An Introduction to America’s Music

CHAPTER 20 | POSTMODERNISM 497

command of both classical virtuosity and the style and panache of a jazz violinist

such as Joe Venuti. The concerto moves fl uidly from Stravinskyan modernism to

ragtime and Gershwinesque lyricism. In the same year, Bolcom’s massive setting

of William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience for solo singers, chorus, and

orchestra, a mixture of modernist music with elements of rock, soul, country,

and reggae, won the Pulitzer Prize for music.

Three years later, the 1987 Pulitzer Prize went to another academic composer,

John Harbison, for his sober, uncompromisingly modernist sacred motet The

Flight into Egypt. Even while composing that work, however, Harbison, a profes-

sor at MIT, was embracing a more expansive tonal language in his Symphony no. 2

(1987). By the time of his 1999 opera The Great Gatsby, Harbison could conceive a

musical setting for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel that moves freely from 1920s dance

styles to spiky modernist idioms in a language that is expressive and intensely

personal.

This shift in composers’ attitudes required letting go of any notion that music

history outlines a story of progress. The increased interest in early music (from

the Middle Ages to Bach), a trend encouraged by university music departments,

had demonstrated that great music has been created in all historical epochs. The

expansion of the usable past opened the door to the appropriation of older musi-

cal styles in new compositions, such as the telling quotation of Bach in George

Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children. Another long-held attitude that lost credence

was the notion that popular styles are, by defi nition, aesthetically inferior to

“serious” music. This shift owed much to the phonograph, which preserved

the work of such performers as Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday. Together,

these attitudes broadened the range of styles on which composers could draw

for inspiration or material.

Although traces of these new artistic attitudes were present throughout the

modernist period, their emergence as a predominant trait in new music com-

position led in the 1980s to the application of a new term to describe the phe-

nomenon. Rather than a repudiation of modernism, postmodernism may be

thought of as both a continuation and a questioning of modernist values. Per-

haps the chief characteristic of musical postmodernism is its questioning of

dividing lines: between past and present, classical and popular, and creators

and consumers. Composers working from a postmodern stance may use quota-

tions and other allusions to various musical styles, often to ironic or “distanced”

effect. Rather than trying to resolve the incongruities among the various idioms

brought together in the same composition, a postmodern composer is likely to

play on their differences, embracing multiple meanings that may be contingent

on the time, place, and social context of the act of performance.

POSTMODERNISM OUTSIDE THE ACADEMY

Harbison, after studying at Harvard in the 1950s, had gone on to graduate work at

Princeton and taught at MIT for many years before taking a step toward postmod-

ernism. Born a decade later, the composer John Adams had a different experience

as an undergraduate at Harvard in the 1960s. The young Adams was disturbed by

the gulf that separated the serialist music he was studying in the classroom from

the records of the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix he was listening to in his dorm room.

As a teacher at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music in the 1970s, he worked

John Harbison

postmodern attitudes

musical postmodernism

John Adams

172028_20_495-513_r3_sd.indd 497 23/01/13 11:14 AM