# How do I get to like Postmodernism?



## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

I think this kept getting in lumped into the Modernism thread, but is actually a different beast altogether, even if it commonly shares the quality of disonnance. And a lot of arguments made for liking modernism actually applies more to Postmodernism.

Postmodernism music is fragmentary, structurally less defined among other things, which is different than music from previous eras

Plus there is no overall systematic organization. It may use a combination of previous techniques, which gives it its contradictory quality.

I believe you can get into it if you open and free your mind from anything you thought you knew about music.

Ok go nuts, I see myself a mod poster boy (yes it is a conspiracy ), so will be stressing no need to attack any poster, but anyone can make any comments on the music itself.


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## mmsbls (Mar 6, 2011)

While I have a general sense of what modernism and post-modernism mean, I don't know what post-Romantic music would fall under each term. Can you give some examples of post-modern works or composers?


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## Guest (Nov 29, 2017)

Are you talking about Rautavaara or Ferneyhough, Part or Beat Furrer?

Lumping all such composers together will generate nothing but flaccid generalizations and opportunities for posters to vent their lack of taste.

How about you start a thread asking how to like a specific composer.


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## Agamemnon (May 1, 2017)

I think one of the first and best instances of postmodern music is Berio's Sinfonia:





Just Google on Sinfonia and postmodernism to find elaborations on why this work is postmodern. A summarizing quote I found is "Luciano Berio's Sinfonia (1968-1969) is generally recognised as the ultimate postmodern musical work in its simultaneous extension and rejection of modernist aesthetics." 
https://sondermag.wordpress.com/2015/04/30/fragmentary-composition-jack-sheen/


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## Agamemnon (May 1, 2017)

And to answer the OP's question: what's not to like?


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Agamemnon said:


> I think one of the first and best instances of postmodern music is Berio's Sinfonia:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


I quite like it, but I can't stand the Mahler. It's just their to provide something comfortable for the modern-music-disabled to cling on to.


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

Tulse said:


> Are you talking about Rautavaara or Ferneyhough, Part or Beat Furrer?
> 
> Lumping all such composers together will generate nothing but flaccid generalizations and opportunities for posters to vent their lack of taste.
> 
> How about you start a thread asking how to like a specific composer.


Bravo! No more epic generalizations about what could be decades of music, but instead comment on not only specific composers, but specific works and specific performances. It's the only way that one can get a specific reaction from listeners based on something they've actually heard rather than on what could be an assumption.


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

Schnittke's 3rd String Quartet sounds postmodern to me, though he called his technique polystylism, "a colorful synthesis of music in the styles of past composers, often using direct quotation, reworked into a contemporary musical language" (Robert Strong). He reworks Beethoven, Shostakovich, and what Strong calls a di Lasso cadence, based on modal harmony. And that's what I like about it; surrounding the unfamiliar with occasional doses of the familiar. 

Of course, PDQ Bach is the ultimate postmodernist, where everything gets mixed up with everything else.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

mmsbls said:


> While I have a general sense of what modernism and post-modernism mean, I don't know what post-Romantic music would fall under each term. Can you give some examples of post-modern works or composers?


I think some prime examples of Postmodern at least according to some musicologists and their own philosophy and views on music are Cage, Ferneyhough, Lachenmann, Cardew. As in the modernism thread Cardew's Treatise is just a series of illustrations with no notes, or any instructions on what or how to play, and up to the performers to just improvise (or compose for themselves). Check this out


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Larkenfield said:


> Bravo! No more epic generalizations about what could be decades of music, but instead comment on not only specific composers, but specific works and specific performances. It's the only way that one can get a specific reaction from listeners based on something they've actually heard rather than on what could based upon an assumption.


The way I see it is postmodern art shares a common philosophy. So if you get the philosophy, you can get the art. If you don't get the philosophy, then even if you happen to like the music, it doesn't necessarily mean you get it.

I could like Scriabin's Black Mass Sonata, and also Cage's Music of Changes, because I like disonnance, but are they even similar?Their philosophies and techniques are totally different.

To get is to understand it, not to just like casually. If I say I like Bartok, he is just Bach in a different sort of language, there is defense to that assertion since they both use counterpoint except with different scales and conventions, but to say late period Cage is just Bach in a different dress is completely wrongheaded, that even Cage would not agree with, since their philosophies are not compatible.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Phil loves classical said:


> The way I see it is postmodern art shares a common philosophy. So if you get the philosophy, you can get the art. If you don't get the philosophy, then even if you happen to like the music, it doesn't necessarily mean you get it.
> 
> I could like Scriabin's Black Mass Sonata, and also Cage's Music of Changes, because I like disonnance, but are they even similar?Their philosophies and techniques are totally different.
> 
> To get is to understand it, not to just like casually. If I say I like Bartok, he is just Bach in a different sort of language, there is defense to that assertion since they both use counterpoint except with different scales and conventions, but to say late period Cage is just Bach in a different dress is completely wrongheaded, that even Cage would not agree with, since their philosophies are not compatible.


Can you say a bit more about what Cardew's Treatise or Great Learning has in common (philosophically or otherwise) with Ferneyhough's music or Lachenmann's?


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## Guest (Nov 29, 2017)

Phil loves classical said:


> *The way I see it is postmodern art shares a common philosophy. So if you get the philosophy, you can get the art*. If you don't get the philosophy, then even if you happen to like the music, it doesn't necessarily mean you get it.
> 
> I could like Scriabin's Black Mass Sonata, and also Cage's Music of Changes, because I like disonnance, but are they even similar?Their philosophies and techniques are totally different.
> 
> *To get is to understand it, not to just like casually*. If I say I like Bartok, he is just Bach in a different sort of language, there is defense to that assertion since they both use counterpoint except with different scales and conventions, but to say late period Cage is just Bach in a different dress is completely wrongheaded, that even Cage would not agree with, since their philosophies are not compatible.


1st bold: I would argue that you have the causation back to front. It is possible to enjoy the music for what it is, then if you seek context, of which philosophy may be part, you can get that afterwards.

2nd bold: I disagree that you need to understand a work of art in order to appreciate it on a more than casual basis. You can just listen with an open and empty mind. It is remarkable what can happen, sometimes when least expected. The key, for me, is trusting the artist.

Now I've been tempted into generalizing. Oh well...


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Mandryka said:


> Can you say a bit more about what Cardew's Treatise or Great Learning has in common (philosophically or otherwise) with Ferneyhough's music or Lachenmann's?


They are all postmodern .

Free form, no prevalent musical system. You can also throw in Cage's 4'33" in the mix. It is all in the real time experience, and can't be typecasted, or reduced.


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## David OByrne (Dec 1, 2016)

Charles Ives is a good place to start, he mixed jazz, marching band music, hymns, tonality, atonality, folk songs all in one mixed bag. A good continuation of him is Alfred Schnittke


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Phil loves classical said:


> They are all postmodern .
> 
> Free form, no prevalent musical system. You can also throw in Cage's 4'33" in the mix. It is all in the real time experience, and can't be typecasted, or reduced.


Well there are examples of free form early music I think, fantasies. No musical system is an interesting idea, and I just don't know if you're right -- what are Ferneyhough's and Lachenmann's compositional methods? (I'm not so sure that their music is completely free form either -- I think that there are ideas which recur for example, and there is a sense of coherence, unity.


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## Daniel Atkinson (Dec 31, 2016)

Phil loves classical said:


> They are all postmodern .


A little bird tells me that this is a spiteful thread and not at all serious about the topic.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Tulse said:


> 1st bold: I would argue that you have the causation back to front. It is possible to enjoy the music for what it is, then if you seek context, of which philosophy may be part, you can get that afterwards.
> 
> 2nd bold: I disagree that you need to understand a work of art in order to appreciate it on a more than casual basis. You can just listen with an open and empty mind. It is remarkable what can happen, sometimes when least expected. The key, for me, is trusting the artist.
> 
> Now I've been tempted into generalizing. Oh well...


That was good, I think you are exhibiting a postmodernist mentality in that reasoning. I have to do it quite consciously. That is similar to what I said about freeing your mind from what you thought you knew about music.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Phil loves classical said:


> The way I see it is postmodern art shares a common philosophy. So if you get the philosophy, you can get the art. If you don't get the philosophy, then even if you happen to like the music, it doesn't necessarily mean you get it.


Postmodern philosophy involves a rejection of objective ideas of human nature, universal morality, absolute truth, rationality, and reality itself. It claims that knowledge and truth are merely products of social, historical or political interpretations or "discourses," that art has no meaning except what we think it has, and that there is nothing worth aspiring to except skepticism, irony, impenetrable verbiage, and prestigious academic chairs.

If I have to "get" that in order to "get" postmodern music, I'll pass.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Mandryka said:


> Well there are examples of free form early music I think, fantasies. No musical system is an interesting idea, and I just don't know if you're right -- what are Ferneyhough's and Lachenmann's compositional methods? (I'm not so sure that their music is completely free form either -- I think that there are ideas which recur for example, and there is a sense of coherence, unity.


Modernists and their analysts are always writing about a system they are using, but where you you hear or see Cage, Cardew, Ferneyhough using X scale or mode, or harmonizing with X chords, etc.


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## Ziggabea (Apr 5, 2017)

Ferneyhough is not a post-modernist in any true sense, he has reworked pitch materials from some old Renaissance motets into a few stand-alone pieces but his music does not contain the post-modern spirit, it is just modernism with that romantic back in it (gestures and continuity etc)

Lachenmann to my knowledge has no post-modern elements, he just expanded on textural writing with more emphasis on timbre than commonly used by other composers. 

I don't know enough about Cardew to say but I don't see from the examples given, how he is "post-modern" unless you want to argue some kind of philosophical reason.

Rautavaara is post-romantic, not post-modern.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Woodduck said:


> Postmodern philosophy involves a rejection of objective ideas of human nature, universal morality, absolute truth, rationality, and reality itself. It claims that knowledge and truth are merely products of social, historical or political interpretations or "discourses," that art has no meaning except what we think it has, and that there is nothing worth aspiring to except skepticism, irony, impenetrable verbiage, and prestigious academic chairs.
> 
> If I have to "get" that in order to "get" postmodern music, I'll pass.


Yes, that's it on the first part. The last part is up to you, but if you really try it out, it can be surprising.

I make no claim that I come from other than a more traditional systematic background regarding music, when I listen and "get" into postmodern, I feel like I got drunk, and feeling and seeing these things, until I wake up again. At least that is how it is for me.

I think my subconscious starts playing games with me during my sessions.


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## Timothy (Jul 19, 2017)

Woodduck said:


> Postmodern philosophy involves a rejection of objective ideas of human nature, universal morality, absolute truth, rationality, and reality itself. It claims that knowledge and truth are merely products of social, historical or political interpretations or "discourses," that art has no meaning except what we think it has, and that there is nothing worth aspiring to except skepticism, irony, impenetrable verbiage, and prestigious academic chairs.


Huh? 

This is exactly what history books have been saying about romanticism. Objectivity to subjectivity (in an political sense, as all music and art has always been and can only be subjective)


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Timothy said:


> Huh?
> 
> This is exactly what history books have been saying about romanticism. Objectivity to subjectivity (in an political sense, as all music and art has always been and can only be subjective)


You're quite mistaken about Romanticism. "Romanticism" was not a philosophy but a loose and diverse cultural phenomenon, and it did not entail the "rejection of objective ideas of human nature, universal morality, absolute truth, rationality, and reality itself." Nor did philosophers in the Romantic era assert that knowledge and truth are merely products of social, historical or political interpretations, or that art has no meaning except what the viewer or listener thinks it has. Moreover, your statement that "all music and art has always been and can only be subjective" is - pardon the expression - only subjective. Art, prior to the 20th century, was never conceived of as a mere Rorschach blot, incapable of embodying and communicating inherent meanings and signifying only what the observer might read into it.


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

Wonderful that Ives was mentioned. Rather than basing things on advanced theories of composition, he simply had such a natural love of clashing sounds and the cacophony of daily life. It was so natural and not theoretical. One could hear how he was enjoying himself and that he had a sense of humor. He had fun with it rather than laboring over every note. He could finish things rather than being bogged down with the effort and details of composing.

Perhaps he's another one who belongs on the genius list, and he was wise enough to write in his leisure rather than depending on it for his living, and consequently he could write what he wanted when he wanted the way he wanted, and he could still be serious too when called for. The Serialists so often seemed beleaguered, harassed and condemned, perhaps because they seemed to be so caught up with the seriousness of what they were doing. But in many ways Ives was just as advanced and brought a democratic spirit and revolutionary anarchy to music that I find so American in the best sense of the word and so full of new sonorities, probing questions and joy. I consider him unique and beyond labels.

