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1
Loos, Helmut. "World Music or Regionality? A Fundamental Question for Music Historiography." English version, no. 10 (October 22, 2018): 13–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.51515/issn.2744-1261.2018.10.13.
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The term “world music” is still relatively new. It came into use around the end of the twentieth century and denotes a new musical genre, one which links European-American pop music to folk and non-European music cultures. It can be seen in a larger context as a phenomenon of postmodernism in that the challenge to the strict laws and boundaries of modernism allowed for a connection between regionality and global meaning to be established. Music in the German-speaking world had previously been strictly divided into the categories of “entertainment music” (U-Musik) and “serious music” (E-Musik), the latter functioning as art-religion in the framework of modernism and thus adhering to its principles. Once these principles of modernism became more uncertain, this rigorous divide began to dissolve. For example, the “serious music” broadcast consisting of classical music, previously a staple of public radio, gradually disappeared as an institution from radio programming. A colourful mixture of various low-key, popular music was combined with shorter classical pieces, so that the phenomenon known as “crossover”, a familiar term in popular music since the middle of the twentieth century, then spread to the realm of classical music. This situation differs fundamentally from the circumstances that once dominated the public consciousness from the nineteenth century well into the twentieth century and that indeed remain influential in certain parts of the population to this day. Historical-critical musicology must adapt to this transformed state of consciousness. Doing so will allow for a number of promising perspectives to unfold.
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NIEBUR, LOUIS. "‘There is Music in It, But It is Not Music’: A Reception History ofMusique Concrètein Britain." Twentieth-Century Music 15, no. 2 (June 2018): 211–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1478572217000299.
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AbstractThe traditional narrative of the development ofmusique concrèteandelektronische Musiktells a story of esoteric, academic branches of musical modernism emerging out of Paris and Cologne in the 1950s. But this narrative clouds our understanding of the unique ways this music developed in Britain, largely filtered through the BBC, as a relatively populist, accessible iteration of Continental techniques. This article explores how British reactions to contemporary music and, in particular,musique concrèteandelektronische Musik, reflected on the one hand continued suspicion towards Continental music and on the other a deep insecurity about Britain's musical position in the world. The predominantly hostile attitude towards electronic music from within establishment musical cultures betray profound concerns about trends that were seen to exert a harmful influence on British musical society.
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Manuel, Peter. "Music as symbol, music as simulacrum: postmodern, pre-modern, and modern aesthetics in subcultural popular musics." Popular Music 14, no. 2 (May 1995): 227–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143000007455.
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Postmodern aesthetics has come to be recognised as a salient feature of much popular culture, including music. Urban subcultures, and especially migrant subcultures, may have inherent inclinations toward postmodern aesthetics, while at the same time retaining ties to modern and even pre-modern cultural discourses. The syncretic popular musics created by such subcultures may reflect these multiple cultural orientations by combining postmodern and more traditional characteristics. Thus, for example, punk rock and rap music can be seen to combine postmodern techniques of pastiche, bricolage and blank irony with modernist socio-political protest. Similar eclecticisms can also be found in the musics of some urban migrant subcultures, whose syncretic musics, like their senses of social identity, often self-consciously juxtapose or combine ancestral homeland traditions with the most contemporary cosmopolitan styles and attitudes. Interpretations of such musics may call for a particularly nuanced appreciation of the distinct aesthetic modes which may coexist in the same work.
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Graham, T. A. "Modernism and Popular Music." Genre 46, no. 3 (September 1, 2013): 449–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00166928-2345587.
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Ballantine, Christopher. "Modernism and Popular Music." Journal of the Royal Musical Association 139, no. 1 (2014): 200–204. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0269040300013384.
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Begam, Richard. "Modernism as Degeneracy: Schoenberg's Moses und Aron." Modernist Cultures 3, no. 1 (October 2007): 33–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/e204110220900032x.
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Richard Begam's essay considers Arnold Schoenberg's “Moses und Aron” (1932) as an extended response to the National Socialist discourse on ‘entartete Musik’ or ‘degenerate music.’ For Begam, Schoenberg asserts that moral degeneracy results not from the rejection of mimesis but precisely from its opposite: the fetishistic and idolatrous worship of the image.
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von Ammon, Frieder. "nr="68"Konkurrenten in musicis. : Thomas Mann, Arthur Schnitzler und Robert Musil im Wettstreit um die ,,heilige Kunst“." Zeitschrift für Germanistik 31, no. 2 (January 1, 2021): 68–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.3726/92169_68.
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Abstract Der Beitrag geht der Frage nach, wie die Intensität der musikliterarischen Intermedialität in der deutschsprachigen Erzählliteratur der Moderne erklärt werden kann. Eine zentrale Rolle spielen dabei die Musikbezüge und insbesondere die Musikbeschreibungen in den Texten Thomas Manns, mit denen sich andere Autoren in der Folge auseinanderzusetzen hatten. Dabei ist eine produktive Konkurrenzsituation entstanden, die im Beitrag anhand von Texten Manns, Schnitzlers und Musils untersucht wird.The present contribution asks how the intensity of musico-literary intermediality in narrative texts of German modernism can be explained. Crucial are the references to and descriptions of music in the texts of Thomas Mann which other authors had to face. The result was a specific competitive situation with productive potential. It is examined on the basis of texts by Mann, Schnitzler, and Musil.
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Milin, Melita. "The stages of modernism in Serbian music." Muzikologija, no. 6 (2006): 93–116. http://dx.doi.org/10.2298/muz0606093m.
