Postmodern music is either a musical condition or a musical style. As a musical condition, postmodern music is music as it exists in the post-world war II society, after modernism, as part of the postmodern condition. In this sense, postmodern music is a commodified language by which people can signify belonging to a musical culture.

As a musical style, postmodern music contain characteristics of all art after modernism or postmodern art. It favors eclecticism in form and musical genre, and often combines characteristics from different genres, or employs jump-cut sectionalization. It tends to be self-referential and ironic, and it blurs the boundaries between "high art" and kitsch.

Most definitions include both concepts. Daniel Albright (2004) summarizes the traits of postmodernism in music as bricolage, polystylism, and randomness.

Contents

1 A Short History of Post-Modern Music 2 Postmodernism as reflected in musical styles 3 Causes and Theories of Post-Modernity in Music 4 Postmodern musical artists 5 See also 6 Sources 7 Further reading 8 External links

A Short History of Post-Modern Music

In the modern period, recording of music was seen as a way of transcribing an external event, as a photograph is supposed to record an moment in time. However, with the invention of magnetic tape in the 1930's the ability to directly edit a recording, and create a result which did not actually occur, made it possible for a recording to be viewed as the end product of artistic work itself. Through the 1950's, most music, even popular music, presented itself as the capturing of a performance, even if that performance was mic'ed to improve hearing of different parts.

Antecedants to this process, including the electronic music of Edgar Varese, can be found dating back for several decades, and in 1948 Pierre Schaeffer would use tape to "compose" pieces, however it is with the advent of Rock n' Roll and particularly producer Phil Spector and Glenn Gould in classical music in the late 1950's that the idea of using tape to create a stand alone artistic work became more and more prevalent. However, it was with the studio recordings of The Beatles where the full use of multi-track recording and layering became common to popular music. The creation of this recording process transformed pop music. Rock and Hip Hop both extend this process further, by using more and more sophisticated techniques to layer and mix individual tracks .

The rise of popular music created another pressure on music, which would lead to another strand of post-modernity, namely the ability to create a sufficiently large audience for works. In the Modernist view, such a connection was unecessary - people would naturally gravitate towards "serious" music as the place where ideas could be presented in musical form, rather than "popular" music, which was seen, as the Victorians had seen it, as subsidiary to the more "weighty" genres. As with Post-modern philosophy, post-modern music questioned whether this hierarchy of "high" and "low" culture was correct or appropriate.

A third strand of post-modern music is a change in the fundamental idea of what music is supposed to be "about". As the period wore on, the idea that "music is mainly about itself", became more and more firmly entrenched. Reference was not merely a technique, but the substance of music. Musical works reference other musical works, not because they can, but because they must. This is part of the general change from Modernism which saw the basic subject of art being the most pure elements of musical technique - whether intervals, motivic fragments or rhythms - to Postmodernism which sees the basic subject of art being the stream of media, manufactured objects, and genre materials. In otherwords, post-modernity views the role of art to be commenting on the consumer society and its products, where as modernism sought to convey the "reality" of the universe in its most fundamental form.

The ability to record and mix, and later sample, would feed into this idea, with the inclusion of "found sounds", snippets of other recordings, spoken voices, noises, sampled tableux into music. Precursors to this can be seen in both classical world, for example John Cage's Europeara and Olivier Messiaen's "bird song" compositions. Early examples include Abbey Road, Pink Floyd's Meddle and the "dub" style of music of Lee 'Scratch' Perry.

Postmodernism as reflected in musical styles

In the late 1950's and 1960's a series of styles, influenced by pop and post-modern conditions began to form, and existing styles began to incorporate post-modern elements.

In popular music, jazz, rhythm and blues, and early rock and roll are all begin to become shaped by not only new technology, but a fundamentally different way of producing recordings. Instead of trying to achieve a rounded three dimensional sound in imitation of the concert experience, recordings increasingly foregrounded the vocals and made the rest of the sounds a single "wall" behind the main track. By the mid 1960's this "wall of sound" style was the standard of most commercial radio. The full incorporation of the studio mixing techniques, electronics and use of layering would lead to the establishment of Rock. "Pop" music, as a specific sub-genre, would eschew the electric guitar driven sound of rock in favor of synthesizers, acoustic instruments, and more subdued rhythm sections.

At the same time, dance music, particularly the "Disc Jockeys" at urban parties were creating a different road into post-modernity in music. Their approach was to take records on turntables, and by hand control the speed of the turntable, and using the mixing board as an instrument, add reverb and other sound effects. At the same time they would speak into the microphone, using the dance tracks as a background for their own speech, which would lead, eventual to Rap music and then to Hip hop.

