LDNLAN2857

From Quotation, through Collage, to Parody: Postmodernism's Relationship with Its Past
Author(s): Sam L. Richards

Source: Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 53, No. 1 (Winter 2015), pp. 77-97
Published by: Perspectives of New Music
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7757/persnewmusi.53.1.0077
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“ FROM QUOTATION, THROUGH
COLLAGE, TO PARODY:
POSTMODERNISM’S
RELATIONSHIP WITH ITS PAST
SAM L. RICHARDS
INTRODUCTION: ON QUOTATION
Tout texte se construit comme mosaïque de citations, tout texte

est absorption et transformation d’un autre texte. (Every text is
constructed as a mosaic of quotations, every text is an absorption
and a transformation of another text.)1
—Julia Kristeva
, , that the “author” con-

Qsciously disowns their
UOTATION MARKS ABOVE ALL INDICATE
contents. They direct the “reader” to send
approbation to whom it is due, and deflect disagreement towards an
alternate and more distant Other. Quotation facilitates an abdication
of authorial responsibility by temporarily transferring the energies of
the interpreter to another source. Quotation is not the author’s own.
This act of disownership can potentially be imbued with an attitude of
78 Perspectives of New Music
suspicion or deference, skepticism or agreement, reservation or

endorsement. It is the dichotomous nature of these concomitant pairs
of uniquely opposing authorial positions—each conveyed via identical
punctuation—that makes them capable of generating a double-coded
discourse.
Scare quotes are a visually identical incarnation of their authoritative
counterpart, the citation, and although it is tempting to conceptually
bifurcate the two—like a punctuational homonym, whose meaning is
entirely different yet whose appearance is the same—such division is
counterproductive if the exact relationship between them is not
carefully articulated. Disownership is the similarity between scare
quotes and the citation, and authorial tone is the difference. Usually.
Quotation marks implicitly flag their contents as having an origin.
Concepts that lack historicity imply a false sense of objectivity, and if
an idea ostensibly always has been, there is a seductive and all-too-
human temptation to make the logically fallacious leap to the con-
clusion that the idea always will be. What has an origin is also often a
construction, and, as such, it is therefore susceptible to deconstruction.
Explicitly framing an idea as a quotation, therefore, historicizes and
highlights the borders of a perhaps previously inscrutable object. It
transforms ballooned and once seemingly objective observations into
subjective perspectives; in an almost astonishing transmutation, ideas
“captured,” unveiled, and exhibited within inverted commas have their
discursive shield of impenetrable iconicity removed. Quotation marks
denude their objects.
And yet, while an idea contained within quotation marks can be
made suspect, it can also be tenaciously authoritative. Quotation can
be used to reinforce, reify, support, concretize, justify, bolster, or
strengthen existing positions. It can exert its force like a campaign,
sweeping away dissent, anomaly, noise, and aberration with an effec-
tive, yet, at times, sinister elegance. Scholasticism’s foundational modus
operandi relies on the dogmatic decrees of “authorship.” Analogous to
law, precedent of quotation reigns supreme, exerting an enormous
paradigmatic inward pressure to conform and work within established
conceptual bounds.2 From this vantage, quotation is the formalized
propagation of deference. It is the ritual enactment of ideological
servitude. It is a conceptual surrender made public, a concession by the
author that another has, at another time, in another place, composed
something that the author considers to be superior to their own. One
quotes when “original” ideas have become exhausted, and when one
senses a scarcity of aesthetic options.3 By quoting another, the authors
themselves undergo a momentous sea change of function, not only
ceding auctorial vision to another party, but also assuming the new
From Quotation, Through Collage, To Parody 79
mantle of reproducer, redistributor, and redisseminator, resulting in a

kind of “death” of authorship.4
In a conspicuous, yet profound, manner, quotation weaves the
historical into the now. It is quintessentially an expression of what has
come before: what has been written, what has been said, what has been
articulated, what has been claimed, what has been argued, what has
been implied, and what has been alluded to. There is no future within
those framing marks, only past, yet by reinstating what has been into
what is, the author reenacts, reapplies, reperforms, and repurposes the
old, exacting a more pervasive chronological and discursive influence
from the “text” than what could be wrought from within the quo-
tation’s original “context.” Indeed, at the very least, quotation marks
indicate a contextual change.5 From multiple contexts multiple
meanings ensue and when the frequency and density of quotation
reaches a critical threshold, the quotations themselves and their recom-
binant forms become aestheticized. The act of quotation itself then
becomes the primary object of artistic or academic exploration, and it
then transcends its function as a peripheral technique of reference or
deference. Through this transformation, authorship by individual
crosses a critical threshold into ambiguity. When the unique assem-
blage of quotations becomes itself a mark of authenticity, quotation
becomes collage.
DIVERSION: A RECAPITULATION
I’ve articulated this introduction with a deliberate avoidance of