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In order to consider this topic, it was first necessary to discuss certain problems of terminology and periodisation relating to musical modernism in general. It is already familiar the extent to which the terms "new music", "modernist", "contemporary" and "avant-garde" music have been used interchangeably, as synonyms. For this reason, it was first important to outline the period of musical modernism as almost generally accepted, which is regarded as an epoch comprising three different periods: (I) period of early modernism (1890?1918), announced by a break with later romanticism and a turn towards French Impressionism, Austro-German Expressionism and Russian "folkloric Expressionism"; (II) period of "classical modernism"(1919?1945) that witnessed a diffusion of neo-classicism and serialism; (III) period of "high modernism" (1946?1972) characterized by highly experimental compositional techniques such as integral serialism and aleatoricism. In relation to this, avant-garde movements are seen as radically innovative and subversive tendencies within this modernist epoch, and while certain postmodernist ideas can be recognized as early as the 1950s, postmodernism as a movement hadn?t gained its full potency until the 1970s. Since then, it has assumed different forms of existence as well as having assimilated a continued form of ?modernist project?. The second part of the article proposes a periodisation of Serbian musical modernism, which is divided into four stages. The first stage (1908?1945) was a period where elements of Impressionism and German expressionism were creatively introduced into the works of several leading composers (Petar Konjovic, Stevan Hristic, Miloje Milojevic, Josip Slavenski, Marko Tajcevic). The second stage (1929?1945) was marked by a group of composers who studied in Prague and assimilated certain progressive compositional techniques such as free tonality, atonality dodecaphony, microtonality and athematicism (Mihovil Logar, Predrag Milosevic, Dragutin Colic, Ljubica Maric, Vojislav Vuckovic, Milan Ristic). The third stage (1951?1970) followed immediately after the era of Socialist Realism, which involved the rediscovery of the pre- World War II Western modernism and prepared the ground for contemporary avant-garde developments almost non-existent before 1961 (Milan Ristic, Dusan Radic, Dejan Despic Vladan Radovanovic, Enriko Josif, Stanojlo Rajicic, Vasilije Mokranjac Aleksandar Obradovic, Ljubica Maric, Rajko Maksimovic). The fourth stage (1956?1980) was the period during which the post-World War II avant-garde developments found their home amongst Serbian composers, some of them conceived almost simultaneously with but independent of the current progressive development in the rest of the world (Vladan Radovanovic Aleksandar Obradovic, Petar Ozgijan, Petar Bergamo, Srdjan Hofman, the group Opus 4).
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Ross, Malcolm. "Missing solemnis: reforming music in schools." British Journal of Music Education 15, no. 3 (November 1998): 255–62. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0265051700003934.
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This paper is intended as a sequel to my earlier paper, ‘What's Wrong with School Music? (BJME 1995, 12, 185-201). It carries an account of recent research into the arts in secondary schools which suggests that, despite National Curriculum reforms and innovations, music still lags behind the other arts in the general esteem of students. The paper proposes that the trouble with music in schools is that it has failed to modernise, that is, that it has somehow been impervious to the creative developments in classical and popular music. Robert Witkin's Art and Social Structure (1995) provides a theoretical account of modernism. The baleful influence of Hymns Ancient and Modern on generations of music teachers is condemned. Cited by way of contrast are two examples of a fully modem music education discovered at the Dartington International Summer School of Music. These, it is argued, capture the participatory ethos promoted in the Anthony Everitt's recent Gulbenkian publication Joining In.
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Kudiņš, Jānis. "Latvian Music History in the Context of 20th-century Modernism and Postmodernism. Some Specific Issues of Local Historiography." Musicological Annual 54, no. 2 (November 15, 2018): 97–139. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/mz.54.2.97-139.
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Do the terms “modernism” and “postmodernism” objectively characterize the trends in the music history of the 20th century or are they merely theoretical abstractions? How can they be applied to the music history of specific countries, for example, when analysing a local historical experience? The article will consider these questions primarily to focus on the representation of the modernist and postmodernist aesthetics in the stylistic developments of the 20th-century Latvian music history.
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Straw, Will. "Music video in its contexts: popular music and post-modernism in the 1980s." Popular Music 7, no. 3 (October 1988): 247–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0261143000002932.
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Writing on music video has had two distinctive moments in its brief history. The first wave of treatments tended to come from the culture surrounding rock music and from those who were primarily interested in music video as something which produced effects on that music. Here, two claims were most common, and generally expressed in the terms and the contexts of rock journalism:(1) that music video had made ‘image’ more important than the experience of music itself, with effects which were to be feared (for example, the potential difficulties for artists with poor ‘images’, the risk that theatricality and spectacle would take precedence over intrinsically ‘musical’ values, etc.);(2) that music video would result in a diminishing of the interpretative liberty of the individual music listener, who would now have visual or narrative interpretations of song lyrics imposed on him/her, in what would amount to a semantic and affective impoverishment of the popular music experience.
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Silverberg, Laura. "Between Dissonance and Dissidence: Socialist Modernism in the German Democratic Republic." Journal of Musicology 26, no. 1 (January 1, 2009): 44–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jm.2009.26.1.44.
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Abstract Both communist party officials and western observers have typically interpreted the composition of modernist music in the Eastern Bloc as an act of dissidence. Yet in the German Democratic Republic (GDR), the most consequential arguments in favor of modernism came from socialists and party members. Their advocacy of modernism challenged official socialist realist doctrine, but they shared with party bureaucrats the conviction that music ought to contribute to the development of socialist society. Such efforts to reform musical life from a Marxist-Leninist standpoint were typical of the first generation of East Germany's intelligentsia, who saw socialist rule as the only guarantee against the reemergence of German fascism. Two of East Germany's most prominent composers, Hanns Eisler and Paul Dessau, routinely used the twelve-tone method in works carrying an explicitly socialist text. During preparations for the 1964 Music Congress, aesthetician Güünter Mayer drew from Eisler's Lenin Requiem and Dessau's Appell der Arbeiterklasse to argue that modernist techniques were highly appropriate for giving expression to contemporary social conditions. The efforts of these socialists to reconcile modernist techniques with their understanding of socialism undermine basic divisions between communism and capitalism, complicity and dissent, and socialist realism and western modernism.