"Stand up and take your dissonance like a man." -Ives


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Phil loves classical said:


> Yes, that's it on the first part. The last part is up to you, but if you really try it out, it can be surprising.
> 
> I make no claim that I come from other than a more traditional systematic background regarding music, when I listen and "get" into postmodern, I feel like I got drunk, and feeling and seeing these things, until I wake up again. At least that is how it is for me.
> 
> I think my subconscious starts playing games with me during my sessions.


Try what out? You said that you thought one had to understand postmodern philosophy in order to understand postmodern music. My point was to question that assertion. Shouldn't music speak for itself? Do I have to understand Spinoza to understand Bach, or Feuerbach to understand Wagner? I'll grant that knowledge of the culture of a period can give us insights into its music, but making philosophical knowledge a condition of musical appreciation erects quite a barrier. No prospect of musical enjoyment could tempt me to read one more word of Derrida.


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## Timothy (Jul 19, 2017)

Woodduck said:


> You're quite mistaken about Romanticism. "Romanticism" was not a philosophy but a loose and diverse cultural phenomenon, and it did not entail the "rejection of objective ideas of human nature, universal morality, absolute truth, rationality, and reality itself."


You're equally as mistaken about post-modernism, which is just as loose and isn't a philosophy. It is more simply put, a very non-specific movement in music (with it's ties back further in history), that is used as an umbrella-term for several artistic concepts.



Woodduck said:


> Nor did philosophers in the Romantic era assert that knowledge and truth are merely products of social, historical or political interpretations, or that art has no meaning except what the viewer or listener thinks it has.


Yet we are not talking about philosophy and politics and how close/far from art it is practically connected/not connected in a literal sense.



Woodduck said:


> Art, prior to the 20th century, was never conceived of as a mere Rorschach blot, incapable of embodying and communicating inherent meanings and signifying only what the observer might read into it.


You've already expressed your own opinions towards this music prior, so whatever your stance is on this is purely a product of this. 
If you are trying to suggest that art now exists for the reason to have no reason or to say nothing, then perhaps you are letting your feelings get the best of you.


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## Timothy (Jul 19, 2017)

Woodduck said:


> Try what out? You said that you thought* one had to understand* postmodern *philosophy in order to understand* postmodern *music.* My point was to question that assertion. *Shouldn't music speak for itself?*


It is never the case, you should enjoy music in itself, nothing more or less.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Another perspective:

"There are certain chameleons among present-day composers -- they call themselves post-modernists -- and they mix everything they can steal, and paint the stolen elements with different colors so that you cannot identify them immediately. They are enormous garbage containers of pre-existing sound figures and clichés..." -- Karlheinz Stockhausen


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Woodduck said:


> Try what out? You said that you thought one had to understand postmodern philosophy in order to understand postmodern music. My point was to question that assertion. Shouldn't music speak for itself? Do I have to understand Spinoza to understand Bach, or Feuerbach to understand Wagner? I'll grant that knowledge of the culture of a period can give us insights into its music, but making philosophical knowledge a condition of musical appreciation erects quite a barrier. No prospect of musical enjoyment could tempt me to read one more word of Derrida.


 I can only speak for myself, postmodern thought was very new to me, when I was so used to older traditions like looking for systems, narrative in music and poetry. Postmodern art threw me completely off. it wasn't until I read more about these and the philosophy behind it, that I knew where they were coming from. At least to me postmodern thought is very much a part of appreciating its Art, moreso than previous eras, but maybe it was just from my upbringing.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Timothy said:


> It is never the case, you should enjoy music in itself, nothing more or less.


What if you can't enjoy it in itself? How do you enjoy 4'33" without knowing what was in mind, the thought behind it, etc.


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## Ziggabea (Apr 5, 2017)

Phil loves classical said:


> What if you can't enjoy it in itself? How do you enjoy 4'33" without knowing what was in mind, the thought behind it, etc.


Since when did 4'33 represent post-modernism as a whole? (and in general)

What do you think 4'33 actually has in common with the composers/compositions you cited previously?

If I did or didn't like 4'33 personally, would that mean anything considering I like other pieces by Cage quite a bit


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Agamemnon said:


> And to answer the OP's question: what's not to like?


The point of this thread is to get some ideas to bring the gap between this kind of response and a deleted response "You Don't".


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Agamemnon said:


> And to answer the OP's question: what's not to like?





Ziggabea said:


> Since when did 4'33 represent post-modernism as a whole? (and in general)
> 
> What do you think 4'33 actually has in common with the composers/compositions you cited previously?
> 
> If I did or didn't like 4'33 personally, would that mean anything considering I like other pieces by Cage quite a bit


I'm skeptical of my liking or not liking, unless it is based on something.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

You're equally as mistaken about post-modernism, which is just as loose and isn't a philosophy. It is more simply put, a very non-specific movement in music (with it's ties back further in history), that is used as an umbrella-term for several artistic concepts.

You're arguing with a strawman. Phil brought up postmodern philosophy and said it helped in understanding postmodern music. I thought it would be pertinent to say what postmodern philosophy is. It has a number of definite traits, which I summarized. Romanticism, which is not a philosophy, is not a parallel.

Yet we are not talking about philosophy and politics and how close/far from art it is practically connected/not connected in a literal sense.

Phil was doing exactly that, and so I responded in kind.

You've already expressed your own opinions towards this music prior, so whatever your stance is on this is purely a product of this. 

What music? I haven't expressed any opinions about any postmodern music. I haven't even considered whether any particular music should be called postmodern.

If you are trying to suggest that art now exists for the reason to have no reason or to say nothing, then perhaps you are letting your feelings get the best of you.

I think you're letting the grammar gremlins get the best of you. I have no idea what you're trying to say.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Woodduck said:


> You're equally as mistaken about post-modernism, which is just as loose and isn't a philosophy. It is more simply put, a very non-specific movement in music (with it's ties back further in history), that is used as an umbrella-term for several artistic concepts.
> 
> You're arguing with a strawman. Phil brought up postmodern philosophy and said it helped in understanding postmodern music. I thought it would be pertinent to say what postmodern philosophy is. It has a number of definite traits, which I summarized. Romanticism, which is not a philosophy, was not a parallel.
> 
> ...


Blame it in Cain


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## Gradeaundera (Jun 30, 2016)

Woodduck said:


> You're equally as mistaken about post-modernism, which is just as loose and isn't a philosophy. It is more simply put, a very non-specific movement in music (with it's ties back further in history), that is used as an umbrella-term for several artistic concepts.
> 
> You're arguing with a strawman. Phil brought up postmodern philosophy and said it helped in understanding postmodern music. I thought it would be pertinent to say what postmodern philosophy is. It has a number of definite traits, which I summarized. Romanticism, which is not a philosophy, is not a parallel.
> 
> ...


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## Gradeaundera (Jun 30, 2016)

Phil loves classical said:


> I'm skeptical of my liking or not liking, unless it is based on something.


You didn't answer Ziggabea's question :lol:


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

In general I don't like the philosophies of post modernism, though they can be useful to an extent. (I like the idea of questioning our current ideas but I don't like the suggestion that there is no truth and nothing objective) I do enjoy some music composed during the post modern era, in any era there will be strong trends but eventually there are other trends that are a reaction against those strong trends.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Gradeaundera said:


> You didn't answer Ziggabea's question :lol:


Sorry, was occupied with another thought. What I'm getting from this thread is this, there is no reason to like or not to like postmodern music, and those who like it (other than me to a certain extent) don't feel it is important to understand the philosophy behind it? As it is either obvious or moot?


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## eugeneonagain (May 14, 2017)

Phil loves classical said:


> Sorry, was occupied with another thought. What I'm getting from this thread is this, there is no reason to like or not to like postmodern music, and those who like it (other than me to a certain extent) don't feel it is important to understand the philosophy behind it? As it is either obvious or moot?


At the time of modernism its vanguard and core audience was not sitting down trying to 'understand' itself in an academic sense. Postmodernism - for want of a better term (or no term) - is the act of grasping water and it just runs through your fingers.

The culture trying to be pinned down by 'postmodernism' is the culture of now; a changeable thing - something where so-called high and low culture meet more than ever before, but still have independence.

Talking about it is like giving a running commentary on things as they happen, but in an attempted 'big picture' sense and for the most part it fails. All one can do is meet each cultural event as it happens and to engage with it - or not engage with it. The business of summing up in an academic way is for the future. Even then it won't be a done deal.

Over and out...I'm officially on a hiatus tiphat


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## Jacob Brooks (Feb 21, 2017)

All postmodern compositions can be summed up either as "woah... wasn't that weird and strange?" or "haha wasn't that funny? How offbeat for a concert hall!"


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Well, I can say I learned one thing from this thread. Postmodern music is whatever we project it to be, good or bad, this or that. Guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. Just finished watching the Big Lebowski for the first time, and it kinda reminded me of this.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

After all this, I admit I have no idea what "postmodernism" is. Fortunately, I don't much care.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

Phil loves classical said:


> Well, I can say I learned one thing from this thread. Postmodern music is whatever we project it to be, good or bad, this or that. Guess I shouldn't have been surprised. Just finished watching the Big Lebowski for the first time, and it kinda reminded me of this.


In response to that I would say be careful not to fall into what I believe is the most negative aspect of postmodern thinking - that there is no objective reality, only subjective perceptions. Some have pointed out that there are many trends going on so it is hard to generalize and that is a valid point, but I think the things you've described are also valid facets of postmodernism, and important in understanding certain trends, and it has sparked some interesting discussion.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

tdc said:


> In response to that I would say be careful not to fall into what I believe is the most negative aspect of postmodern thinking - that there is no objective reality, only subjective perceptions.


Didn't Dr. Johnson have something to say about that when he kicked that rock?

*Refutation of Bishop Berkeley*: After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus."


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## Guest (Nov 30, 2017)

Woodduck said:


> that art has no meaning except what we think it has,


On this basis, I'm a post-modernist. Unless someone's around to think that art has meaning, how can it have meaning?



Woodduck said:


> that there is nothing worth aspiring to except skepticism, irony, impenetrable verbiage, and prestigious academic chairs.
> 
> If I have to "get" that in order to "get" postmodern music, I'll pass.


On this basis, I'm with you, though I am very fond of skepticism and irony.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Phil loves classical said:


> Modernists and their analysts are always writing about a system they are using, but where you you hear or see ? . . , Ferneyhough using X scale or mode, or harmonizing with X chords, etc.


This is the question I'm asking. I was hoping someone would have studied it.

I'll just mention some idea that I had the other day about Cage.

There's an exhibition of Marcel Duchamp's art right now in London. I saw for the first time that he made works of art based on randomness, called stoppages. I'm starting to think that Duchamp's project overlaps with Cage's - and is about exploring what happens if you reduce or minimise the artist's contribution to the work of art.

It would be strange, I think, to say that Duchamp was a postmodernist - you could say it but it's surprising. Same for Cage.

The Berio symophonia seems a much more clear example of postmodernism, with it's kitsch central Mahler quotation movement.

By the way, I think that Cardew's music, Treatise and The Great Learning, were partly exploring how to open up music performance to people who can't read standard notation. Cage wrote some similar things, very good, I recommend it, called The Songbooks, it's inspired a couple of really magical recordings. Stockhausen dabbled in this type of thing too.


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## Ziggabea (Apr 5, 2017)

Phil loves classical said:


> Sorry, was occupied with another thought. What I'm getting from this thread is this, there is no reason to like or not to like postmodern music, and those who like it (other than me to a certain extent) don't feel it is important to understand the philosophy behind it? As it is either obvious or moot?


Gradeaundera is right, you are deliberately avoiding answering my questions to your awfully specific statement


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## Ziggabea (Apr 5, 2017)

Jacob Brooks said:


> All postmodern compositions can be summed up either as "woah... wasn't that weird and strange?" or "haha wasn't that funny? How offbeat for a concert hall!"


What about sincere enjoyment and personal attachment? (in the same way as early centuries or styles of music) 
Not all post-modern music is joking around or trying to weird you out. There are pieces like that but I think that you are being a bit arrogant about it, to be honest.


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## arnerich (Aug 19, 2016)

"How do I get to like Postmodernism?", reminds me of a music appreciation class I took. A student asked the professor "how do I get to like Brahms?"... An awkward silence and a blank stare ensued. :l


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## Rosie (Jul 4, 2016)

Phil loves classical said:


> What if you can't enjoy it in itself?


If you don't enjoy it in itself, then you simply don't enjoy it. No biggy, no need for a big tantrum.

