CHAPTER 3

Is there a close relationship between twenty-first-century historicism and postmodernism? Should it, indeed, be assumed as some do that any reference to the past in today's music is unequivocally "postmodern"? Although historicism by no means excludes postmodern styles because they, too, have entered history, I do not believe historicists and postmodernists are one and the same.

Even from a conventional chronological frame of reference, historicism in fact if not always in name was a well-established aesthetic phenomenon in the arts long before the term postmodernism was coined. What is more, twenty-first-century historicists seem to enjoy a far less problematic relationship with the past than many of their postmodernist colleagues, whose work is often given to sardonic distortion, grotesque parody, highly contrastive collage, or marked mannerism (e.g., the mantra-like repetition of melodic fragments and harmonic formulas of the minimalists). Historicism needs to be understood, therefore, as both a distinct and distinctive phenomenon in the new millennial landscape as well as a creative modality that has existed in one form or another since the earliest human civilizations.

As I have attempted to redefine it for the twenty-first century, historicism comes with far fewer ideological complexities and contradictions than the omnivorous—and not infrequently dyspeptic—polymorph that postmodernism seems to have become.¹ It approaches the past not with the "anxiety of influence," but with a ready willingness to accept history's gifts without subjecting them to needlessly tortuous, even hostile critical analyses and transmogrifications.

Indeed, after all is said and done, it seems that postmodernism is no more—or less—than the paradox-laden outcome of modernism's phobic rejection of a past from which it never could have severed itself without losing its essential identity. The more closely one examines twentieth-century art, the more apparent it becomes that postmodern and modern are essentially two sides of a coin so worn through constant tossing that one can barely distinguish obverse from reverse.²