(resonating music)
- Hello!
Oh, ****.
Hello, Josef here.
I'm a musician, I'm a composer.
And I love talking about music
right here on this channel
for your eyeballs to consume.
So today, I wanted to broach
the immensely complicated
and not at all contentious
topic of postmodernism.
I know postmodernism is a
bit of a hot-button topic
right now, for some reason,
the right wing has decided
that it means the fall
of Western civilization
and the end of Judeo-Christian values.
And why do I have to
see gay people around?
But all that is just nonsense.
And I endeavor in this
video to illuminate you
on what postmodernism actually is
and what it means in regards to music.
Let me make this really clear.
I am not a philosopher.
No doubt there will be
nuance that I have missed
or omitted for the sake of brevity.
As with most questions,
there is no clear-cut answer.
And because this is art,
none of this is empirically a fact.
Please do your own research.
Also, all of these ideas
apply to more than just art.
This is philosophy about culture,
but I'll be using art mainly as examples,
because that's the theme of the channel.
And you can't tell me what to do.
Please like the video
Please subscribe if
you'd like to see more,
and most importantly,
please do click the bell.
Let's go.
(electronic music)
So before I talk about
what postmodernism is
with regards to music,
we first of all need to
tackle what I actually mean
when I say postmodernism.
And also, what does it mean
for something to be an ism
like postmodernism, modernism,
impressionism, et cetera.
We, as humans like to divide things up.
We like to spit up big things
that are hard to understand
into smaller, more
easily digestible chunks.
Even if the divide between
those chunks is a lot blurrier
than we like to imagine.
So, culture and art is big.
Philosophy is big.
History is big.
Trying to swallow all of
history or art or thought
or any other part of human endeavor
as one big mass is very
difficult to consume.
So we split them up.
Imagine you're walking
through an art museum.
You're having a lovely time.
You've just bought some piece
of trash from the gift shop.
And you want to look at some paintings.
So, you start walking in the
direction of the gallery,
and you notice something,
there are signs up
directing you to different
sections of the gallery.
One says Cubist.
The other says Impressionist.
Another says Post-war.
You wonder to yourself,
"Why have they done this?
Why has the curator decided to split up
all these different
paintings into subsections?"
The answer might seem obvious,
but it's because some are
more similar than others.
As an example,
let's look at impressionism specifically
as I've covered this
before on the channel.
Take these two paintings.
The first is a Monet.
The second is Renoir.
Someone who is unfamiliar
might not naturally group
these two works together.
They look very different.
They both have very different subjects,
very different painting
styles, different composition.
There's not a whole lot,
at least on the surface, to suggest
that they might both have
a common perspective,
but nonetheless, they absolutely do.
And there are various criteria we can use
to group them together.
First of all is timeframe,
both Renoir and Monet lived
around the same period
in 1800s France.
This was late romanticism,
and having them both
live around the same time
in the same place means that their ideas
very likely intermingled
and influenced each other.
Second of all is technique.
A common method between impressionists
was to bring their
canvases out of the studio
and to the subject that
they'll be painting.
This gave painting a time limit.
Sunsets don't last forever,
groups must disband.
And this meant that things
like extreme detail had to be sacrificed
in order to get the painting done in time.
Finally, and most importantly
is philosophical placement.
This is much more of
a subjective criteria,
and I'm not an art expert, so
please do your own research.
But these paintings, as a
result of their common methods
and their place in history,
treat emotion in a similar way.
The paintings both aim to capture
a sense of mood and ambiance
as opposed to distinct emotions
like anger, fear, or love.
Monet's sunset isn't fiery or bright.
It's actually very dim
and distant, moody almost,
as if we, as the observer, are watching
from a great distance.
Renoir's partygoers aren't fighting,
no one's crying or jumping with joy.
They're just people living quiet emotion,
and nobody is looking
directly to us, the observer,
because we are just that, an observer.
This sense of distance and ambiance
is what ultimately groups
these paintings together.
They both make the observer
experience a similar-ish feeling
of being removed from the
scene or watching from outside.
They also represent a departure
from the early romantic
approach to emotion,
which was more dramatic and fiery.
