Hans Zender and postmodernism

It is not easy to label Hans Zender music historically. In works like Music to hear and Cabaret Voltaire he uses a harmonically, rhythmically and technically highly complex musical language which seems to grant him a place among the successors of musical modernism. In other pieces, like Schuberts “Winterreise” and Schumann-Phantasie, Zender’s citation and commenting of canonical works seems to make him the prototype of a musical postmodernist. And the occupation with East Asian culture in works like the Lo-Shu series could all too easily earn him the label “exoticist”, which in turn would strengthen a superficial postmodernist categorization.

And to be sure, during the 1980s, when the discussions over musical postmodernism reached Germany, Zender wrote several texts where he principally recognized the theoretical terms of the present “postmodern condition”. He characterized the aesthetic openness enabled by the virtual coexistence of all musical times and places as a great possibility for the composers, but also as a great danger. In Zender’s opinion, musical postmodernism must be aesthetically “responsible”; the juxtaposition of different styles has to be worked through formally. Zender has no patience for uncommitted eclectism or unreflected recycling of pre-modernistic forms. This cautious and conditional support of musical postmodernism is not unusual in German music in the 1980s and 1990s.

Joakim Tillman has written an insightful review of the German debate over musical postmodernism, which shows how the understanding of the concept as a synonym to regressive anti-modernism was countered by changing concepts of postmodernism as a reflective continuation of modernism. The first concept of postmodernism was influenced by Habermas’ debasing characterization, while the latter, more positive type of concepts were more influenced by the French debate fronted by Lyotard. Among the attempts at a definition that Tillman recounts, Zender’s understanding of postmodernism seems quite close to Thomas Schäfer’s idea of postmodernism as “a radicalized continuation of Modernism, freed from dogmatism.” Some of Hermann Danuser’s criteria are fitting as well: the “fundamental pluralism of musical languages” will be a central theme in this presentation of Zender’s work, as will the strategies of “double-coded” use of historical elements and rehabilitation of the avant-garde. However, Danuser’s characterization of postmodernist music as “bridging the gap between high and low art”, how appropriate it may be in relation to postmodern music in general, is not to the point in the case of Zender. Later, I will return to how entertainment music is kept outside of Zender’s pluralism, and instead acts as a negative definition of the unity of his chosen material.

However, Zender has increasingly sought to define his music beyond the dichotomy of modernism and postmodernism. In a sketch from 2004, where he interrogates himself about the unity of his work, he leaves the common presupposition that modernism is about compositional unity and postmodernism about compositional pluralism. Instead, he redefines modernism as a search for multiplicity:

Noch vor einigen Jahre hätte ich wenigstens negativ eine Einheit zu bennenen versucht: Abwendung von den Klischees der Moderne wie der Postmoderne – von pseudoabstraktem Kunstgewerbe wie von historisch oder exotisch ausgerichteter Beliebigkeit... Heute glaube ich zu erkennen, dass der tiefste Impuls der Moderne eine Hinwendung zur (nicht homogenen, nicht reduzierbaren) Vielheit ist. Vielheit – das heisst ja auch Offenheit für das Unerwartete. [...]

This understanding of modernism as an occupation with complexity and irreducible heterogeneity is not only striking in the context of Zender’s works, it also has immense consequences for the revaluation of the music of supposedly “strict” modernist music.