I like some postmodern music and think it's beautiful but I also don't like some classical era music at the same time. You don't have to put all your eggs in one basket and you don't have to like everything you hear 

Where did you get your idea from? :lol:


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## Rosie (Jul 4, 2016)

arnerich said:


> "How do I get to like Postmodernism?", reminds me of a music appreciation class I took. A student asked the professor "how do I get to like Brahms?"... An awkward silence and a blank stare ensued. :l


I think it is because you can't make yourself like anything, whether it's Brahms or Cage or Beethoven


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Ziggabea said:


> Gradeaundera is right, you are deliberately avoiding answering my questions to your awfully specific statement





Rosie said:


> If you don't enjoy it in itself, then you simply don't enjoy it. No biggy, no need for a big tantrum.
> 
> I like some postmodern music and think it's beautiful but I also don't like some classical era music at the same time. You don't have to put all your eggs in one basket and you don't have to like everything you hear
> 
> Where did you get your idea from? :lol:


I think I was trying to rationalize everything, including liking, which is already at odds with postmodern thinking. Till now I haven't seen anyone can dispute the fact there is no prevailing musical system in works by Ferneyhough and others. So I think I'm not wrong in saying from another thread way back, that it is effects-driven, as opposed to Modernism which clearly is an extension of an underlying certain musical system, some different from common practice. This is how I had defined postmodernism, in fact, the lack of a prevailent system, so when I can't detect it, or read about it, then I figure I just chill and the liking comes differently, which is harder to put a finger on.

I like analogies, and one I came up with is non-postmodern music is like different angles of looking at something, and the focus is on that thing (which is a musical system). Postmodern is focussed on just what you see, not on anything else in particular.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

Woodduck said:


> Postmodern philosophy involves a rejection of objective ideas of human nature, universal morality, absolute truth, rationality, and reality itself. It claims that knowledge and truth are merely products of social, historical or political interpretations or "discourses,"


I agree with this analysis of Postmodernist philosophy



Woodduck said:


> that art has no meaning except what we think it has,


I do agree with this, irrespective of what Postmodernist philosophy says. Art is (only) about what we like and don't like. We then dress it up with "philosophy" and ex post facto justification.



Woodduck said:


> and that there is nothing worth aspiring to except skepticism, irony, impenetrable verbiage, and prestigious academic chairs.


I agree with this analysis of Postmodernist philosophy.



Woodduck=1354889 said:


> If I have to "get" that in order to "get" postmodern music, I'll pass.


I'll pass also, but mostly because I just don't care for the music.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Phil loves classical said:


> I think I was trying to rationalize everything, including liking, which is already at odds with postmodern thinking. Till now I haven't seen anyone can dispute the fact there is no prevailing musical system in works by Ferneyhough and others. So I think I'm not wrong in saying from another thread way back, that it is effects-driven, as opposed to Modernism which clearly is an extension of an underlying certain musical system, some different from common practice.


Effects _driven_, I think, is too strong, though I expect that the sounds that you get when the voices (the processes) interact inspire him to _not _follow the plan -- he's not on rails!

In reply to the observation that his completed work is more arbitrary than the result of a process, Ferneyhough said



> The . . . pre-compositional preparation for a piece does not set out to define a
> priori each and every event: it is meant to provide a life-support system, a
> dispositive of constraints and delimitations with which it is meaningful to
> make decisions affecting other parts of the totality. The almost ritual
> ...


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## Myriadi (Mar 6, 2016)

I like Cage, Stockhausen, Xenakis, and many other composers mentioned in this thread. But I don't think any of them are post-modern in _any_ sense of the word. A work like Johannes Kreidler's "-Bolero" certainly is, though:






There are many young composers doing these sorts of stunts. Like Kreidler, they get paid rather well for their work, some of them teach composition and/or performance, and many EU countries have government supported programs sponsoring these kinds of... events. I don't know how to get to like this, and I certainly wouldn't want to.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Mandryka said:


> Effects _driven_, I think, is too strong, though I expect that the sounds that you get when the voices (the processes) interact inspire him to _not _follow the plan -- he's not on rails!
> 
> In reply to the observation that his completed work is more arbitrary than the result of a process, Ferneyhough said


Good post. Yes, a lack of prevailing system doesn't mean arbitrary. Ken's post by Stockhausen says it all, except to put in better light, it uses a mix of preexisting techniques in ways different than before.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Myriadi said:


> I like Cage, Stockhausen, Xenakis, and many other composers mentioned in this thread. But I don't think any of them are post-modern in _any_ sense of the word. A work like Johannes Kreidler's "-Bolero" certainly is, though.


Wow. That's like a fine prime rib dinner as served in a vegan restaurant.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

Myriadi said:


> I like Cage, Stockhausen, Xenakis, and many other composers mentioned in this thread. But I don't think any of them are post-modern in _any_ sense of the word. A work like Johannes Kreidler's "-Bolero" certainly is, though:


You don't think Cage was postmodern in _any_ sense of the word?

That statement seems right up there with the one about Schoenberg being musically conservative.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

I said: "Postmodernist philosophy claims...that art has no meaning except what we think it has."



Strange Magic said:


> I do agree with this, irrespective of what Postmodernist philosophy says. Art is (only) about what we like and don't like. We then dress it up with "philosophy" and ex post facto justification.


The postmodernist assumption is that the meaning of anything is entirely a creation of the person for whom it has meaning. This is an unjustifiable limitation on the idea of meaning, and ultimately just a verbal ruse. Not every interpretation of a work of art, or of anything else, is equally consistent with the content of that work. Shakespeare's _Macbeth_ cannot reasonably be construed to be the sad tale of a liberated woman in medieval Scotland destroyed by a morally repressive society, although I'm sure some hotshot 21st-century director wanting to appear _au courant_ will try to stage it that way. Works of art do have actual content which makes some interpretations truer than others, and if the creator is any good he will choose his content carefully to convey meaning within a certain range of possibilities. What crazy uncle Harold thinks _Macbeth_ is about may describe what it means to him, but no one wanting to understand the play will turn to him for insight.

Music, being more abstract than drama, is less determined in what it will mean to listeners, but far from wholly indeterminate. Postmodernists, as I understand them, deny that there are any invariant factors in the generation of meaning, or any common ground between the artist, the work, and the receiver which would allow us to say that a work possesses _this_ meaning and not _that._

In real life, we seek to understand the meaning of works of art on the assumption that they have meaning to be discovered, and we hope that this process will get us past mere liking or disliking, and perhaps modify the form of that liking or disliking in the direction of something "meaningful" in a fuller sense of the word.


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## Timothy (Jul 19, 2017)

tdc said:


> That statement seems right up there with the one about Schoenberg being musically conservative.


And with Beethoven being "innovative" :lol:


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

Timothy said:


> And with Beethoven being "innovative" :lol:


Yes and the sky is green, down is up, and black is white. How postmodern of us.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Timothy said:


> And with Beethoven being "innovative" :lol:


Seems to me that Beethoven redefined not the techniques of music, but the purpose of music. I don't know how you get more innovative than that.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

@Woodduck: I do not quarrel with the idea that works of art have actual content and that some interpretations or re-imaginings are truer to that content than others. But, to take another example, suppose a contemporary playwright penned a play with Richard III as a tragic hero falsely accused of murdering the young princes and instead falling victim to a campaign of character assassination and then death on the battlefield as a result of the machinations of a scheming usurper. And what if that play was an enormous critical triumph for all concerned and lauded to the skies? _Amadeus_ presented a relationship between Mozart and Salieri that was not necessarily accurate: some people liked Amadeus; others hated it. I enjoyed it as a cartoon, like _Lisztomania_, another very enjoyable cartoon. Should either be viewed for their faithfulness to historical fact? As cartoons? As deliberate slurs upon the reputations of their namesakes? All I know is that I liked both.

But I may be misunderstanding your argument.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Strange Magic said:


> @Woodduck: I do not quarrel with the idea that works of art have actual content and that some interpretations or re-imaginings are truer to that content than others. But, to take another example, suppose a contemporary playwright penned a play with Richard III as a tragic hero falsely accused of murdering the young princes and instead falling victim to a campaign of character assassination and then death on the battlefield as a result of the machinations of a scheming usurper. And what if that play was an enormous critical triumph for all concerned and lauded to the skies? _Amadeus_ presented a relationship between Mozart and Salieri that was not necessarily accurate: some people liked Amadeus; others hated it. I enjoyed it as a cartoon, like _Lisztomania_, another very enjoyable cartoon. Should either be viewed for their faithfulness to historical fact? As cartoons? As deliberate slurs upon the reputations of their namesakes? All I know is that I liked both.
> 
> But I may be misunderstanding your argument.


I don't see any of that as problematic. Those plays should be viewed as what they appear to be, on the non-postmodern assumption that they actually are something more permanent than our impressions of them, and something we can understand and discover. That doesn't mean that any one of us will appreciate everything that they are. It's pretty clear from the style of _Amadeus_ (I haven't seen _Lisztomania_) that it isn't exactly historical (as usual with film bios of composers), but just how accurate it is is an extra-artistic question that we needn't ask unless we care. As for it being a deliberate slur, its author will know what he intended, but if the deliberateness doesn't announce itself in some way it probably doesn't exist, or else the author didn't do his job very well.

_Amadeus_ is clearly using the familiar legend of Mozart and Salieri to make points about creative genius and the unfairness of nature in bestowing her gifts on mortals. It does that obviously and entertainingly. The last thing I want is some deconstuctionist telling me that that's just one "culturally situated" reading of a "text" based on my "Eurocentric paradigm" of the artist as "other."


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## Timothy (Jul 19, 2017)

tdc said:


> Yes and the sky is green, down is up, and black is white.


The one where people try to claim that Mozart _didn't_ write the same piece over and over and over, cracks me up every time :lol:


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## Daniel Atkinson (Dec 31, 2016)

I would probably agree that the 20th century brought more diversity and novelty to music than any previous time, even the innovation-filled 19th century. An important factor in bringing that about was the breakdown of national and cultural insularity and the dilution of local traditions, resulting from increasing ease of transportation and communication. This broadening of cultural, hence musical, awareness did not suddenly begin in the 20th century; it was a continuation of a process that had begun with the growth of international trade under capitalism, the increasing ease and popularity of travel brought about by the railroad and the steamship, and the fascination of Romantic composers with the music of other countries and distant lands, increasingly including non-European cultures, newly available for them to experience first hand. Think Mendelssohn and Berlioz in Scotland and Italy, Saint-Saens in Africa, Bizet who never actually visited Spain(!), and Debussy who was fascinated by gamelan music from Java. But concurrent with this increasing exposure of cultures to each other was the solidification of European nation-states in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with composers inspired to study their own indigenous musical traditions, resulting in a proliferation of national styles and a tremendous enrichment of music's vocabulary of sounds. Think Smetana, Dvorak, Janacek, the Russian Five, Sibelius, Vaughan Williams, Bartok, Stravinsky, Ives, Copland. Thus a growing nationalism and growing international influence acted simultaneously to expand and diversify classical music even before anything called "Modernism" was talked about.

For a composer, this widening field of radically different musical styles, available for creative use and highly suggestive to the creative mind, is both an opportunity and a danger. If he has a powerful enough vision and concentration of mind, he can forge a synthesis of influences both original and compelling. Otherwise he may produce the merely novel - and novelty, difference for the sake of difference, is not an artistic virtue. But novelty is an idea implicit in the very notion of the "modern," and "Modernism," as an ideology or mindset, was and is often characterized by a fascination with the "new," the "revolutionary," and the "futuristic," and by a determination to challenge or abolish traditional values and expectations, even fundamental conceptions of what art should be and do. This Modernist premise or attitude is not extinct in the so-called "postmodern" era, and the result is that the post-Romantic era is full of brilliance Just observe the differences of opinion inspired by this thread!

I don't want to debate definitions here, but it's clear to me that what "Modernism" definitely is not is a kind of music, regardless of certain tendencies to which the term tends to be assigned. "Isms" are cultural movements, philosophies, ideologies. Modernism, being the product of a bewilderingly diverse and confused time, is even less a kind of music than is Classicism or Romanticism, which grew up in better-defined cultures and have no implication in their names of being reactions to anything, or trying to supersede anything. Thus, despite the pleasure I find in a lot of 20th-century music, I consider meaningless the idea of finding joy in "Modernism," or modernity as such. I find joy only in this music or that - and this music and that music may have nothing in common.


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

mmsbls said:


> While I have a general sense of what modernism and post-modernism mean, I don't know what post-Romantic music would fall under each term. Can you give some examples of post-modern works or composers?