In the classical world arguably the beginnings of postmodern music lie in the total serialism of Pierre Boulez and others. This marked the triumph of the theorising of Arnold Schoenberg in the immediate post-war era. However, composers soon found its strictures too demanding and began to experiment with ways of broadening their musical palettes: Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage for example, soon began to introduce elements of 'chance' in their music to create aleatory music. However, it is with the creation of Minimalism that the first "post-modern" style of classical music is born. Again, minimalism developed out of total serialism (the man who basically invented it, LaMonte Young studied at first under Schoenberg, and his first compositions were serial). However, minimalism began a much more radical attack on the Western tradition of music than even serialism had envisaged: breaking music down into its component elements, and writing pieces, for example, that consisted purely of rhythm.

At almost the same time, composers such as Edgar Varese began to experiment with the new electronic instruments, using synthesizers and tape loops (what we would now call 'sampling'). This was developed throughout the 1960s. There was also a new interest in non-Western music. For example, György Ligeti began to use elements of Pygmy song in his compositions, and Olivier Messiaen experimented with Eastern musical techniques.

Despite the difficult and complex nature of these compositions, ironically enough, they laid the groundwork for re-integrating popular and 'highbrow' music, which had been seperated since the rise of Modernism. By the 1970s, avant garde rock and pop musicians (such as Suicide (band) and Throbbing Gristle) had become interested in electronic instrumentation, the use of Eastern rhythms and instruments (for example the use of the Sitar by the Beatles) and drone like, repetitive music, stylistically similar to Minimalism (such as the music of The Velvet Underground and Kraftwerk). Tape loops also prefigured the use of 'sampling' in Techno music and House music, and the 'scratching' of hip-hop. Moreover the 'ironic' 'cut and paste' approach of Stockhausen's later work (which used elements from both 'high' and 'low' art) was highly influential on many pop and rock composers in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s: see, for example, Frank Zappa or The Residents. (See Contemporary music).

It should also be noted that postmodern Jazz has also been highly influential on contemporary pop/rock music. This has developed from two main sources, the innovations of Charlie Parker in the immediate post-war period, and (again) Arnold Schoenberg: this time, however, not so much his serial work as his pre-WW1 'atonal' style, where all forms of tonality were abandoned. The merging of these two traditions led to the development of Free Jazz in the 1950s by Ornette Coleman who went onto inspire a new generation of musicians in the 1960s and 1970s: for example, John Coltrane, Albert Ayler and Sun Ra. Free jazz was hugely influential on many avant-garde rock musicians: for example Captain Beefheart, and, in a completely different way The Stooges and Lou Reed (who ended up collaborating with Don Cherry who had worked with Coleman in the early years). These artists themselves were influential on a generation of punk musicians in the 1970s and 1980s (see for example The Lounge Lizards and The Pop Group). In the 1970s Miles Davis repaid the compliment by incorporating elements of funk and rock into his sound, most notably on his Bitch's Brew album. Again, this has been hugely influential on contemporary rock and jazz.

Causes and Theories of Post-Modernity in Music

For some, post-modernity is degenerate modernity, the critic Theodor Adorno being a prominent example of the idea that trends of music after serialism represent the banalization of modernity.

For others, post-modernity is the sign of late capitalism and the decline of identity creating metanarratives, such as nation-states.

Another theory advanced is that post-modernity is the explicit reaction to the rise of a mass production consumer society, and is linked to the need to create coherence and aesthetic value from the artifacts and patterns of that society.

Postmodern musical artists

Classical/Jazz

• John Cage
• John Adams
• Philip Glass
• Steve Reich
• George Rochberg
• Alfred Schnittke
• John Zorn
• György Ligeti
• Ornette Coleman
• Pierre Boulez
• Karlheinz Stockhausen
• LaMonte Young
• Luciano Berio

Rock/Pop

• The Beatles
• Can
• Kraftwerk
• The Velvet Underground
• Pink Floyd
• Frank Zappa
• Wire (band)
• The Butthole Surfers
• Beck
• Suicide (band)
• Throbbing Gristle

Rap/DJ/Hip Hop

• King Tubby
• Kurtis Blow
• Grandmaster Flash
• Run DMC
• Pete DJ Jones
• Kool DJ Herc
• Public Enemy

See also

• 20th century classical music
• Walter Benjamin
• Theodor Adorno

Sources

• Albright, Daniel (2004). Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226012670.

Further reading

• Sullivan, Henry W. (1995) The Beatles with Lacan: Rock ‘n’ Roll as requiem for the modern age. (Sociocriticism: Literature, Society and History Series Vol. 4). New York: Lang. xiv.
• Larkin, C., ed. (1995). The Guinness Encyclopedia of Popular Music, vol 1-5. England: Guinness Publishing.

External links

Postmodernism and its Critics What is Postmodernism?