historical particulars. A comprehensive history of quotation, including
pre-twentieth-century examples, usage, and aesthetic tendencies, is far
beyond the scope of this document. A lengthy historical overview of
quotation would be such a sprawling endeavor that within the confines
of a single essay it would result in a uselessly vast collection of
anecdotes and superficial observations about instances, whereas the
narrative I am, instead, attempting to weave primarily consists of
abstractions in relation to a genealogy of quotation, collage, parody,
and their roles within postmodernism.
I’ve framed the opening paragraphs in such a way so as to draw
attention to the complexity of what quotation does, what it can do, and
how it functions linguistically, philosophically, ideologically, and aes-
thetically. I’ve done this with the ultimate goal of demonstrating that
the seeds of parody and the postmodern turn were long before sown in
the seemingly benign device of quotation, and it only required the
catalyst of industrialization in the eighteenth century and the ensuing

pluralism of the twentieth century to fully crystalize its latent aesthetic
and cultural ramifications. To clarify, I’m not in any way claiming that
there has been a Hegelian fate of quotation that was only able to reach
its full, blossomed potential near the end of the twentieth century. Nor
am I proffering a thesis whose underlying assumption is one of deter-
ministic progress—that there was somehow an inevitable organicist
development of quotation that fruitfully reached its full potential near
the end of the twentieth century. I am, however, claiming that the
unique circumstances of western civilization in the twentieth-century,
paired with the notion of literary, academic, and artistic quotation,
effectively captured the budding ideological concerns of fin de siècle
culture, particularly those which stemmed from cultural disen-
chantment, providing a kind of coping mechanism for a collective
unconscious that sensed an impending collapse of enlightenment values.
DEVELOPMENT: ON COLLAGE AND MUSIC
Collage is the all-purpose twentieth-century device. . . . From our

vantage point near the end of the century we can now begin to see
that collage has all along carried postmodern genes.6
—Kim Levin
Not Schönberg (the sterility of whose achieved system he already

glimpsed) but Stravinsky is the true precursor of postmodern cul-
tural production. For with the collapse of the high-modernist ide-
ology of style . . . the producers of culture have nowhere to turn
but to the past: the imitation of dead styles, speech through all the
masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now
global culture.7
—Frederic Jameson
As a compositional device, and as a musical practice, quotation has

been present in a dizzying array of cultural contexts and styles prior to
the twentieth century. Borrowing, and its many forms, has long been
an aesthetic staple of western musical proclivities. The cantus firmus,
used as a basis for contrapuntal play, pedagogy, imitation, harmoni-
zation, and multifarious performance practices, has functioned as an
ideological precursor to modern musical usage. The prominent
position of the cantus firmus in the historical consciousness of learned
musicians, both secular and sacred, virtually ensured that quotation
itself would, at some point, become an aesthetic fetish in its own right.
Other obvious examples include theme and variation, arrangement,
structural modeling, stylistic allusion, and, a practice on the cusp of
collage, the medley.8 Collage, however, differs from the above
mentioned techniques of borrowing in a fundamental way. Collage, as
mentioned above, is characterized not by cursory quotation, or even
frequent allusion, but rather variety and density. Collage consists of a
plurality of quotations so tightly packed that there are internal colli-
sions between its constituent parts. External fragments of reference and
their associated contexts and meanings become forced together in a
compulsory yet distinctive marriage, where tension breeds harmony.
New meanings are latent in the work due to the charged and opposing
poles of its disparate contents fused together, generating a potential
energy of meaning, substance, and signification. Collage is a charac-
teristic of the work, not merely a structural rubric. Collage is not only
a medium; it is an idea.9
Collage’s close relation with early twentieth-century modernist art
brings to mind canvases of Pablo Picasso or Georges Braque—cutting,
pasting, hoarding, and assembling. Frederic Jameson’s positing of
Stravinsky as the “true” musical precursor to postmodernism (in con-
trast to Schoenberg) is likely due to both his music’s stylistic features as
well as its compositional techniques. The now infamous riot at the
premiere of Le sacre du printemps (which Stravinsky continued to
stretch the truth of for the remainder of his career!) was primarily
caused by an unsettling disparity of the work’s assembled components:
“grotesque” choreography in contrast to the expected sophistication of
the ballet in the opulent performance hall; writhing, lurching, and
“primal” bodily gestures in contrast to the normative elegantly
extended limbs; unpredictable, sudden, and visceral changes of disjunct
musical meters and timbres; idiosyncratic and seemingly “improper”
orchestration; “uncivilized” and crude thrusting of bodies and rhythms.
The entire event was perceived as the conglomerate of discontinuity
incarnate—a veritable collage of previously unencountered elements.10
Stravinsky’s music alone often functions (and sounds!) like a basket of
motivic blocks, butted together in clever and manipulative ways. Glenn
Watkins has observed that
from the early decades of the twentieth century the very idea of
Modernism has been likened to a curio cabinet, where unrelated
objects are placed together and achieve cohesion through arrange-
ment and proximity. . . . In music’s reshuffling of bits and scraps
of memory, in the unsuspected confrontation and unusual alliance
of materials, and in the manipulation of both time and space

