Postmodernism In Music

It becomes more and more difficult to specify exactly what is that ‘postmodernism’ is supposed to refer to as the term gets stretched in all directions across different debates, different disciplinary and discursive boundaries, as different factions seek to make it in their ownway, using it to designate a plethora of incommensurable objects, tendencies and emergencies.

- Kaushik Chattapadhyay

An anti-teleological (possessing no overall design or universal plan) tendency within epistemology (the science of knowledge), the attack on the metaphysics of presence (a self-certifying or absolute structure or foundation which lies beyond the operation of language), a general attenuation of feeling, an identity, consciousness or ego which is deferred, displaced, fragmented or marginalised within a structure can be described as postmodernism and then it’s clear we are in the presence of a buzzword. Debates have raged with intensity in the field of music for several years now. As a result, individual subject areas have thrown up varying bodies.

Key characteristics of postmodern ‘experimental’ music...

It combats the self as expressive agent in music, so that chance processes, nondeterminism or indeterminism become main compositional principles.