ABSTRACT

What is postmodern music and how does it differ from earlier styles, including modernist music? What roles have electronic technologies and sound production played in defining postmodern music? Has postmodern music blurred the lines between high and popular music? Addressing these and other questions, this ground-breaking collection gathers together for the first time essays on postmodernism and music written primarily by musicologists, covering a wide range of musical styles including concert music, jazz, film music, and popular music. Topics include: the importance of technology and marketing in postmodern music; the appropriation and reworking of Western music by non-Western bands; postmodern characteristics in the music of Górecki, Rochberg, Zorn, and Bolcom, as well as Björk and Wu Tang Clan; issues of music and race in such films as The Bridges of Madison County, Batman, Bullworth, and He Got Game; and comparisons of postmodern architecture to postmodern music. Also includes 20 musical examples.

part II|57 pages

Scaling the High/Low Divide

chapter 8|17 pages

Postmodern Polyamory or Postcolonial Challenge?

Cornershop's Dialogue from West, to East, to West …

chapter 9|12 pages

Production vs. Reception in Postmodernism:

The Górecki Case

part III|67 pages

Compositional Voices

chapter 12|14 pages

Resistant Strains of Postmodernism:

The Music of Helmut Lachenmann and Brian Ferneyhough

chapter 13|23 pages

Imploding the System:

Kagel and the Deconstruction of Modernism

chapter 14|13 pages

Collage vs. Compositional Control:

The Interdependency of Modernist and Postmodernist Approaches in the Work of Mauricio Kagel

part IV|59 pages

Linking the Visual and Aural Domains

chapter 15|19 pages

Race and Reappropriation:

Spike Lee Meets Aaron Copland

chapter 16|12 pages

The Politics of Feminism, Postmodernism, and Rock:

Revisited, with Reference to Parmar's Righteous Babes

chapter 17|25 pages

Natural Born Killers:

Music and Image in Postmodern Film