through a new set of coordinates, a sense of discovery was already
being heralded from the first dozen years of the century in the
music of such notables as Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky.11
The French impressionists, here mentioned in tandem with

Stravinsky, also hold a unique place within the course of collage’s
history. While Debussy expressed a fascination with gamelan and other
exotic inter-cultural influences, Ravel had a soft spot for Basque and
other folk traditions. Anecdotes exist in regards to each of these
composers intimating that they were perceived by their contemporaries
as enigmatic. Their sources of influence were so wide and varied that
to the casual observer their eclecticism had a mystical, persistent, and
impenetrable aura. Perhaps most interesting, however, is that despite
their distaste for the term “impressionism,” part of that distaste, no
doubt, was due to the fact that many practicing artists and musicians of
the era would apply the term in a derogatory fashion. “Impressions”
lack substance, they are fleeting, ephemeral, and ultimately deceiving.
In a conservative nod to the Austro-German tradition, critics devalued
these composers’ music for precisely the reason that the Frenchmen
pursued it in the first place. While their critics valued “form,” “develop-
ment,” “motive,” and “content,” Debussy and Ravel intentionally
rebelled by simply, and defiantly, valuing other things. Debussy’s
Printemps, in particular, was noted to have “called into question the
authority of academic values, and so its ‘impressionism’ appeared ‘one
of the most dangerous enemies of truth in art.’”12 Impressionism was
an ideological cannonball lobbed at established hierarchies. As a move-
ment, it was marked by young artists who sought alternate modes of
displaying their work and gaining recognition beyond established modes
of production and aesthetic judgment. In the words of Jann Pasler,
What these artists agreed on was the inversion of conventional

hierarchies and values, sometimes by means of influences from the
distant past and exotic places. Rejecting the use of imposing forms
to project grandeur and promote intellectual reflection, . . . like
the painters who stressed not new realities but new perceptions of
it, Debussy explained that this music’s ‘unexpected charm’ came
not so much from the chords or timbres themselves—already
found in the vocabularies of composers such as Field, Chopin,
Liszt, Grieg, Franck, Balakirev, Borodin and Wagner—but from
their ‘mise en place’, ‘the rigorous choice of what precedes and
what follows’.13
Debussy’s poetic attribution of “the rigorous choice of what

precedes and what follows” as the source of his music’s “charm” is
essentially an indirect rendering of how collage unfolds in a musical
medium. In music, of course, collage may either occur as a simul-
taneity or transpire. In the case of the latter, it is less a snapshot of
assembled pluralism and more a series of aural montages, ranging in
sources, influences, and styles.
In all of this there is an almost uncanny resemblance to the tacit
tenets of the postmodern: challenge the master narrative; invert the
hierarchy; embrace the subjective at odds with the objective “Truth”
(with a capital “T”). I, here, hesitate to categorically and compre-
hensively list all the characteristics of postmodernism, a notion that
remains notoriously difficult to define,14 and whose complex relation-
ship with modernism remains a matter of much debate, for fear that I
will fall prey to similar criticism as the much cited as well as much
maligned list presented by Jonathan Kramer in “The Nature and Origins
of Musical Postmodernism.”15
DIVERSION: ON THE PAST
Instead of liberation and enlightenment, Modernism led to exclu-

