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Postmodern Art Theory Seminar 2
There was one music student in the most recent iteration of this seminar. He was a pianist, and very bright. Yet, his experiences in the music department gave him, in contrast to the art students, virtually no background for the course. The art students were intensely focused on the implications of the course for their own work. For many of them, it was not so much the fact that they were doing postmodern and/or “contemporary” art, but that they were profoundly interested in how they and their work fit into the world of the twenty-first century. Almost all of those students were studio artists, not historians. They were not concerned with theoretical aspects of aesthetics, except in the immediate arena of their own work. They were bravely entering a class that would require them to take a hard look at theory and, in a larger sense, philosophy.
This was also the case with the music student, but, although he was very successful in the course, his work was severely hampered by his almost total ignorance of what postmodernity was and what it could mean for him and for music. Significantly, he was stymied by the fact that in the beginning of the course he could not name (beyond one piece—Berio’s Sinfonia) any postmodern pieces of music.
As we see later, naming postmodern pieces of music that are squarely in the Western classical tradition can be a challenge. There are many “contemporary” works that recall tonal practices but are not “postmodern”; they are, rather, neo-Romantic or neoclassical. And there are works that use tonal practices but are postmodern because tonality is appropriated as a phenomenon, not as a paradigm.
Contemporary Music Course
Until very recently, many of our students, when introduced to the idea that a computer can be a musical instrument, recoiled in horror. They rejected the possibility out of hand.