I would claim that a postmodernist trait is not to argue about definitions.
Postmodernism is loosey goosey:  in my small mind I see it best as this
simplification:  a critique of modernism--however you view modernism.

The New Grove has a fine article on the subject by Jann Pasler, where
he describes it as "a style that throws into question certain assumptions
about Modernism, its social basis and its objectives.  These include
faith in progress, absolute truth*, emphasis on form and genre and the
renunciation of or alienation from an explicit social function for art."
Pasler then goes on to distinguish three approaches the the critique:  (1)
neoconservatism (neotonalists, neo-Neoclassicists, neo-spiritualists, etc),
(2) "resistance" (addressing the "master narratives" of tonality, narrative
structure, Western hegemony and male dominance)(here are shoehorned
Minimalists, among others), and (3)"connection or interpenetration ...
when a work's juxtapositions involve an eclectic inclusion of material
from disparate discourses."

The third approach resonates the most for me, for I experienced stongly
in respective "temples" in Houston in the early 1980s.  For me, the Temple
to Modernism was the Rothko Chapel; the Temple of Postmodernism the Transco
Building and Wall of Water by Philip Johnson.  As with the AT&T building in
New York, the triangular pediment from classic (and Georgian) architecture
became an ironic quotation, so to speak, just like those of Schnittke and
other composers like Rouse practicing in this third "school." The Rothko
Chapel was an essence of abstraction, almost the 4'33" of art.  I loved
and still love both temples.

I did not mean to imply that Ives was A postmodernist, just that from time
to time, especially in the second movement of the second symphony, he
SOUNDS postmodernist (to my ears).

* Thus there can be no "true" postmodernism, many which have linked to that
scary (to some) logical dead end (to others), Relativism.

Jeff Dunn
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