mannerism
A discussion I had with my friend Robert Duckworth haunted me for years afterwards. After playing one time at a live radio show on KPFA, Berkeley, we were wondering if we would be able to tell if our music were mannerist.
Since then I've thought a lot about that, and then as now, it's hard to say. Mannerism itself seems like such a modernist notion, the idea that if it happened at the end of the Renaissance it is bound to happen again, that it is the necessary winding down of artistic period.
Hans Ibelings, in his book Supermodernism, sees deconstrucivism as a kind of mannerism, a type of extreme aesthetic play for aficionados. This is a pejorative view, aesthetic play sounds lovely to me. I think it is the lack of social relevance he sees in architectural deconstructivism that bothers him most. And it is bothersome, its displacement from the greater concerns of humanity.
But then I start thinking about the music that Heather and I are making, and the music of people like the Books, and Anne Laplantine, and so on. They, and we, I think, are closer to Ibelings idea of Supermodernism, a populist form of modernism, a postmodernism that speaks to the heart, a deconstructivism in the service of the greater good.