# Deconstructivism in classical music



## jurianbai (Nov 23, 2008)

As I am from architectural background , the last thing I learn is in architecture, the latest buzz is the deconstructivism style / idea. See : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconstructivism

I wonder if such an idea exist in classical music ? Usually classical music is in parallel with other art development such as modernism, post modernism, etc.

Any example on Deconstructivism in classical music ?


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## tenor02 (Jan 4, 2008)

minimalism? 

that's all i can really think of.


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

Minimalism is another beast altogether. Coming from an art background with a working knowledge of the history of architecture I'm think that the key characteristics of Deconstructivism would include a fragmentation and an unpredictable distortion or dislocation of the key elements of traditional form. I'm thinking we'd need to look to Post-Modernist music (1970s or 1980s and later). I have a decent collection of works from this period, but I cannot pretend to be at all an expert of the era. I also recognize that a great many of the works of this era are rooted more in other "traditions": Post-Romanticism, late Modernism, Minimalism, Polystylism, etc... I'm thinking you might look at Tan Dun's _Water Passion_, the work of Frank Zappa, John Cage, George Crumb, etc...


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## Weston (Jul 11, 2008)

Wikipedia said:


> The finished visual appearance of buildings that exhibit the many deconstructivist "styles" is characterized by a stimulating unpredictability and a controlled chaos.


This sounds a lot like aleotoric music or software composed or software assisted compositions.



Wikipedia said:


> It is characterized by* ideas of fragmentation*, an interest in manipulating ideas of a structure's surface or skin, *non-rectilinear shapes* which serve to distort and dislocate some of the elements of architecture, such as structure and envelope.


 (my bold editing)

This could almost be compared to 24 tone (or other microtonal scaled) music. Just an idea. If you have more tones to play with, the music phrases could be more smoothly curved, less rectilinear. Not many people seem to be experimenting with this. It must be awfully hard to do. I only know of Paul Dresher, Wendy Carlos, and Prent Rogers who have worked with microtonal scales and still produced something I would call music (though others may not).
http://www.soundclick.com/bands/default.cfm?bandID=104802&content=music


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

Deconstructivism/postmodernism in the sense of contemporary works 
quoting many fragments from works composed in earlier historical periods 
of music - thus leaving their original formal conception and rules behind - 
and afterwards mixing all these fragments in a new structure
that gives a new perspective and meaning, can be found in

Luciano Berio Sinfonia, especially the Scherzo-movement
Alfred Schnittke 1.Symphony
George Rochberg Music for the Magic Theatre

I´m not musically qualified to go into a "deep" discussion about
the asthetical and philosophical implications of their structure,
but they represent something new in the obvious and rebellious anarchy,
that is different from, say, earlier composers habit of quoting motifs their
colleagues now and then. Louis Spohr´s "Historical Symphony" has,
as far as i remember, movements that characterize various historical
styles, but it is all very civic and chronological. Rochberg´s movements
have accompanying texts that imply "a new meaning" as a modernist
or existentialist programme - that nostalghia for the past should be abandoned.
Interesting subject - have to leave now ...


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## jurianbai (Nov 23, 2008)

I remember one composition that can be played in normal way AND in reverse way. forget the name and composer. that's might be one of Deconstructivism idea.


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## Argus (Oct 16, 2009)

jurianbai said:


> I remember one composition that can be played in normal way AND in reverse way. forget the name and composer. that's might be one of Deconstructivism idea.


Bach's Crab Canon?


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## Head_case (Feb 5, 2010)

Lol. Did he have that Crab Canon as an hors d'oeuvres before making a pavlova?

Jurianbai - deconstructivism did not originate in architecture: it was borrowed from a philosophical movement, best characterised through the writings of Jacques Derrida, or even Deleuze & Guattari. We've been living under the influence of deconstructionism in the post-modern world and its influences are inescapable. 

However the visual representation of such fragmentation and unmasking of traditional concepts, does not necessarily add up to Beethovenian beauty. Too often, the modern barbarism and brute architectural forces of such a movement, are too palpable ... not in architecture, but music.

Lutoslawski's String Quartets, as with Penderecki's String Quartet, embody these ideals; the fusion of aleatory notes, randomly coalescing to form a super-structure. And somehow, this is supposed to be interesting for the listener 

The intellectual application of such philosophical principles, imported into music or architecture might be interesting: 'interesting' in terms of 'controversial'; or 'controversial' in terms of attention seeking. That is - 'sensationalist', rather than substantive. And when there is no substance, why bother with deconstructionism? 

