism (such as the music of The Velvet Underground, Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk, and later, Stereolab). Tape loops also prefigured the use of sampling in techno music and house music, and the "scratching" of hip hop music. Moreover, the ironic "cut and paste approach" of Stockhausen's later work (which used elements from both "high" and "low" art)[citation needed] was highly influential on many pop and rock composers in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s: see, for example, The Residents.[citation needed] The spread of Minimalism in contemporary music has led to the creation of similar movements within modern electronic music, particularly microhouse and minimal techno, with artists such as Basic Channel freely adapting the traditional minimalist approach of Steve Reich and Philip Glass in a dancefloor context.[citation needed]
[edit] The postmodern musical condition
As a musical condition, postmodern music is music situated after the modern age, during the present period, where music has become valued primarily as a commodity and a culture, rather than a form of idealized modernist expression for its own sake. One author has suggested that the transition in music from modern to postmodern occurred in the late 1960s, influenced in part by psychedelic rock and the late Beatles album (Sullivan 1995, 217), while others place the onset of musical postmodernism much earlier, around 1930 (Karolyi 1994, 135; Meyer 1994, 331–32). In the 1970s, the postmodern condition continued with the advent of disco, heavy metal, Punk, Post-punk, and a newly-commodified country music.
[edit] The postmodern musical attitude
Jonathan Kramer posits the idea (following Umberto Eco and Jean-François Lyotard) that postmodernism (including musical postmodernism) is less a surface style or historical period (i.e., condition) than an attitude. Kramer enumerates 16 "characteristics of postmodern music, by which I mean music that is understood in a postmodern manner, or that calls forth postmodern listening strategies, or that provides postmodern listening experiences, or that exhibits postmodern compositional practices." According to Kramer, postmodern music:
(1) is not simply a repudiation of modernism or its continuation, but has aspects of both a break and an extension; (2) is, on some level and in some way, ironic; (3) does not respect boundaries between sonorities and procedures of the past and of the present; (4) challenges barriers between 'high' and 'low' styles; (5) shows disdain for the often unquestioned value of structural unity; (6) questions the mutual exclusivity of elitist and populist values; (7) avoids totalizing forms (e.g., does not want entire pieces to be tonal or serial or cast in a prescribed formal mold); (8) considers music not as autonomous but as relevant to cultural, social, and political contexts; (9) includes quotations of or references to music of many traditions and cultures; (10) considers technology not only as a way to preserve and transmit music but also as deeply implicated in the production and essence of music; (11) embraces contradictions; (12) distrusts binary oppositions; (13) includes fragmentations and discontinuities; (14) encompasses pluralism and eclecticism; (15) presents multiple meanings and multiple temporalities; (16) locates meaning and even structure in listeners, more than in scores, performances, or composers. (Kramer 2002, 16–17)
[edit] Causes and theories of post-modernity in music
For some, post-modernity is degenerate modernity. The critic Theodor Adorno believed that trends of music after serialism represent the banalization of and regression from modernity.[citation needed]
For others, post-modernity is merely "the modernism of the present" (Danuser 1991, 63), or an expanded modernism (Wellmer 1991, passim).
Still others[weasel words] follow Fredric Jameson, who holds that post-modernity is the condition of late capitalism and the decline of identity-creating metanarratives, such as nation-states (Jameson 1991,[citation needed]).
Another theory advanced is that post-modernism is the explicit reaction to the rise of a mass production consumer society, and is linked to a loss of a belief in the imminence and immanence of change for the better, and the consequent need to create coherence and aesthetic value from the artifacts and patterns of that society, a condition firmly in place by 1930 (Heilbroner 1961, 47–48; Meyer 1994, 331–32), the year in which Ortega y Gasset published La rebelión de las masas. While of course never using the term "postmodern", Ortega describes these same conditions as gradually emerging after 1830, and reaching maturity in the 1890s (Ortega 1932, 50, 56, 125, 135, 181).
[edit] See also
- 20th century classical music
- Musical montage
- Plunderphonics
- Postmodern composers
- Sound collage
- Theodor Adorno
- Walter Benjamin
[edit] Sources
- Albright, Daniel. 2004. Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-01267-0.
- Danuser, Hermann. 1991. "Postmodernes Musikdenken—Lösung oder Flucht?". In Neue Musik im politischen Wandel: fünf Kongressbeiträge und drei Seminarberichte, edited by Hermann Danuser, 56–66. Mainz & New York: Schott. ISBN 3795717728
- Heilbroner, Robert L. 1961. The Future as History. New York: Grove Press.
- Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN 0822309297 (cloth); ISBN 0822310902 (pbk)
- Karolyi, Otto. 1994. Modern British Music: The Second British Musical Renaissance—From Elgar to P. Maxwell Davies. Rutherford, Madison, Teaneck: Farleigh Dickinson University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses. ISBN 0-8386-3532-6
- Kramer, Jonathan. 2002. "The Nature and Origins of Musical Postmodernism." In Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, edited by Judy Lochhead and Joseph Aunder,[citation needed] New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-8153-3820-1 Reprinted from Current Musicology 66 (1999): 7–20.
- Meyer, Leonard B. 1994. Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Patterns and Predictions in Twentieth-Century Culture, second edition. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-52143-5
- Ortega y Gasset, José. 1932. The Revolt of the Masses. New York & London: W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-31095-7 Online edition
- Sullivan, Henry W. 1995. The Beatles with Lacan: Rock ‘n’ Roll as Requiem for the Modern Age. Sociocriticism: Literature, Society and History Series 4. New York: Lang. ISBN 0-8204-2183-9.
- Varga, Bálint András, and Rossana Dalmonte. 1985. Luciano Berio: Two Interviews, translated and edited by David Osmond-Smith. London: Boyars. ISBN 07145282930714528293
- Wellmer, Albrecht. 1991. The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics and Postmodernism, trans. David Midgley. Cambridge [Massachusetts]: MIT Press. ISBN 0262231603