siveness, contempt, and persecution. Its theoretical voices, which
included natural science and structuralism, made claims to be
independent of any subject, to be the voices of truth itself. Yet,
like all voices, they proceeded from a speaker; indeed they carried
a distinct whiff of the cocksure, bragging white male.16
—Raymond Monelle
Over the course of the twentieth century, the fiercely creative force of
plurality slowly developed into a mechanized, dehumanizing reality.
The initial insight of assemblage as idea was largely superseded by
collage qua quantifiable matrix. The chaos of collage seemed to so
shock its adherents that order itself became an aesthetic panacea. The
rawness and enthusiasm for pure artistic material that generated Piet
Mondrian’s De Stijl was slowly transformed into a stoic positivism,
with mid-century artists fending with the task of picking up the post-
war pieces. It was here that Schoenberg’s posterity flourished, and
Stravinsky’s began to wane. Serialism’s strictest adherents invented and
abided by systems so tightly ordered and ostensibly autonomous that
they not only weeded out expression in order to make room for their
infatuation with structure, but they also dispensed with the need for a
listener altogether.17 The dominant and, at times, authoritarian pressures
of post-war serialism had the unintended effect of generating its anti-

thesis. In Susan McClary’s words, “an increasing number of the West’s
most creative artists—weary of what they perceived as the cul-de-sac of
the European tradition and its attendant ideologies—jumped ship.”18
COLLISION: ON POSTMODERNISM
We do not, cannot, begin all over again in each generation,

because the past is indelibly printed on our central nervous sys-
tems. Each of us is part of a vast physical-mental-spiritual web of
previous lives, existences, modes of thought, behavior, and per-
ception; of actions and feelings reaching much further back than
what we call ‘history.’ We are filaments of a universal mind; we
dream each others’ dreams and those of our ancestors. Time, thus,
is not linear, but radial.19
—George Rochberg
In “The Nature and Origins of the Musical Postmodern” Jonathan

Kramer lists the characteristics of postmodern music in a taxonomical
fashion, like a safari guide pointing out the difference between hyenas
and wild dogs; it is as if identifying postmodern musical works was the
equivalent of diagnosing a psychopathological disorder. The 2002
edition of his essay numbers sixteen characteristics—each actually
preceded by a number—all under the textbook-like heading:
“CHARACTERISTICS OF POSTMODERN MUSIC.”
The essay was first published in 1996 and was updated for its
inclusion in Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought. James Wierzbicki
woefully observes that, for many, it still serves as the “official guide” to
postmodern music, jabbing that Kramer’s list is “easily memorized by
students, and easily convertible into a syllabus for a full-semester
course.”20 I say “woefully” because Wierzbicki maintains a similar
degree of Jeremiad-like lamentation over the embarrassing conserva-
tism of musicology and music theory when it comes to parsing the
postmodern. In a double review of the book, Adam Krims and Peter
Sedgwick take Kramer, and most of the other authors, to task on their
modernist methods. Sedgwick, for example, begins his review with a
wry “lists have uses. . . . When one goes shopping, for example,” and
then, after noting Kramer’s panoply of qualifying statements regarding
his own list, Sedgwick continues:
Why draw up a list in the first place if what you are talking about
(postmodernism) is just as prone to fail to exhibit some of these
characteristics as what you are not talking about (modernism, neo-
conservatism, etc.) is prone to exhibiting some of them? One is
thereby left with the impression that an approach of this kind
expresses a methodological urge to categorize that, by definition,
flies in the face of its avowed subject matter.21
In the Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, published in 2004,

the same year as Krims and Sedgwick’s reviews, editor Steven Connor
exposes, is baffled by, and ultimately attempts to explain the dearth of
postmodern musical discourse:
The relative conservatism and autonomy of the world of academic

music study may account for its long resistance to postmodernist
formulations and arguments. . . . The recent collection Postmod-
ern Music/Postmodern Thought seems to represent the most con-
servative kind of extension of postmodernism’s range. . . . The
strange absence of a mature postmodernist discourse within music
studies, rather than the absence of potential fields in which it might
be brought to bear, is the reason that musical postmodernism is
not one of the areas reported on in this current collection.22
Indeed, in the collection are chapters devoted to philosophy, film,