As much as I am open to trying new forms of music, particularly 20th century and 21st century music, deconstructionist tendencies seem to offer the weakest heuristic for any composer I listen to. Lutoslawski and Penderecki represent the weakest of the rich Polish composer's legacy in this respect for me: the Vintage 33 group led by Henryk Gorecki and his contemporaries, like Wojiiech Kilar and Tadeusz Baird, who are not afraid to draw from their folk roots, have profound foundations to draw their music from, than starting with a tabula rasa and dispersing random notes on it. Similarly, the minimalist spirituality of the Baltic composers (think Part; Silvestrov etc) draw on what is essentially anti-thetical to deconstructionism.


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## Lukecash12 (Sep 21, 2009)

Head_case said:


> As much as I am open to trying new forms of music, particularly 20th century and 21st century music, deconstructionist tendencies seem to offer the weakest heuristic for any composer I listen to. Lutoslawski and Penderecki represent the weakest of the rich Polish composer's legacy in this respect for me: the Vintage 33 group led by Henryk Gorecki and his contemporaries, like Wojiiech Kilar and Tadeusz Baird, who are not afraid to draw from their folk roots, have profound foundations to draw their music from, than starting with a tabula rasa and dispersing random notes on it. Similarly, the minimalist spirituality of the Baltic composers (think Part; Silvestrov etc) draw on what is essentially anti-thetical to deconstructionism.


You make a good point, but how do we know whether or not deconstructed music is a good platform to create actual substance?


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## Head_case (Feb 5, 2010)

Lukecash12 said:


> You make a good point, but how do we know whether or not deconstructed music is a good platform to create actual substance?


We know in the same way posed by Heraclitus, when he asks whether man can step into the same river of Being twice. When the river is running fresh, there is always a natural flow; substance, transforming, from being to becoming.

In deconstruction of this river of Being, there is only recycled water. Recycled parts. Fragments of poop and musical motifs congealing like flatulence in swamp like mesmerisation. Fit only for the lavatory 

(j/k)


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## jurianbai (Nov 23, 2008)

Interesting one Head_case. the reason I asking about Decons in Classical is just to check how far the deconstructivism already used in classical music. I am not at all a follower in 20th century music, which mean all the atonal, twelves tones is deconstructivism in my ear. 

In architectural since it is visual, the decons can easily attract eyes, works by Zaha Hadid is easily distinguished from those by Frank L. Wright or De Corbusier.

I agree deconsctructivism maybe not a well developed platform for music, especially if we stick to the theory where no need a trained ear to enjoy music, as in some of the thread in this forum. Deconstructivism is, must also listenable.


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## Head_case (Feb 5, 2010)

Yes....architecture forms are more visceral and tangible - or "concrete". It is an ideal form for the expression of (philosophical) concepts. Music which runs on these lines however.....risks remaining 'cerebral' or too intellectual. 

I guess my premise is that music is not an intellectual form; it can be informed by intellectual processes, however must transcend these. In that respect, I don't mind listening to Lutoslawski or Penderecki, say, once every 2 years 

Gorecki and atonal music doesn't necessarily fall into deconstructivism. His Polish catholicism takes the percept: that there is a natural order to the world: like gravity; like 'chance', or random events. However this would be a purely monocular view of the world and fall into the trap of deconstructivist ideology. Gorecki's catholicism imputes a force: "Grace", or what is essentially, the only force which transcends the natural order of chaos or monadic existence; to bring his music to fruition, after exhausting and transforming each monadic little atonal snippet within his music. Other Polish eclectic composers, like Pawel Szymanski, deliberately draw on the forms of tradition, however accents these conventional elements through a metaphor, such as linguistic transformation. Maybe what makes such composers so highly regarded, is their grounding in a methodology, which does not deconstruct itself, or its own music, to the mere aleatory. 

This is the problem with modern deconstructivism; it rests on tradition in order to be viable, yet whilst it tries to renounce tradition, but speciating the elemental; the chance occurence and juxtaposition of random events. No one wants to listen to fractals or computer generated music. The whole enterprise of deconstruction in music isn't just a paradox: it's a self-defeating contradiction.


