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PARTISAN REVIEW
Modernism used its claim to historical inevitability so successfully that,
despite Sibelius, Richard Strauss, Ravel, Gershwin, Weill, Copland, Puc–
cini, Britten, and many other fine conservative composers, most listeners
associate the first seventy years of our century with modernism. Similarly,
postmodernism projects itself as the final destination of history and the
beginning of the eternal present. If we don't like to examine this ploy
very closely, it is because its failure would suggest the possibility of a
third
modernist period (the second began in the 1950s). In that case the tenn
'postmodernism' would have been as absurd as calling the 1815 restora–
tion of the monarchy in France 'postrevolutionary' (with 1830, 1848,
and 1871 still to come).
The attempt of writers on the left to appropriate postmodernism is
fraught with contradictions between postmodernism as protest and post–
modernism as utopia. Both versions appear hostile to modernism. Yet I
see no reason why postmodernism as protest cannot dialogically
incorporate the voice of modernism, interpreted as the anguished cry of
the exploited and dispossessed. 'Academic' modernism (those who think,
as Webern did, that major sevenths can be beautiful and consonant) is the
inevitable enemy of postmodernism as protest: it raises the unthinkable
specter of a new form of beauty which would (at least at first) exclude
most listeners and, even worse, permit the return of autonomous art. But
the music of Babbitt, for example, surely represents a kind of utopia
(pace,
Adorno). There is also an abundant body of modernist music
which could be understood as dialogically confronting protest and
utopia. It is excluded from leftist versions of postmodern not because it
couldn't logically find a function there, but because there is no political
advantage to including it.
But if the left excludes modernism from its versions of postmod–
ernism for reasons of expediency, its opportunism does not stop there. Its
attempt to assimilate elements of postmodernism with which it can and
should have nothing in common is, at the least, deplorable. For the
attitude of most 'neotonal' or neoromantic music towards the past is (in
the words of Rachel Hadas), "nostalgic, parasitic, and cynical": it's as
crass as allowing the Bill of Rights to be commercially sponsored by
Philip Morris. Those composers who are willing to provide the music
market with what it wants have found the 1980s a time of unlimited
opportunity. This is especially true of the high-flying insider traders
sponsored by Exxon as musical advisors to American orchestras. No
matter what kind of music they wrote before, they almost inevitably end
up writing the kinds of music star conductors think their audiences can
tolerate; and inevitably they have the most to gain from recommending
the works of other Exxon composers for performance by 'their'
orchestras. Some of this music is very good; but in the present discussion,
