GEORGE EDWARDS
705
that's irrelevant. If the left wants to promote a Marxist culture, it cannot
simply promote whatever's out there, excluding only modernism and the
most commercialized pop music.
Similar problems arise with regard to minimalism. It is almost de–
void of any possible dialogical elements; indeed, it is even more claustro–
phobic in this respect than most 'academic' modernism. Minimalism's
surface is usually highly polished, affectless, even glitzy: hardly the stuff of
protest. It creates a sense of community, but more often provides that
community with a narcotic than a stimulant. In some ways rninimalism
seems less like other postmodern music than like a return to Stravinsky as
understood by Boulander. Its production, even when improvised, is re–
lentlessly mechanical, as is its effect: Adorno would call this fascist. I
would instead associate the eternal present of minimalism with an ersatz
yuppy-utopia, whose perfection consists only of being ruined by attempts
to complicate it.
It appears that I have fallen into the trap set for me by those who
want to consider music in social and political terms, 'not as art': I too
am simply projecting the music I don't much like onto the social and
political tendencies I deplore. However, my purpose is simply to indicate
some of the obstacles to Marxist appropriation of postmodern music, as
well as to deny that the ultimate value of any music depends on
any
in–
terpretation of its social or political message.
The crucial difference between postmodern appropriation of past or
non-Western styles, and, for example, Bach's dialogical use of a variety of
different musics is that Bach tried to create a finished artistic whole. A
much more appropriate role model for postmodernism would be Bach's
famous son,
C.
P. E. Bach - or even his remote descendant, P. D.
Q.
Bach. For C . P . E. Bach, unlucky in falling between two periods whose
methods and goals seemed at first to be utterly incompatible, often leaves
musical and stylistic conflicts completely unresolved. Just as
C.
P. E. Bach
was shortly followed by Haydn and Mozart (great masters of more fin–
ished but still dialogically rich music), composers may not long be satis–
fied with either retreating into the arid utopia of rninimalism or throw–
ing together different styles indiscriminately. I have recently been
encountering the term 'post-postmodernism. ' Perhaps this
will
be a time
when composers will once again count on the
listener
to bring chaos
into even the most complete and perfect work.
But that time has not yet come, and there are more powerful
forces than Marxist criticism working against it. One effect of the
commercial ubiquity of music (muzak,
film
music, music to exercise to) is
that we easily accept the most remarkable (modernist) breaks of musical
continuity (as of logic in political discourse) as normal. In at least this
respect, postmodern music is the outgrowth, not the antithesis, of
