"The purpsoe of this book uis to explore the new possibilities that postmodernist modes of thinking offer to the understanding of Western "classical" music and, by implication, of music in general.  Just what the elusive term _postmoderism_ means will ocupy a substantial part of the fist chapter.  Suffice it to say here that recent decades have witnesses something like a Nietzschean transvaluation of all values in the human sciences.  This development has certainly not gone uncontested, and its outcome is far from clear, but its impact is undeniable.  A complexly interdisciplinary body of theory, intertwining concerns with language, culture, and subjectivity, has been rethinking and making it mandatory to rethink, the traditional foundations of thought.  Conceptual paradigms have been proliferating which problematize the great ordering principles of rationality, unity, universality, and truth, recasting them as special cases of contingency, plurality, historicity, and ideology.  Both knowledge and its objects are increasingly being recognized as decentered, heteronomous, and prismatic.  As Donna Harray puts it, they are being "constructed deconstructively."
 "A turn to postmodernism in this sense would be bound to have a dramatic, even traumatic, effect on the ways we think about music, which have long been unusually dependent on the concepts under stress.  Music has figured familiarly in modern Western culture as the vehicle for everything that cannot be represented or denoted.  It embodies the feeling or intuition or pure mode of apprehension to which we attain after all the resources of signification have been exhausted.  By one reckoning, music serves this function in Apollonian terms, reviving ancient figures of cosmic harmony in the modern form of aesthetic order--the tangible embodiment of rationality, unity, universality, and truth.  In music the forms of though become manifest as pleasure by withdrawing themselves from the contents of thought.  The Dionysian complement of this process, in which the withdrawal appears as a rupture and music taps emotions and desires at depths beyond the reach of any order, is equally pervasive as a cultural trope.  The opposites, as opposites do, interact and depend on each other.  Music in the modern era can transcend signification both Platonically and daemonically.  Either way, ti stands apart form the suasions and coercions of the real.  It figures as a self-enclosed plenitude, an acoustic image of pure interiority.
 "By undercutting the foundations of this conceptual and representational order, postmodernism has made it necessary to rethink music from every possible perspective.  The force of this necessity stems from the perception that the resistance to signification once embodied by music now seems to be an inextricable part of signification itself.

Lawrence Kramer.  Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge.  Berkeley:  University of California Press,c1995

Term Postmodernism designates a conceptual order in which grand, synthesizing schemes of explanation have lost their place and in which traditional schemes of rational understanding - unity, coherence, generality, totality, structure - have lost their authority if not their pertinence." [5]
Rationality
Enlightenment called on impartial reason to know the world and guide its progress, independent of religious and social authority and unintimidated by them" [6]
Diderot, _Encyclopedia_ "All things must be examined, all must be winnowed and sifted without exception and without sparing anyone's sensibilities." [6]
A major effort of modernist thought has been to humanize reason without entirely sacrificing its detachment from its objects, which serves as the measure of truth." [7]
Postmodernism abandons detachment
Knowing is partial in all its guises, never finished
The only way to find a largger vision is to be somewhere in particular [7]
have account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recogniaing our ownways of making meanings and a commitment to faithful accounts of the "real" world. [7-8]
Generality
Modernists intend to frame a comprehensive system of general truth
Derrida relocates universals (form, essence) from objective reality to a human subject "conscious and certain of itself." [8]
modernity has nostalgia for unity it shatters
modernism critiques this by attempting to enfranchise the forces of decentralization (which makes more sens conceptually than practically)
any formulation  of master narrative can be read as responsive to local interests
Subjectivity
modern subject includes identity, boundlessness, autonomy, interiority, depth and centrality [9]
with infinite assurance[9]
subject is an exploded fiction
true human subject is fragmentart, incoherentm overdetermined. forever under construction
Foucault, disappearance of man
decentered subject seen as alienated, deviant, or comic
postmodernism undoing efforts of modernism to distance and regulate decentering
modernism privileges the constative - that which is judged true or false (postmod sees this as a only feature of language)
postmodern sees performative - that which is judged successful or ubsuccessful as primary
general transposability of communication ( pos variety of media and situations, but w/ alternative uses and realizations
psychical, social, and cultural agencies intersect [11]
dissemination - sowing meaning without hope of reaing a harvest, without possession of what comes from it [12]
and leads to no ultimate unity