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

Some sources as regards the above-mentioned works:

Rochberg: "Music for the Magic Theatre" .... (1967) ... falls into 3 parts or acts, the 1st and the 3rd enclosing areworking of the adagio of Mozarts K287 divertimento in the manner of a concerto in which the piano and solo violin share the major roles (...). Even though other composers (Varese, Webern, Mahler, Beethoven) are quoted, my primary interest was not in a raw or literal presentation of a variety of sources, but rather in the projection of an almost cinematic series of shifting ideas and levels which, nevertheless, combine in an inevitable fashion, despite sharp contradicions and paradoxes, to produce a totality, a unity. In its combinations of the past and present, of seemingly accidental, unrelated images, whose placement in the stream of time obeys no apparent logic, the work partakes of the state of dreaming - whether awake or asleep, and like all dreams, it becomes a fantasy, a fiction of the mind nonethelss real. The title came after the work was completed and was taken from (...) Hesse´s Novel Steppenwolf, in which, as in this work, the magic theatre functions as that mental domain in where reality and fantasy, where past and future, real history and imagined history confront each other to create new configurations and new openings for living existence. In this way the title became a metaphor for the internal character of the music and the music became a metaphor for the contradictory levels of the contemporary state of mind which in Mircea Eliades phrase is the coincidentia oppositorum of all true existence" (George Rochberg, record sleeve notes for desto LP dc 6444).
Eliade is apparently often associated with the various concepts of postmodernism and deconstructivism, as some googling reveals.

Wikipedia: Sinfonia is a composition by the Italian composer Luciano Berio that was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for its 125th anniversary. Composed in 1968-69 for orchestra and eight amplified voices, it is a musically innovative post-serial classical work, with multiple vocalists commenting about musical (and other) topics as the piece twists and turns through a seemingly neurotic journey of quotations and dissonant passages. The eight voices are not used in a traditional classical way; they frequently do not sing at all, but speak, whisper and shout words by Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose Le cru et le cuit provides much of the text, excerpts from Samuel Beckett's novel The Unnamable, instructions from the scores of Gustav Mahler and other writings.

Leonard Bernstein states in the text version of his Charles Eliot Norton lectures from 1973 that Sinfonia was representative of the new direction classical music was taking after the pessimistic decade of the sixties (Bernstein 1976, p. 423).
Movements
The work is in five movements:
I 
II - O King 
III - In ruhig fliessender Bewegung 
IV 
V 
The first movement primarily uses a French text source and the third movement primarily uses English text sources. The text for the second movement is limited to the phonemes of the title, "O Martin Luther King." The remaining movements are primarily instrumental with occasional vocal elements. The overall form of the piece is an arch form with elements of the first movement reflected in the fifth and connections between the second and fourth. The third movement, a study of inter-relations, stands on its own.

[edit] First movement
In the first movement of Sinfonia, Berio uses texts from Le cru et le cuit (The Raw and the Cooked) by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss. The form of the piece is also inspired by Lévi-Strauss, who in his work on mythology had found that many myths were structured like musical compositions, with some myths having a "fugal" form and others resembling a sonata. One mythical transformation however, had a structure for which he was not able to find a musical equivalent (Lévi-Strauss & Eribon 1991, p. 177), and this is the form Berio used in his Sinfonia-though Lévi-Strauss did not notice this. Interviewed by Didier Eribon, he said:

[Y]ou know that Berio used The Raw and the Cooked in his Sinfonia. A part of the text is recited, accompanied by the music. I admit that I did not grasp the reason for this choice. During an interview a musicologist asked me about it, and I answered that the book had just come out and the composer had probably used it because it was at hand. Now, a few months ago Berio, whom I don't know, sent me a very disgruntled letter. He had read the interview, several years after the fact, and assured me that the movement of this symphony offered the musical counterpart of the mythical transformation I was revealing. He included a book by a musicologist (Osmond-Smith 1985) who had demonstrated the fact. I apologized for the misunderstanding, which was, I said, the result of my lack of musical training, but I'm still baffled. (Lévi-Strauss & Eribon 1991, p. 178) 
[edit] Second movement: O King
In 1968, Berio completed O King, a work dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King (Berio 1986). This movement exists in two versions: one for voice, flute, clarinet, violin, cello and piano, the other for eight voices and orchestra. The orchestral version of O King was, shortly after its completion, integrated into Sinfonia. It uses a fair amount of whole tone scale motifs (which also appears in the quote from Le Sacre du Printemps in the third movement.)