And these common values
are why art historians
placed them together
under the same category
of impressionism despite
looking very different.
This all might seem so
trivial and obvious.
Of course, we group things
together based on common traits,
it's totally natural
and you would be right.
But nonetheless, it is a
crucial point to understanding
what postmodernism is.
(bouncy music)
So we've got all these
collections of similar-ish art.
We've got cubism, impressionism, futurism,
and other pretentious crap.
We now need a structure in which to place
all these different contrasting groups.
There are similarities and
connections between them
that people can feel, but
need to be articulated.
And we do this because drawing connections
between different areas of culture
can very often provide new insight.
We need a framework, a context
which brings us to modernism.
Modernism is a general movement,
a framework for understanding
art that appeared specifically
between the late 1800s
and up to World War II.
It's values are mostly
a rejection of the ideas
of the enlightenment,
ideas of clear-cut
rationality and tradition,
and also the desire to
create new forms of art
that had never been seen before.
Things like the
stream-of-consciousness novel,
montage cinema, and atonal music
were all created around this
time as a hunger for the new
and a rejection of the old
would take over the world.
Lots of art made during the
turn of the 20th century
connected to these values and ideas.
And modernism lets us provide context
and place these smaller artistic movements
within a wider set of intentions.
Going back to the painting example,
impressionism can be placed
into this framework of modernism.
Impressionism and its rejection
of the bombastic emotion of romantic art
is just a manifestation of how modernism,
a wider cultural movement
was rejecting all the
ideals of the romantic.
Impressionism is arguably
a part of modernism,
a branch of the greater tree.
Imagine a doctor with lots of patients.
The doctor uses her
framework of modern medicine
to understand and diagnose her patients,
and then to find the right
course of treatment for them.
Modernism and postmodernism,
which we will get to in a
second, are like medicine
in that we use them as a framework
through which to understand
what's actually going on deeper within.
So, finally onto postmodernism.
(bouncy music)
Okay, I'll tell you.
Postmodernism was a movement
in philosophy and the arts
that started mostly after World War II
and it was characterized as
a departure from modernism.
That's it, nothing more.
Despite what Jordan
Peterson wants you to think,
postmodernism is not evil.
It's not a threat to
Judeo-Christian values.
In fact, it doesn't necessarily
stand for anything at all.
It's just a framework through
which to understand culture.
Postmodernism describes a
set of similar-ish values,
which a lot of different
artistic movements might exhibit.
These include a rejection of ideologies
or grand sweeping
statements about the world,
irony, skepticism, and a suspicion
towards clear-cut rationality.
The pre-war 20th century
was quite hopeful in nature,
ideas of utopia and an
excitement for the new
were thrown around.
But the horrors of World
War I and World War II
would taint this hope.
People had seen the
darkness within humanity,
and ideas, which seemed
so clear to people before
were no longer so obvious and
everything was up for debate.
Postmodernism doesn't reject modernity.
Instead it recontextualizes it
and builds on ideas of modernism,
ideas like the rejection of absolute truth
and rallying against tradition
carried on from modernism.
They still resonated with
people just in a new light.
To sum it all up,
modernism and postmodernism
are essentially sets of values
or ideas, which characterize
a historical period.
Art in the early 20th century
often had similar themes.
And that's why we grouped stuff
made during that time under modernism.
Remember the gallery example,
the exact same could, I emphasize could,
be said for modernism
just for different values
under a different timeframe.
(gentle music)
These postmodern values of irony
and building on from modernism
fed very much into music at the time.
Postmodernists were looking
at all the new things
that composers had created decades before,
and were thinking, "How
can we build on this?
What can we do?"
This created a great deal of
diverse approaches to music
from which postmodern themes can be drawn.
Music from 1600 to 1900,
what we call the common practice period
was built on a very
complex and established set
of musical rules and traditions.
Modernism had already laid the groundwork
for the rejection of these traditions.
It was postmodernism that
built on this groundwork.