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KENDALL, GARY S. "Juxtaposition and Non-motion: Varèse bridges early modernism to electroacoustic music." Organised Sound 11, no. 2 (August 2006): 159–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1355771806001440.
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Edgard Varèse's Poème électronique can be viewed as a bridge between early twentieth-century modernism and electroacoustic music. This connection to early modernism is most clearly seen in its use of musical juxtaposition, a favoured technique of early modernist composers, especially those active in Paris. Juxtaposition and non-motion are considered here, particularly in relationship to Smalley's exposition of spectromorphology (Smalley 1986), which in its preoccupation with motion omits any significant consideration of non-motion. Juxtaposition and non-motion have an important history within twentieth-century music, and as an early classic of electroacoustic music, Poème électronique is a particularly striking example of a composition that is rich in juxtapositions similar to those found in passages of early modernist music. Examining Poème électronique through the lens of juxtaposition and non-motion reveals how the organisation of its juxtaposed sounds encourages the experience of sound structure suspended time.
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Warnaby, John. "THE MUSIC OF NICOLAUS A. HUBER." Tempo 57, no. 224 (April 2003): 22–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0040298203000135.
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There is a school of thought in Britain which suggests that the rigours of modernist composition resulted in sterility and uniformity. Yet in the German-speaking world, composers have explored a wide range of expressive possibilities within a modernist sensibility. They have proved that the discipline of modernism is capable of stimulating genuine individuality, and over the past 30 years, Nicolaus A. Huber has emerged as one of the most distinctively radical, yet equally recognizable personalities on the German contemporary music scene. In contrast to Lachenmann, Rihm, or Höller, Huber has not attempted anything on the largest scale, but in the spheres of orchestral, chamber and instrumental music, he has produced a substantial body of work of considerable originality and dramatic power, frequently involving theatrical elements.
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Guillaumier, Christina K. "AMBIGUOUS MODERNISM: THE EARLY ORCHESTRAL WORKS OF SERGEI PROKOFIEV." Tempo 65, no. 256 (March 29, 2011): 25–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0040298211000143.
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Sergei Prokofiev's association with modernism was a curious one: on the one hand, he thought his technically innovative, bold and challenging music positioned him as a modernist but on the other, he remained wary of aligning himself with any specific movement. Such a combination of reluctance and ambiguity in the face of a movement that was engaging interwar Europe with such intensity stems from what can be viewed as an overly protective attitude to his own purity of idiom. Prokofiev was keenly aware of his own prodigious talent and simultaneously anxious of possible musical influence. Nonetheless, he continued to be watchful of cutting-edge developments in music even if he was not particularly sympathetic to the accompanying philosophical debates on modern music.
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Waters, Julie A. "British Music and Modernism, 1895–1960." Musicology Australia 33, no. 1 (July 2011): 142–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08145857.2011.585517.
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Mikic, Vesna. "Different shapes of modernism/neoclassicism: Case study of Dusan Radic’s creative output." Muzikologija, no. 6 (2006): 267–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.2298/muz0606267m.
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This paper deals with musical neoclassicism in the context of modernism, and shows that some neoclassical features, usually considered to be reactionary and retrograde, could and should be understood as modernist. This kind of contextualization is especially important when Serbian postwar music is in question. Neoclassicism in Serbian music began in a specific ideological milieu. Paradoxically, and despite its "call for order" characteristics, it turned out to be a kind of modernistic phenomenon. On one hand it received all typical shapes of European modernism, while on the other it remains as a typical idiom of postwar Serbian musical production, blending in perfectly with the postmodern. These issues are argued and proved through analysis of some pieces written by Dusan Radic during the 1950?s. We see a kind of "disguised" modernism in the composer's subversion of the norms of national romanticism and socialist realism in the neoclassical choir piece Gungulice (1953), a modernism that is based on Freud's "reaction-formation" notion. Then, a more radical kind of modernism is followed in the piece The List for chamber ensemble (1952? 1954), arguing the notion of radical in the context of Serbian music, and coming to the conclusion that different interpretations of this piece as avant-garde, radical, or neoclassical/modernist can occur as a consequence of the listener's position. In the case of The Tower of Sculls we observe the same kind of "disguised" modernism, but now directly interwoven with proto-postmodern elements, coming from popular music practices, which is also the case in other pieces by Dusan Radic. The composer?s nonconformity, lack of pretentiousness, and inclination toward the simplicity of everyday things form his modernistic identity.
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Chowrimootoo, Christopher. "Copland’s Styles." Journal of Musicology 37, no. 4 (2020): 518–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jm.2020.37.4.518.
