Jonathan Kramer - PoMo music theory

 

A very interesting aspect of postmodern music theory. This will help you with your next essay.

Media Theorist Jonathan Kramer says "the idea that postmodernism is less a surface style or historical period than an attitude. Kramer goes on to say 16 "characteristics of postmodern music, by which I mean music that is understood in a postmodern manner, or that calls forth postmodern listening strategies, or that provides postmodern listening experiences, or that exhibits postmodern compositional practices."
According to Kramer (Kramer 2002, 16–17), postmodern music":

1. is not simply a repudiation of modernism or its continuation, but has aspects of both a break and an extension
2. is, on some level and in some way, ironic
3. does not respect boundaries between sonorities and procedures of the past and of the present
4. challenges barriers between 'high' and 'low' styles
5. shows disdain for the often unquestioned value of structural unity
6. questions the mutual exclusivity of elitist and populist values
7. avoids totalizing forms (e.g., does not want entire pieces to be tonal or serial or cast in a prescribed formal mold)
8. considers music not as autonomous but as relevant to cultural, social, and political contexts
9. includes quotations of or references to music of many traditions and cultures
10. considers technology not only as a way to preserve and transmit music but also as deeply implicated in the production and essence of music
11. embraces contradictions
12. distrusts binary oppositions
13. includes fragmentations and discontinuities
14. encompasses pluralism and eclecticism
15. presents multiple meanings and multiple temporalities
16. locates meaning and even structure in listeners, more than in scores, performances, or composers

Jonathan Donald Kramer (December 7, 1942, Hartford, Connecticut – June 3, 2004, New York City), was a U.S. composer and music theorist.

Active as a music theorist, Kramer published primarily on theories of musical time and postmodernism. At the time of his death he had just completed a book on postmodern music and a cello composition for the American Holocaust Museum.

Exam question - Postmodernism

Discuss why some peopleare not convinced by the idea of postmodern media.

There are many different elements which make up what postmodernism is, there isn’t just one definition to sum it up.   It is a movement of media, music, arts and other things in life that we do or see which rejects modernism.  It is the breaking down of boundaries such as genres to allow for the coming together of different things to create new meanings.  This is done in different ways and in media texts it can be done to humiliate the original pieces it has been taken from which would make it a pastiche e.g. in Family Guy’s Blue Harvest we see the coming together of a comedy Television show ‘Family Guy’ being mixed with the first ever Star Wars film ‘A New Hope’ creating a recognisable piece of media for both star wars and family guy fans who would see it and know that star wars wasn’t meant to be funny but it has now been made to look funny through telling the story with the family guy cast and characters.  This however will have people disagreeing with this kind of media with the mixing together of something which they might love, with some comedy show from the states and may cast it aside as rubbish and no good.  These people may not be convinced of the postmodernism being presented through the text as they might feel that things should be kept to their own and not tampered with as star wars was a great success and has been for many years a great classic, but it has now been brought back in the form of comedy and ruined by the family guy producers, and so they would try to ignore this kind of media. 
There is an online game called desert bus which is very postmodern in which you lay it in real time to get a bus from one destination to another in 8 hours for only one point making the game a pointless one and not worth playing.  This is what it was meant for though because games of today are played by many teenagers and adults also, where you can do many different things in different games and get for example 500 points for a kill made, or a race won etc and use these points to buy things with the money made for the game which is not real making it unrealistic, however what desert bus has done is make the game very realistic by having it in real time, ignoring the graphics which are not that great, and giving only one point.  Someone who is not convinced by this kind of postmodern media would think that the game is rubbish and pointless, which it is meant to be anyway, and say to themselves and others ‘why make the game in the first place if it is made to be pointless’ as they could maybe not understand what is trying to be put across to them and so ignore the convention of postmodernism as they either don’t want to know, or just don’t understand.
Postmodernism refers to the grand narratives in life which are religion, science and politics.  All three of these are the paths many people follow individually e.g. someone may believe only in religion and not in science or politics etc, however postmodernism takes little bits of all three of these grand narratives and uses them instead of just one of them.  From these grand narratives many people will not be convinced of postmodern media as it mixes up all three of the narratives where these people will believe in only one and so they will not want to be involved by media that is postmodern as it will be against their beliefs.
In the past e.g. the 1900’s, many people were not able to make things which were identical using just their hands and other tools with the resources available to them and so having skills and talent were very highly praised.  However when mechanisation came into existence people were able to produce identical things e.g. the same chair over and over again using machines in factories etc and therefore talent and skill was no longer something very few people had as now everyone could own the same thing.  This is where postmodernism rejects the idea as it sees the value in mixing different things together from different periods in time e.g. Dan Black’s ‘Symphonies’ where there are intertextual references from films from many different time periods and has put them all together in the video with himself in the frame of each of them.  He has done this with music as well where he has taken different bits of the song from other songs and has done this to show to the audiences that anyone can use references from different things in media and make their own remix as he has done.  It also shows that postmodernists are influenced by things from the past to create new things however they seek to take their influences from the wrong place and therefore many people won’t be convinced by their media remixes/creations.  They will again not like how things from the past have been brought to the future and mixed with other past texts as well as future texts as they may believe it destroys the meaning of the originality in the first place.

Exam Question 1

‘Digital technology turns media consumers into media producers’.  In your own experience, how has your creativity developed using digital technology to complete your coursework productions?

In my experience of producing my media products, my creativity skills have developed using the digital technologies available to me.

