I don't know about "any longer"; I've always doubted whether there has ever really been a meaningful (i.e. for the generation generating it and for all future generations) aspect to such a "collective title", especially since the very mapping "onto the Stravinsky/Schoenberg dichotomy", as you appositely put it, seems itself to throw up some kind of contradiction in terms, so I am inclined to agree with the idea that it is not meaningful to subsume the examples you mention under any collective title. I am also less convinced than you appear to be that some of what you cite really represents as profound a "break with much of mainstream 19th-century aesthetics" as you imply; why did Stravinsky still seek to maintain the idea of his umbilical connection with the Russia of his past and Schönberg laud Brahms as not only a great master but a "progressive" composer? - were these things done just for effect, do you suppose?

True...

OK - so the principal upshot of your answers here is, for me, the fact that you see all these works as having in common a factor of "atonality"; now even allowing for the fact that I happen to feel naturally inclined to prioritise this aspect above the others that you mention (which, by the way I am certainly not ignoring) - and allowing also for the fact that my musical background inclines me toward the belief (within reason) that one man's atonality is another man's tonal flexibility - I wonder if the term "atonal" (for all its definitional shortcomings and experiential variations) might be more informative than "post-modern" when addressing music in the unfortunate spirit of the need to categorise...

That's an interesting question and one which I am pleased that you have asked. Whilst not entirely against such definitional labls in principle, I am very conscious of their shortcomings and the dangers of their over-use. I therefore do not "have a problem" with the other terms that you mention per se, but I do have a problem with the exaggerated importance that some musicologists have pinned upon them, sometimes more for the convenience of their own work than for any wider educative reasons. You write of the examples of "modernism" that I cited (albeit in a questioning manner) as having the common factors of being "atonal" and having in "some sense...roots in the work of the Second Viennese School"; now, given that this very "school" (one which I used, in my worse moments, to call the "Viennese Secondary School") had its own very well-defined roots in certain aspects of past musical traditions - first Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, then Schumann, Mendelssohn and Brahms as well as Wagner, Bruckner and Mahler - the very idea that its prime movers' principal motive was to cut ties with the past seems seriously untenable, notwithstanding their various and variously committed ventures into so-called "atonality". So, the terms you mention are not "meaningless"; they're just not as helpfully informative and significant as so many tend to make out, in my view.

Best,

Alistair

That's just the point - a "break", if you will, but merely one of many that occurred throughout musical (and other) history without necessarily bringing about a notion of something that could credibly be termed "modernism" in order to distinguish it from other such earlier "shifts".

Individually, perhaps, but not collectively! My only problem with any of them is when they erect notional edifices which they claim, erroneously, to be vital contributions to international understanding of music; by this I refer by implication to the various false and misleading premises that some of them are wont to construct and promote (let's not go into examples here and get ourselves bogged down with them - we know who at least some of the principal culprits have been!)...

Beethoven's "shifts" were, at the time, clearly one of the more notable and far-reaching of all Western composers; his work demonstrates a number of "shifts" which occurred as a direct consequence of the inexorable progressive development of his unique vision. Whilst taking your pint about the post-WWI era, I remain unconvinced that the drastic changes that this ghastly event brought about are, in terms purely of musical developments, any more significant than those Beethovenian "shifts" of which you write and the like of which had, to greater or lesser degree, been going on before Beethoven and which continued after him (not least, in the latter case, as an indirect or even direct consequence of his example).

OK - now my head's about to hit the keyboard, so it's high time for it to go hit something slightly less uncomfortable and misprint-inducing!

Best,

Alistair

Thank you, Marbleflugel, for returning this discussion to the topic of postmodernism in music   

You're getting the next round, I reckon (thought you didn't like beer, though)?

Here is a bit of text I posted on r.m.c.r. a while ago on the origins of the term:

'The British architect and architectural writer Charles Jencks cites the term (post-modernism) as first originating in the 1870s, used by the British artist John Watkins Chapman (with reference to post-impressionism), then in 1917 by the German Nietzschean and proto-Nazi philosopher Rudolf Pannwitz (who used it to refer to a type of reborn heroism, athleticism, nationalism, mysticism, militarism, religiosity in opposition to what he saw as the decadent modern world). Other early uses of the term include those by Federico de Onís, Hispanist at Columbia University, who used it in 1934 to refer to a move away from the difficulty and perceived esoteric qualities of modernist poetry, the British historian Arnold J. Toynbee, who used it in 1939 to refer to the collapse of the Western bourgeois order of the last few centuries, the art historian Bernard Smith in 1945, to refer to socialist realism in painting, the American poet Charles Olson during the 1950s, whose definition I'm not sure of in detail, but it had something to do with replacing fragmentation with fullness (very different to the later meaning the term came to have), the writers and critics Irving Howe and Harry Levin in 1959-60 to refer to the decline of high modernism. However, the term came into more frequent use in the early 1970s in architecture, deriving from the thought of American architect Robert Venturi, and in particular Jencks's own book The Language of Postmodern Architecture of 1977. In a more theoretical and abstract sense, the term gained wide currency after Jean-Francois Lyotard's The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge first published in French in 1979. '

I think my answer to the exam question is: not very, no. Whatever post-modernism is, or maybe was, in relation to the other arts, it seems to have made hardly any dent at all in music. There's Berio's Sinfonia (the example) and there's some of Schnittke and that's more or less it, isn't it? Interesting and important pieces but hardly a movement let alone a musical epoch. I don't know enough about very recent music to be able to say but most of the attempts to round up other late twentieth century composers as 'post-modernists' (Cage? Adams?) looks to me anyway as musicologists (sorry, those whipping boys again) trying to say 'my subject too!' to their literary and critical theory colleagues romping around in lush academic pastures - and not very convincingly.

I don't really know why this should be. I suppose possible reasons might be to do with the fact that 'post-modernism' (although it didn't start out that way) has become concerned principally with 'meaning' and its slipperiness, and 'meaning' was already quite slippery enough in connection with music, so no change there to get excited about. Or perhaps to do with the fact that, by the time everyone else became post-modernists in rebellion against modernism in their respective art forms (1960s or thereabouts?), there wasn't anything much in the way of a modernist status quo in music to push off against. Composers had gone their own separate ways anyway ('Modernism? Been there, done that. Diverged from it already, thanks.').  

Or have I been tempted into Reiner's man trap (Msg 1)?  (Perhaps I should rephrase that....)