Classic music and postmodern knowledge

Abstract

In Classic Music and Postmodern Knowledge Lawrence Kramer responds to the diverse trends of thought which may be named collectively as ‘postmodernism’ by absorbing them into his critical stance towards European music of the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries. His concern is not with postmodernism as an historical period, or an artistic movement, but as a philosophical reaction to ‘modernism … the conceptual order inaugurated by the European Enlightenment’ (p. 6). His title is, then, well-chosen. There is no postmodern music under discussion here, but a revision of modes of reasoning about the traditional canon, with one minor extension, the most radical figure cited being Charles Ives. The book is divided into eight chapters. Theoretical exposition is given in the first two, followed by: Chapter 3, ‘Music and Representation’; Chapter 4, ‘Musical Narratology: A Theoretical Outline’; Chapter 5, ‘Felix Culpa: Mendelssohn, Goethe, and the Social Force of Musical Expression’; Chapter 6, ‘The Lied as Cultural Practice’; Chapter 7, ‘Cultural Politics and Musical Form: the Case of Charles Ives’, and Chapter 8, ‘Consuming the Exotic: Ravel's Daphnis and Chloe’.¹