ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the problem of an avant-garde music in the cultural and social conditions which characterize postmodernity. The changed conditions under which music has been produced and consumed since the 1960s and 1970s can be seen as both socio-technological in character and aesthetic-ideological. It is this change in conditions that the author would identify as the shift from modernity and aesthetic modernism to postmodernity and aesthetic postmodernism. The chapter discusses characteristic features of postmodernity and aesthetic postmodernism in relation to aesthetic modernism, drawing on Lyotard, Jencks and Jameson. Through a critique of Habermas and Adorno, it suggests that there are two sharply contrasting directions identifiable for a radical avant-garde music under these changed conditions. The chapter also discusses the intensification and extension of music's autonomy-character, taking the example of Brian Ferneyhough and it also considers the intensification and critical recontextualization of music's commodity-character, taking the example of Frank Zappa.