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This article examines the relationship between Aaron Copland’s activities as composer and as pedagogue in order to illuminate the fraught midcentury relationship between musical modernism and middlebrow culture. I situate his unpublished lecture notes and music appreciation books within the middlebrow context and trace their connections with the works he composed during this period. At the center of my investigation is the contentious midcentury category of “style,” which implicated both Copland’s music and his pedagogy in ways that illuminate middlebrow cultural appreciation at large. Challenging long-standing modernist depictions of the middlebrow as the straightforward commercialization of high culture, I excavate characteristic middlebrow commitments to compromise, novelty, and breadth that proved even more unsettling to midcentury hierarchies than mass culture’s supposedly shameless pandering. By emphasizing Copland’s commitment to a canon of modern “styles,” in composition as in music appreciation, I draw out underlying tensions between his “middlebrow” approach to modern music and a “higher,” purer form imagined by Arnold Schoenberg and Theodor W. Adorno. At the same time, I show how these distinctions often threatened to collapse. On a broader methodological level, I chart a middle course between “social” conceptions of the middlebrow—as a means of marketing, distributing, and teaching high art to a mass audience—and “aesthetic” discussions of it as a compositional style. By examining the reciprocity between Copland’s pedagogy and music, I ultimately suggest that the problem which middlebrow culture posed to high modernism lay not just in its ability to mediate between high and low, modernism and mass culture, but also in the challenges it posed to fantasies of aesthetic immediacy and autonomy.
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Earle, Ben. "Modernism and Reification in the Music of Frank Bridge." Journal of the Royal Musical Association 141, no. 2 (2016): 335–402. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02690403.2016.1216045.
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ABSTRACTDrawing on the tradition of Formenlehre, this article puts forward a methodological historicism as a means of mediating between the disciplinary expectations of musical analysis, on the one hand, and philosophical aesthetics, on the other. Stylistic developments in the later music of Frank Bridge, perhaps British music's best claim to a high modernist of the generation of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, are illuminated by means of Theodor W. Adorno's notion of musical ‘reification’. A comparative analysis of the complementary modernism of Bridge's contemporary Ralph Vaughan Williams is also put forward, and a critical light shone on recent writing on British musical modernism in general.
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Ercoles, Marco. "New Music." Greek and Roman Musical Studies 7, no. 1 (March 21, 2019): 70–104. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/22129758-12341335.
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Abstract The examination of ancient historical accounts of the development of rhythmopoiia in ancient Greek music and the analysis of the main rhythmical features associated with modernist composers of the late fifth-early fourth century BC show that the actual ‘novelty’ of New Music style in this field lies in a more consistent and elaborate use of existing resources rather than in the invention of new practices (perhaps, with the only exception of warbles). Among other passages, Ar. Th. 120-2 and Tim. PMG 791.229-33 are taken into deeper consideration.
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Hubbs, Nadine. "Homophobia in Twentieth-Century Music: The Crucible of America's Sound." Daedalus 142, no. 4 (October 2013): 45–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_00237.
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Challenging notions of the composer as solitary genius and of twentieth-century homophobia as a simple destructive force, I trace a new genealogy of Coplandian tonal modernism–“America's sound” as heard in works like “Rodeo,” “Appalachian Spring,” and “Fanfare for the Common Man” – and glean new sociosexual meanings in “cryptic” modernist abstraction like that of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson's opera “Four Saints in Three Acts.” I consider gay white male tonalists collectively to highlight how shared social identities shaped production and style in musical modernism, and I recast gay composers' close-knit social/sexual/creative/professional alliances as, not sexually nepotistic cabals, but an adaptive and richly productive response to the constraints of an intensely homophobic moment. The essay underscores the pivotal role of the new hetero/homo concept in twentieth-century American culture, and of queer impetuses in American artistic modernism.
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HEILE, BJÖRN. "Darmstadt as Other: British and American Responses to Musical Modernism." Twentieth-Century Music 1, no. 2 (September 2004): 161–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1478572205000162.
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There is currently a backlash against modernism in English-language music studies. While this vogue of ‘modernism bashing’ is ostensibly based on progressive ideologies, it is dependent on a one-sided perception of musical modernism which it shares with earlier conservative disparagements. Of central importance in this respect is the ‘othering’ of musical modernism as an essentially continental European phenomenon in the ‘Anglosphere’, where it is consistently suspected of being a ‘foreign import’ – by conservative commentators in the first part of the twentieth century, just as by their ‘new-musicological’ successors at the turn of the twenty-first.The example of the Anglo-American reception of the so-called Darmstadt school, usually regarded as quintessentially modernist, demonstrates how certain partial understandings and downright prejudices are handed down. For instance, the critical commonplace of Darmstadt’s presumed obsession with such values as technical innovation, structural coherence, and a scientistic rationalization of composition says more about those who coined it – mostly American critics who were uncomfortable with the aesthetic as well as the political radicalism of Darmstadt – than about the music itself. It is often precisely this depoliticized, sanitized construction of modernism that present-day critics have attacked, apparently unaware that this has always been a misrepresentation. By thus tracing some common misapprehensions in the Anglo-American reception of musical modernism, I want to argue for a fuller recognition of modernism’s essentially dialectical nature.
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Williams, Alastair. "Modernism, Functionalism, and Tradition: The Music of Friedrich Goldmann." Tempo, no. 193 (July 1995): 27–30. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0040298200004289.
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The current reappraisal of tradition, along with an interest in a music that deals with concrete emotions and which has a direct appeal to audiences, sounds a certain resonance with the aesthetic doctrines that prevailed in the former communist bloc. A sense of history is vital to socialist politics, but the availability of a symphonic tradition to Soviet composers after a break with that heritage suggests a state of posthistoire; a condition normally associated with postmodernism. The postmodernist reappraisal of the past is anticipated by, for example, Shostakovich's complex and sometimes ironic relationship to the symphonic tradition. Conservative traditionalism in the East maintained to be a critique of high modernist principles; in the West, ironically, a turn to tradition is now put forward as an alternative to the same rationalist modernism. At the moment when the achievements of the historical avant-garde and of high modernism have become fully available to the former Eastern Europe, the former Western Europe is engaged with the reappraisal of tradition. Even where a modernist music did develop in Eastern Europe – as, for example, it did in Poland – it was followed by a move back to more traditional techniques. The consequence of this inclination is that composers such as Górecki and Pärt, who employ traditionally-based expressive languages, have shot onto centre stage. The point is that composers from the former communist bloc have already encountered many of the issues that now preoccupy some contemporary composers in the capitalist West.
