Postmodernity's Musical Pasts (PDF)

Covering classical to popular to neo-traditional musics, the topics covered in Postmodernity's Musical Pasts mirror the eclectic and diverse nature of the postwar era.

Postmodernity's Musical Pasts covers topics from classical to popular and neo-traditional musics to concerns of the disciplines of musicology. These provide insights how the progression of time and history can be conceptually understood after 1945.

It covers an extensive and varied spectrum of topics, from both the centre and the periphery of the musicological canon, that mirror the eclectic and diverse nature of the postwar era itself. The first section, 'Time and the (Post)Modern', investigates how to understand manifestations of the past in musical composition with regard to time, on the one hand, and with regard to genre, style, and idiom, on the other. The second section, 'Manifestations of History', shows how time and history manifest themselves in art music. A third section, 'Receptions of the Past', takes the contrasts and transitional moments of post-1945 practices further by looking at the temporality of reception from different angles. A final part investigates questions of nostalgia and the temporalities of belonging. The volume subverts the understanding of temporality as linear progression of past, present, and future. It offers new avenues of conceptual thinking relevant for those engaged in the study of music history and culture and for the humanities at large.

TINA FRÜHAUF is Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University, New York and serves on the faculty of The Graduate Center, CUNY.

CONTRIBUTORS: Michael Arnold, Susana Asensio Llamas, Georg Burgstaller, Caitlin Carlos, Daniela Fugellie, Tina Frühauf, John Koslovsky, Lawrence Kramer, Beate Kutschke, Laurenz Lütteken, Max Noubel, Joshua S. Walden