When I first studied music history as a little 'un, the Baroque period was defined as 1675-1750, classical 1750-1825, romantic 1825-1900, modern as music by composers active after 1900 but no longer living, and contemporary as music by composers who were still living. Today I would propose modern as 1900-1975, and contemporary or postmodern as after 1975. These 75 year periods may seem arbitrary and of course they are, but such labels are inevitably quite arbitrary. I say, better to define the time period and ask, "What were the main features of western music during this period?" rather than the other way around. 1900 roughly corresponds with the beginning of commercial recording, which had a profound effect on western music. 1975 roughly corresponds with the widespread use of computerized and electronic equipment in music, though that began to happen a few years earlier. It's interesting how postmodern music (i.e., music written after 1975 per my definition), even if only acoustical instruments and voices are used, often mimics the sounds of electronics, as with the highly regular repeated patterns of Terry Riley, Philip Glass and other minimalists. The Grammy-winning CD shown below includes two pieces by John Corigliano, one of which uses postmodern electronic effects and the other, a concerto for percussion and orchestra, does not. But to me they both have a postmodern feel.
Feel free to disagree. The only one of the above statements that I'm quite confident I can prove is that labels like "modern" and "postmodern", whatever precise definitions are attempted, are inevitably arbitrary to a significant extent.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Daniel Atkinson said:


> I would probably agree that the 20th century brought more diversity and novelty to music than any previous time, even the innovation-filled 19th century. An important factor in bringing that about was the breakdown of national and cultural insularity and the dilution of local traditions, resulting from increasing ease of transportation and communication. This broadening of cultural, hence musical, awareness did not suddenly begin in the 20th century; it was a continuation of a process that had begun with the growth of international trade under capitalism, the increasing ease and popularity of travel brought about by the railroad and the steamship, and the fascination of Romantic composers with the music of other countries and distant lands, increasingly including non-European cultures, newly available for them to experience first hand. Think Mendelssohn and Berlioz in Scotland and Italy, Saint-Saens in Africa, Bizet who never actually visited Spain(!), and Debussy who was fascinated by gamelan music from Java. But concurrent with this increasing exposure of cultures to each other was the solidification of European nation-states in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with composers inspired to study their own indigenous musical traditions, resulting in a proliferation of national styles and a tremendous enrichment of music's vocabulary of sounds. Think Smetana, Dvorak, Janacek, the Russian Five, Sibelius, Vaughan Williams, Bartok, Stravinsky, Ives, Copland. Thus a growing nationalism and growing international influence acted simultaneously to expand and diversify classical music even before anything called "Modernism" was talked about.
> 
> For a composer, this widening field of radically different musical styles, available for creative use and highly suggestive to the creative mind, is both an opportunity and a danger. If he has a powerful enough vision and concentration of mind, he can forge a synthesis of influences both original and compelling. Otherwise he may produce the merely novel - and novelty, difference for the sake of difference, is not an artistic virtue. But novelty is an idea implicit in the very notion of the "modern," and "Modernism," as an ideology or mindset, was and is often characterized by a fascination with the "new," the "revolutionary," and the "futuristic," and by a determination to challenge or abolish traditional values and expectations, even fundamental conceptions of what art should be and do. This Modernist premise or attitude is not extinct in the so-called "postmodern" era, and the result is that the post-Romantic era is full of brilliance Just observe the differences of opinion inspired by this thread!
> 
> I don't want to debate definitions here, but it's clear to me that what "Modernism" definitely is not is a kind of music, regardless of certain tendencies to which the term tends to be assigned. "Isms" are cultural movements, philosophies, ideologies. Modernism, being the product of a bewilderingly diverse and confused time, is even less a kind of music than is Classicism or Romanticism, which grew up in better-defined cultures and have no implication in their names of being reactions to anything, or trying to supersede anything. Thus, despite the pleasure I find in a lot of 20th-century music, I consider meaningless the idea of finding joy in "Modernism," or modernity as such. I find joy only in this music or that - and this music and that music may have nothing in common.


You're continuing, and to an extent paraphrasing, ideas discussed in the other recent thread, Was there a single "modernism"? But you take us only up to modernism in your historical survey, merely suggesting that certain modernist ideas are still present in the postmodernist period.

My question is: how do we distinguish postmodernism in music from modernism? Is there anything peculiarly new about the sounds employed or the way in which compositions are made, anything specifically musical (as opposed to philosophical or cultural) that justifies speaking of a new musical "period"? And does postmodernism reside more in musical techniques and the "grammar" of music (parallel, perhaps to what we see in postmodern architecture), or in some expressive qualities or meanings that the modernist era didn't explore? Is there anything a composer _must_ do, or _not _do, to be considered postmodern? And how much music being composed in the post-modernist era should actually be considered postmodern? Enough to justify speaking of a postmodern "period" at all?

I mention postmodern architecture because its peculiar features might provide a clue or guideline to what is postmodern in music. Among those features is "quotation" from historical styles, using old forms in order to evoke earlier eras in a manner that obviously "comments" on them without permitting any illusion of participating in or perpetuating the living traditions to which those styles belong. Such quotation can have the serious goal of relating new architecture to the traditional structures around it - as opposed to the deliberate and clashing rejection of the old seen in modernist buildings sandwiched incongruously between Colonial or Gothic Revival - or it can be simply a playing around with traditional forms for an effect, often a humorous one. Either way, this use of old forms in new contexts and unexpected, "non-organic" combinations seems to be the principal distinguishing feature of an otherwise great diversity of architecture we would identify as postmodern. If this principle holds for music as well, we might view the compositional approach in that Berio piece posted a while back as embodying in a particular way the essentially postmodern idea. As for what that idea means philosophically and culturally, that's certainly material for further discussion.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

I must return again to Woodduck's quote that, under Postmodernism, art is said to have no meaning except what we think it has, and my comment that I agreed with this, irrespective (or despite) whether it was a valid tenet of Postmodernist thought. We may be approaching this issue from two entirely different perspectives, but I offer the following speculation: Shostakovich, if memory serves, wrote somewhere that his 5th symphony, rather than being his attempt at rehabilitation as a Soviet composer, instead chronicled--especially in its final movement--the destruction of a personality. I also recall reading that Shostakovich planned the 7th before the war "and consequently it cannot be seen as a reaction to Hitler's attack....I was thinking of other enemies of humanity when I composed the theme". This quoted from Schonberg's _Lives of the Great Composers_. It matters not for the purposes of this discussion whether we actually know Shostakovich's true intention (the "content" of his art), but to what extent should our response to the symphonies be affected or controlled or modified by whether we believe the quoted scenarios or we do not? Is the music different, or better, if it represents Shostakovich as attempting his redemption or recording his destruction as an artist; if it is about Hitler invading Mother Russia or about the brooding spectre of Stalin and Stalinism?

My position has always been to exalt the primacy and the validity of my own personal response to art. I yield to none in matters of personal taste, and I extend that same primacy and validity to everyone else, as I must logically do. Thus, I pick and choose among music and the arts regardless of preconception as to the intent of its creators or of the content and context of the work: my guide is my whim, though later familiarity with the creators' lives, thought, concretely expressed intent, can enrich the experience. But it all starts and ends with the subjectivity of liking or disliking, or being unmoved, by art--be it whatever called.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Strange Magic said:


> I must return again to Woodduck's quote that, under Postmodernism, art is said to have no meaning except what we think it has.


Maybe I'm confused. Isn't that true of ANY kind of art, at any time?


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## Guest (Dec 1, 2017)

Woodduck said:


> Not every interpretation of a work of art, or of anything else, is equally consistent with the content of that work.


Is that what Postmodern philosophy allows, then? Your 'Uncle Harold' illustration is amusing, but is that what PM philosophers actually believe, or are you just exaggerating the idea that we can all believe what we want, no matter how absurd?

[add]Reading the summary in Wiki on Postmodern philosophy, it's not really possible to get under the skin of what PM is really about, and it's also obvious that there's more than one strand, and that some of those who were reported to be PM philosophers deny the claim.

In other words, we're in another dark wood of uncertain size with only a small torch and cartoon of a map to guide us.

(Obviously, there are some here who know much more, but unless we're willing to settle down to a fully referenced lecture on the subject, there's not much knowledge going to be exchanged that will help get past the superficial).


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

KenOC said:


> Maybe I'm confused. Isn't that true of ANY kind of art, at any time?


No, Renaissance art, for example, is full of symbols which had established meanings. I'm not sure it's true of any art.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Strange Magic said:


> My position has always been to exalt the primacy and the validity of my own personal response to art.


It's a bit self centred, that.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Mandryka said:


> No, Renaissance art, for example, is full of symbols which had established meanings. I'm not sure it's true of any art.


In other words, meanings that we give them (or gave them at that time). My question stands. And my position remains, art has no meaning except what we think it has. How could it be otherwise?


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Woodduck said:


> The postmodernist assumption is that the meaning of anything is entirely a creation of the person for whom it has meaning. .


I don't think that's quite right. You know, no one is empowered to make "black" in English mean white.

Try "people" - not person. Community engaged in a shared form of life. Meaning is a product of the whirl of organism which is engaged in a shared form of life.

Bathes, Foucault, Dérida etc were aware of these Wittgenstineian ideas.


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## Guest (Dec 1, 2017)

Mandryka said:


> No, Renaissance art, for example, is full of symbols which had established meanings. I'm not sure it's true of any art.


But if the viewer isn't familiar with the meanings of the symbols, s/he's left to make of it what s/he will. But then, the plebs were not queuing at galleries during the Renaissance!

Whatever the intent of the artist, the audience is king in determining how it is received, whether we like it or not.

View attachment 99671


I know next to nothing about this painting, but I've seen enough art to know what I think about it, and that includes recognising that it is open to several types of interpretation. My gut reaction is that it's ugly, but it merits more than a gut reaction.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Look, someone who isn't familiar with the meaning of the symbols in "Mon enfant, ma sœur, songe à ma douleur... " isn't left to make of it what they will - to understand it he can learn French.


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## Guest (Dec 1, 2017)

Mandryka said:


> Look, someone who isn't familiar with the meaning of the symbols in "Mon enfant, ma sœur, songe à ma douleur... " isn't left to make of it what they will - to understand it he can learn French.


A different order of meaning and understanding, I think.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

MacLeod said:


> A different order of meaning and understanding, I think.


Over to you to explain.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Phil loves classical said:


> Good post. Yes, a lack of prevailing system doesn't mean arbitrary.


I don't think there's any lack of prevailing system, on the contrary.

That quote was about Lemma Icon Epigraph. There has been some work published about his compositional procedures for the string trio, where he used software (Patchwork) to generate some preliminary ideas for the music, particularly rhythmic ideas. You can't get more system-oriented than that! But of course he intuitively modified the resulting output. Boulez said somewhere that he doesn't trust intuitive methods of composition because they're too dependent on the composer's memory, and I think this is one of the ways Boulez influenced Ferneyhough. Maybe it's true to say that for Ferneyhough the process comes first, the listener's experience of sound second. But of course the intuitions about what it'll sound like have a sort of "right of veto."

Is Feldman post-modern, by the way? I don't think these ideas - modernism, postmodernism etc -- really help.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

Mandryka said:


> It's a bit self centred, that.


How else should it be?


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Strange Magic said:


> How else should it be?


That your appreciation of some music is both sensual and intellectual, the intellectual side of it partly being about understanding it's original context and its subsequent reception. And eventually these two aspects of appreciation interact with each other.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Mandryka said:


> I don't think there's any lack of prevailing system, on the contrary.
> 
> That quote was about Lemma Icon Epigraph. There has been some work published about his compositional procedures for the string trio, where he used software (Patchwork) to generate some preliminary ideas for the music, particularly rhythmic ideas. You can't get more system-oriented than that! But of course he intuitively modified the resulting output. Boulez said somewhere that he doesn't trust intuitive methods of composition because they're too dependent on the composer's memory, and I think this is one of the ways Boulez influenced Ferneyhough. Maybe it's true to say that for Ferneyhough the process comes first, the listener's experience of sound second. But of course the intuitions about what it'll sound like have a sort of "right of veto."
> 
> Is Feldman post-modern, by the way? I don't think these ideas - modernism, postmodernism etc -- really help.


What I meant by lack of prevailing system isn't in compositional procedures, but in musical system, like tonal, modal, 12 tone, Messaien's modes of transposition, combined scales, additive rhythm, etc. This is what separates modernism from postmodernism. The former is progressive in these things, while he latter doesn't use any in particular, but a mix, and the integration of these systems is not apparent. these labels are useful in analysis of the works.