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Miller, David H. "Modernist Music for Children." Journal of Musicology 37, no. 4 (2020): 488–517. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jm.2020.37.4.488.
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On several occasions in the midcentury United States, the music of Anton Webern was reimagined as music for children. In 1936 conductor and musicologist Nicolas Slonimsky published the score of Webern’s op. 10/4 on the children’s page of the Christian Science Monitor. In 1958 Webern’s op. 6/3 was featured in a New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concert, the first conducted by Leonard Bernstein. Eight years later, Webern’s Kinderstück (Children’s Piece) received its posthumous premiere at Lincoln Center, performed by a nine-year-old pianist. In each case children served as a marker of accessibility, meant to render Webern’s music more palatable to adult audiences; thus was Webern’s music subsumed within the middlebrow circulation of classical music. Although recent scholarship has considered the intersections between modernist music and middlebrow culture, Webern’s music has remained absent from these discussions. Indeed, Webern’s terse, abstract, and severe compositions might at first appear ill suited to middlebrow contexts. Yet, as these three historical moments make clear, children served as a potent rhetorical force that could be used to market even this music to a broad audience of adults.
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Drott, Eric. "Ligeti in Fluxus." Journal of Musicology 21, no. 2 (2004): 201–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jm.2004.21.2.201.
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During a brief period in the early 1960s, Fluxus, a neo-avant-garde group active in the United States, Europe, and Japan, engaged the unlikely participation of Gyorgy Ligeti. Ligeti's three contributions to Fluxus publications-the Trois Bagatelles for David Tudor (1961), Die Zukunft der Musik-eine kollektive Komposition (1961), and Poèème Symphonique for 100 metronomes (1962)-proved both compatible with and divergent from the general ideology and aesthetic of Fluxus. Central to the consideration of Ligeti's Fluxus pieces is the contentious relationship that existed between experimental and modernist branches of new music at the time. Ligeti's flirtation with more experimental forms of composition not only reflects the general dynamic of this relationship but also illuminates how Ligeti positioned himself within the field of European contemporary music ca. 1960 and in subsequent years.
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Locke, Brian. "Novák's Lucerna and the Historiographical Problem of "Czech Modernism"." Articles 26, no. 1 (December 7, 2012): 86–112. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/1013244ar.
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The opera Lucerna (premièred 1923) by the Czech composer Vitězslav Novák demonstrates the problematic position of Czech music in the historiography of the early twentieth century, since neither "avant-garde" nor "antimodernist" suffice for it as stylistic labels. A leader of Czech modernism during the fin de siècle, Novák's music embodies the aesthetic crisis his generation faced after 1918. Lucerna's score reveals a complex negotiation of multiple stylistic influences, including impressionism, folklore, and Strauss, paralleling the Czech community's hesitant acceptance of international modernism in the early interwar period. The opera's lack-lustre finale echoes the contemporaneous return to Czech traditional values, using Smetana as an anachronistic model for modernist opera.
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Head, Raymond. "Holst – Astrology and Modernism in ‘The Planets’." Tempo, no. 187 (December 1993): 15–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0040298200003247.
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The subject of modernism in early 20th-century British music is rarely examined: partly because it is often thought that British composers were not interested in the Modern Movement before World War I, and partly because in discussing Modernism (a convenient umbrella term for the whole cultural avant-garde whose components included Expressionism, Futurism, Primitivism and Surrealism) one must be prepared to engage subjects which, in this country, are normally considered Verboten. There is no doubt, for instance, that the development of the Modern Movement on the Continent was partly inspired by a widespread awareness of Theosophy, and the interest, which it encouraged, in such esoteric areas as Indian philosophy and astrology. In this article I want to look at this aspect of Modernism in relation to Gustav Hoist, and especially in The Planets (1914–16): his, and British music's, first striking testament to the Modernist outlook. The very bases of this work are Hoist's understanding of astrology, his friendships of the time, and his Theosophical upbringing.
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Faulk, Barry J. "Modernism and the Popular: Eliot's Music Halls." Modernism/modernity 8, no. 4 (2001): 603–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mod.2001.0082.
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Goody, Alex. "Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism (review)." Modernism/modernity 14, no. 4 (2007): 775–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mod.2007.0079.
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Vergo, Peter. "Art, music and the cult of modernism." Art History 26, no. 4 (September 2003): 586–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.0141-6790.2003.02604005_3.x.
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Dopp, Bonnie Jo. "Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernism (review)." Notes 64, no. 2 (2007): 288–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/not.2007.0151.
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COLLINS, SARAH. "The Composer as ‘Good European’: Musical Modernism,Amor fatiand the Cosmopolitanism of Frederick Delius." Twentieth-Century Music 12, no. 1 (January 28, 2015): 97–123. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1478572214000164.
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AbstractThis article argues that early twentieth-century debates about both musical modernism and the idea of Europe were conditioned by prevailing attitudes towards autonomy. It will challenge the current rendering of modernist autonomy as depoliticized by showing how the attribution of ‘cosmopolitan’ characteristics to the music and persona of Frederick Delius indicated both an absence of affiliation and a definitive marker of Englishness. Underpinning this argument is the idea that attending to the dialectical interplay between independence and cooperation in the notion of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ can offer a model for a renewed conception of autonomy and commitment in musical modernism. Delius’s devotion to the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, and Nietzsche's own analysis of European nihilism, will act as the backdrop to this discussion and help to suggest how both ‘Europe’ and musical modernism can be understood – via the notion of cosmopolitanism – as dispositions extending beyond their conventional geographical and historical demarcations.