The twelve-tone system of
music created by Schoenberg
in the early 20th century
was a modernist invention,
which sought to create
an entirely new system
on which to base music,
a system which completely
rejected standard musical concepts
like keys, chords, and harmony.
Postmodernists like Boulez would build
on the twelve-tone system,
developing what is now known as serialism.
Serialism is so complicated and honestly
kind of beyond my understanding,
at least for me to comfortably
talk about it in a video,
but it was essentially
an extension of the ideas
of the twelve-tone technique,
extending the ideas of Schoenberg
across many more regions of music
than the original composer
could have imagined.
This is what postmodernists often did.
They built and refined modernist concepts,
especially in music.
(chiming music)
Postmodern music also very often
challenged the distinctions
between high and low art.
For a lot of human history,
society was built into the haves,
royalty who would be played
refined chamber music and symphonies,
and the have-nots, essentially
the plebs on the ground,
listening to Ed Sheeran.
But the 20th century and
the rise of the middle class
had challenged this assumption.
And it was beginning to show in music.
Popular music was no longer
seen as a vapid and empty
and actually had the capacity
for deep musical meaning.
Old ideas of high and low were obsolete.
And the playing field
was essentially leveled.
David Bowie saw this very clearly.
His music was massively popular
and considered by some purists as base
but very often carried
hidden commentary on culture.
Some people interpret Bowie's
lyrics in "Life on Mars"
as a direct comment on the American dream
or perhaps the British dream.
I don't know what that would look like.
Referencing the empty promises
of capitalism and Western ideals.
♪ Take a look at the ♪
George Crumb in the '70s
created one of the most famous pieces
of postmodern classical
music, "Black Angels."
Written for electric string
quartet and percussion,
Crumb stated in the score
that the piece was written
in a time of war,
potentially referencing
the bloody Vietnam War
going on at the time.
The piece is commonly interpreted
as a criticism or mockery
of the shambolic battle
that America was waging
and losing in Vietnam.
The first movement, "Night
of the Electric Insects"
involves screeching violins
with lurching dynamics.
(screeching music)
These electric insects
could be interpreted
as the sound of American
helicopters on Vietnamese soil,
violent and repulsive in sound,
but nonetheless, as impotent as insects.
The piece also commands abstract imagery
of devils and fallen black angels,
perhaps as a direct commentary
on the state of America itself,
gone with a naive ideas of the USA
as a benevolent superpower,
modernism had already set the groundwork
for the critique of
American exceptionalism,
and postmodernists observed the atrocities
America and other Western powers
were committing across the world
and their art built on
these modernist ideas.
The moral mythology of America
was a delusion and a farce,
and the ideals that once held
the West up as exceptional
were now shown to have never existed.
America had fallen from grace
and Crumb, in his music,
saw his own home country as a black angel.
(children shouting)
Fundamentally, composers
during the postmodern period
were responding, challenging,
and building on modernist ideas.
Art made during this time
was diverse and rich,
and oftentimes had very
different goals and meanings.
Music carried on in the direction
of subversion and deconstruction
of old traditions,
and composers and musicians
became more individual
in their vision,
making commentary on wider
and wider areas of culture.
Honestly, I've spent all this time
chatting about postmodernism
and what it represents,
but some people argue
that it doesn't mean
much of anything at all.
So many of the supposed
themes of the period
end up conflicting and
contradicting with one another.
It's important to remember that labels
like modernism and
postmodernism are labels
that describe human concepts,
concepts, which are really messy
and don't necessarily
always fit well together.
However, they can be useful
if used properly and with caution
and not just stuck on anything you like.
Most academics agree
that we are currently
out of postmodernism.
People don't yet know
what to call this period,
or even if we should be giving it a name,
but some labels like
post-postmodernism or metamodernism
get thrown around occasionally.
What this means for
music is up for debate.
We could carry on with the
trends of the 20th century,
continuing to deconstruct.
Or we could go in a completely
different direction.
Right now we don't know.
We're standing too close to the painting.
Only as we step back into the 21st century
will we truly begin to
see the bigger picture.
Thank you so much for watching this video.
Please leave a comment,
subscribe, please like, and share.
Love you, bye.
(gentle music)