When I hear disonnance, it could stem from a musical system, or just infused there manually. Some may not be interested in these differences, but they are intentional from both modern and postmodern perspectives, and is a part of appreciating the music. I'm sure Ferneyhough doesn't want to be heard as Prokofiev and vice versa, even when they both contain lots of disonnance, since they have vastly different goals.

A causual listener could say who cares (a response I think I am seeing from some posters on this thread), since they take away the same things from either, which is itself a postmodern view, that there is no real practical difference to them, when there most definitely is in the goals (which stem from different philosophies). One presents what you hear based from a musical system, while the other presents music based on sounds none other than from the composer's discriminate choice (which could be based on composition techniques), or in some cases indeterminate sources.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

KenOC said:


> Maybe I'm confused. Isn't that true of ANY kind of art, at any time?


On the no meaning except what we think it has, I think it has become increasingly that way of thinking in our post-postmodern society. Back in the day, you could get institutionalized, or have a teacher physically knock some sense into you for you views.

This is affecting the way we receive music, as you see in some rock critic reviews, where everything is expressed in cosmic terms.


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## Guest (Dec 1, 2017)

Mandryka said:


> Over to you to explain.


Learning French enables you to read Baudelaire. That doesn't enable you to understand the symbolism. So, translation from one language to another enables one type of understanding meaning. But to understand the meaning of a picture or piece of music, translating (say symbols into digestible terms) is insufficient. You need another approach, a different order of understanding meaning.


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## Myriadi (Mar 6, 2016)

tdc said:


> That statement seems right up there with the one about Schoenberg being musically conservative.


I have no problem with calling Schoenberg musically conservative. To my ears his music has a very strong relationship with tradition (and indeed it's one thing I don't like about Schoenberg, in general) whereas Webern's music, to provide one contemporary example, is very different.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

Myriadi said:


> I like Cage, Stockhausen, Xenakis, and many other composers mentioned in this thread. But I don't think any of them are post-modern in _any_ sense of the word. A work like Johannes Kreidler's "-Bolero" certainly is, though:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


I just want to say for the record that that piece was a lot of fun for me, and I thank you for sharing it.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

Myriadi said:


> I have no problem with calling Schoenberg musically conservative. To my ears his music has a very strong relationship with tradition (and indeed it's one thing I don't like about Schoenberg, in general) whereas Webern's music, to provide one contemporary example, is very different.


Here is a quote from Cage's wiki:

"(Cage's) teachers included Henry Cowell (1933) and Arnold Schoenberg (1933-35), both *known for their radical innovations in music*."

On Schoenberg's wiki it states he came to personify "atonality", and that he developed the 12 tone technique, and "was the first modern composer to embrace ways of developing motifs without resorting to the dominance of a centralized melodic idea."

These are fairly well known facts, and I think it is hard to be a composer that is known for radical innovations, yet still be conservative at the same time, isn't there kind of a disconnect there? How do you explain that? Do you know of any examples of other composers before Schoenberg that were writing music that resemble his 12 tone or free atonal pieces?


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

Mandryka said:


> Look, someone who isn't familiar with the meaning of the symbols in "Mon enfant, ma sœur, songe à ma douleur... " isn't left to make of it what they will - to understand it he can learn French.


Ah, Les fleurs du mal. And above, Wittgenstein, Foucault and Derrida. I'm glad none of you gave me a music history exam.


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## fluteman (Dec 7, 2015)

MacLeod said:


> Whatever the intent of the artist, the audience is king in determining how it is received, whether we like it or not.


Absolutely true. And as Somerset Maugham ruefully notes in Cakes and Ale, only those works that earn a significant audience right away are candidates for artistic immortality. Nevertheless, the audience 25, 50 or 100 years after the work is first presented is not the same as the first audience. For me, a great work of art has something to offer significant and profound enough that it can survive the era and even the culture in which it is created, even as the task of translation becomes ever greater. 
And I can't blame Strange Magic if he values his own opinion above that of any critic or commentator, at least once he has had the chance to familiarize himself with the world that produced the art in question. Clearly, he's read a few books and attended a few concerts, and so have you and I.


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## Agamemnon (May 1, 2017)

KenOC said:


> After all this, I admit I have no idea what "postmodernism" is. Fortunately, I don't much care.


Perhaps this is an useful analogy: romanticism is choosing a national language (English or French or Dutch etc), modernism is constructing Esperanto (a new, universal language) and postmodernism is living in the Tower of Babel.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Strange Magic said:


> I must return again to Woodduck's quote that, under Postmodernism, art is said to have no meaning except what we think it has, and my comment that I agreed with this, irrespective (or despite) whether it was a valid tenet of Postmodernist thought. We may be approaching this issue from two entirely different perspectives, but I offer the following speculation: Shostakovich, if memory serves, wrote somewhere that his 5th symphony, rather than being his attempt at rehabilitation as a Soviet composer, instead chronicled--especially in its final movement--the destruction of a personality. I also recall reading that Shostakovich planned the 7th before the war "and consequently it cannot be seen as a reaction to Hitler's attack....I was thinking of other enemies of humanity when I composed the theme". This quoted from Schonberg's _Lives of the Great Composers_. It matters not for the purposes of this discussion whether we actually know Shostakovich's true intention (the "content" of his art), but to what extent should our response to the symphonies be affected or controlled or modified by whether we believe the quoted scenarios or we do not? Is the music different, or better, if it represents Shostakovich as attempting his redemption or recording his destruction as an artist; if it is about Hitler invading Mother Russia or about the brooding spectre of Stalin and Stalinism?
> 
> My position has always been to exalt the primacy and the validity of my own personal response to art. I yield to none in matters of personal taste, and I extend that same primacy and validity to everyone else, as I must logically do. Thus, I pick and choose among music and the arts regardless of preconception as to the intent of its creators or of the content and context of the work: my guide is my whim, though later familiarity with the creators' lives, thought, concretely expressed intent, can enrich the experience. But it all starts and ends with the subjectivity of liking or disliking, or being unmoved, by art--be it whatever called.


You are opposing the "artist's intention" to the "listener's response" as if the work itself didn't even exist! That is precisely the postmodernist's error.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

KenOC said:


> Maybe I'm confused. Isn't that true of ANY kind of art, at any time?


No, it isn't. The work exists and has specific characteristics which set boundaries to reasonable interpretation. The question "What does it mean?" is not identical to "How do I react to it?"


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## Guest (Dec 1, 2017)

Woodduck said:


> The question "What does it mean?" is not identical to "How do I react to it?"


Well, yes and no. One's starting point is surely one's reaction to it, and for some, that may be sufficient meaning. One's reaction can certainly be more informed by enquiring into "What the artist intends it to mean" and as others have suggested, "What do artists of this school / period / place / culture often intend it to mean?", but all of that can be cast aside and the audience still derive a meaning. A work's meaning may be publicly declared as x, but if the audience doesn't get x but y instead, the audience response isn't an invalid meaning. Otherwise, one is giving supremacy to the "artist's intention" as if the audience didn't even exist!


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## Myriadi (Mar 6, 2016)

tdc said:


> Here is a quote from Cage's wiki:These are fairly well known facts, and I think it is hard to be a composer that is known for radical innovations, yet still be conservative at the same time, isn't there kind of a disconnect there? How do you explain that?


I'm fairly certain you're just having fun at my expense, but assuming you're serious, imagine if you will, as a thought experiment, two composers active around c. 1899 who both went to Exposition Universelle and were very impressed by gamelan music. So much that both decided to compose their own, and threw in some more ethnic percussion they've seen at the same exhibition. They both persisted against the public's conservatism, racial prejudice, and many other vicissitudes, and each composed several dozen works. They both went down in history as radically innovative, since not much percussion music existed at the time, and adopting the gamelan like that would take quite a bit of courage (for reasons we won't go into here). Except Composer A made quintets for gamelan and strings, concerti for solo gamelan and orchestra, gamelan sonatas (the Allegro - Adagio - Presto kind), mélodies for gamelan and soprano, arrangements of popular arias for the same, and so on, trying, where possible, to conform to Western ideas of melody, thematic development, etc. Whereas Composer B dug a little deeper into the authentic gamelan repertoire and produced huge works frequently over 90 minutes in duration, eschewing Western forms, and instead adopting gamelan polyphony and augmenting it with his own devices, using Western instruments unconventionally. No sonatas or quintets, but strange ensembles such as gamelan, guitar, flute, and choir, or piano, drums, and wind trio playing gamelan rhythms, and so on.

Wouldn't Composer A be rightfully considered to be conservative, while Composer B much less so? If you replace "gamelan" with "12-tone", "authentic gamelan repertoire" with "Renaissance polyphony", "huge works frequently over 90 minutes in duration" with "tiny works frequently less than 2-3 minutes in duration", and a few other changes, you'll get a rough approximation of what Schoenberg and Webern were like, at least in my view (and that of quite a few people I've known over the years - frankly I'm surprised to a different reaction, but maybe you don't care much for Schoenberg's music, or Webern's?)

That said, I do know a few composers who were doing 12-tone, or similar techniques, before Schoenberg. One famous example is Josef Matthias Hauer, one less known is Yefim Golyshev (who did 12-tone and serial durations in 1914/25). And since you seem to be fond of using Wikipedia as a source, I'd like to point you to the following passage in the "History of use" section of the article on 12-tone technique:

"The twelve-tone technique was also preceded by "nondodecaphonic serial composition" used independently in the works of Alexander Scriabin, Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Carl Ruggles, and others.[10] Oliver Neighbour argues that Bartók was "the first composer to use a group of twelve notes consciously for a structural purpose", in 1908 with the third of his fourteen bagatelles.[11]"


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

Woodduck said:


> You are opposing the "artist's intention" to the "listener's response" as if the work itself didn't even exist! That is precisely the postmodernist's error.


What do the two Shostakovich symphonies I referenced tell us about Shostakovich's intent? Should we care? What if we're wrong? The music is the music. I knew nothing about Shostakovich, the Soviet State's demands upon him, his alleged attempt at rehabilitation, whatever, when I first heard the 5th these umpteen years ago. I loved it upon first hearing then, and love it still. Opposite reaction to the 7th--that's just me--but the same innocence concerning everything about it except what my ears told me. Am I, was I so wrong? I'm not aware of a requirement to jump through any sort of hoop as I enter an art gallery, museum, or listen to a fresh piece of music. The work exists, and I exist to experience it, and to judge it.


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## Myriadi (Mar 6, 2016)

Nereffid said:


> I just want to say for the record that that piece was a lot of fun for me, and I thank you for sharing it.


I'm sure you're the first person I see - well, communicate with in person - who liked the work! But then the composer is quite famous in contemporary music circles, so I suppose he's got many admirers. I wonder if you'd respond as favorably to this piece of his, though?






He's also famous for a piece called _Fremdarbeit_, which he was commissioned to do, and was paid for, and he proceeded to reveal he "outsourced" the work to two people in Asia. I think India and China, but I can't remember now. Caused a big scandal. Like that other piece some other contemporary composer did, I forget the name: he was given something like 8000 USD to create a piece, and he provided unfinished parts to the musicians, claiming that the "piece" was what they would play decipher the parts in public, as it were.


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## Guest (Dec 1, 2017)

Strange Magic said:


> Am I, was I so wrong? I'm not aware of a requirement to jump through any sort of hoop as I enter an art gallery, museum, or listen to a fresh piece of music. The work exists, and I exist to experience it, and to judge it.


You relativist/subjectivist you! The trouble is it's the thin end of the wedge (and probably a slippery slope) if you say it's all up to you what you make of things. Next you'll be proclaiming that there are no objective absolutes, like 'good' and 'evil', that all moral standards are equivalent and that consequently, we can do and say just as we please.

While others pick out their preferred handcart to go to hell in, I'm just assembling my own standards, comparing them to what others have established over the milennia and behaving accordingly, since I refuse to accept that my subjectivity knows no limits and I'm not going to make up daft interpretations of the meaning of art.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

You sly fox, you! We both know that good and evil are socially determined and are relative. Otherwise, Reinhard Heydrich would never have been assassinated, Jean Valjean never would have stolen his loaf or been sent to the galleys. And you would never tell a lie.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Strange Magic said:


> and to judge it.


And how are you going to do that? I know you can say whether you like it, but how can you judge it?


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

MacLeod said:


> Well, yes and no. One's starting point is surely one's reaction to it, and for some, that may be sufficient meaning. One's reaction can certainly be more informed by enquiring into "What the artist intends it to mean" and as others have suggested, "What do artists of this school / period / place / culture often intend it to mean?", but all of that can be cast aside and the audience still derive a meaning. A work's meaning may be publicly declared as x, but if the audience doesn't get x but y instead, the audience response isn't an invalid meaning. Otherwise, one is giving supremacy to the "artist's intention" as if the audience didn't even exist!