[edit] Third movement
In the third movement of Sinfonia Berio lays the groundwork by quoting multiple excerpts from the third movement scherzo from Mahler's Symphony No. 2 and has the orchestra play a slightly cut-up, re-shuffled and occasionally re-orchestrated version of it. Many have described Berio's third movement as a "musical collage", in essence using an "Ivesian" approach to the entire movement (American composer Charles Ives in his Symphony No. 2 first used musical quotation techniques on a grand scale at the turn of the 20th century about 65 years earlier).

The orchestra plays snatches of Claude Debussy's La Mer, Maurice Ravel's La Valse, Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, as well as quotations from Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Johannes Brahms, Henri Pousseur, Paul Hindemith, and many others (including Berio himself) creating a dense collage, occasionally to humorous effect. When one of the reciters says "I have a present for you", the orchestra follows immediately with the introductory chord from Don, the first movement from Pli selon pli by Pierre Boulez.

The quoted fragments are often chosen because they bear a rhythmic or melodic likeness to Mahler's scherzo. For example, Berio uses a violin line from the second movement of Alban Berg's violin concerto with chromatically descending sixteenth notes two measures before a similarly descending line appears in Mahler's scherzo. This is then accompanied by another violin descent, taken from Johannes Brahms' violin concerto (Schwartz & Godfrey 1993, p. 378).

The eight individual voices simultaneously recite texts from various sources, most notably the first page of Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable. Other text fragments include references to James Joyce, graffiti Berio noticed during the May 1968 protests in Paris and notes from Berio's diary (Schwartz & Godfrey 1993, p. 376).

Berio himself describes the movement as a "Voyage to Cythera", in which a ship filled with gifts is headed towards the island dedicated to the goddess of love. This idea is musically implied by the "flowing" multi-quoted excerpts from Mahlers second symphony, the boat drifting past a variety of historical music quotations.

[edit] Musical quotations
A partial list of musical quotations used in the third movement of Sinfonia in order of their appearance:

Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, fourth movement (violent opening scale played by the brass) 
A brief quotation of Mahler's Symphony No. 4 (Mahler) just before..... 
Mahler's Resurrection Symphony, third movement (the only quotation that is ongoing) 
Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé, flute solo from the Pantomime 
Berlioz's idée fixe from the Symphonie Fantastique (played by the clarinets) 
Ravel's La Valse (orchestra plays octave motif with piccolo playing a chromatic scale) 
Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps (the "Dance of the Earth" sequence at the end of the first tableux) 
Stravinsky's Agon (upper oboe part from the "Double pas de quatre") 
Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier (one of the waltzes composed for the opera) 
a chorale by Johann Sebastian Bach 
Alban Berg's Wozzeck (the drowning scene late in the third act) 
Beethoven's Pastorale Symphony, second movement (melody stated with the clarinets) 
(Schoenberg segment quoted again) 
Debussy's La Mer, second movement "Jeux de vagues" 
Boulez's Pli Selon Pli, very first chord of the entire piece from the first movement ("Don") 
Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gruppen for three orchestras (during the introductions of the vocalists near the end) 
[edit] Analysis
The result is a narrative with the usual tension and release of classical music, but using a completely different language. The actual chords and melodies at any one time do not seem as important as the fact that we are, for example, hearing a part of Mahler or a particular bit of Alban Berg with added words by Beckett. Because of this, the movement is often described as one of the first examples of Postmodern music[citation needed]. It has also been described as a deconstruction of Mahler's second symphony, just as Berio's Visage was a deconstruction of Cathy Berberian's voice.

The third movement is mostly in 3/4 time, although Berio occasionally adds or takes away a beat or two for temporary effect. It's been suggested by Louis Andriessen who was interviewed in Frank Scheffer's short film "Voyage to Cynthera" that the waltz beat pattern was symbolic of the "old school" of composers during the 19th century. Berio's modernistic treatment of it (much the same way Ravel's "La Valse" did earlier in the 20th century) was apparently a statement that the classical music establishment was/is too rooted in its past. It was time to move on from the (as Leonard Bernstein put it) "over-waltzed" Austro-Hungarian empire mentality.

