3.5 Postmodernism in music

Peter Greenaway, a British director who collaborated with Dutch minimalist Louis Andriessen a number of times, introduced the term ‘Casablanca syndrome’, in the 1990s. He stated that the 1942 Michael Curtiz film Casablanca, starring Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, had three principles that were cast in stone: script (story), acting (and/ or famous actors), and camera/photography (visual beauty). But in what regard was Casablanca about film itself, like a Cubist painting is about painting rather than about what is depicted? To what extent was film really anything more than filmed theatre? According to Greenaway, the Casablanca syndrome had to be overcome by film that was only about film.

Like Godard’s 2014 film Adieu au Langage [Goodbye to Language], in which, to the great delight of critics and thanks to 3D-technology, at one point two scenes are projected at the same time and the audience has to choose which one to look at. The film is otherwise rather boring, consisting of images of an elderly couple on the toilet, and a rambling dog.

What Greenaway did not mention is that these three principles: a good scenario, acting, and visual beauty, are precisely the reasons why people go to see movies and why this medium is by far the most influential and popular post-World War II art form. Perhaps we should cherish it!

3.5 POSTMODERNISM IN MUSIC Not only the language of music underwent great changes after 1910, music consumption also revolutionised. The inventions of the gramophone and the radio brought music to every living room and introduced music as a commercial product from which fortunes could be made.

Traditional folk music all but disappeared, being replaced by songs that were constructed from a number of fixed components (see also Chapter IV, 5.6, page 172).

In the official classical concert world, the innovations of the Second Viennese School and of Young Music were completely up in the air, the more so because these innovations had realised the most drastic change in language, texture, and aesthetics of classical music ever. It is safe to say that as a result of this revolutions the music world became more conservative and the composers more radical.

It was not a context in which Postmodernism was warmly welcomed. The established composers of Young Music – who by now had taken up the position of teachers of composition at the conservatoires – preferred to hold onto their monopoly on innovation. And so postmodern influences only sparsely affected Young Music. But there were two other reasons as well.

Firstly: At the heart of postmodern music is a concern, a concern about the broken communication between listener and composer that was so natural in the old days. And also a concern about the loss of playfulness, irony and commonly understood musical gestures. This concern touched the modernistic music in the hart.

Secondly: Composers such as Ligeti, Xenakis, Scelsi, and Penderecki were in their modernistic works Logo composers, meaning they were the sole representatives of a self-created musical style. This resulted in an increase of their market identity and value which, ultimately, came at a price. To a high extent they were prisoners of their Logo. Only in his last period Ligeti managed to escape from the prison of this self-created musical style in his Etudes while Xenakis and Scelsi stubbornly repeated themselves. Penderecki eventually changed course so radically that listening to an early and late work of Penderecki is like listening to two totally different composers. Stockhausen and Boulez both maintained that their new language was objective and had general validity. However, it turned out to be extremely difficult to produce music in this style with a real recognisability of its own.198 For the next generation of composers this created a big problem: they had the choice of either following the style of the masters or to hope for a lucky break in which they would find a Logo of their own in the scraped-out landscape of the previous generation.

Finding the next Logo among many others was much more complicated compared to the ever-changing visual arts: music is an art form that needs a podium on which, within a certain time slot, a direct line of communication with its audience is created. The listener, at least to some degree, must understand in real time the line of thought of the composer. Additionally, composers generally write for other musicians, which makes communication something of a triangular affair. In this respect, postmodernism was a reaction of a cornered generation unable to develop the over-complicated musical language of their predecessors.

198For instance compare the piano cycle Quantitäten by the Swedish composer

Bo Nilsson, which was composed by ear after having listened to the Darmstadt music on the radio (Nilsson lived in the north of Sweden), with Klavierstück 1-4, composed completely with the use of the serial structurisation principles by Stockhausen. The two pieces sound strikingly similar. See the article Nilsson wrote in the magazine Ord&Bild (autumn 1961) in which he writes that he

‘bluffed his way into musical fame’ in Darmstadt.