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If in earlier eras music may have seemed slow to respond to advances in other artistic media, during the modernist age it asserted itself in the vanguard. Modernism and Music provides a rich selection of texts on this moment, some translated into English for the first time. It offers not only important statements by composers and critics, but also musical speculations by poets, novelists, philosophers, and others-all of which combine with Daniel Albright's extensive, interlinked commentary to place modernist music in the full context of intellectual and cultural history.
Modernist art often seems to give more frustration than pleasure to its audience. Daniel Albright shows that this perception arises partly because we usually consider each art form in isolation, rather than collaboration.
Modernism in music still arouses passions and is riven by controversies. Taking root in the early decades of the twentieth century, it achieved ideological dominance for almost three decades following the Second World War, before becoming the object of widespread critique in the last two decades of the century, both from critics and composers of a postmodern persuasion and from prominent scholars associated with the ‘new musicology’. Yet these critiques have failed to dampen its ongoing resilience. The picture of modernism has considerably broadened and diversified, and has remained a pivotal focus of debate well into the twenty-first century. This Research Companion does not seek to limit what musical modernism might be. At the same time, it resists any dilution of the term that would see its indiscriminate application to practically any and all music of a certain period. In addition to addressing issues already well established in modernist studies such as aesthetics, history, institutions, place, diaspora, cosmopolitanism, production and performance, communication technologies and the interface with postmodernism, this volume also explores topics that are less established; among them: modernism and affect, modernism and comedy, modernism versus the ‘contemporary’, and the crucial distinction between modernism in popular culture and a ‘popular modernism’, a modernism of the people. In doing so, this text seeks to define modernism in music by probing its margins as much as by restating its supposed essence.
This collection brings fresh perspectives to bear upon key questions surrounding the composition, performance and reception of musical modernism.
A collection of essays which reevaluates the significant connections between the disciplines of music, fine art and architecture in the period covering the emergence and flowering of modernism, c. 1849-1950.
Listening to instruments -- "The joy of precision" : mechanical instruments and the aesthetics of automation -- "The alchemy of tone" : Jörg Mager and electric music -- "Sonic handwriting" : media instruments and musical inscription -- "A new, perfect musical instrument" : the trautonium and electric music in the 1930s -- The expanding instrumentarium
In the first decade of the twentieth-century, many composers rejected the principles of tonality and regular beat. This signaled a dramatic challenge to the rationalist and linear conceptions of music that had existed in the West since the Renaissance. The ‘break with tonality’, Neo-Classicism, serialism, chance, minimalism and the return of the ‘sacred’ in music, are explored in this book for what they tell us about the condition of modernity. Modernity is here treated as a complex social and cultural formation, in which mythology, narrative, and the desire for ‘re-enchantment’ have not completely disappeared. Through an analysis of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Boulez and Cage, 'the author shows that the twentieth century composer often adopted an artistic personality akin to Max Weber’s religious types of the prophet and priest, ascetic and mystic. Twentieth Century Music and the Question of Modernity advances a cultural sociology of modernity and shows that twentieth century musical culture often involved the adoption of ‘apocalyptic’ temporal narratives, a commitment to ‘musical revolution’, a desire to explore the limits of noise and sound, and, finally, redemption through the rediscovery of tonality. This book is essential reading for those interested in cultural sociology, sociological theory, music history, and modernity/modernism studies.
Traditionally, ideas about twentieth-century 'modernism' - whether focused on literature, music or the visual arts - have made a distinction between 'high' art and the 'popular' arts of best-selling fiction, jazz and other forms of popular music, and commercial art of one form or another. In Modernism and Popular Music, Ronald Schleifer instead shows how the music of George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Thomas 'Fats' Waller and Billie Holiday can be considered as artistic expressions equal to those of the traditional high art practices in music and literature. Combining detailed attention to the language and aesthetics of popular music with an examination of its early twentieth-century performance and dissemination through the new technologies of the radio and phonograph, Schleifer explores the 'popularity' of popular music in order to reconsider received and seeming self-evident truths about the differences between high art and popular art and, indeed, about twentieth-century modernism altogether.
Exploring the ideas of consensus, resistance and rupture, this book contributes an important and nuanced reflection to the current debate on modernism in music.
Using an approach to music informed by T. W. Adorno, this book examines the real-world, political significance of seemingly abstracted things like musical and literary forms. Re-assessing music in James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Sylvia Townsend Warner, this book re-shapes temporal, aesthetic and political understandings of modernism, by arguing that music plays a crucial role in ongoing attempts to investigate language, rational thought and ideology using aesthetic forms.