Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening

Description

Kramer was one of the most visionary musical thinkers of the second half of the 20th century. In his The Time of Music, he approached the idea of the many different ways that time itself is articulated musically. This book has become influential among composers, theorists, and aestheticians. Now, in his almost completed text written before his untimely death in 2004, he examines the concept of postmodernism in music. Kramer created a series of markers by which we can identify postmodern works. He suggests that the postmodern project actually creates a radically different relationship between the composer and listener. Written with wit, precision, and at times playfully subverting traditional tropes to make a very serious point about this difference, Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening leads us to a strongly grounded intellectual basis for stylistic description and an intuitive sensibility of what postmodernism in music entails. Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening is an examination of how musical postmodernism is not just a style or movement, but a fundamental shift in the relationship between composer and listener. The result is a multifaceted and provocative look at a critical turning point in music history, one whose implications we are only just beginning to understand. - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/postmodern-music-postmodern-listening-9781501306044/#sthash.vxYmlumU.dpuf FC Half title Title Copyright Contents List of Illustrations Editor’s Introduction Robert Carl Preface Jann Pasler Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening Foreword Acknowledgments BOOK I: IDEAS Part 1 Chapters on Postmodern Concepts of Music 1 The Nature and Origins of Musical Postmodernism 1.1. The Postmodern Attitude 1.2. Postmodern Views on Unity, Intertextuality, and Eclecti 1.3. Characteristics of Postmodern Music 1.4. Postmodernism vs. Modernism 1.5. Postmodernism and History 1.6. The Origins of Postmodernism in Contemporary Culture 1.7. Why Today’s Composers Write Postmodern Music 2 Postmodernism (Not) Defined 2.1. Postmodernism 2.2. Quotations in Search of a Definition 2.3. Postmodernism and Modernism 2.4. Irony and Parody 2.5. Past and Present 2.6. High and Low 2.7. What Is Musical Postmodernism? 3 Modernism, Postmodernism, the Avant Garde, and Their Audien 3.1. Musical Modernism and Postmodernism 3.2. The Avant Garde 3.3. The Avant Garde in the 1960s: Modernist or Postmodern 3.4. The Music of Cage: Modernist and Postmodernist 3.5. Modernism, Education, and Lineage 3.6. Alienation from the Audience Part 2 Chapters on Concepts of Postmodern Music 4 Postmodernism and Related Isms in Today’s Music 4.1. Meta-Narratives 4.2. Styles of Postmodernism 4.3. Postmodernism, Latter-Day Modernism, and Antimodernism 4.4. Postmodernism and Vernacular Music 5 Unity, Organicism, and Challenges to Their Ubiquity 5.1. Unity and the Composer 5.2. The Ubiquity of Unity 5.3. Synchronic and Diachronic Unity 5.4. Unity and Organicism in Schoenberg 5.5. Unity and Organicism after Schoenberg 5.6. Unity and Organicism in Schenker and Others 6 Beyond Unity 6.1. Music that Defies the Unity Mystique 6.2. The Need for Analyses of Disunity 6.3. Chaos and Chaos Theory 6.4. A Taxonomy of Musical Unity 7 Postmodern Listening 7.1. The Listener and the Musical Text 7.2. The Listener as Creator 7.3. Communication and Expression 7.4. Postmodern Music Analysis and the New Musicology 7.5. Multiple Narratives 7.6. Semiosis and the Problem of Musical Communication 7.7. Postmodernism and Communication 7.8. Intertextuality Revisited 7.9. A Simple Example 7.10. A More Complex Example: Is the Meaning in the Music or in the Perceiver? 7.11. Is Musical Communication Possible? 8 Postmodern Musical Time: Real or Unreal? 8.1. Multiply-Directed Time 8.2. Gestural Time 8.3. Time Out of Phase 8.4. Time in Recent Modernist and Postmodernist Music 8.5. Deconstructing the Concept of Real Musical Time 8.6. Time Taken vs. Time Evoked 8.7. Real Time in Electroacoustic Music 8.8. Intertextuality and Real Time 8.9.
Real Time and Postmodernism 8.10. Real Time and Modernism 8.11. Speed and Unrepeatability 8.12. Real Times in a Work by Szymański 9 Surrealism, Neoclassicism, and Postmodernism 9.1. Did Music Have a Surrealist Period? 9.2. Music in the Time of Surrealism 9.3. Are Musical Surrealism and Postmodernism the Same? Part 3 Postmodern Chapters on the Concept of Music 10 Economics, Politics, Technology, and Appropriation 10.1. Postmodern Music as Commodity 10.2. Postmodern Music as Commodity (continued) 10.3. The Politics of Modernism and Postmodernism in New York 10.4. Subversive Music? 10.5. Appropriation 10.6. Technology and Postmodernism 10.7. Commercialization and Aesthetics 10.8. Marketing Musical Commodities 11 Beyond the Beyond: Postmodernism Exemplified 11.1. Some Thoughts 11.2. The Otana Bee Story 11.3. More Quotations 11.4. A Tale 11.5. Non-Musical Artworks that Exhibit Traits Found in Musical Postmodernism 11.6. Repetition and Other Matters 11.7. Good and Bad Music 11.8. Another Tale 11.9. Yet Another Tale 11.10. Thoughts from Poland and Elsewhere 11.11. Multiculturalism 11.12. Two Surprises 11.13. Postmodernism and Feminism 11.14. Why Tell Stories in a Book on Music? 11.15. Almost the End 11.16. The End BOOK II: CASE HISTORIES 12 Postmodernism in the Finale of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony 12.1. Overview 12.2. Ambiguities in the Opening 12.3. The Rondo Theme 12.4. Second Rondo Statement 12.5. Out-of-Phase Articulations 12.6. The Major-Third Cycles 12.7. Themes and Theme Groups 12.8. Lack of Development 12.9. Breaking Out 12.10. The Augmented Triad 12.11. Does the Movement Work? 12.12. Mahler as Postmodernist? 13 Unity and Disunity in Nielsen’s Sinfonia Semplice 13.1. Sinfonia Semplice and Postmodernism 13.2 Ambiguity at the Outset 13.3. The Three Fugues in the First Movement 13.4. First Movement Climax 13.5. Simplicity and Complexity, Unity and Disunity 13.6. Second Movement 13.7. Third Movement 13.8. Fourth Movement APPENDIX: ESSAYS ON POSTMODERNISM AND JONATHAN KRAMER Editor’s Note 1. Postmodern Music, Postmodern Performing Deborah Bradley-Kramer 2. Are We Postmodern Yet? Brad Garton 3. Music in the Anthropocene John Luther Adams 4. On (re-)Hearing Kramer: Five Reactions to Postmodern Music, Postmodern Listening John Halle 5. Uncommon Kindness: Reflections on Jonathan Kramer 
Duncan Neilson 6. Kramer Post Kramer Martin Bresnick Biographies Bibliography Index