9.2 Postmodern Approaches to Composition

Postmodern composers challenge traditional music norms, embracing eclecticism and unconventional techniques. They mix styles, quote existing works, and use chance operations to create unique sounds. This approach reflects broader postmodern ideas about subjectivity and fragmentation.

These techniques connect to the chapter's focus on contemporary music trends. Postmodernism's emphasis on blending genres and questioning artistic boundaries aligns with the eclectic nature of music in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Postmodern Techniques

Postmodern Philosophical and Artistic Movements

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• Postmodernism encompasses a broad range of philosophical and artistic movements that emerged in the late 20th century
  • Challenges traditional notions of objectivity, universality, and progress
  • Emphasizes subjectivity, diversity, and fragmentation
  • Questions the boundaries between high art and popular culture
• Eclecticism involves drawing inspiration from a wide variety of sources, styles, and genres
  • Combines elements from different cultural traditions, historical periods, and artistic disciplines
  • Creates works that are diverse, hybrid, and often unconventional
• Intertextuality refers to the complex web of relationships between texts, both literary and musical
  • Recognizes that all texts are influenced by and in dialogue with other texts
  • Encourages the reader or listener to make connections and interpret meaning based on these relationships

Postmodern Musical Techniques and Strategies

• Pastiche involves imitating or borrowing from various styles or genres to create a new work
  • Often combines elements in a playful, ironic, or nostalgic manner
  • Can be used to comment on or critique the original sources (Berio's Sinfonia)
• Quotation involves directly incorporating fragments of existing music into a new composition
  • Can range from brief allusions to extended passages
  • Challenges traditional notions of originality and authorship (Schnittke's Concerto Grosso No. 1)
• Deconstruction involves breaking down and reinterpreting musical structures, conventions, and meanings
  • Questions the stability and coherence of musical works
  • Reveals hidden assumptions and contradictions within the music (Derrida's concept of deconstruction)

Experimental Approaches

John Cage and His Influence

• John Cage was an American composer, music theorist, and artist known for his avant-garde and experimental approach
  • Challenged traditional notions of music, composition, and performance
  • Explored the use of chance operations, indeterminacy, and silence in his works
  • Influenced a wide range of artists and composers across various disciplines
• Aleatory music involves the use of chance or randomness in the composition or performance of a work
  • Can involve the use of dice, coin flips, or other chance operations to determine musical elements
  • Allows for a degree of unpredictability and spontaneity in the music (Cage's Music of Changes)
• Indeterminacy refers to the openness and flexibility of a musical work
  • Leaves certain aspects of the composition or performance to the discretion of the performer
  • Can involve graphic notation, verbal instructions, or other unconventional forms of scoring (Cage's 4'33")

Interdisciplinary Practices

Multimedia and Performance Art

• Multimedia involves the integration of multiple artistic media within a single work
  • Combines music with visual arts, theater, dance, literature, or technology
  • Creates immersive and multi-sensory experiences for the audience (Laurie Anderson's United States)
• Performance art blurs the boundaries between music, theater, dance, and visual arts
  • Emphasizes the process and experience of the performance over the final product
  • Often involves improvisation, audience participation, and site-specific elements
  • Challenges traditional notions of the performer-audience relationship (Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's Einstein on the Beach)