After the war, many styles, and a word that came late to music

After the Second World War, this reading says, twentieth-century music was hard to name as one style or school. Electronic music, chance music, composition by timbre, minimal music, neo-romanticism and neo-tonality arose and coexisted. Early in the century, music had sought a break with earlier periods and something new; by the later century that wish for something even newer sat beside a wish to go back to the old. The contrast is conceptualized as postmodernism, and is said to have formed a creative background for many composers working in the second half of the century.

Postmodernism is treated as a late-century frame in philosophy, culture and the arts more broadly. Discussion began, this reading says, in literature and architecture, with a philosophical base, and only later — comparatively late, from the 1980s — in music. In architecture the idea is read as a challenge to functionalist, efficiency-minded modernist building; in literature, the stress falls on intertextuality, joining already existing texts in a new context rather than on originality; in philosophy, as a revolt against the Western tradition of reason-centrism and universalist metaphysics. Shared ground is named as the crossing of borders, pluralism or plurality, and a revolt against totality or wholeness, though definitions remain diverse and sometimes sharply opposed.

A 1910 break, and Fiedler in 1967

A musical reform is dated from 1910. From that point, this reading says, the functions and content of harmony, melody and rhythm — long treated as basic elements — began to change completely, and musical form, genre, the tonal system and the work itself began to come apart at the same time. Even when new kinds of music had already appeared, a standing confidence in the continuity of music history was shaken.

Among theories of postmodernism, Leslie Fiedler’s 1967 essay, given in this reading as “Cross the Border — Close the Gap,” is said to have stated that rupture clearly. The year stays in 1967, and the 1910 dating stays in this reading’ own periodization, not as a later official turning point.

Konold, Danuser, Dibelius, and a 2000 Korean essay

In musicology, this reading says, postmodern discussion began in the 1980s. Wulf Konold is credited with first applying the concept to the field, in a piece titled “Composition in Postmodernism” (1980), linking it to musical change that had appeared in the early 1970s. In the 1970s, they add, the situation of new music changed gradually and, at root, fundamentally.

Hermann Danuser attempted a periodization of twentieth-century music history and pointed to another chronological boundary in 1976. From the mid-1970s, a “break between avant-garde and modernism” is called a central paradigm among composers of the time, a period in which sharply opposed tendencies coexisted, and Danuser is said to have wanted to tie that closely to postmodernism. What this reading names Ulich Dibelius, in “Postmodernism in Music” (1989), judged that, given the characteristic developments after the mid-1970s, applying postmodernism to music was appropriate. Oh Hee-sook, in 2000, is listed under Musical Postmodernism, in Music and the Nation, no. 20. Those publications stay in their years. The same Korean report, at fuller length, is on CampusDown.

Sources

1. Notes for a Western-music-history assignment on the concept and features of musical postmodernism, after a postwar coexistence of styles and a comparatively late arrival of the term in music from the 1980s.
2. A musical reform dated from 1910; Leslie Fiedler, “Cross the Border — Close the Gap” (1967).
3. Wulf Konold, “Composition in Postmodernism” (1980); Hermann Danuser’s 1976 boundary and a mid-1970s break; Ulich Dibelius as this reading spells the name, “Postmodernism in Music” (1989); Oh Hee-sook (2000), Music and the Nation, no. 20.

Last updated: 14 November 2026