Full 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.
Contents
Editor's Introduction by Robert Carl
Preface by Jann Pasler
Acknowledgements
Foreword
BOOK 1. IDEAS
PART I. CHAPTERS ON POSTMODERN CONCEPTS OF MUSIC
Chapter 1: The Nature and Origins of Musical Postmodernism
Chapter 2: Postmodernism (Not) Defined
Chapter 3: Modernism, Postmodernism, the Avant Garde, and Their Audiences
PART II. CHAPTERS ON CONCEPTS OF POSTMODERN MUSIC
Chapter 4: Postmodernism and Related Isms in Today's Music
Chapter 5: Unity, Organicism, and Challenges to Their Ubiquity
Chapter 6: Beyond Unity
Chapter 7: Postmodern Listening
Chapter 8: Postmodern Musical Time
Chapter 9: Surrealism, Neoclassicism, and Postmodernism
PART III. POSTMODERN CHAPTERS ON THE CONCEPT OF MUSIC
Chapter 10: Economics, Politics, Technology, and Appropriation
Chapter 11: Beyond the Beyond: Postmodernism Exemplified
BOOK II. CASE HISTORIES
Chapter 12: Postmodernism in the Finale of Mahler's Seventh Symphony
Chapter 13: Unity and Disunity in Nielsen's Sixth Symphony
BOOK III. ESSAYS ON POSTMODERNISM AND JONATHAN KRAMER
Editor's note
1. Postmodern Musings, Postmodern Performing by Deborah Bradley-Kramer
2. Are We Postmodern Yet? By Brad Garton
3. Music in the Anthropocene by John Luther Adams
4. On (re-) Hearing Kramer: Five Reactions to Postmodernism Music, Postmodern Listening by John Halle
5. Uncommon Kindness: Reflections on Jonathan Kramer by Duncan Neilson
6. Kramer Post Kramer by Martin Bresnick
Biographies
Bibliography
Index
