Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought

Judy Lochhead, Joseph Auner, Judy Lochhead, Joseph Auner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135717858
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: 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.

SECTION I

THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS AND DEBATES

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Judy Lochhead

Critical writings on issues of philosophical, cultural, and aesthetic postmodernism have played a prominent if not dominant role in a wide variety of humanistic disciplines during the last twenty years. Occasionally, this “postmodern debate” has migrated into the domains of the natural and mathematical sciences, raising questions about the foundations of scientific explanation. The debate has been vital, contentious, and nearly ubiquitous in a wide variety of disciplinary discussions. Within the domain of musical studies, issues of postmodernism have trickled into the discourse with little sustained discussion about how the term might apply and to what kinds of musical phenomena it might refer. Of the writing that has occurred, three types may be discerned: English-language writing about popular music, German-language writing about concert music, and English-language writing about concert music.

Of the three types, discussion of the postmodern aspects of music within popular culture has been the most prevalent. A wide variety of authors have contributed to an understanding of the new genre of music video and about how music is used in and affected by postmodern cultural forms. Some examples include: Goodwin 1987, [1988] 1990, 1992; Kaplan 1987; Lipsitz 1990, 1994; Straw [1988] 1993. In German-language musicology there was a relatively sustained response to the issues raised by Jürgen Habermas’s 1981 essay “Modernity—An Incomplete Project” with respect to the compositional work of composers within the concert tradition, addressing the music of John Cage, George Rochberg, György Ligeti, Wolfgang Rihm, and Peter Ruzicka (Habermas [1981] 1987). (See also Joakim Tillman’s essay in this volume for more on the “German debate” in music.) And finally, English-language musicology has recently begun to address questions of postmodernism in the concert tradition over the last decade (see, for instance, J. Kramer 1995; Morgan 1992; McClary 1989; Hartwell 1993; Pasler 1993; Watkins 1994).

The authors within these three types of discussion all address music written after World War II, employing concepts from the wide domain of postmodern thought. Since the mid-1980s another and mostly different group of authors have developed a “postmodern” musicology, defining new paradigms of understanding music in general. The resulting “New Musicology” has indeed generated a vital debate whose ripples have been felt beyond the discipline itself (see, for instance, L. Kramer 1995; McClary 1991; Tomlinson 1993). Motivated on the one hand by Foucauldian notions of cultural power and on the other by Gadamerian hermeneutics, the New Musicology typically focuses on historical music of the concert tradition (music composed before 1945) or on music outside the concert traditions (music of the popular and jazz traditions). In the New Musicology, the focus on historical music confirms what some have described as a postmodern engagement with the past through twentieth-century technological developments—notably recording technologies for music—that bring the past palpably into the present. Further, it provides critique of the various ways that music functions in social settings as a tool either of social power or affirmation¹ and as a consequence paves the way for the scholarly study of musical traditions which had typically been excluded. The influx of ideas from the various strands of postmodern thought has enacted a flattening of traditional hierarchies, effectively broadening the canon. Ironically, however, the focus on historical music within New Musicology has a conservative—perhaps even neo-conservative—effect of reinscribing the canon. This new postmodern musicology entails on one hand, a methodological shift in its approach to canonic works of the Western concert tradition and on the other, an embrace of music in the popular and jazz traditions as well as music outside of the West. In the latter case, the music may be approached with either the new methods or more traditional, “modernist” ones.²

A vigorous scholarly interest in recent practices in the concert tradition has not arisen as a response to postmodern methodologies in the New Musicology or to postmodern thought in humanistic studies generally. Such a seeming reluctance to study and write about recent practices does not occur in the sister arts where there is a strong tradition of writing about recent work. A quick survey of books devoted to contemporary art confirms a serious scholarly interest (see, for instance, Foster 1996; Krauss 1985; Kuspit 1993). It may be that music scholars have been concerned to let “time be the test” of musical value or to avoid the appearance of advocacy. But such attitudes contradict postmodern theories of “situated knowledge” and “institutional power” which maintain that value, not an absolute quality, arises in a context of beliefs and that the choices writers make necessarily amount to advocacy. In fact, the newly affirmed interest in writing on popular music and jazz within academic musicology entails advocacy based on revised notions of value.

One might construe the reticence of professional music scholars to write about recent music in the concert tradition as in fact advocacy not only of a particular music but of traditions of thinking about music. The more established pathways of thought about historical music—especially music of the canon— may offer more satisfying intellectual rewards for scholars, thus confirming personal and professional goals. Furthermore, those established pathways of critical and analytical appraisal which have worked for Beethoven and Mozart apply relatively well to Coltrane and the Beatles. This applicability allows an opening up of the canonic repertoire without requiring new critical/analytical methodologies. Further, one may observe that recent composers themselves write infrequently about their own or others’ music—an absence that stands in stark contrast to the practices of the prior generation.³

The relative silence in print about recent concert music in various sorts of specialist and non-specialist scholarly venues has complex sources. It is not, however, the goal of this volume to analyze the motivations for this silence. Rather, the intent is multi-faceted: to stimulate a sustained scholarly discussion of recent musical practices, to broaden discussion of the implications of postmodern thought for music scholarship, and further to encourage conversations about music that participate in the issues and debates confronting society today. In other words, we hope to overcome the tendency for music to “lag behind the other arts.” Our goals build upon and extend work begun at a conference, “Postmodernism and Music,” held at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in March 1999 under the auspices of the Department of Music and the Greater New York Chapter of the American Musicological Society.⁴

Several of the essays here were delivered at the conference, while the remaining were solicited for the volume. They are grouped into four categories. In Section I, “Theoretical Foundations and Debates,” the essays address general issues of musical postmodernism and engage a broad range of prior thought about postmodern thought generally. In Section II, “Scaling the High/Low Divide,” the essays take into consideration music from domains of music making that have been considered separate and in hierarchical terms, exploring the implicit relations between these domains in postmodern practices. The essays of Section III, “Compositional Voices,” investigate in some detail particular works of specific composers with respect to questions of postmodern aesthetics. And finally, the essays in Section IV, “Linking the Visual and Aural Domains,” focus on how film and music are entwined in the construal of meaning in a postmodern context.