literature, art, performance, space, science, technology, religion, etc.
Music is conspicuously absent, and, as both a cause and effect, music
studies have often piggybacked on the work of those in other, more
discursively “mature” disciplines.
SEAMS OR TRANSITIONS: MORE ON PARODY
It seems easy to distinguish between postmodernist forms and

functions of intertextuality and intertextuality in, for instance, the
literature of the English Augustan Age. It is, however, much more
difficult to establish a similar distinction between intertextuality in
postmodernist and in modernist literature, just as the general dis-
tinction between these periods is still an open question.23
—Ulrich Broich
There exists something of an articulated feud between those who

interpret the postmodern as an extension of the prior era and those
who interpret it as a distinct and notable break from it. In Parody,
Margaret Rose has provided a remarkably thorough table dividing

theorists into their respective ideological factions: those who maintain a
postmodernism of negation, and those who maintain a postmodernism
of affirmation.24 Despite the dichotomous nature of the chart she is
careful to qualify it and describes the blurred nature of the respective
columns. In the positive are thinkers such as Charles Jencks, John
Barth, and Robert Stern, whereas the negative contains the likes of
Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Frederic Jameson, et al. Linda
Hutcheon, notably, is one of the few chosen by Rose to bridge the two
columns and cites Hutcheon’s tendency to refer to the “double-coded”
nature of postmodernism. Other authors have referred to Hutcheon as
staunchly affirmative in her position, and as expressly moving beyond
negation,25 referring explicitly to her frequent counter-discourse to
Jameson’s insistence that postmodernism is mere “pastiche,” “blank
parody,” or that it is “parody that has lost its sense of humor.”26 For
Jameson postmodernism resembles an almost childish “crisis of
historicity” due to “the continual promulgation of a diversity of lin-
guistic and aesthetic styles that are taken out of their historical context
and presented as currently available.”27 His characterization of post-
modernism construes it as an aesthetic of “depthlessness,” and as such it
suffers from a quintessential “superficiality” which he considers its
“supreme formal feature.”28 To Jameson postmodernism is a flattened,
shallow, and perpetual present—it comprises features thoughtlessly
wrested from their countless cultural and chronological contexts.
In contrast, Hutcheon’s assessment of postmodern artists asserts
that, if anything, they possess an increased awareness of and outwardly
expressed tension with the past. She carefully articulates the post-
modern paradox of stylistic pluralism as leading, fundamentally, to “a
vision of interconnectedness.”29 In other words, the parodic quotation
of the postmodern is not a fundamentally de-historicizing act, as Jame-
son asserts, but it is, rather, a process which generates an increasingly
complex temporal and aesthetic lattice. A plurality of languages and
the lack of a normative practice is precisely what allows artists to inject
their works with new and novel meaning, and this diversity of styles
couldn’t (or wouldn’t) be utilized at all if postmodernists weren’t first
cognizant of their existence, denotations, connotations, and contextual
allusions. To forge new works out of a past that is dominated by
longstanding “grand narratives” à la Lyotard, indicates a sophistication
of historical consciousness. To effectively challenge such narratives, an
intimate knowledge of them is required, whereas Jameson seems to
indicate that it is the lack of a historicizing impulse in conjunction with
a pluralism that has ultimately diluted the power of definitive meaning.
The pressures felt by postmodernists are less that of rebellion and