One of the more neurotic moments of the piece takes place during the Wozzeck drowning quotation late in the third movement. At this point separate individual singers are contesting each other, requesting the music to either "stop!" or "keep going!". Another notable quote near the very end of the same movement is when the spotlight tenor voice states "...there was hope for Resurrection or almost". This is a clear reference to the Mahler's second symphony of which the third movement is quoted throughout the entire third movement of Sinfonia.

There are also brief elements of indeterminancy that pop up in the third movement-mentions of another piece on the program just past midpoint and the singers and conductor at the end. These would change from performance to performance as they are variables. For example, the in-print Erato label 1986 recording thanks "Mr. Boulez" not because one of his pieces is quoted but because he is the conductor on that particular recording.

Because Sinfonia directly quotes from other musical sources as far back as the late baroque era (Bach) and as recent as a few years before the 1968 premiere of the piece, it is arguable that Sinfonia uses the widest array of techniques ever employed in a single musical work. Even the latest musical technique to evolve by that time, sound mass from the early sixties (originated by such composers as Krzysztof Penderecki and György Ligeti), is used several times throughout the third movement.

[edit] Fourth movement
The fourth movement was initially intended as a kind of coda, and reuses texts from the first three movements. It opens with a quotation from Lévi-Strauss that is at the same time a veiled reference to Mahler's second symphony: the fourth movement of Sinfonia opens with the words "rose de sang" (French for "rose of blood"), and the fourth movement of Mahlers symphony begins with the words "O Röschen roth!" (German for "O red rosebud!") (Berio, Dalmonte & Varga 1985, p. 109).

A customer review of Schnittke´s 1.Symphony at Amazon.com 
Excessive, rambling and incoherent--but utterly gripping, December 11, 2003 
By Edward Wright

Alfred Schnittke's First Symphony is one of the most extraordinary works to have come out of Soviet music. Written between 1969 and 1972 this symphony--or unsymphony as the composer originally intended to call it--attempts to sum up the whole of the world around the composer in a frenetic collage. One commentator has described this work as "The Gulag Archipelago of Soviet Music", another as "a massive temper tantrum". The truth lies somewhere in between.
The work is in fact in the standard four movements--sixty-five minutes in total--but that is about as far as the resemblances go to a conventional symphony. The first movement starts with the sound of chiming bells, before the musicians enter the hall one by one, improvising. When the conductor arrives, the music halts, only to start up again in a set of parodic episodes, including an improvisatory trombone cadenza. At the climax of the movement, the entire orchestra start shouting, before the music lurches into the transition between the last two movements of Beethoven's 5th symphony, then collapses entirely.

The second movement is just as chaotic. It starts with vigorously rhythmic pseudo-Baroquery, before drums intrude and convert this into a parodic march. Suddenly, this breaks off for a semi-improvised violin-and-piano cadenza, before the Baroque parody returns. Eventually the orchestration thins down, leading into the elegiac third movement.

This is a more conventionally serious piece of writing, even if the nasty jokes of the other movements occasionally intrude. Written serially, this movement builds up to a massive tragic climax, which fades away, leading straight into the finale.

The finale begins with a collage of other composers' work, before clarifying into a set of episodes based on the Dies Irae. As these become more and more excessive, they break down into a free jazz improvisation, followed by a biting parody of a contemporary Russian pop hit. A cadenza for organ and timpani leads into an enormous pile-up where much of the material of the whole symphony is compressed into a short period. After this, the musicians begin to leave the stage until a single violin is left, playing the 'Farewell' motif from the Haydn symphony, before the chiming of bells brings the work back to the opening, and the performers return to the stage. The music ends with a single note being pounded out, fortissimo, against pounding drums.

This is a remarkable work--one almost guaranteed to fail, but nonetheless extremely powerful, particularly in as gripping a performance as this one. I wouldn't want to listen to it often, but when I return to it, I am usually surprised at how well-written and effective it is. In some ways, despite the differences in musical language between the two composers, I feel this is perhaps the closest any other composer has come to the late works of Bernd Alois Zimmermann. (Certainly, the often-cited comparisons between this work and Berio's Sinfonia seem pointless to me.)