POSTMODERNISM 2000?

The question of why in the 1980s the postmodern debate never fully captured the imaginations of musicologists in English-language scholarship might well be understood as incidental to the question of why it should be necessary or relevant to raise the question of postmodernism at all in the new millennium. Two responses are relevant to this project. First, any number of writers in musical and other domains have questioned the usefulness of the term, remarking on its conceptual slipperiness and its broadstroke and hence feeble descriptive powers. While it might be attractive to refuse the term as some have suggested in various others fields, that response continues the self-imposed exclusionary practices of music scholars with respect to issues in the rest of the humanities. If musicology and music theory hope to be more than parasitic on intellectual developments in other fields, they must take up the debates, showing how musical production is implicated in its social context— how it reflects and constructs that context. And while such study of music should rightly consider how music of the past is used in the context of contemporary consumer society, it should also consider the musics that are produced in all of the various traditions of music-making—popular, jazz, and concert music.

The second response is practical yet equally central: the term “postmodern” freely circulates in various types of informal and formal writings about music. Consider these examples:

From the New York Times, Arts and Leisure Section, July 12, 1998, the headline of an article on George Rochberg reads: “From an Early Postmodernist, a Day of Overdue Vindication”

From the promotional blurb about Glenn Watkins’s 1994 historical study of 20th century music, Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists: “A rich and revealing picture of twentieth-century music and the arts, Watkins’ work shows us what our present Postmodern aesthetic owes to our Modernist past.”

From a review in Spin of Sonic Youth’s covers of twentieth-century avant-garde works, Goodbye 20th Century: “Expressway to yr skull? More like a stairway to postmodernist heaven, the two CD Goodbye finds SY and pals rifling through scores by venerable odd ball composers.” (Hermes 2000)

The term “postmodern” is in full use in descriptions of musical practice, and its growing prevalence suggests a responsibility to demarcate the dimensions of its meanings. Further, refusal to address the term would simply amount to a refusal of postmodern linguistic theory which claims the undecidability and fluidity of meaning.

The essays included in this volume attest to both a certain unease about the term and the various ways it has been utilized. They also demonstrate the kind of category the term “postmodernism” implies: it is not a category defined by simple “binaries” as the prefix “post” implies, and it is a category whose defining features remain elusive. Such conceptual slipperiness is not the exclusive domain of postmodernism, however. Contemplating the concept of time in the fourth century St. Augustine remarked: “What, then, is time? I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled” (Augustine 1977, 264). Not one to be deterred by such difficulties of understanding, Augustine proceeded to write persuasively on time, his thoughts serving as the beginning point for several centuries of writers wishing to “pin down” a concept of time. Like Augustine, the authors included in this text have taken on the challenge not necessarily to “pin down” and hence make static a meaning of musical postmodernism, but rather to demarcate the various kinds of significances the term may have in current thinking about musical practices.

If the scholarship on music included here is to mark an engagement with current humanistic thought about musical practices in the present, then it needs to be cognizant of the issues that have been the focus of debates in literature, art, philosophy, and cultural studies generally. And while it will not be practical nor intellectually necessary to give a thorough overview of the postmodern debate, it is helpful to delineate for readers its broad outlines and to articulate some important sources of information.⁵

POSTMODERNITY/POSTMODERNISM: THE ISSUES

The “postmodern debate” that so dominated thinking in humantistic disciplines in the 1980s necessarily engaged questions of basic definitions. Its prefix of “post” implies a link to the modern, another term that has taken a variety of differing meanings. If the link is understood as a temporal demarcator, then questions arise as to how clear a break is implied and to how the postmodern responds to the modern. Hal Foster argues for two kinds of responses: a postmodernism of resistance that “seeks to deconstruct modernism and resist the status quo” and a postmodernism of reaction that “repudiates” modernism in order to “celebrate” the status quo (Foster [1983] 1998, xii). The general issue revolves around whether the postmodern is discontinuous or continuous with the modern trajectory and whether the modern is figured in negative or positive terms. Such issues of response further engage the question of whether the postmodern marks an underlying change of paradigm with respect to social order and intellectual thought or whether it denotes stylistic changes that apply to surface mannerisms.

General questions about what the postmodern might entail have been fueled by a wide variety of thought in the humanities. Work by scholars in the more traditional disciplines of philosophy, English, and comparative studies have defined new areas of thought focused on gender, sexuality, and culture which have resulted in the transformation of existing disciplines and the creation of new ones. Questions that had been central in the traditional disciplines have been replaced or radically transformed by such recent work and by technological developments. Here I sketch out some of the changes central to the postmodern debate that are relevant for thinking about music.

Concepts of time and temporality have been transformed in the wake of theories of indeterminacy and chaos in the sciences and mathematics, of technological developments that affect the speed of travel and communication, and of a general questioning of teleology. Time and temporal processes in general are no longer understood to imply a futurally-directed progress in which events are causally related. Lyotard makes the link...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Studies in Contemporary Music and Culture
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Series Editor's Foreword
• Section I: Theoretical Foundations and Debates
• Section II Scaling the High/Low Divide
• Section III Compositional Voices
• Section IV Linking the Visual and Aural Domains
• Contributors
• Index