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Panegyres, Konstantine. "Classical Metre and Modern Music." Greek and Roman Musical Studies 6, no. 1 (March 22, 2018): 212–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/22129758-12341319.
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Abstract This article explores the influence of Greek metre on modern music. It begins by looking at how composers and theorists debated Greek metre from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, before focusing more extensively on twentieth century and contemporary material. The article seeks to show that Greek metre for a long time played an important role in the development of Western music theory, but that in more recent times its influence has diminished. One significant development discussed is the influence of Greek metrics on musical Modernism in the early twentieth century. The article is intended as a contribution to our understanding of the reception of ancient metrics in connection with musical developments.
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Calico, Joy H. "Schoenberg's Symbolic Remigration: A Survivor from Warsaw in Postwar West Germany." Journal of Musicology 26, no. 1 (January 1, 2009): 17–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/jm.2009.26.1.17.
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Abstract Musicologists have recently begun to study a crucial component in the reconstruction of European cultural life after World War II——the remigration of displaced musicians, either in person or (adopting Marita Krauss's notion of "remigrating ideas") in the form of their music. Because composers are most significantly present in the aural materiality of their music, and because Arnold Schoenberg's name was synonymous with modernism and its persecution across Europe, his symbolic postwar reappearance via performances of his music was a powerful and problematic form of remigration. The case of Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw and the former Nazi music critic Hans Schnoor serves as a representative example. Schnoor derided Schoenberg and Survivor in a newspaper column in 1956 using the rhetoric of National Socialist journalism as part of his campaign against federal funding of musical modernism via radio and festivals. When radio journalist Fred Prieberg took him to task for this on the air, Schnoor sued for defamation. A series of lawsuits ensued in which issues of denazification and the occupying Allied forces put a distinctly West German spin on the universal postwar European themes of anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, remigration, and modernism.
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Moody, Ivan. "‘THE SPACE OF THE SOUL’: AN INTERVIEW WITH SOFIA GUBAIDULINA." Tempo 66, no. 259 (January 2012): 31–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0040298212000046.
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AbstractIn this interview Gubaidulina discusses her understanding of religion and the way in which it relates to her music, by means of symbolism and metaphor. In particular she speaks of her understanding of the Apocalypse as a book of light, greatly influenced by the writings of Fr Aleksandr Men. She talks about the symbolism of instruments in her work, notably percussion, which she sees as a way to the subconscious; her understanding of the role of modernism in music, and the way in which her work connects with this historical process; and also her use of the Fibonacci sequence. The relationship of her music to liturgy is discussed, as is the double path, apparently contradictory, of the artist who composes both liturgical and concert music. The experience of the composer during the profound changes in music during the 20th century, specifically as regards possible intersections between modernism and spirituality, are also discussed.
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Warnaby, John. "A New Left-Wing Radicalism in Contemporary German Music?" Tempo, no. 193 (July 1995): 18–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0040298200004277.
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‘Communism is dead’, crowed a recent Prime Minister, little realizing that the shaky condition of capitalism would precipitate her downfall in short order. ‘Socialist art is a phenomenon of the past’, pronounced many post-modernist critics, who equated creative expressions of radical politics with a modernist aesthetic they had already consigned to their re-interpretation of history. Yet as the developed economies totter from one crisis to the next, interspersed with stock market upheavals or corruption scandals, and the ‘new world order’ fails to materialize, a new left-wing idealism is beginning to assert itself in the work of several German composers, and the growing number of discs of their music testifies to the existence of a substantial international audience for their output. It is a movement of considerable diversity, but also genuine sophistication, for it takes account of the limitation of modernism, and is not averse to encompassing expressions of radicalism from the ‘romantic’ era, where appropriate. Thus, it does not shun post-modernism, but incorporates those features which have not been sucked into the new world chaos, or into the prevalent nostalgia, usually associated with the banner of ‘pluralism’. Above all, the new radicalism reaffirms certain fundamental truths, respected by socialism, which have been overlooked both by postmodernists and proponents of the ‘new world order’. It also asserts the importance of artistic integrity at a time when consumerism is undermining creative values.
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BARRETT, G. DOUGLAS. "Contemporary Art and the Problem of Music: Towards a Musical Contemporary Art." Twentieth-Century Music 18, no. 2 (February 15, 2021): 223–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1478572220000626.
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AbstractThis article elaborates the art-theoretical concept of ‘the contemporary’ along with formal differences between contemporary music and contemporary art. Contemporary art emerges from the radical transformations of the historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde that have led to post-conceptual art – a generic art beyond specific mediums that prioritizes discursive meaning and social process – while contemporary music struggles with its status as a non-conceptual art form that inherits its concept from aesthetic modernism and absolute music. The article also considers the category of sound art and discusses some of the ways it, too, is at odds with contemporary art's generic and post-conceptual condition. I argue that, despite their respective claims to contemporaneity, neither sound art nor contemporary music is contemporary in the historical sense of the term articulated in art theory. As an alternative to these categories, I propose ‘musical contemporary art’ to describe practices that depart in consequential ways from new/contemporary music and sound art.
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Macenka, Svitlana. "Music as Metaphor and Music Metaphors in Belles-Lettres and Scientific Music-Literary Discourse." Pitannâ lìteraturoznavstva, no. 101 (July 9, 2020): 88–108. http://dx.doi.org/10.31861/pytlit2020.101.088.
