My introduction to Postmodernism, 1 of 4

For Julie Perret,
after Mark Dresser's wonderful double bass concert at UCSD
(Just to clarify, the picture below is the Halloween Spooktacular at Cleveland. I don't have picture of Mark's concert...)

What is postmodernism? Can you give a short introduction to the idea and its relationship with music?

Okay. Let me try this in a series of 4 to 5 blog entries. The first one (this one) will be an intro, some blabbing... real stuff starts from the second.
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My mom calls something "postmodern" when she faces something abstract and cannot come to terms about it. Let's face it: "postmodern" is not a term that will proliferate in society. Few people, save for literary enthusiasts and serious academic humanitarians, will ever need to use the term postmodern to denote something in their lives. In contrast, the word "modern" is much more common and easy to comprehend: the iPad is modern; your fashionable clothes are modern; the corrupted cadres in China build a 6-story office with the most cliche architectural design and that is also modern. (Ask me why if you don't understand this.) But I don't mean that the word postmodern is useless. We (I) use the term because the word modern is not sufficent in denoting current conditions. The earliest history of the term is in the 1940s and 50s (see Calinescu p.265-9) but I won't state it here because that is in a large part irrelevant to our discussion. The terms' revival in lit theory in 1970-80s, mostly to describe the tumults in the 1960s, contributes largely to our understanding and usage of the term. Jonathan Kramer gives a great introduction to musical postmodernism in his article (2002), which includes a list of postmodern musical features. In contrary, I attempt to introduce postmodernism by how the term can be meaningfully used in at least three inter-connected contexts. See "Tentative plans for the next couple of posts" below.

A piece of bad news for young scholars, perhaps, is that postmodernism is already an old idea in academia (however new, or "mom-ly postmodern" it sounds like). The early readings include Lyotard (1979) and Foucault (1975/77), but a perhaps lesser known philosophical gem would be Gianni Vattimo's The Transparent Society (1989/92). I also enjoyed Baudrillard, Hal Foster, and Agamben, all of which I only read a little. Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism was first published in Chinese in China in 1986 (26 years ago), followed by the English version. (Good food for thoughts: why did he do that?) In music, my advisor Jann Pasler published one of the first musicological articles on postmodernism in 1993. There's a boom in the musical scholarly literature on this issue before and around 2000. Now, if one puts the keyword "postmodern/ postmodernism" on a title or abstract, I would have less curiosity than expectation on the paper. (Consider that none of the papers in the upcoming AMS/SEM/SMT conference has the word "postmodern" in its title.) I do not think that the idea of postmodernism is exhaustable, but given the huge amount of literature, it is hard to conclude the somewhat hermetic and convoluted term and then build upon it/ criticize it in a short paper. But that is a good piece of challenge... and until today it is still a useful term to look into various social and cultural phenomenons and problems, as I will show in the upcoming blogs.

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Tentative plans for the next couple of posts:

How is the term "postmodernism" used?
1. Postmodernism denotes a key change in the attitude toward time and history; some composers no longer
Challenge A. Historical Performance Movement
Challenge B. Performers and Audience vis-a-vis Postmodernism

2. Postmodernism starts with the cultural movement in the 1960s, and decisively shapes the world nowadays with the closely related ideas of post-colonialism, racial equality, etc.

3. Postmodernism is an academic (and to some extent a cultural) trend in which "meta-narratives" are exposed; absolute truths are exposed and challenged in an unprecedented manner, which leads to, as I see, two kinds of truth-discourses.

Have we entered the age of postmodernity?/ What goes after it? (Or are these the right questions?)

Modernist composers are self-consciously modern. They use the term/ idea modern themselves. Do the "postmodernist composers" work in a similar way? (Or are there flaws in this question in itself?)

Conclusion
Key idea:  Although the word postmodern is meaningless to the general public (including many musicians), I believe that the intellectual, the policy makers, and people who tie themselves closely with public interests need to

P. S. The proliferation of terms in academic studies
Key ideas: New perspectives, New... meanings... new... survival kit?