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Postmodern music is both a musical style and a musical condition. As a musical style, postmodern music contain characteristics of postmodern art—that is, art after modernism (see Modernism in Music). 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. Daniel Albright (2004) summarizes the traits of the postmodern style as bricolage, polystylism, and randomness.
As a musical condition, postmodern music is simply the state of music in postmodernity. In this sense, postmodern music does not have any one particular style or characteristic, and is not necessarily postmodern in style. However, the music of postmodernity is thought to differ from that of modernity in that whereas modern music was valued for its fundamentals and expression, postmodern music is valued as both a commodity and a symbolic indicator of identity. For example, one significant role of music in postmodern society is to act as a language by which people can signify their identity as a member of a particular subculture.
The postmodern musical style
Modernist influences and early postmodernism
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.
Antecedents 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 unnecessary - 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.
In the classical world, elements of late modernism began to lay a framework for later postmodern styles. For example, in the immediate post-war era, the modernist project of atonality, begun by Arnold Schoenberg, had been taken to its logical conclusion, total serialism, by such late modernist composers as Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and others. In reaction to this ultra-modernist trend in which music was created in essence by mathematical principles, Boulez, Stockhousen, John Cage, and others began introducing elements of 'chance' in their music to create aleatory music. Aleatory music began to blur the boundaries between the composer and the audience, and between the musician and the environment, which was a postmodern trend.
At almost the same time, modernist 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.
The emergence of postmodern 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 eventually evolving into the DJing and MCing of hip hop music. Further evolution in the 1990s turntablism movement focused on the DJing aspect of hip hop, with music made almost entirely of samples. DJ Shadow is the most well known turntablist DJ, but Q-Bert and Mixmaster Mike of the Invisibl Skratch Piklz, DJ Spooky and Cut Chemist were also highly influential.
In classical music, Minimalism is usually regarded as the first "post-modern" style. Minimalism was in part a reaction to the perceived inaccessibility and sterility of modernist classical music of such composers in the tradition of Arnold Schoenberg, Pierre Boulez, the early John Cage, and others among the avant-garde. The earliest minimalist composers included LaMonte Young, who had studied under Schoenberg and incorporated elements of serialism in his early minimalist works, and Terry Riley, who was largely influenced in his composition by the repetitiveness of Indian music and rock music.
Minimalism and related postmodern musical styles 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 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-WWI '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 eventually worked with Coleman in 2003 on the Raven album). 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.
The postmodern musical condition: the condition of music in postmodernity
As a musical condition, postmodern music is music situated after the modern age, during the present period, where music has become valued primarily a commodity and a culture, rather than a form of idealized modernist expression for its own sake. Some authors have suggested that the transition in music from modern to postmodern occurred in the late 1960s, influenced in part by psychedelic music and the late Beatles albums. (Sullivan, 1995, p.217.) In the 1970s, the postmodern condition continued with the advent of disco, punk rock, heavy metal, hip-hop, and a newly-commodified country music.
The difference between modern music and postmodern music then is that modernist music was characterized by a focus on musical fundamentals and expression. In postmodern music, however, the commodity being sold by record companies and pop stars is not the fundamentals of the music, but the cultural image surrounding the music, which reverberates through film, television, and other media.
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
Rock/Pop
Hip Hop/Rap/DJ
See also
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.
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