In this article, I argue that the use of the term “postmodern” among musicians in the United States is older than scholars usually recognize. I further argue that such early uses were more closely tied to the movement broadly known as the “counterculture” and its values than most previous accounts have suggested. In particular, I show how the term was used to critique what was known at the time as the “technocracy” or “technocratic society”—a society dominated by scientistic, rational ways of thinking about and ordering the world. I focus on the case of American composer and author Eric Salzman. In 1969 Salzman composed and recorded a work titled The Nude Paper Sermon for Nonesuch Records. In the album’s liner notes, he described the piece as “post-modern,” becoming one of the earliest musicians to use the term. Salzman also used it in an influential music history book published in 1974 titled Twentieth-Century Music: An Introduction, which went on to become a commonly used text in US college classrooms in the 1990s. I show how musicians like Salzman, and later, US musicologists like Susan McClary and Richard Taruskin, used the idea of postmodernism in music to advance a specifically countercultural, anti-technocratic agenda.
John Kapusta (Thu,) studied this question.