denial, and more an aesthetic way of surviving socio-cultural realities.
Parody’s waning humor is not merely due to its newly-minted ideo-
logical roles, but also its intrinsic anxiety. Parody functions as a coping
mechanism, a method of mastering one’s influences in the process of
superseding them. In “Parody Without Ridicule,” Hutcheon even goes
so far as to claim that “parody then becomes one more mode to add to
Harold Bloom’s catalogue of ways in which modern writers cope with
the ‘anxiety of influence.’”30 George Rochberg has written that in
undertaking musical composition following his son’s tragic death, he
embarked on “an effort to rediscover the larger and more sweeping
gestures of the past, to reconcile my love for that past and its traditions
with my relation to the present and its often-destructive pressures.”31
Similarly, laced through Hutcheon’s postmodern turn is a persistent
and intelligent reconciliation with the constructedness of inherited
cultural values, their means, and their products. For Hutcheon, parody
is not merely a jesting dig at the previously dominant authorities of the
past. While Jameson is inclined to characterize postmodern’s parody as
“pastiche,” incapable of inducing laughter because of its self-imposed
historical bastardization, Hutcheon credits an expanded capacity of
parody whose multi-faceted usage is no longer strictly humorous, but
rather it is a “double process of installing and ironizing, [it] signals
how present representations come from past ones and what ideological
consequences derive from both continuity and difference.”32 This
double-coded process suits a wide range of quotational intents—from
the ridiculing to the respectful. Indeed, parody in its newly rehabil-
itated form need not target its source at all; it can, instead, wield the
source’s material as a parodic weapon, while setting its aim somewhere
else entirely.33
G. D. Kiremidjian further observes a much broader aesthetic his-
torical pattern: that parody often creeps into the discourse when an
exhaustion of established forms are sensed by its practitioners.34
Characterizing it as much more than a mere derivative exercise or
supplementary option in the artistic bag of tricks, Kiremidjian stands
with Hutcheon in defense of parody expressing gratitude and relief
that parody in the twentieth century has experienced a unique, though
certainly not universally recognized, redemption in light of its derisive
history. The particularly dehumanizing exhaustion of late modernism
has already been mentioned, with its stoic obsession with quantifi-
ability and truth-pushing. Many of modernism’s adherents felt this
exhaustion, although relatively few, as predicted by Kiremidjian, sought
the means to empower themselves by overcoming that exhaustion
instead of succumbing to it. The artist him/herself plays an affirmative

and proactive role in the process of aesthetic exhaustion, rehashing,
reusing, recycling, and appropriating in the process of overcoming.
Through parody one fully refeels the significance of the past like a
therapeutic creative task en route to a reinvented future.
In this way parody resembles a healing salve that has served to
simultaneously smooth the confrontation of aesthetic exhaustion for
artists themselves and confuse the relationship between the modern-
isms for those seeking well-defined borders. Those who strive to
overcome the pressures of the present via the past have long resisted
placement into the historical narrative. Given the West’s longstanding
progressivist proclivities, any reinstatement of the past is easily con-
strued as a regression, and thus, is easily derided, marginalized, or
perhaps even ignored. It is no wonder, then, that postmodernism, a
persistent movement with broad influence in which quotation and
parody have so often been considered central, has been so troublesome
and controversial to trace and define. The crux of the matter is that
postmodernism’s parody and quotational proclivities are about its own
relationships. It is metadiscursive, with postmodernism functioning
within its own self-conscious quotations. In this way postmodernism is
about itself; postmodernism is about its own identity, and its own
relationships with the many pasts that have preceded it. The dividing
line between the modern and postmodern remains elusive because
postmodernism, by its very character, has served to problematize and
ultimately obfuscate it.
SUMMARY
Just as postmodernism generated an increasingly interconnected dis-

course via its redeployment of past styles, gestures, and tropes, there is
a resonating filament of postmodern mimetic habitus thread through
the practice of quotation more generally. The inchoate postmodern
attitude of rebellion, repurposing, and borrowing from the “sweeping
gestures of the past,” à la Rochberg, is much older than any particular
late-twentieth-century epoch. Although drawing lines through the his-
torical sediment always excludes critical traces of ontological strata, the
aforementioned alluvium of French impressionism is a germane candi-
date for one of postmodernism’s first causes. With their penchant for
cross-cultural borrowing, their anti-establishment orientations, their
reinstallment of ancient forms and images, and their cultural and aes-
thetic rebellion in the wake of the Franco-Prussian war, they represent
a modern prototype for postmodern proclivities. Modernism’s own

dominating pressures became tectonic in force and, at times, magmatic
in their dissolution of dissent, ironically paving the way for a new kind
of rebellion whose practitioners, not unlike the impressionists, were
desperate for a multitude of voices in the face of a governing aesthetic;
indeed, the geological metaphor’s analogue is revealing: in the face of
a hostile landscape of perceived pyroclastic homogeneity, artists coped
by craving, valuing, and assembling an aesthetic conglomerate, reach-
ing over the boundaries of the most recent past for sundry and
sometimes distant samples to reinvigorate and repopulate the present.
The collective scars of each transitional era are made uniquely manifest
via the individual struggles of those who reached through barbed bor-
ders and into foreign territories, and the scars of the postmodern turn
have the distinctive mark of quotation, collage, and problematizing
parody.
NO T E S
1. Julia Kristeva, Semeiotike: Recherches Pour Une Sémanalyse (Paris:

Éditions du Seuil, 1969), 146.
2. “Of all professions the law is the least concerned with aspiration. It
is concerned with precedent, not with discovery, with what was
witnessed at one time in one place, and not with vision and
intuition.” See John Cage, Empty Words: Writings ’73–’78
(Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1981), 4.
3. John Barth, “The Literature of Exhaustion” in The Friday Book:
Essays and Other Non-Fiction (London: John Hopkins University
Press, 1984).
4. Roland Barthes, “The Death of The Author,” trans. Stephen Heath,
trans., in Image-Music-Text (New York: Hill and Wang, 1977).
5. For a seminal example of this, see Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre
Menard, Author of Quixote,” ed. Anthony Kerrigan, trans.
Anthony Bonner, in Ficciones (New York: Grove Press, 1962).
6. See Kim Levin’s contribution, “Foreword,” in Collage: critical
views ed. Katherine Hoffman (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press,
1989).
7. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 17.
8. In “The Uses of Existing Music: Musical Borrowing as a Field,” J.
Peter Burkholder provides an extensive table of compositional
“techniques” as they are related to borrowing, which he has parsed
out of the music of Charles Ives. Despite the composer-specific
preoccupation of his research in regards to borrowing, going so far
as to detail specific instances of each technique as they appear in
Ives’ corpus, Burkholder’s work remains useful in pointing out the
enormous variety of quotational practices that have exacted such a
profound influence on western musical culture that they are easy to
take for granted. He provides examples of borrowing as they were
practiced from the early renaissance through the early twentieth
century, including some not mentioned above: mass, improvisation,
jazz, paraphrase, etc. See J. Peter Burkholder, “The Uses of Exis-
ting Music: Musical Borrowing as a Field,” Notes, Second Series,
Vol. 50, No. 3 (1994): 851–870.
9. See Katherine Hoffman, “Collage in the Twentieth Century: An

Overview,” in Collage (1989), 1.
10. Richard Taruskin has published an excellent exegetical essay about
the event titled “A Myth of the Twentieth Century: The Rite of
Spring, the Tradition of the New, and ‘The Music Itself,’” in
which one of his primary theses is that it was the choreography and
not the music that initiated the rabble-rousing among the crowd.
While his analysis is, no doubt, in partial response to the
exaggerated narrative of the event-made-myth, including any self-
congratualatory back-patting among musicologists in regards to
the supposed “power” of music to cause “riots,” I, nevertheless,
find it impossible that the music had nothing to do with the
debacle. It was, after all, part of the “context.” Modernism/
Modernity, Vol. 2.1 (1995): 1–26.
11. Glenn Watkins, Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and
Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists (Cambridge, Mass.:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994), 1–2.
12. Jann Pasler, “Impressionism” in Grove Music Online, Oxford Music
Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com.proxy.lib.umich.edu
/subscriber/article/grove/music/50026 (accessed April 26,
2012).
13. Ibid.
14. Richard Taruskin, upon broaching the topic of postmodernism in
his five volume Oxford History of Western Music, immediately
concedes that “defining it is a notorious fool’s errand.” Richard
Taruskin, “After everything,” in The Oxford History of Western
Music, Vol. 5 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 411–472.
15. Judith Irene Lochhead and Joseph Henry Auner, eds., Postmodern
Music/Postmodern Thought (New York; London: Routledge,
2002), 16.
16. Raymond Monelle, The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000), 4.
17. Dika Newlin, one of the last living students of Arnold Schoenberg,
audaciously summed up her mentor’s perspective on the subject:
“Music need not be performed any more than books need to be
read aloud, for its logic is perfectly represented on the printed
page; and the performer, for all his intolerable arrogance, is totally
unnecessary except as his interpretations make the music under-
standable to an audience unfortunate enough not to be able to
read it in print.” Dika Newlin, Schoenberg Remembered: Diaries