You're doing essentially what Strange Magic did in considering the artist's intention and the audience reaction as the sole relevant factors. To these you add cultural context, but you're still discounting the fact that the art work itself is of a particular nature. Wagner commented in a letter to a friend that a work of art may contain meanings of which even the artist is unaware, and this may be extended to the audience as well, and perhaps summed up in the aphorism "there's more to this than meets the eye."

I'm not implying that anyone's understanding of a poem, painting or symphony is "wrong" because it isn't identical to mine or to some received opinion. It's in the nature of art, unlike discursive language, to generate practically limitless meanings. I'm only arguing that the nature of the work limits the meanings which can reasonably be assigned to it - that, in other words, artistic meaning is not arbitrary and not merely a product of an audience's personal and cultural biases. And, speaking as an artist, I've always been comfortable, as Wagner evidently was, with the fact that other people may see things in my work that I never considered, regardless of my intentions during the act of creating. A work of art has a permanent identity which both transcends and directs the ways in which it's viewed.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Not every interpretation of a work of art, or of anything else, is equally consistent with the content of that work.



MacLeod said:


> Is that what Postmodern philosophy allows, then? Your 'Uncle Harold' illustration is amusing, but is that what PM philosophers actually believe, or are you just exaggerating the idea that we can all believe what we want, no matter how absurd?
> 
> [add]Reading the summary in Wiki on Postmodern philosophy, it's not really possible to get under the skin of what PM is really about, and it's also obvious that there's more than one strand, and that some of those who were reported to be PM philosophers deny the claim.
> 
> ...


We might generously assume that not all postmodern philosophers would be willing to embrace crazy Uncle Harold as a culture critic, but once you deny objective meaning and turn it into something arbitrarily "situated" in cultural and personal bias you might as well give Harold the podium, or sell him the lecture hall.

In looking back at art and art criticism in the twentieth century, I'm struck by the increasingly inverse relationship between the actual content of art and the amount of academic verbiage used to justify it: it was necessary to say more and more to explain less and less. This was modernism reaching its desperate end, and postmodernism justified the chaos and emptiness by enshrining it as ultimate reality, and appointing Uncle Harold as Minister of Culture.


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## Nereffid (Feb 6, 2013)

Myriadi said:


> I'm sure you're the first person I see - well, communicate with in person - who liked the work! But then the composer is quite famous in contemporary music circles, so I suppose he's got many admirers. I wonder if you'd respond as favorably to this piece of his, though?
> 
> 
> 
> ...


I'm not an admirer of the composer, whom I'd never heard of before you posted that first video. I genuinely can't even remember his name as I type this! The above is the sort of thing that's of no interest to me as music. But your "-Bolero" example is AFAIC a nice piece of orchestral minimalism.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

Mandryka said:


> And how are you going to do that? I know you can say whether you like it, but how can you judge it?


In my case, they are one and the same. What do you loathe and deeply respect?


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## Myriadi (Mar 6, 2016)

Nereffid said:


> But your "-Bolero" example is AFAIC a nice piece of orchestral minimalism.


I see. Thanks for replying! Personally though, I have to add, if I wanted to listen to orchestral minimalism, I'd pick John Luther Adams' pieces, or maybe some Torke (not sure how minimalistic he is, though).


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Strange Magic said:


> What do the two Shostakovich symphonies I referenced tell us about Shostakovich's intent? Should we care? What if we're wrong? * The music is the music.* I knew nothing about Shostakovich, the Soviet State's demands upon him, his alleged attempt at rehabilitation, whatever, when I first heard the 5th these umpteen years ago. I loved it upon first hearing then, and love it still. Opposite reaction to the 7th--that's just me--but the same innocence concerning everything about it except what my ears told me. Am I, was I so wrong? I'm not aware of a requirement to jump through any sort of hoop as I enter an art gallery, museum, or listen to a fresh piece of music. * The work exists, and I exist to experience it, and to judge it.*


Exactly. The music is the music, and the work exists. It exists independent of both its author and its audience, and as such it embodies certain qualities, values and meanings which it will embody forever, regardless of the "spin" either author or audience places upon them, and regardless of how the work makes anyone feel. Because of the objective content of the work, that spin and those feelings will take certain forms and not others. Those forms may even at times contradict each other - is the finale of Shostakovich's 5th "triumphant" or "ironic"? - but given the nature of the work, both interpretations may be reasonable within the range of possible meanings it contains. "Funereal" or "romantic" would not be.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Strange Magic said:


> In my case, they are one and the same. What do you loathe and deeply respect?


Most of "middle period" Beethoven. Pretty well everything by Bruckner, Shostakovich and Rachmaninov. Pretty well everything by Lully, Handel, Scarlatti, Liszt. Many things by Finnissy. Most operas by Verdi and all operas by Rameau. Xenakis's late music, his final phase. Tippett. Busoni. Reich.


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## Guest (Dec 1, 2017)

Woodduck said:


> You're doing essentially what Strange Magic did in considering the artist's intention and the audience reaction as the sole relevant factors. To these you add cultural context, but *you're still discounting the fact that the art work itself is of a particular nature*. Wagner commented in a letter to a friend that a work of art may contain meanings of which even the artist is unaware, and this may be extended to the audience as well, and perhaps summed up in the aphorism "there's more to this than meets the eye."


I don't think I am. Well, I might have in my post on this issue, but I don't discount the work itself in determining its meaning - for me, that was a given. The difference is that, if I read you right, the work has some objective meaning if only the artist and the audience could find it. Perhaps if you could give an example, it might help. For me, there are boundaries to possible meanings (I'm picturing a Venn diagram with the possible meanings of the work as a Universal set and within it at least two circles, one for the artist's intent and the other for the audience's reception) but for the purposes of the consumption of art, without the audience, it's the old "tree falling in the forest that no one hears".



Woodduck said:


> We might generously assume that not all postmodern philosophers would be willing to embrace crazy Uncle Harold as a culture critic, but once you deny objective meaning and turn it into something *arbitrarily *"situated" in cultural and personal bias you might as well give Harold the podium, or sell him the lecture hall.


It's the presumption of 'arbitrarily' that gets in the way here. Denying objective meaning only necessitates arbitrary-ness in the logic--philosopher's world. In the real world, there tends to be a broad consensus, and those who fall outside it are entitled to their view, but not assert their absolute supremacy over the consensus (who can only assert that there is a consensus, not their absolute supremacy either). If our society decides on, for example, an appropriate age for legal driving at 18, this is not based on any absolute or objective. It could just as easily be 21. (I've tried to pick a deliberately non-controversial example.) But 18 and 21 are not arbitrary choices, just because there is no objective standard.

Similarly, the valid meanings to be derived from, say, Turner's _Rain, Steam and Speed - The Great Western Railway _may be limitless, but not arbitrary - that is, provided the audience justifies their 'meaning' with reference to the work.

View attachment 99676


It's so much more difficult with music.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

MacLeod said:


> I don't think I am. Well, I might have in my post on this issue, but I don't discount the work itself in determining its meaning - for me, that was a given. The difference is that, if I read you right, the work has some objective meaning if only the artist and the audience could find it. Perhaps if you could give an example, it might help. For me, there are boundaries to possible meanings (I'm picturing a Venn diagram with the possible meanings of the work as a Universal set and within it at least two circles, one for the artist's intent and the other for the audience's reception) but for the purposes of the consumption of art, without the audience, it's the old "tree falling in the forest that no one hears".
> 
> It's the presumption of 'arbitrarily' that gets in the way here. Denying objective meaning only necessitates arbitrary-ness in the logic--philosopher's world. In the real world, there tends to be a broad consensus, and those who fall outside it are entitled to their view, but not assert their absolute supremacy over the consensus (who can only assert that there is a consensus, not their absolute supremacy either). If our society decides on, for example, an appropriate age for legal driving at 18, this is not based on any absolute or objective. It could just as easily be 21. (I've tried to pick a deliberately non-controversial example.) But 18 and 21 are not arbitrary choices, just because there is no objective standard.
> 
> ...


Given your last paragraph (bolded), we agree.

I'm going to leave it at that, since it's a sunny morning and I need to go out and make some vitamin D.


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

Not everything necessarily has the same meaning given by others, but certainly everything exists within its own context, and I would suggest that Shostakovich's "Leningrad" Symphony is one them, which regardless of its merits was so inspirational to the Russian people during WWll, though it's not necessarily what I would call a war symphony. I find this hugely important because he has been blamed by his armchair critics, safe from war in their easy-chairs-_their_ snug little context not his-for not writing a better symphony, and I find it more satisfying to except it for the way it is because of the circumstances it was written under. Sometimes the understanding of the context can modify one's purely self-interested expectations about a work and broaden one's perspective from the composer's point of view. I doubt if anyone has not somehow profited by reading about a composer and his or her works, and I believe there can be something very illuminating about getting into a composer's state of mine. I've noticed over the years that human beings hear through the ears but also through the filter of the _mind_ that is so often choosing what to focus on.


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Myriadi said:


> I like Cage, Stockhausen, Xenakis, and many other composers mentioned in this thread. But I don't think any of them are post-modern in _any_ sense of the word. A work like Johannes Kreidler's "-Bolero" certainly is, though:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


I question whether this sort of thing is really postmodern. How does it differ from, say, the "dada" or absurdist strain of modernism? I don't see it as different from Duchamp's urinal: you pick up something you didn't make, alter it or put it in an unfamiliar context so that people stare in fascination, put your name on it, and call it "art."

There's a company called "Music Minus One" that publishes recordings of famous pieces like piano concertos without the soloist, allowing you to play a piece at home with a real orchestral accompaniment. It looks like Kreidler's clever idea isn't even original. Maybe _that's_ what makes it postmodern.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

Woodduck said:


> Exactly. The music is the music, and the work exists. It exists independent of both its author and its audience, and as such it embodies certain qualities, values and meanings which it will embody forever, regardless of the "spin" either author or audience places upon them, and regardless of how the work makes anyone feel. Because of the objective content of the work, that spin and those feelings will take certain forms and not others. Those forms may even at times contradict each other - is the finale of Shostakovich's 5th "triumphant" or "ironic"? - but given the nature of the work, both interpretations may be reasonable within the range of possible meanings it contains. "Funereal" or "romantic" would not be.


The music exists, yes, as a score and embodies certain qualities: instrumentation, length, marked tempos, other markings by the composer: _Vivace_, etc. Values and meanings? Not so much. In the last movement of the Shostakovich 5th, I hear the onset and flowering of tragic mania, not 'triumph" or "irony". But, again, that's just me; that's my spin.


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

MacLeod said:


> I don't think I am. Well, I might have in my post on this issue, but I don't discount the work itself in determining its meaning - for me, that was a given. The difference is that, if I read you right, the work has some objective meaning if only the artist and the audience could find it. Perhaps if you could give an example, it might help. For me, there are boundaries to possible meanings (I'm picturing a Venn diagram with the possible meanings of the work as a Universal set and within it at least two circles, one for the artist's intent and the other for the audience's reception) but for the purposes of the consumption of art, without the audience, it's the old "tree falling in the forest that no one hears".
> 
> It's the presumption of 'arbitrarily' that gets in the way here. Denying objective meaning only necessitates arbitrary-ness in the logic--philosopher's world. In the real world, there tends to be a broad consensus, and those who fall outside it are entitled to their view, but not assert their absolute supremacy over the consensus (who can only assert that there is a consensus, not their absolute supremacy either). If our society decides on, for example, an appropriate age for legal driving at 18, this is not based on any absolute or objective. It could just as easily be 21. (I've tried to pick a deliberately non-controversial example.) But 18 and 21 are not arbitrary choices, just because there is no objective standard.
> 
> ...


I'll agree with this also, if by "meaning", we understand that Turner was depicting a locomotive on its track. And it is so much more difficult with music.


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## Timothy (Jul 19, 2017)

Woodduck said:


> How does it differ from, say, the "dada" or absurdist strain of modernism?


What does it actually share in common is a more useful question?

A: Absolutely nothing


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## Woodduck (Mar 17, 2014)

Timothy said:


> What does it actually share in common is a more useful question?
> 
> A: Absolutely nothing


Since I described a commonality in my post (which you omitted from your quote), there is, obviously, a commonality. I'll repeat it in case you didn't read that far: "You pick up something you didn't make, alter it or put it in an unfamiliar context so that people stare in fascination, put your name on it, and call it 'art.'" I hope you can grasp that without further explanation.


