Interparadigmality as a State of Contemporary Musical Culture

Abstract

The aim of this article is to define the problem of the “laminary” state of contemporary musical culture, in which various paradigms of artistic experience that have emerged and established in different periods of cultural history coexist and actively interact with each other. The cultural paradigm is comprehended as a complex hierarchical integrity formed by an internal unity of ideas, intuitions, and feelings that permeate the entire vertical of life. The classical and non-classical universal models of culture with their local-historical and metahistorical dimensions are present at the highest level of paradigmatic generalization. The internally heterogeneous classical paradigm reflects the demand for a creative attitude towards clarity, completeness, perfection, rationally comprehensible order and harmony. The non-classical paradigm, marked in musical creativity from the first modernist experiments to the postmodernist playing with the near and distant past, manifests the setting of “breaking down” traditions, overcoming the inertia of the past, as well as bringing in radical experiments in the field of sound and its organization. Against the background of the “fatigue” from postmodernism at the turn of the 20th and the 21st centuries in music scholarship, there are broad discussions currently happening of such concepts as post-postmodernism, metamodernism, and postnonclassics, all of which assert a breakthrough toward new strategies of art. At the same time, none of these tendencies that lays claim to paradigmatic significance reflects a holistic picture of the art of music in its aesthetic, stylistic, and linguistic plurality. Perhaps the important reason for this is the tendency to remain in the simultaneity of the different models of artistry. This way, it seems natural to examine the borderline artistic phenomena in the direction of interaction of paradigms. In order to determine the relevant processes in music culture, the productivity of the introduction of the term “interparadigmality” is substantiated. Among the key parameters of interparadigmality, the author identifies the simultaneous relevance of various cultural modes, aesthetic values, and genre-style models. Interparadigmality, which fixates the openness and mobility of the boundaries between different cultural models, corresponds with the concept of crisis (as being at the border), with the idea of “creolization” and “creolized systems” (the definition of Yuri Lotman), and the terminology of the “philosophy of instability” created by Ilya Prigozhin. At the same time, it is particularly interparadigmality, by bringing chaos to the borderline areas of paradigm interaction, which becomes applicable to the search for a holistic approach to contemporary musical realities.

Keywords: interparadigmality, cultural paradigm, contemporary music, philosophy of instability, creolized systems