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In view of the importance of music as metaphor in the famous works of German literature (Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, Hermann Hesse's The Bead Game) and with reference to numerous statements made by the authors about music as an important element of their creativity, the article offers insight into the advantages of metaphorical approach to the analysis of music in literature as one that is productive and compatible with intermediality. As some Germanic literary studies papers attest, the proponents of metaphorical understanding of the interaction between literature and music (e.g. English modernist literature researcher Sarah Fekadu, Hermann Hesse's scholar Julia Moritz, theoretician of literature and jazz relations Erik Redling) rely on leading concepts about metaphor (those by Wilhelm Köller, Hans Blumenberg, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson) to substantiate the specific idea of musicality behind literary text. In particular, J. Moritz suggests that the musicality of a literary text should be perceived as metaphor which enables different ideas, depending on context or literary phenomena. Music and literature in this case form a completely different link, in which not the forms of art themselves but the perceptions of them are transformed in such a way as to create a new image which reveals a specific quality of literary text. It is emphasized that the metaphorical model helps solve the dilemma of whether “real” music can be found in literature as we no longer speak of such medium as “music” but of musicality as a specific quality of literature. That is why, literature which possesses musicality does not need to give up its essence to imitate music. The interdisciplinary character of the metaphorical understanding of music is also discussed and exemplified by current music studies papers which study literature. Music studies scholars do not deny the interaction between the two sign systems – music and literature. Thus, Christian Thorau claims that metaphorical calling is the calling of “contrastive exemplification”, figurative and sensual calling of common and different qualities. Semiotic prospect maintains sensibility where heterogeneous sign constellations (for instance, painting and music but also music and verbalized text) produce the moment of conflict through different sign forms regardless of the strength of semantic compatibility or difference. Within the semiotic mode this conflict may be studied as cross-modal metaphorism.
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Tenzer, Michael. "One Fusion Among Many: Merging Bali, India, and the West through Modernism." Circuit 21, no. 2 (July 21, 2011): 77–100. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/1005274ar.
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The relationship between world music traditions and modernist art music in the European tradition is often explored in composers’ musical fusions, but the motivations and aesthetics of such works often receive less notice than those grounded in post-modern (minimalist, popular music) approaches. In this essay the author asserts a particular relationship between rigorous modern composition technique and the highly rational patterning of Indonesian and Indian music, and follow this with analysis of Unstable Centre/Puser Belah (2003) a work composed for two simultaneous Balinese gamelan. The analysis demonstrates fusion at detailed levels of pattern and structure, but the article closes with a self-critical assessment of the venture.
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PIERSON, MARCELLE. "Voice,Technē, andJouissanceinMusic for 18 Musicians." Twentieth-Century Music 13, no. 1 (March 2016): 25–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s147857221500016x.
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AbstractIn this article, I propose that Steve Reich takes on the voice as a problem, and that his solutions to this problem are manifold, informing – perhaps driving – works from across his oeuvre. A close reading of his music and commentary indicates that he is motivated by reinvigorating what I call the ‘vocal imaginary’ of Western classical music, or the connection between melody, voice, and human presence. My argument unfolds in four parts. First, I read closely Reich's writings and interviews that illuminate this problem. Second, I turn an analytic lens on two works composed before and afterMusic for 18 Musicians, respectively –It's Gonna RainandTehillim– to see how it plays out in music. Third, I focus on a close reading ofMusic for 18 Musicians. Finally, I close with some thoughts about how Reich's relationship with the voice might complicate his professed relationship with modernism, calling into question his adversarial stance vis-à-vis modernist practice.
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FORKERT, ANNIKA. "Magical Serialism: Modernist Enchantment in Elisabeth Lutyens's O Saisons, O Châteaux!" Twentieth-Century Music 14, no. 2 (June 2017): 271–303. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1478572217000238.
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AbstractElisabeth Lutyens's music of the 1940s and 1950s provides one important, but frequently overlooked, link between British music and modernism before the so-called Manchester School. I argue that the main reason that the composer and her music have not yet received much attention is that early twentieth-century modernism, as it is commonly understood, has been gendered masculine. This article engages with the composition, texts, and reception of Lutyens's 1946 cantata O saisons, ô châteaux! in the context of other Lutyens pieces in order to argue that the composer sought to transcend what she perceived as a complex of disadvantages in the reception of her music (both regarding her gender and composition technique): the Cantata is an essentially melodic piece of ‘magical serialism’. Rather than ‘taming’ or ‘feminizing’ her serial music, Lutyens thus carves out a place for herself as Arthur Rimbaud's magician, reflecting on the set text of O saisons, ô châteaux! and anticipating her later ‘credo’, in which she declares her music's allegiance with secret science rather than note counting or personal branding.
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MUNDYE, CHARLES. "‘Motz el Son’: Pound’s musical modernism and the interpretation of medieval song." Cambridge Opera Journal 20, no. 1 (March 2008): 53–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0954586708002401.
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ABSTRACTThe article explores an interdisciplinary conjunction of music, literature and modernism. I examine the relationship between aspects of early music scholarship and modernism, with specific reference to Ezra Pound’s critical and editorial work on medieval song, and to the composition, in the 1920s, of his modernist opera Le Testament. This analysis places Pound’s work as editor and composer not only in the context of recent critical reflections on the idea of authenticity, but also in relation to the histories and methodologies of medieval music interpretation. First, in drawing attention to Pound’s much–neglected collaborative edition of medieval songs entitled Hesternae Rosae, I contextualise his experiments in rhythmic reconstruction with reference to early and late twentieth-century musicologists working in this field. I make particular reference to the work of Pierre Aubry and rhythmic mode theory, and the later perspectives of Hendrik van der Werf. Secondly, I proceed to analyse Pound’s monophonic and dance song compositions in Le Testament, exploring the way in which serious medieval musicological scholarship prepared for, and is allied to, the development of a rhythmically and dramatically complex musical style.