and Recollections 1938–1976 (New York: Pendragon Press,
1980), 164.
18. Susan McClary, “Rap, Minimalism, and Structures of Time in Late
Twentieth-Century Culture” in Audio Culture: Readings in
Modern Music, ed. by Christopher Cox and Daniel Warner (New
York: The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc, 2010),
293. Within this context, she is explicitly referring to the develop-
ment of musical minimalism, but I submit that quotation and
collage techniques were engaged by many as an alternate means of
“jumping ship.”
19. George Rochberg, Liner notes for String Quartet No. 3, Nonesuch
H-71283, 1973.
20. James Wierzbicki, “The Postmodern in Music,” Semiotica 183, no.
1/4 (2011): 283–308.
21. Adam Krims and Peter Sedgwick, “Postmodern Musicology in
Combined Development: a Review of Postmodern Music/
Postmodern Thought,” Twentieth-century Music 1, no. 1 (2004):
130–135.
22. Steven Connor, The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism
(Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004),
17.
23. Ulrich Broich, “Intertextuality” in Johannes Willem Bertens and
Douwe Fokkema, eds., International Postmodernism Theory and
Literary Practice (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1998), 254.
24. Margaret Anne Rose, Parody : Ancient, Modern, and Post-modern
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 198.
25. See, for example, Catherine Constable, “Postmodernism and Film,”
in Connor, The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, 50.
26. See Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,”
in Hal Foster, Postmodern Culture (London: Pluto, 1987), 114.
27. Constable, The Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, 49.
28. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 9.
29. Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory,
Fiction (New York: Routledge, 1988), 24.
30. Linda Hutcheon, “Parody Without Ridicule: Observations on

Modern Literary Parody,” The Canadian Review of Comparative
Literature (Spring 1978), 205.
31. Rochberg (1973).
32. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (London; New
York: Routledge, 1989), 93.
33. John A. Yunck, “The Two Faces of Parody,” Iowa English Yearbook
8 (1963), 29–37.
34. G. D. Kiremidjian, “The Aesthetics of Parody,” The Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism 28, no. 2 (Winter 1969), 231–242.
There is an obvious compatibility here between Kiremidjian and
the previously cited “Literature of Exhaustion,” by John Barth.
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Kerrigan. New York: Grove Press.
Burkholder, J. Peter. 1994. “The Uses of Existing Music: Musical
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From Quotation, through Collage, to Parody: Postmodernism's Relationship with Its Past

Author(s): Sam L. Richards

Tout texte se construit comme mosaïque de citations, tout texte

, , that the “author” con-

suspicion or deference, skepticism or agreement, reservation or

mantle of reproducer, redistributor, and redisseminator, resulting in a

I’ve articulated this introduction with a deliberate avoidance of

catalyst of industrialization in the eighteenth century and the ensuing

DEVELOPMENT: ON COLLAGE AND MUSIC

Collage is the all-purpose twentieth-century device. . . . From our

Not Schönberg (the sterility of whose achieved system he already

As a compositional device, and as a musical practice, quotation has

of materials, and in the manipulation of both time and space

The French impressionists, here mentioned in tandem with

What these artists agreed on was the inversion of conventional

Debussy’s poetic attribution of “the rigorous choice of what

DIVERSION: ON THE PAST

Instead of liberation and enlightenment, Modernism led to exclu-

of post-war serialism had the unintended effect of generating its anti-

We do not, cannot, begin all over again in each generation,

In “The Nature and Origins of the Musical Postmodern” Jonathan

“CHARACTERISTICS OF POSTMODERN MUSIC.”

In the Cambridge Companion to Postmodernism, published in 2004,

The relative conservatism and autonomy of the world of academic

Indeed, in the collection are chapters devoted to philosophy, film,

SEAMS OR TRANSITIONS: MORE ON PARODY

It seems easy to distinguish between postmodernist forms and

There exists something of an articulated feud between those who

Margaret Rose has provided a remarkably thorough table dividing

The pressures felt by postmodernists are less that of rebellion and

instead of succumbing to it. The artist him/herself plays an affirmative

Just as postmodernism generated an increasingly interconnected dis-

a modern prototype for postmodern proclivities. Modernism’s own

1. Julia Kristeva, Semeiotike: Recherches Pour Une Sémanalyse (Paris:

9. See Katherine Hoffman, “Collage in the Twentieth Century: An

read it in print.” Dika Newlin, Schoenberg Remembered: Diaries

30. Linda Hutcheon, “Parody Without Ridicule: Observations on

Attali, Jacques. 1985. Noise: The Political Economy of Music.

———. 2005. “Innovation and Repetition: Between Modern and

Pasler, Jann. n.d. “Impressionism.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music

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