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 [log in to unmask]