L'ALLEGORIE DU PALIMPSESTE: LA MUSIQUE POSTMODERNE EN QUESTION

• Published in: New sound 2018-01, Vol.52 (2), p.57-69
• Main Author: Castanet, Pierre Albert
• Format: Article
• Language: fre
• Subjects: 20th century; Classical music; Composers; Compositional styles; Humanities and Social Sciences; Musicology; Musicology and performing arts; Postmodernism; World music
• ISSN: 0354-818X; 1821-3782

Proceeding from the fact that the reception of art music has always entained divisions and debates between advocates of classical and classicist ideals on the one hand, and of new, modern tendencies on the other, the author uses numerous examples to examine and elaborate the question of whether "looking back" is in fact characteristic of not only post-modernism but all music production, including that of the entire 20th century. Starting from the turnabout in the late creative periods of R. Strauss, who, after "Elektra" took refuge in "Der Rosenkavalier," an 18th-century pastiche, Hindemith, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg, the paper travels through the space and time of last century's music. Citing Gilles Lipovetsky's verdict that the second are of modernism is revolutionary merely on the technoscientific level, while artistically manifesting itself as autoreflexive, individualistic-emotional and identitarian, it lingers particularly on examples of compositions whose authors resorted to "ethnic corpora" in an attempt to transcend Western spatial-temporal concepts and offer real or oneiric journeys; for example, a group of works from the seventies and eighties in which authors (G. Aperghis, J.Y. Bosseur, S. Reich, L. Harrison and H. Prosseur, among others) variously approached the sound of the gamelan, or works based on allogeneous principles such as Reich's "Drumming," Crumb's "Music for a Summer Evening," or Xenakis' "Pleiades," which were joined by a new generation of French composers at the beginning of the new century. This leads to the conclusion that cultures of the "endless return" from the "Nietzschean" to the melange of World Music, refer equally to texts and contexts of social art history and identitarian signs and signals of culture and memory. Isn't then every composer a magician who comments, paraphrases, transposes, creates, quotes, forgets? Isn't each new text a palimpsest?