Postmodernity's Musical Pasts

Postmodernity's Musical Pasts considers music after 1945 as a representation of concepts such as "historicity" and "temporality". The volume understands postmodernity as a period in which both modernism and postmodernism co-exist. It is attracted to a wider interpretation of "historicity" that focuses on the complex nexus of past-present-future. "Historicity" is understood as leaning closely on "temporality", generally thought of as the linear progression of past, present and future. The volume broadens the absolutist understanding of temporality to include processes which can occur in circular, spiral, transcending and other formations.
The book covers an extensive spectrum of topics from classical to popular and neo-traditional musics to concerns of the disciplines of musicology. Such a wide range of topics from both the centre and the periphery of the musicological canon mirrors the eclectic and diverse nature of the postwar era itself. The first section 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. A second section shows how time and history manifest themselves in art music. A third section 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 temporalities of belonging.

TINA FRHAUF 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 Frhauf, John Koslovsky, Lawrence Kramer, Beate Kutschke, Laurenz Ltteken, Max Noubel, Joshua S. Walden