"Learned" and "popular", postmodernism and mundialization

Abstract

The music after 1945 evidences a reconciliation of "leamed" and "popular" music. This paper sheds a critical light on this reconciliation, mainly as seen from the point of view of leamed music. In a first moment (1959-70), one observes an interest of contemporary music for the extra-European repertories (be they "leamed" or "popular"). Tuen begins postmodernism, that carries along multiple references to ail sorts of music, including the "popular", within leamed music. Finally, at the end of the l 970's, the rise of the question of globalization, examined here in the light of the "national American question" and of some European questions (national or not). Globalization is now the place of the bringing together of the "leamed" and the "popular": this is why it is of such importance to determine whether one is dealing with a neo-liberal glo­balization, of concern to economics exclusively and not to musicology, or with that which may lead to interesting musical results.