706
PARTISAN REVIEW
modernism. Even I no longer hesitate to turn off the radio in the middle
of a piece: this is one way to make even the most "autonomous" work
dialogic and contingent. As long as the musical snippets we separate (or
are presented to us separately) are tonal or vernacular, we are happy: this
is postmodernism. If the snippets were atonal, dissonant, etc., we would
regard
them
as modernist. But by disconnecting snippets,
regardless
of what
they themselves are like, we are doing what is appropriate to our image
of modernism, in which no event appears to imply any particular (or
even any) continuation. Musical postmodernism, therefore, is modernism
turned into a virus capable of attacking the music of the past. For some,
this is utopia.
Coming in
Partisan Review
• Czeslaw Milosz:
On Nationalism
and
Reality
• Tatyana Toistoya:
Fiction
• Doris Lessing:
On Feminism
• Alfred Kazin:
On
Howards End
• Anatole Broyard:
A Memoir
• Pearl K. Bell:
Fiction Chronicle
• Elizabeth Dalton:
On Henry James
• George Stade:
On Lionel Trilling
