Quote:
Originally Posted by starrynight
Why would it be surprising? And all music has an audience with limited time. 'God working through man'???? You are saying that earlier composers like JS Bach weren't religious? To say modernism or post-modernism or whatever mainly just abandons structure is a big exaggeration. I won't comment on whatever courses you do as I don't think that gives you any more authority than many other people here.
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1 - Your assertion regarding Bach is backwards. God working through an artist is not what Bach claimed of his work, he was a man praising god through his OWN work. This is an entirely different kettle of fish and matches up more markedly with the thinking of the time, compared to romantic thinking which implied the artist was a vessel for the work of god, or modernism, which sought to reject the use of past forms or ideas in favour of 'making it new', which subsequently led to the rejection of traditional diatonic tonality in favour of atonalisty and serialism, (Serialism being concieved as a method by which to remove traditional harmony's influence over note choice by treating all 12 notes of the western musical form as equal, without leading notes or tonic notes, no resolutions of any kind). Many composers also removed the traditional forms of structure as an extension of this, such as Cage, whose works make a point of HAVING structure, to the point of 4'33 making the point of music only requiring the opening and closing of the piano 3 times, in mock of the fact that you can REMOVE any element of music, up to and including notes and/or silence, but it still needs to be structured to exist, but 4'33 makes no claims as to requiring specific structures, and indeterminate works such as Terry Reily's "In C" depend on having a loose structure which cannot be nailed down to a specific result!
Then we can mention freeform jazz or improvisational styles which depend on no explicit structure at all to define them, indeed, usually their defining feature is a lack of specific structure to create a more natural movement between sections or parts. They are not easily reproduced before being recorded as a performance, but their structure can only be determined, in most cases, in retrospect, its barely considered during the compositional process itself, if at all!
2 - I never mentioned postmodernism, I mentioned modernism and romanticism. Post-modernism is a very, very, VERY different movement, predominant in popular culture to this day, even in the referential sense, such as Lady Gaga, whose image is pretty much Dadaist/surrealist, both of which are postmodern, rather than modernist, styles.