When creating my music video I had very little experience using a video camera besides filming things on holidays or with friends, I had never used one in a project for filming particular shots or angles and so I knew it would be challenging.  When it came to filming I was able to look at the angles wanted from the storyboard we had created and was able to apply this to the cameras positioning and have the shot and angle I wanted.  I was able to do this for all of the filming needed and when I had begun I felt as if I was getting better and better at being able to hold the camera correctly to get the right angles and shots we needed.  During the filming of the video there were some shots that I had down on the storyboard which I felt did not feel right on the camera after watching them back and so I would improvise by changing the angle slightly or the zoom on the shot so that it looked better and more significant. 

When it came to the editing of the music video the software we used was called Sony Vegas and it enabled us to do pretty much anything we wanted to the video.  We both had minimal experience of using video editing software, and so using one we had both neither used before made it even more challenging to complete the video.  However we managed to figure out the basics from messing around with it and this set us on our way with editing the video.  I was able to split the clips up and fit them together with the music by working out all of the timings etc. and as we had many shots which could fit in different places I chose the ones which looked best in each place and kept them there which I felt was being creative as I was mixing them all around to look as best as they could.  At the end of putting all of the clips together we tweaked around with the contrast and colour to give it a lonely and slightly dark feel to emphasise the feeling of being alone and trapped in the city, and doing this to the video we felt made it look a whole lot better and less of a home movie feel.

Modernism

'The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there'.

This quote means that the future is going to constantly have things being done differently, in other words a song from the past can be remixed and listened to differently to give it a completely different meaning e.g. Where is my mind by Pixies which has been used in the movie Fight Club and on a Thompson holiday advert and has been put across to the audeinces very differently in the two.

'If you look to the future and keep one eye on the past you are blind in one eye.  If you keep both eyes on the future and no eyes on the past you are blind in both eyes and god have mercy on you'.

This quote means that the things used today and in the future are influenced, referenced or copied from the past as we have many songs which sample existing songs and also movies which have many of their elements influenced by existing movies.

Jean-Francois Lyotard

Lyotard rejected what he called the 'Grand Narratives' or universal 'Meta Narratives'.

Principally, the grand narratives refer to the great theorie of history, science, religion and politics.  For example, Lyotard rejects the ideas that everything is knowable by science or that as history moves forward in time, humanity makes progress.  He would reject universal political solutions such as communism or capitalism.  He also rejects the idea of absolute freedom.

Desert Bus

In a lesson we were told to play the game 'Desert Bus' and realise the purpose of the game.

The game is basically a bus in which you a driving it and the only buttons you can press are the arrow keys for acceleration, braking, steering left and steering right, honing the horn and opening the bus door.  It is supposed to simulate a real bus journey in real time in which you are driving from Tuscan to Las Vegas and the time it takes is 8 hours.  On completion of the journey you recieve one point and this is because existing games today gove you a numbber of points for completing a simple task and so the game creators wanted it to give you one point to make it seen that this is all you need and that you dont need 500 or 1000 points for just doing one thing.  The fact that the game is made to be played for 8 hours is because games today that people play are played for short amounts of time for a single objective and not in real time and so the creators wanted to emphasise the reality of the game for having it for this long.  As it is a simulation making it in real time makes it very 'realistic' even thoght the graphics are poor and the background is the same, a desert landscape, for the whole journey.

Dan Black

In Dan Black's 'Symphonies' there are many intertextual references.
The first of these is the opening of the video which is similar to the 'Universal' movie clip in which the world is rotating, Dan has made his own copy of this in which he has a planet rotating which looks like the moon (i think it probably is) with UN pictures covering it.  This gives the video a sense of it being the opening of a movie.  When the beat kicks in we then see a clip of a road which then has Dan Black's name rolling down and the songs name, this has been copied from the opening scene of Lost Highway where we see the shot moving down a road with the credits coming up above the lines in the road.  There is a reference from the original TRON film in which the artist is hovering above a simulated area lit up with green lines with green arrows flyring around as if he were in some virtual gaming system, just like in the TRON movie.  There is a clip taken from the movie Starman with a spaceship flyring across the screen giving the video a sci-fi type theme as these kinds of clips run thoughout the video.  There is then a clip showing the artists falling down inbetween building and this has been copied from the film Sin City where we have the black and white colour theme with the Red writing which is similar to the Sin City title.  Next there is a reference used from the film 'Symphonies' and so the audience can then see that this is where the influence for the song title has come from.  The video then goes on to having refernces from Bond films where we see a figure of a woman and we can see the artist through her, this is used mainly in the opening of the Bond films.  There is then a reference from the film Bonanza where we see the artist in what is obviously an old western style shot with the credits in the font used in western films.  Elements of The film Donnie Darko have been put into the video where we see the artist through a mid shot with smoke surrounding him and a black background and this quickly changes to him having a rabbit mask on, and this, for anyone who has seen Donnie Darko, can be immediatly recognised as there is a character in the movie who wears a rabbit outfit.  It then goes on to a Thunderbird type clip with the artist as a big headed puppety figure driving a toy car around which is noticably similar to Thunderbirds as well as the credits that come up similar to the Thunderbirds title to reinforce the idea.  At the end of the video there is then the credits reading 'The End' in the fonts of all of the movies that Dan Black has included in his video.
The use of addition in this video is that the artist has brought together a variety of different narratives and made it into one.
The use of deletion in this video is that the narratives are only shown as the opening's of each or the endings where the rest is not shown, there is a continuous use of this throughout the video.
The use of substitution is used throughout the whole video for every clip where Dan Black has replaced the characters from each narrative with himself and all of the scenes he has replaced with his own inspiration of each scene. 
The use of transposition is that the artist has brought together for example a spce theme and an old western theme and edited it to make it fit to his own advantage and made it work, nothing in the video really fits with anything in the video and so this is why what he has done has created a new meaning.