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## Agamemnon (May 1, 2017)

A great article about postmodernism (it's origins and where it has lead us culturally and politically):
https://areomagazine.com/2017/03/27...-west-postmodernism-and-its-impact-explained/


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

Myriadi said:


> I'm fairly certain you're just having fun at my expense, but assuming you're serious, imagine if you will, as a thought experiment, two composers active around c. 1899 who both went to Exposition Universelle and were very impressed by gamelan music. So much that both decided to compose their own, and threw in some more ethnic percussion they've seen at the same exhibition. They both persisted against the public's conservatism, racial prejudice, and many other vicissitudes, and each composed several dozen works. They both went down in history as radically innovative, since not much percussion music existed at the time, and adopting the gamelan like that would take quite a bit of courage (for reasons we won't go into here). Except Composer A made quintets for gamelan and strings, concerti for solo gamelan and orchestra, gamelan sonatas (the Allegro - Adagio - Presto kind), mélodies for gamelan and soprano, arrangements of popular arias for the same, and so on, trying, where possible, to conform to Western ideas of melody, thematic development, etc. Whereas Composer B dug a little deeper into the authentic gamelan repertoire and produced huge works frequently over 90 minutes in duration, eschewing Western forms, and instead adopting gamelan polyphony and augmenting it with his own devices, using Western instruments unconventionally. No sonatas or quintets, but strange ensembles such as gamelan, guitar, flute, and choir, or piano, drums, and wind trio playing gamelan rhythms, and so on.
> 
> Wouldn't Composer A be rightfully considered to be conservative, while Composer B much less so? If you replace "gamelan" with "12-tone", "authentic gamelan repertoire" with "Renaissance polyphony", "huge works frequently over 90 minutes in duration" with "tiny works frequently less than 2-3 minutes in duration", and a few other changes, you'll get a rough approximation of what Schoenberg and Webern were like, at least in my view (and that of quite a few people I've known over the years - frankly I'm surprised to a different reaction, but maybe you don't care much for Schoenberg's music, or Webern's?)
> 
> ...


In response to your thought experiment, both composers would be considered innovative. The fact one composer can be seen as more innovative than the other, does not make composer A suddenly conservative. If we are comparing these composers to Schoenberg and Webern, Webern may have taken music farther in the direction of what we can loosely call 'Modernism', but that does not automatically relegate Schoenberg to being conservative, or change the fact that Webern's innovations would not be possible without first adopting Schoenberg's harmonic approach.

I assure you I am not having fun at your expense, I have never been given a reasonable explanation by anyone as to why some consider Schoenberg conservative, and I'm still waiting for one. You mention this or that piece that precedes Schoenberg's methods, yet they do not sound anything like the music of the second Viennese school. Here is the Bartok work:

(Piece in question starts at 2:05)





This 3rd bagatelle is less than a minute in duration, and actually sounds much closer to the approach used by Debussy than anything composed by Schoenberg (really it is not even close). I still have never heard a piece by any composer pre-Schoenberg that sounds very close to his music, maybe there were some less successful experiments I have not come across, you still have not shown me a specific piece that qualifies. I'm listening to the music of Josef Matthias Hauer right now, it does not sound very much like Schoenberg's 12 tone or free atonal pieces. Is there nothing you can point to that can be seen as sounding significantly similar to Schoenberg to the extent that say Buxtehude sounds to J.S. Bach?

Hauer - _Nomos op.19_ 





There were other composers before Monteverdi who attempted less successful operas, that is not enough to suddenly make Monteverdi a conservative composer, nor change the fact that he is widely considered as the pioneer of opera as we know it.

Even if you do find one or two little known pieces, that you feel qualify as pre-Schoenberg in sound, that is not enough to make Schoenberg conservative, unless we are reinventing the term based on our own subjectivity or using appeal to authority logical fallacies. Attempting to reinvent truth based on ones subjective feelings can be looked at as an aspect of postmodern thought.


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## arpeggio (Oct 4, 2012)

If we called postmodern music postatonal music would you like it better? It is what it is no matter what one calls it.

Frankly, after reading all of the posts in this thread, I have no idea what post modern music is.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

Strange Magic said:


> We both know that good and evil are socially determined and are relative.


Incorrect, and it is this line of thinking that has created the bulk of the problems we face as a society today. Things are made to look endlessly complex more so than they are, actually. That is the great tragedy of the human condition. Actually morality is very simple. Don't steal from anyone or harm another person (unless in obvious self defense). Period. The end. There really is nothing more to it and if humans would come into harmony with this natural law, we could create an incredible world that is a paradise. The bulk of what you learn in school and media are just obfuscations designed to distract you, divide you and make you feel like you are not smart enough to really understand the world, so that our manipulators can maintain control over us.


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## eugeneonagain (May 14, 2017)

tdc said:


> Incorrect, and it is this line of thinking that has created the bulk of the problems we face as a society today. Things are made to look endlessly complex more so than they are, actually. That is the great tragedy of the human condition. *Actually morality is very simple. Don't steal from anyone or harm another person (unless in obvious self defense). Period. The end.* There really is nothing more to it and if humans would come into harmony with this natural law, we could create an incredible world that is a paradise. The bulk of what you learn in school and media are just obfuscations designed to distract you, divide you and make you feel like you are not smart enough to really understand the world, so that our manipulators can maintain control over us.


What you describe are social contract rules of artificial societies. If you want to call that 'morality', so be it, but there is no universal foundation upon which you can build this. The requirements of such social contracts differ from society to society and through time. 
Not killing one another is a basic self-preservation agreement beyond the world of basic survival, but the practices most often referred to as 'morality': e.g. sexual, reproductive, treatment of children, social conduct... do not have universal agreement, or at least the approaches to supposed universal principles differs greatly.

There is no 'natural law' of morality unless one appoints a (divine) giver of such a law. Once that happens, enquiry ceases.

The matter is actually rather more sprawling and complex than you are suggesting.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

I think each of believes we are the final and perfect vessels of morality, and if others would simply follow our rules the world would be a very fine place.

My belief: Only Darwin makes the rules. Always has, always will.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Myriadi said:


> I like Cage, Stockhausen, Xenakis, and many other composers mentioned in this thread. But I don't think any of them are post-modern in _any_ sense of the word. A work like Johannes Kreidler's "-Bolero" certainly is, though:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


How is this postmodern? it is 100% common practice piece, completely rooted in tonal system. Just the accompaniment to Bolero.

How is Cage not postmodern, his commentary in his interviews are straight from postmodern texts. his later music is definitely not common practice.

Any meaning of the term postmodern includes a reference to its rejection of ideologies, narratives etc.

I can see this coming from the deconstruction angle without the melody, but it is still held too strongly together with the individual parts


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

Phil loves classical said:


> How is this postmodern? it is 100% common practice piece, completely rooted in tonal system. Just the accompaniment to Bolero.
> 
> How is Cage not postmodern, his commentary in his interviews are straight from postmodern texts. his later music is definitely not common practice.
> 
> ...


I think that the Cage piece _Credo in US_ is probably usefully called postmodern. And maybe the Appartment House harmonies.

It's just that some of Cage's music may be better described using other terms, like surrealist, especially the music based on chance. As surreal as Duchamp's Stoppages. I don't think it helps to use postmodern to categorise Cage's slow, meditative pieces either, like the quartet number piece (_Four_ I think it's called, or Music for Piano.) When people say postmodern they imagine kitch quotation and free juxtaposition of old styles, like in the Berio symphonia.


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## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

KenOC said:


> After all this, I admit I have no idea what "postmodernism" is. Fortunately, I don't much care.


Oh dear.

..........


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## Guest (Dec 2, 2017)

Strange Magic said:


> I'll agree with this also, if by "meaning", we understand that Turner was depicting a locomotive on its track. And it is so much more difficult with music.


Do I read this right...you'll agree with it only if the picture is about a locomotive?

And if the locomotive got in the way while he was trying to paint something meaningful about light?



tdc said:


> Incorrect,


No, not "incorrect", but by all means "I disagree".

As for music, it seems that unless the composer provided some kind of post-modern narrative or comment, it's difficult to spot the point on the modern-post-modern continuum where one becomes the other.


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## Myriadi (Mar 6, 2016)

tdc said:


> In response to your thought experiment, both composers would be considered innovative. The fact one composer can be seen as more innovative than the other, does not make composer A suddenly conservative. If we are comparing these composers to Schoenberg and Webern, Webern may have taken music farther in the direction of what we can loosely call 'Modernism', but that does not automatically *relegate Schoenberg to being conservative*, or change the fact that Webern's innovations would not be possible without first adopting Schoenberg's harmonic approach.


_Relegate_ Schoenberg to being conservative? This and some other aspects of your post makes me think this is more of a semantic thing, really. You seem to think it's impossible for a person to be innovative and conservative at the same time, and I think it's perfectly plausible to stick to the old things while emracing some new ones. Rimsky-Korsakov comes to mind - the man who wasn't afraid to use wholetone scale, yet had a problem with Mussorgsky. Or Bach - this has actually just come up in another thread - who worked almost exclusively in genres and forms invented by others, but whose approach to harmony - to name one thing - was very innovative.

But like I said, since our understanding of the word "conservative" differs, I imagine you wouldn't see either RK or Bach the way I described. I can't imagine why you can say "innovative" and "more innovative", but can't say "less conservative" and "more conservative" about the composers from my thought experiment. In fact, when you say



tdc said:


> ...unless we are reinventing the term based on our own subjectivity or using appeal to authority logical fallacies. Attempting to reinvent truth based on ones subjective feelings can be looked at as an aspect of postmodern thought.


I'm completely lost. Perhaps it's that English is my second language, but consulting Merriam-Webster, "conservative" simply means "..tending or disposed to maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions", as well as "marked by or relating to traditional norms of taste, elegance, style, or manners". Tending, you see, and/or marked by. So, a quality that can be present in various degrees in an individual. Is there some other definition that works exclusively for arts?


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## Myriadi (Mar 6, 2016)

Phil loves classical said:


> How is this postmodern? it is 100% common practice piece, completely rooted in tonal system.


Uh, why are you talking about the actual notes? You realize this guy didn't write any of them, yes? The "act of composition" was to rent the relevant parts of Ravel's work and distribute them to the musicians. This is what make it postmodern to me, whereas



Phil loves classical said:


> How is Cage not postmodern, his commentary in his interviews are straight from postmodern texts. his later music is definitely not common practice.


I don't know which texts Cage quoted in his interivews, sorry, but his later music isn't common practice, you're quite right, it's modernism. Maybe there's a line somewhere in Cage's music where you think he started doing post-modernism?



Phil loves classical said:


> Any meaning of the term postmodern includes a reference to its rejection of ideologies, narratives etc.


Of course! Here the composer rejects the idea of authorship, the idea of actually having to do any work when paid to do it, and a large variety of ideas that can be broadly described as "common decency".


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## eugeneonagain (May 14, 2017)

Myriadi said:


> I don't know which texts Cage quoted in his interivews, sorry, but his later music isn't common practice, you're quite right, it's modernism. Maybe there's a line somewhere in Cage's music where you think he started doing post-modernism?


You must realise that Cage's _4:33_ likely qualifies as a major event of postmodern art? His background grew out of the modernist movements of the very early 20th century, but he wasn't merely an extension of the same. The dividing line between these movements is, in any case, a very faint division.... leading to:



Myriadi said:


> Of course! Here the composer rejects the idea of authorship, the idea of actually having to do any work when paid to do it, and a large variety of ideas that can be broadly described as "common decency".


Consider Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q, or the picture of the Mona Lisa with a moustache and beard drawn on it (sold in October for $750,000). It's from the high point of Dadaism - modernism in your chronology - but it's identical in tone and idea to the "work" you posted above. Even Duchamp was preceded by Eugène Bataille a figure in the intellectual circles of France from the 1870s, who drew a caricature of the Mona Lisa smoking a pipe (for the _Exhibition of Incoherent Arts_ of 1883).

The artistic and intellectual subcultures of his period contained seeds of a great deal of what is now thought to be unique to the early 20th century. The 19th century was not just all fin de siècle romanticism and ennui, quickly superseded by revolutionary new ideas in a flash. The transitions are generally a slow drip from various sources over an extended time period. So-called "huge changes" are built up slowly while the majority of people are not taking notice. The change occurs when they accumulate enough that they can no longer be contained by the prevailing culture norms. At some point they get 'recognised' and christened with whatever name sticks.

