Re: [Finale] TAN: "postmodern" (reply and ramble)

[Tim Thompson]

I'd say that Boulez and Stockhausen (and to some extent, Messiaen) represent the other end of the spectrum. My understanding (while not having been a participant in either), is that both the Darmstadt school and IRCAM, and other such institutions, were very slow to be inclusive of those who espoused post-modern ideas and practices. To me, the the continuum of efforts by composers to find methodologies to make music more complex and controlled, including computer-based techniques, is an extension of the same modernist movement that brought about serialism, and which has become institutionalized in our academic settings. Not that I mind!

I think Cage is seen by many as the father of post-modern thought in music composition. As you said, it depends on how you define it. I have described here more of modernism/anti-modernism. That conveniently leaves off any other connotations of post-modernism, but has the misleading connotation that post-modern music is not modern! I also don't want to imply that post-modern music need be non-complex, or banal in any way. As someone else said, post-modernism is an analyst's label, but bucking the trend of "modernism" in music has been the job of many composers for the last three decades or so.

Tim

On Friday, January 3, 2003, at 11:53 AM, Andrew Stiller wrote:

I got into a debate with someone over Postmodernism, and realized that I had no clear idea of what the term was supposed to mean when applied to music. In the other arts, the term indicates the incorporation of stylistic gestures from the past into an otherwise modernist idiom, but a lot of people seem to apply it more broadly to music. So here's a list of composers; which if any of them would you folks say are "postmodern" in style? What's the criterion?

George Crumb
John Cage
Karlheinz Stockhausen
Pierre Boulez
Olivier Messiaen
_______________________________________________
Finale mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale

_______________________________________________
Finale mailing list
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://mail.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale