ABSTRACT
Postmodernism began to have an impact upon music and musicology in the 1980s when it became evident that a paradigmatic shift in thought was needed in order to find answers to the theoretical impasse that had been reached in several areas. This chapter explores what the terms 'modernism' and 'postmodernism' mean, and to consider why musical consensus was lost and how it might be regained. Postmodernism ousted notions of universalism, internationalism and 'art for art's sake', and replaced them with concerns for the values of specific cultures and their differences. 'Art for art's sake', a nineteenth-century doctrine born of distaste for industrialization, had proved to be an insuperable obstacle to the production of music that satisfied widespread social needs. In the postmodern world, relativism has replaced universalism. The story of the evolution and dissolution of tonality is one of those grand narratives that postmodernists dismiss as ideology.
