More PoMo than thou: the status of cultural meanings in music

New Formations - ISSN 0950-2378
Volume 2008 Number 66

More PoMo than thou: the status of cultural meanings in music
Susan McClary pages -

Abstract

The New Musicology of the 1970s, in reaction against a conservatorium culture that demanded a single-minded focus on structural analysis detached from its social and cultural ‘contexts’, insisted on finding contestable meanings in musical form; and it coincided with the emergence of composers such as Steve Reich, Laurie Anderson and Meredith Monk, whose music embraced pop-cultural material and spoke to the life-worlds of its audiences. This generation had a sense of the plurality of ‘little narratives’ that seemed capable of blooming once high modernism’s metanarrative had been demoted to the status of just one among other little narratives, or merely one particularly stringent special interest. Suddenly it was possible, even desirable, to compose from a specific subject-position - of a woman, an Australian, a gay man or an African American. But this opening of the art-music terrain to identity politics also raised divisive questions, which McClary explores in the latter half of her article through her commentary on the work of Osvaldo Golijov. If musicological post-postmodernism should come to reject New Musicology’s view of music as meaning-laden sound, McClary is ready to retreat back into ‘that Old Time Postmodernism’.

SORRY - you are not registered as being permitted online access to the full text of this article

You have the following options:

  1. If you are viewing this via an institution or academic library you can ask that your institution takes out a Subscription to this journal.
  2. If you already have a Personal Subscription please login below


    Forgotten your username / password? Click here to locate

  3. Purchase an annual Personal Subscription
    PRINT + DIGITAL personal subscription (£45 / year)
    DIGITAL personal subscription (£30 / year)
    A Personal Subscription provides immediate access not only to the single article you are seeking, but also to all past and future articles in this journal up to the expiry of your annual (calendar year) subscription.
  4. Purchase immediate access to this single article (UK£7.00) - Buy article Coming Soon

To cite this article
Susan McClary (2008) More PoMo than thou: the status of cultural meanings in music, New Formations, 2008(66), -

Share this