CHAPTER 9 After Everything

Postmodernism: Rochberg, Crumb, Lerdahl, Schnittke

Chapter:

CHAPTER 9 After Everything

Source:

MUSIC IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Author(s):

Richard Taruskin

Richard Taruskin

The Modern Age, which sounds as if it would last forever, is fast becoming a thing of the past.¹

—Charles Jencks, What is Post-Modernism? (1986)

…we realize that only the present is really real… because it is all we have … but in the end it, too, is shadow and dream … and disappears … into what?²

—George Rochberg, epigraph to act 3 of Music for the Magic Theater (1965)

Where does all this lead us? Quite appropriately, nowhere.³

—Leonard B. Meyer, “Future Tense: Music, Ideology, and Culture” (1994)

What it does do, I think, is threaten the mind-set of modernists who believe that the artist is a high priest who breaks laws and creates new ones that advance civilization.⁴

—Fred Lerdahl, “Composing and Listening: A Reply to Nattiez” (1994)

Because it was often relatively consonant in harmony and employed ordinary diatonic scales, minimalist music was frequently attacked as “conservative” by academic modernists, for whom the term was the deadliest of slurs. But the charge was unconvincing. The contexts in which familiar sounds appeared in minimalist music, and the uses to which they were put, were too obviously novel, and the effect the music produced was too obviously of the present. Besides, “progressive” music, against which minimalism was being implicitly measured in such a comparison, was following a technical and expressive agenda that had been set at least a quarter of a century, even half a century, before. It no longer seemed quite immune to the epithet it habitually hurled.

Citation (MLA):

Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 9 After Everything." The Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford University Press. New York, USA. n.d. Web. 11 May. 2021. <https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume5/actrade-9780195384857-chapter-009.xml>.

Citation (APA):

Taruskin, R. (n.d.). Chapter 9 After Everything. In Oxford University Press, Music in the Late Twentieth Century. New York, USA. Retrieved 11 May. 2021, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume5/actrade-9780195384857-chapter-009.xml

Citation (Chicago):

Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 9 After Everything." In Music in the Late Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press. (New York, USA, n.d.). Retrieved 11 May. 2021, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume5/actrade-9780195384857-chapter-009.xml