Metamodern in Music and Around It

The reviewed monograph of Nastasya Khroustcheva “Metamodern in Music and Around It”, published in 2020, covers a wide range of issues related to the art, philosophy and aesthetics of the era of the fourth industrial revolution and the total Internet. The author considers new forms of artistic communication and builds vertical semantic connections between different levels of modern culture, expanding the context of aesthetic reality and including in its orbit both professional art objects and viral Internet memes of social networks. Relationships between postmodern and metamodern, two stages of culture of the late 20th – early 21th century, are studied, as well as the mechanisms of transmission, storage and transformation of information that ensure continuity on the one hand, and differences on the other, in the structure of two cultural paradigms. From this perspective, numerous oppositions are considered: postmodern irony and the pursuit of direct expression of the metamodern, citation of texts and citation of meanings, professionalism and new amateurism, artist and creative Everyman etc. The specific features of metamodern in music are revealed — the return of tonality, the return of a melody, the return of a song. Without claiming either the ultimate truth or the final conclusions, N. Khrushcheva offers her vision of the contemporary cultural situation; the picture of the era unfolded in her monograph attracts with its inherence, integrity and boldness of the concept.