Editing Postmodernism (section)

=== Music ===
[[File:Madonna Adi 9 (cropped).jpg|thumb|American singer-songwriter [[Madonna]]]]
{{Main|Postmodern music|Postmodern classical music|Art pop}}

Postmodern influence extends across all areas of music; its accessibility to a general audience requires an understanding of references, irony, and pastiche that varies widely between artists and their works.<ref name=":8">{{Cite web |last=Pasler |first=Jann |date=Jan 20, 2001 |title=Postmodernism |url=https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/display/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000040721 |access-date=2024-12-15 |website=[[Grove Music Online]] |language=en |doi=10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.40721}}</ref>  In [[popular music]], [[Madonna]], [[David Bowie]], and [[Talking Heads]] have been singled out by critics and scholars as postmodern icons. The belief that [[art music]] – serious, classical music – holds higher cultural and technical value than [[Folk music|folk]] and popular traditions, lost influence under postmodern analysis, as musical hybrids and crossovers attracted scholarly attention.<ref name=":8" /><ref name=":9">{{Cite journal |last=Alper |first=Garth |date=Dec 2000 |title=Making sense out of postmodern music? |url=https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03007760008591782 |journal=Popular Music and Society |language=en |volume=24 |issue=4 |pages=1–14 |doi=10.1080/03007760008591782 |issn=0300-7766}}</ref>

Across musical traditions, postmodernism can be identified through several core characteristics: genre mixing; irony, humor, and self-parody; "surface" exploration with less concern for formal structure than in modernist approaches; and a return to tonality.<ref name=":9" /> This represents a loss of authority of the Eurocentric perspective on music and the rise of [[world music]] as influenced by postmodern values. Composers took different routes: some returned to traditional modes over experimentation, others challenged the authority of dominant musical structures, others intermingled disparate sources.<ref name=":8" />

The composer [[Jonathan Kramer]] has written that avant-garde musical compositions (which some would consider modernist rather than postmodernist) "defy more than seduce the listener, and they extend by potentially unsettling means the very idea of what music is."<ref>{{Cite book |last=Kramer |first=Jonathan |title=Postmodern music, postmodern listening |publisher=[[Bloomsbury Academic]] |year=2016 |isbn=978-1-5013-0602-0 |location=New York |pages=45}}</ref> In the 1960s, composers such as [[Henryk Górecki]] and [[Philip Glass]] reacted to the perceived elitism and dissonant sound of atonal academic modernism by producing music with simple textures and relatively consonant harmonies,{{citation needed|date=June 2024}} whilst others, most notably [[John Cage]] challenged the modernist account of structure by including the contingent in the structure of his compositions themselves.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Williams |first=Alastair |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-companion-to-john-cage/52F3631719F4EBFBA9133AC011F4618A |title=The Cambridge Companion to John Cage |date=2002 |publisher=[[Cambridge University Press]] |isbn=978-0-521-78968-4 |editor-last=Nicholls |editor-first=David |series=Cambridge Companions to Music |location=Cambridge |pages=231–232 |chapter=Cage and postmodernism |doi=10.1017/ccol9780521783484}}</ref>

In 2023, music critic Andy Cush described Talking Heads as "New York art-punks" whose "blend of nervy postmodernism and undeniable groove made them one of the defining rock bands of the late 1970s and '80s."<ref>{{Cite web |last=Cush |first=Andy |date=Sep 21, 2023 |title=Talking Heads' Original Lineup on Stop Making Sense, Their Early Days, and the Future |url=https://pitchfork.com/features/interview/talking-heads-reunion-2023-stop-making-sense/ |access-date=Sep 25, 2024 |website=[[Pitchfork (magazine)|Pitchfork]]}}</ref> [[Media studies|Media theorist]] [[Dick Hebdige]], examining the "[[Road to Nowhere]]" music video in 1989, said the group "draw eclectically on a wide range of visual and aural sources to create a distinctive pastiche or hybrid 'house style' which they have used since their formation in the mid-1970s deliberately to stretch received (industrial) definitions of what rock/pop/video/Art/ performance/audience are", calling them "a properly postmodernist band."<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Mitchell |first=Tony |date=Oct 1989 |title=Performance and the Postmodern in Pop Music |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/3208181 |journal=Theatre Journal |volume=41 |issue=3 |pages=284 |doi=10.2307/3208181|jstor=3208181 }}</ref> According to lead vocalist/guitarist/songwriter [[David Byrne]], commenting in 2011, "Anything could be mixed and matched – or [[Mashup (culture)|mashed up]], as is said today – and anything was fair game for inspiration.”<ref>{{Cite web |last=Jensen |first=Emily |date=July 27, 2022 |title=How Virgil Abloh Defined Postmodern Fashion |url=https://jingdaily.com/posts/virgil-abloh-off-white-louis-vuitton-postmodern-fashion |access-date=Sep 25, 2024 |website=Jing Daily}}</ref>

Avant-garde academics labelled American singer Madonna a "personification of the postmodern" and created a sub-discipline of [[cultural studies]] known as [[Madonna studies]].<ref name="Brown2003">{{cite web |last=Brown |first=Stephen |year=2003 |title=On Madonna's Brand Ambition: Presentation Transcript |url=https://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/11267/volumes/e06/E-06 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20170419105437/https://www.acrwebsite.org/volumes/11267/volumes/e06/E-06 |archive-date=19 April 2017 |access-date=1 April 2021 |publisher=Association For Consumer Research |pages=119–201 |volume=6}}</ref> Her self-aware constructs of gender and identity, and classic film references in music videos for "[[Material Girl#Music video|Material Girl]]" (1984) and "[[Express Yourself (Madonna song)#Music video|Express Yourself]]" (1989), made her a favorite of cultural theorists, who saw her as "enacting postmodernist models of subjectivity."<ref>{{Cite web |last=McClary |first=Susan |date=Nov 26, 2013 |title=Madonna |url=https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/display/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000046456 |access-date=2024-12-15 |website=Grove Music Online |language=en |doi=10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.46456|isbn=978-1-56159-263-0 }}</ref> Madonna was seen to embody fragmentation, pastiche, retrospection, anti-foundationalism, and de-differentiation; her "subversion of the subversion of the subversion of the [[male gaze]]" in the "Material Girl" video was analyzed.<ref name="Brown2003" />