Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought (Studies in Contemporary Music and Culture)

Rating:
Summary: After-Post Modernity, what is it,?Who knows!
Review: Music is always behind in theory,in cultural critique, in appraisals of its theoretical implications. Simpy compare the art world in the level of discussion and dialogue with the corridors of serious music, and you will find a large gulf.
The Impressionists,the Expressionists eras were over before music caught up with the conceptual trajectories that produced this art.Not that I adhere to strict categorical paralleles for it does have its conceptual limitations.But music seems mired in itself, and it has only bee recently(the last ten years) where we even find writers finding useful parallels from music to social dimensions, culture or politics.And there is no excuse for it with perceptive writers as Theodor Adorno and Pierre Bourdieu to lead the way. For instance we have musicologists today that are still contemplating the "mysterious" harmonic schemes of Wagner's prelude to "Tristan und Isolde",or finding the "golden circles through set theory with differeing pitch configurations while in the other arts vigorous fascinating work abound in theory,in concept,in technique in dialogues in discussion of the lifeworld interbreed with philosophy and culture where we may find where the limits of post-modernity reside.
So this is a welcome book if only because it helps situate music a realm even the likes of Lyotard and Jameson hardly speak about, or only as generally and opaque as possible.It hasn't been since Jacques Attali(a relative novice in music) where his book "Noise" we have some all-encompassing subversive, drawing in categories of the economic, production,and composition.
So What is post-modern music?,it really doesn't matter anymore, and when it did the various music scholars were silent, or confused, or both. Well musical post-modernity is that where it has given up the torch of modernity and we can even include the gravitas of Boulez and Stockhausen,Cage and Berio into this transgressiveness for they, their music has been, in various ways, bit by the buzz, the fashionable, the accessible,the market even the more serial orthodox compositional extremes of Brian Ferneyhough has loosened his vigorous grip on his overdetermined complexity , where rhythms and textures are simpler than ever seen in his oeuvre.
For music I guess it was the late Sixties with the rebellions in Europe and campus demonstrations here that seemed to spark something, a democratization of culture, where (as a Cage canon has it) we are all composers. We have now a levelling-down of modernity, modernity made more "user=friendly". It is much easier to become a composer today in that reading music is no longer a prerequisite, even consummate rocker Elvis Costello can have/write serious music for orchestra today.

The tardiness here again here refers to the fact that we no longer use the term post-modernity, we have (according to theorist Hal Foster) long past the post, we are in the era After-Post, and I hope it stops there for nothing is illuminated. The Market, the Glorious Buck controls everything now, serious music is whatever anyone wants to pay for it or produce it, to distribute it, that's todays definition,or guideline also in terms of bourgeois prizes handed to some composers who really (let's face it gents and ladies) really don't deserve it. But that's another trajectory of the bureauocracitization of the avant-garde or music.

Some of the essays here are simply general expose of particular composers as Lachenmann and Ferneyhough, but all the more valuable for it helps situate their work within a larger whole. There is quite a number of topics here all worth contemplating as multi-ethnicity,and composition, profiles of composers, how they work. Politics(a forever important realm for the creative artist) seems to have been forsakened here,examining the larger framework of where commissions emanate from,why are artists marginalized (censored really) who gets what, when and How. But that's a small reservation compared to the value of this book.