Here was music by a young composer audaciously combining postserial techniques with the buzz-saw din of rock.

For indeed it is of apoplexy, so to speak, and a plethoric lazy habit of body, that Churches, Kinships, Social Institutions, oftenest die. Sad, when such Institution plethorically says to itself, Take thy ease, thou hast goods laid up;—like the fool of the Gospel, to whom it was answered, Fool, this night thy life shall be required of thee!

“You must have heard” – addressed the stranger – “about the blight that has struck our mapletrees. Terrible. Some little fly has attacked our mapletrees. The papers are full of it. A real blight. Right at the core of our mapletrees. They’ve written a song about it.”[…]Stefan emptied his glass and, paprika-red, declared that the authorities, apparently inspired by the Baron, had turned the mapletree into a kind of local totem.

The most famous definition of postmodernism is Lyotard's: “I define postmodern as incredulity towards metanarratives.” […] To accept Lyotard's definition of postmodernism is to accept the premise that postmodernism is the first movement since the Enlightenment to think critically about such narratives.