Postmodernism in music The postmodern era in art-music began with the End of the Sixties - a phenomenon I associate directly with the American Bicentennial. The huge number of commissions for and about this occasion produced, in many cases, some of the most conservative-sounding "new" music heard in this country since the 1930's. This anti-weird, anti-60s series of compositions led, in turn, to further developments. While many of the leading style-committed composers simply continued their work, others (camp-followers) tended to adopt more conservative compositional approaches; some even returned to student-day techniques. Composers labeled old-fashioned during the '60s began to experience re-birth, while many of those who remained weird, themselves came to be known as old-fashioned. Symphony audiences (and boards of directors) became increasingly intolerant of certain modern styles. In New York, the quick departure of Boulez ("too much Schonberg") and the series of performances called "The New Romanticism?" provided powerful images of musical revisionism - or would that be deconstructionism? The latter was most powerfully manifest however, not in classical, but in the emergence of an entirely new type of music, the so-called New Age style. The marked change in musical consumerism was staggering. Within a few years of its advent, this simple diatonic-modal cold pablum had become so potent that the products of its principle record company outsold the entire classical field. Postmodernism in popular music (if at all) probably began some time after the summer of 1969, but its roots are more tangled than those of classical. The retro qualities of Sha Na Na (at Woodstock) and the seminal elements in Velvet Underground depict an extremely broad base of musical activity. If one associates postmodernism with "cool" and somewhat "distant" modes of behavior, the late-70's New Wave and disco styles seem to fit quite well. Modern popular music does not exemplify any single style or mind-set. It can only be described as a proliferation of special- interest products, each with its own relatively exclusive audience.If the current existence of Hip-Hop, Country, grunge-Punk, Aladdin, the Dead, new Christian, Barney and the latest Glenn Miller Revival can't tell us much about the current state of society, what can? 5/94 FMc