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## Derrida (Mar 5, 2010)

*Deconstructing Deconstruction, In Defense of Philosophy and Music*

My definitions need not be treated as the be-all-end-all definition. They are what i believe to be the common usage in academia and music circles in Europe and America. of course, you can use whatever term to call whatever you want, but there must be at least some kind of effort not to confuse one with previously existing definitions of a term if you are to use your new terms without any mention whatsoever of the common definitions.

*Deconstruction* is a philosophical "method", and as someone mentioned has roots in the work of Derrida and simular continental philosophers. "Deconstructionism" as far as I know, is not really a word accepted in either scholarship or it's counterparts in the fine arts (while deconstruction is). Deconstruction is associated with *postmodernism*, which is a wide field of diciplines and philosophical projects. Postmodernism is both an umbrella term for a number of important theorists and their associated movements. Deconstruction thus, is not actually really an influence in 20th century composition. Atonalism, serialism, twelve tone, Schoenberg, etc are all examples and models of *MODERNIST* composition, Little to do with deconstruction or derrida or even postmodernism.

What DOES have much to do with postmodernism is the *pastiche style *as one commenter mentioned. a sort of colage of various period styles and methods. Again this has little to do with deconstruction, although it may be influenced by certain ideas brought about by deconstruction. Such ideas include the suggestion that much of music is socially constructed, and that concepts such as "greatness" or "genius" in music are the heritage of a long tradition of Humanist "individualist" ideologies, commercialization of music, and the long history of literary traditions that have been constructed around composers such as Beethoven and Mozart. Deconstruction thus, is not so much a factor of compositional methods in the late 20th century, rather than a tool historians and musicologists use to dissect history. Deconstruction challenges the traditional authority of western classical music and it's right/monopoly over value judgements and intepretations of itself and non-western musics. 

If I were to rephrase the original question, I suggest replacing deconstructionism with postmodernism.
Deconstruction as a theory of space and architecture is a highly esoteric application of the larger deconstruction of derrida and deluze etc, which has much to do with analysing the socially produced dynamics of space rather than a style of architecture. It is much the same in music. The difficulty comes when people confuse deconstruction, which is obviously a very esoteric field, with postmodernism. Postmodernism CAN be referred to as a style of music however, and is used to describe modern "pastiche" compositional methods as described below.

Now to defend "deconstructionism." Deconstruction and derrida's philosophy do not suggest as commenters seem to imply, a kind of disgusting total relativism. Deconstruction challenges the fixed meanings of concepts such as "soul" or "humanism" and cannot be associated with simple obscurism and/or "playing records backwards as well as erasing the names of the composers on the cd" Deconstruction as a philosophical method has met with much resistance in the academic field and otherwise and also is a now relatively old field with many thinkers associated with postmodernism transcending and developing on old "deconstruction" themes. There are many charlatans associated with the academic field of deconstruction as well as any other discipline, thus the american public's generally negative attitude towards deconstruction. there is much good and much bad in deconstruction as there is much good and much bad in contemporary musics. It would never be right to generalize and impose such value judgements on something one is so ill-informed about.

Now Postmodernism is often associated with the serialist, atonal, lutoslawski/shoenberg/berg/Szymanski, traditions of music. What sense does this make however? given the popular misconception of Postmodernism as forwading the idea that classical traditions are foundationally unstable and the value of all music the same (something neither proposed by deconstruction nor postmodernism...) then atonal, twelve tone, serialism etc would be equally ridiculous as socially constructed "musics" if not more so. Often music critics with little knowledge of either contemporary music or deconstruction and postmodernism mix all the terms together and try to either discredit them as degenerate trash or praise them as the new forms of music which future generations might come to appreciate.

Finally, Deconstruction is not a concept as used by the people in this forum and never was. Derrida never associated himself with Deconstruction, or deconstructionism and in fact would be turning in his grave if he knew how fixed the term seems to be locked with his name. Of course, we need names to talk about things, and thus, we call his tradition the tradition of "deconstruction" I would discourage using the term deconstruction when talking about music (unless in the academic context of deconstructing "texts" (pieces, concepts, composers, narratives)) and also condemn the use of "deconstructionism" as a general term to designate any sort of music composed in the modern and postmodern "eras" of music art.

I hope that the detractors of contemporary music would address such music by their own names ie. minimalism, serialism, twelve tone etc. and even then, refrain from addressing music in such general and bombastic terms like: "everything that is wrong with music" and the "end of classical music" As "Deconstruction" would have us understand, it's not quite that simple.


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