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REYLAND, NICHOLAS. "The Spaces of Dream: Lutosławski's Modernist Heterotopias." Twentieth-Century Music 12, no. 1 (January 28, 2015): 37–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1478572214000152.
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AbstractThis article offers a revisionist perspective on the contested notion of Witold Lutosławski's authenticity as a modernist composer. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to musicology's increasingly nuanced narration of the story of musical modernism. The case is argued partly by relating Lutosławski's output to broader traditions in twentieth-century modernism, including musical representations of alienation, loss, violence, and nostalgia. Crucially, however, it is also argued by interpreting the more conventionally gratifying aspects of his pieces as something other than a hedonistic cop out. Adapting ideas from Michel Foucault, such passages are deemedheterotopianin function and interpreted in a wider-ranging sociohistorical context including Poland's responses to modernism and to Soviet Cold War oppression. The article's other main objective, therefore, is to interpret as heterotopian (and thus alternatively authentic) the expressive, structural and symbolic functions of passages in Lutosławski's works, thereby introducing Foucault's little-known idea to a wider audience of music scholars – given the concept's potential to contribute to critical explorations of a much wider diversity of musical texts and phenomena. Analysis of Lutosławski'sLes espaces du sommeilfor baritone and orchestra (1975) interconnects these strands.
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van Niekerk, Retha. "Modernism, post-modernism and music videos. A reading ofAmerican Dream." Communicatio 18, no. 1 (January 1992): 36–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02500169208537778.
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Beckwith, John. "The Present State of Unpopular Music." Essay 27, no. 2 (September 13, 2012): 8–18. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/1013110ar.
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When asked, "what kind of music do you write?" the late composer Harry Somers always replied "unpopular music." Whatever it is called, the category has undergone marked changes recently. SOCAN's 1992 transference of control from its "classical" wing to its commercial sector was, for the Canadian musical scene, a historic indicator of change. The death of modernism has become a critical cliché. Recent studies declare the end of "classical" music cultivation in the U.S.A. Composers are enjoined to conform to the vocabulary of U.S. pop. A simplified and meditative popular approach is espoused by some, notably (in Canada) Christos Hatzis. Despite signs of decline, a minority consumership for new "unpopular" works of diverse kinds remains strong. For a marginalized Canadian, local communication is genuine, and small is beautiful.
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Mukherjee, Anoosua. "Reconsidering the Composer-Educator in Postwar America." Journal of Historical Research in Music Education 40, no. 2 (December 8, 2017): 170–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1536600617743012.
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By the middle of the twentieth century, American universities had evolved into powerful institutions with aggressive cultural agendas. Renewed interest in the arts provided a platform for composers employed by these universities to grow into powerful civic leaders. This article investigates the contributions of four modernist composers—Walter Piston, Roger Sessions, William Schuman, and David Diamond,—who held academic and administrative posts at Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Juilliard School of Music. During this period, these four composers used their academic positions to shape American classical music culture—not through their compositions—but by overhauling music departments, authoring textbooks, and extending the reach of universities and conservatories far beyond the campus walls. This project relies on primary and secondary sources, weaving together academic records, administrative reports, and composer correspondence into a narrative of educational reform, cultural patronage, and even urban renewal. This article endeavors to widen the historiographic focus on postwar composers like the Four to reconsider their relevance as music educators, cultural authorities, and practitioners of modernism outside of the concert hall.
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Riccardi, Ricky. ""You've got to appreciate all kinds of music"." Journal of Jazz Studies 10, no. 1 (August 29, 2014): 78. http://dx.doi.org/10.14713/jjs.v10i1.80.
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Bye, Antony. "Carter's ‘Classic’ Modernism." Tempo, no. 189 (June 1994): 2–5. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0040298200003417.
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In a recent interview Elliott Carter reaffirmed his commitment to ‘modernism’, a concept which he went on to define – with respect to music – as ‘the concern with an expanded vocabulary which Stravinsky, Varése and Schoenberg introduced before the first world war – and after’. This ‘expanded vocabulary’ involved ‘Not only the whole field of dissonance, but also new points of view about rhythm and new sonorities’. Carter's musical modernism was also bound up with an awareness ‘that we were living in a world… completely changed by the writings of Freud’ and that ‘the whole sense of the subconscious and the conscious were much more intricately involved that we had thought’.
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Frisch, W. "Reger's Historicist Modernism." Musical Quarterly 87, no. 4 (January 1, 2004): 732–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/musqtl/gdh024.
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Hailey, Christopher. "Franz Schreker and the Pluralities of Modernism." Tempo, no. 219 (January 2002): 2–7. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0040298200008810.
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Vienna's credentials as a cradle of modernism are too familiar to need rehearsing. Freud, Kraus, Schnitzler, Musil, Wittgenstein, Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka conjure up a world at once iridescent and lowering, voluptuously self-indulgent and coolly analytical. Arnold Schoenberg has been accorded pride of place as Vienna's quintessential musical modernist who confronted the crisis of language and meaning by emancipating dissonance and, a decade later, installing a new serial order. It is a tidy narrative and one largely established in the years after the Second World War by a generation of students and disciples intent upon reasserting disrupted continuities. That such continuities never existed is beside the point; it was a useful and, for its time, productive revision of history because it was fuelled by the excitement of discovery.