Postmodern music

Music that challenges modernist ideals through stylistic borrowing, eclecticism, irony, and the mixing of popular and art-music traditions.

Pastiche: An artwork that combines or imitates recognizable styles without necessarily mocking them. Postmodern music often places borrowed styles side by side as pastiche.
Sinfonia (Berio): Luciano Berio's 1968–69 work for orchestra and eight amplified voices, built around quotations and layered texts. Its third movement overlays Mahler with a dense web of musical and verbal references.
Luciano Berio: An Italian composer whose works include Sinfonia and the Sequenze for solo instruments. His collage-like works make quotation and historical memory central compositional materials.
Musical modernism: A broad twentieth-century movement that pursued new musical languages and rejected inherited conventions. Postmodern music questions modernism's claims to rupture, originality, and stylistic progress.
Cultural appropriation: The adoption of elements from one culture by people or institutions associated with another, often amid unequal power relations. Borrowing across traditions raises questions about ownership, power, and the ethics of musical quotation.
Musical eclecticism: The use of elements from multiple musical styles or traditions within a work or practice. Eclecticism lets postmodern works move freely among stylistic materials.
Nixon in China: John Adams's 1987 opera about Richard Nixon's 1972 visit to China. Its accessible tonal language and historical subject complicate modernist expectations for opera.
John Adams: An American composer associated with postminimalist orchestral music and operas including Nixon in China. His music combines repetitive procedures with tonal and dramatic conventions.
Serialism: A compositional method that organizes musical parameters through ordered series, especially pitches. Its systematic organization contrasts with postmodern openness to mixed styles and references.
Sampling (music): The use of recorded sound fragments as material in a new musical work. Sampling extends postmodern reuse into production, where recordings themselves become compositional material.

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Neue MusikCompared with: It challenged the claim that contemporary music must continually break with the past.