So pinning the tail on the donkey in terms of deciding when postmodernism is applicable or when postmodernism _started_ is always going to be tricky. Jean François Lyotard's book _The Postmodern Condition_, considered one of the initial statements of postmodernism, is from 1979, but it is an after-the-fact recognition of cultural trends and thought far pre-dating its publication. He refers to the "lack of credulity towards grand narratives", and this is indeed a feature of one strand of modern culture; achieved on a low-level through non-committal behaviour and 'ironic' acts, but I wouldn't say it typifies all extant culture. In that sense I'd suggest that postmodernism is an umbrella term standing for the fact that people no longer know what to believe. It's an ideas crisis when compared to the grand narratives view of culture.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

Myriadi said:


> Uh, why are you talking about the actual notes? You realize this guy didn't write any of them, yes? The "act of composition" was to rent the relevant parts of Ravel's work and distribute them to the musicians. This is what make it postmodern to me, whereas
> 
> I don't know which texts Cage quoted in his interivews, sorry, but his later music isn't common practice, you're quite right, it's modernism. Maybe there's a line somewhere in Cage's music where you think he started doing post-modernism?
> 
> Of course! Here the composer rejects the idea of authorship, the idea of actually having to do any work when paid to do it, and a large variety of ideas that can be broadly described as "common decency".


 If the listener agrees to view it as postmodern art, then it is for that listener. If that Bolero melody was on a track that was accidentally not included, and the recording was released by accident, I doubt anyone would see it as postmodern, since there was no apparent intent (even if someone maliciously did it and the recording label had to classify it as an accident).

This brings up an interesting argument against postmodern thinking which I brought up before in other threads, that this assertion there is no objectivity is only by those who perpetrate this idea, when there in fact is. That postmodernists are hypocrites (BtW, not my idea or arguement, was taken from a critique on postmodern poetry). An example is that postmodernists believe there is no idea of a chair even if there are multiple copies that are the same make, etc. That you can't assume if you sat on one without breaking, you can assume another one won't break, since each chair is different, and that a postmodernist must check each chair that it won't break before sitting. Also that your bank account balance today is not the same as yesterday, even if you had no transactions. Yet the postmodernist wouldn't accept a bank teller (who is also a postmodernist) saying his/her money disappeared, and is legit, since the money wasn't really there in the first place, or that each day is a different balance.

The same idea could be projected onto that argument that there is no objectivity in music. It is denied by those who want or choose to deny, but had existed previously before, and some continue to believe it exists, and could possibly objectively exist.

That is the reason I kept referring to the lack of a prevailing musical system in some works of postmodern music. But it may not be a necessary criteria for postmodern music (ie. seems some minimalism which is obviously based on the tonal system is considered postmodern).


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

eugeneonagain said:


> What you describe are social contract rules of artificial societies. If you want to call that 'morality', so be it, but there is no universal foundation upon which you can build this. The requirements of such social contracts differ from society to society and through time.
> Not killing one another is a basic self-preservation agreement beyond the world of basic survival, but the practices most often referred to as 'morality': e.g. sexual, reproductive, treatment of children, social conduct... do not have universal agreement, or at least the approaches to supposed universal principles differs greatly.
> 
> There is no 'natural law' of morality unless one appoints a (divine) giver of such a law. Once that happens, enquiry ceases.
> ...


One can get into the subtler aspects of it for sure, but I think that it is important to go after the bigger things first. In other words I think people should confront the fact that our current systems of government, banking, taxation, corporate law, military etc. Allow for continual theft, fraud and violence to occur on a massive and global scale (sadly in the name of protecting us from these things). Therefore there is too big of a disconnect between what is occurring and what the average persons perception of what is occurring is. This I believe is the primary root of human suffering at the moment. So I would suggest more work needs to be done to expose these things and to discuss them, and to educate people in an ethical way that is empowering (rather than enslaving), so that these types of situations are less likely to occur in the future. I strongly believe there is a spiritual component to the world we live in that has been supressed from us but is being used against the average person in a negative way. Once these things are made clear to the masses, the world can begin to truly heal, and then it will be much easier to look at the issues of morality you've brought up. I essentially believe that the issues of morality I've discussed should be the cornerstones of society, and aside from that people should be free to live and learn from their own mistakes. To understand more about natural law in the way I've described it look into the work of Mark Passio.


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## tdc (Jan 17, 2011)

Myriadi said:


> I'm completely lost. Perhaps it's that English is my second language, but consulting Merriam-Webster, "conservative" simply means "..tending or disposed to maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions", as well as "marked by or relating to traditional norms of taste, elegance, style, or manners". Tending, you see, and/or marked by. So, a quality that can be present in various degrees in an individual. Is there some other definition that works exclusively for arts?


Yes you're right it can be looked at in different degrees, but in cases like this I think one can simply use common sense, and see that Schoenberg leans to the innovative side of the spectrum. The only people who have ever claimed otherwise are either composers who are using methods of composition that are off shoots of Schoenberg's methods, or academic types that I believe are either indoctrinated themselves or have an agenda of pushing Schoenberg's style of composition onto the public.

Schoenberg is widely seen as the guy who severed ties with harmonic tradition (a bit of a bogeyman I suppose), so if one _was_ interested in cleaning up his public perception and making his music seem less scary and approachable to the average person (therefore simultaneously making a huge percentage of other newer music more palatable to the public) what better way to do it than label him a "conservative"?

Hey I like some of the guy's music I'm just calling it like I see it here, but it seems like good old intuition and common sense are beaten down in academia.

I believe it was Hitler who said (paraphrase) "make the lie big enough, and repeat it enough times and people will believe it". This seems to be the case with the Schoenberg conservative thing.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

^^ I think there can be no doubt about Schoenberg. Dodecaphony was very radical departure that even Stravinsky was openly against (until he started experimenting with himself). To state he was conservative is to use relativist language. Him ‘sounding’ more conservative is an incredible feat, something someone without a musical education may not grasp. Webern may sound more ‘modern’, but he was only following Schoenberg’s concept.
on the other hand, minimalism is not radical or original in musical terms, but only in its use of perception, which is extraneous to the musical content. Minimalism was still used into this century, while dodecaphony hasn’t which may give the impression the latter is conservative. I would argue Pachelbel’s Canon is minimalism, but not in the postmodern ‘sense’. That is why I still say postmodern thought and philosophy is integral to understanding the music, even if you can ‘enjoy’ it (another relativist term) without it.


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## eugeneonagain (May 14, 2017)

tdc said:


> One can get into the subtler aspects of it for sure, but I think that it is important to go after the bigger things first. In other words I think people should confront the fact that our current systems of government, banking, taxation, corporate law, military etc. Allow for continual theft, fraud and violence to occur on a massive and global scale (sadly in the name of protecting us from these things). Therefore there is too big of a disconnect between what is occurring and what the average persons perception of what is occurring is. This I believe is the primary root of human suffering at the moment. So I would suggest more work needs to be done to expose these things and to discuss them, and to educate people in an ethical way that is empowering (rather than enslaving), so that these types of situations are less likely to occur in the future. I strongly believe there is a spiritual component to the world we live in that has been supressed from us but is being used against the average person in a negative way. Once these things are made clear to the masses, the world can begin to truly heal, and then it will be much easier to look at the issues of morality you've brought up. I essentially believe that the issues of morality I've discussed should be the cornerstones of society, and aside from that people should be free to live and learn from their own mistakes. To understand more about natural law in the way I've described it look into the work of Mark Passio.


I won't disagree with the fact that society is corrupted by power and abuse of power or that this is the chief cause of a lot of human suffering, but this is not because of the transgression of existing natural moral laws, it is due to the even wider recognition that there _are no_ universal moral laws. 
I will repeat that 'moral law' is an artificial construct devised for the purpose of the space we inhabit: human societies. An organised existence removed from the world inhabited by other animals in a state of nature. A mixture of ancient taboos, common-sense, philosophy and some scientific knowledge. 'Natural law' is improperly applied to ideas of morality.

Religions and other similar belief systems _must_ posit a pre-ordained system of moral law, which is simply obeyed rather than assented to on rational grounds. Unfortunately it generates an unthinking sort of assent and plants a falsehood about the existence of fixed moral "law".

It's a pity you mentioned Mark Passio. He is a conspiracy quack and a disciple of David Icke - as his terminology betrays. In short, not worth listening to because his talk merely helps reinforce disinformation nonsense which keeps the origin and maintenance of this world's real problems obscured. The bits which make sense can be found elsewhere, largely because they are obvious truisms.

Very little of this has much to do with Postmodernism


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

“Is there some other definition that works exclusively for arts?”

The word “conservative” as applied to the arts? Perhaps when art makes reference to the past rather than ignoring it or challenging it. Elsewhere, modern and postmodern are terms that most people don’t seem to understand or agree upon. But the words modern and contemporary, everyone seems to understand that and perhaps they are the most useful. When people get up in the morning do they say, “Here’s to another day in our postmodern world!” Maybe the musicologists, intellectuals, historians, scholars and academics do, but all they can do is describe the circumstances according to their own interpretation without necessarily knowing how to best live within it—and that’s the hard part.


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## eugeneonagain (May 14, 2017)

tdc said:


> Yes you're right it can be looked at in different degrees, but in cases like this I think one can simply use common sense, and see that Schoenberg leans to the innovative side of the spectrum. The only people who have ever claimed otherwise are either composers who are using methods of composition that are off shoots of Schoenberg's methods, or academic types that I believe are either indoctrinated themselves or have an agenda of pushing Schoenberg's style of composition onto the public.
> 
> Schoenberg is widely seen as the guy who severed ties with harmonic tradition (a bit of a bogeyman I suppose), so if one _was_ interested in cleaning up his public perception and making his music seem less scary and approachable to the average person (therefore simultaneously making a huge percentage of other newer music more palatable to the public) what better way to do it than label him a "conservative"?
> 
> Hey I like some of the guy's music I'm just calling it like I see it here, but it seems like good old intuition and common sense are beaten down in academia.


Who has labelled Schoenberg's music conservative? There is no doubt that with regard to his tastes he yearned for the possibility to be able to compose regular tonal, romantic music and remain a vital, modern artist. This seemed an impossibility to him, hence his direction. However his largest book is an exhaustive book on standard traditional harmony. He often maintained that he was adding to musical language and not 'severing' anything. He had conservative tendencies, but was also a vanguard artist, as all serious 'artists' must be. That artistic existence is not unique to Schoenberg.

His perception doesn't need to be either 'cleaned-up' or neatly repackaged to cater to more people, especially people who have no interest in his music and don't want to pursue it. Art is not commerce.


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## Forss (May 12, 2017)

eugeneonagain said:


> However his largest book is an exhaustive book on standard traditional harmony. He often maintained that he was adding to musical language and not 'severing' anything. He had conservative tendencies, but was also a vanguard artist, as all serious 'artists' must be. That artistic existence is not unique to Schoenberg.


This is _my_ view, also! The so-called "Death of the Author" proclaimed by Barthes is completely erroneous, in my opinion. I _constantly_ see to the _personal character_ in a work of art: to the seriousness of intent, to the cultivation of taste, to the moral compass, and to the very aesthetic execution itself, all of which, as a matter of philosophical principle, _always shines through the joints_ in a work of art.

This philosophical principle (no _one_ proposition can make a statement _about itself_), as I see it, is also why Schoenberg's apparent modernism could be recognized as a result of his conservatism. The conservatism of Schoenberg's character (and overall _weltanschauung_) felt it was _strictly forbidden_ to compose in the style of, say, Beethoven or Mozart (or even Mahler), because it would essentially be _dishonest_ and out of keeping with _his_ culture, regardless of how much he liked or detested _his_ particular culture. It is all about integrity, and for _this_ we should be in awe of Schoenberg's heroic self-overcoming.


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## Minor Sixthist (Apr 21, 2017)

I don't know how thoroughly your question has been answered, and this might've been said before, but all I have to say is, seek to understand and explore unfamiliar musical territory without the predisposed objective of 'liking' it. I've found that in the past, if I ever tried listening to a piece I felt I 'should' like — in the past I was given the impression that there are certain things I 'should' like, and felt pressure to do so out of the personal inclination to conform — it changed my objective perception. And if it didn't change it observably, it definitely had the potential to change it, in a variety of unfavorable ways. 

I've found it's great to relax and be observant, so light research on motives and contextual backgrounds of the people who create what they did. Try to think about what motivated the artist yourself before you delve into other people's outlooks. Different strokes for different folks, but try not to feel obligations toward the music; you don't owe anything to the music but respect, a fair chance and some time. Looking retrospectively at this reply, sorry if my answer is simplistic, it's just the answer I would give myself. And sorry if my grammar is rusty...I'm tired and brooding


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