The Modernist Legacy: Essays on New Music

Björn Heile

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351542401
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica

This collection of essays offers a historical reappraisal of what musical modernism was, and what its potential for the present and future could be. It thus moves away from the binary oppositions that have beset twentieth-century music studies in the past, such as those between modernism and postmodernism, between conceptions of musical autonomy and of cultural contingency and between formalist-analytical and cultural-historical approaches. Focussing particularly on music from the 1970s to the 1990s, the volume assembles approaches from different perspectives to new music with a particular emphasis on a critical reassessment of the meaning and function of the legacy of musical modernism. The authors include scholars, musicologists and composers who combine culturally, socially, historically and aesthetically oriented approaches with analytical methods in imaginative ways.

PART I

New Music, Social Debates and the Aesthetics of Critical Modernism

Chapter 1

Modernism’s Moment of Plenitude

Andrew Timms

This chapter addresses one aspect of the way in which modernism is currently being received by some musicologists and critics. I do not have in mind here the specifically critical side of modernism, by which I mean its supposed identification with various types of formalism, positivism and rationality;¹ these claims require – and will one day hopefully receive – a thorough and final critique. Instead, I should like to concentrate on the reception of what one might call creative modernism – the cultural products (often known as art) that are identified as modernist. For scholars of the visual and written arts, the word modernism used in this sense is inherently colourful and enticing: modernism denotes some of the most exciting and indeed popular art on offer from the late nineteenth century until around the mid-point of the twentieth. For many musicologists, however, modernism now signals something much greyer and altogether more ominous. Put simply, modernism is still too readily associated with one particular aspect of music – namely, atonality. Of course, to cast the situation in these terms is obviously to generalize to some extent, and to point as much towards an atmosphere that persists in corridors and seminar rooms than to actual musicological publications. However, substantial evidence of such thinking is not difficult to find even within musicology: a recent collection of essays entitled Reviving the Muse: Music after Modernism roundly attacks modernism, which is here closely linked to Schoenbergian atonality and serialism, in the harshest of terms; Schoenberg is rejected in one of these shocking essays as pathological and self-deceiving.² Even the recent and much more generous collection of essays rather strikingly entitled The Pleasure of Modernist Music does little to shake this consensus: Lloyd Whitesell, for instance, claims that common-practice tonality is, in the eyes of many, ‘a repressed, shadow image of modernism’;³ Martin Scherzinger writes intelligently of the key relationship between modernism and autonomy, but still gives little sense that modernism might be anything other than the atonal mainstream, if it indeed is a mainstream any longer.⁴ And when the book’s editor, Arved Ashby, writes on its first page that this is a book ‘about twentieth-century art music with popularity problems’, one has trouble imagining that he is writing about Shostakovich or Britten.⁵

There is little point, however, in challenging the viability of this linkage of modernism and atonality; for it has persisted not because it is or was ever felt to be an adequate reading of the historical period. On the contrary, it has become especially attractive because it allows the latter to be equated with a convenient stylistic tag, and, most important of all, viewed negatively. This reading of modernism not only falls in with the more general hostility that the term now provokes, but also effects a curious finesse: the very radicalism and aesthetic difficulty of musical modernism, features which one would expect to be central to the identification of modernism in the first place, are in fact judged to be too radical and too difficult – to have gone ‘too far, too fast’.⁶ The end result is a situation in which musical modernism is increasingly being read as some kind of historical wrong turn, underpinned by two crucial, fragile foundations: first, modernist music only won favour in a small number of vociferous critical circles. Secondly, the broader socio-historical position of this moment, in which the post-war West felt compelled to demonstrate a conclusive cultural superiority over the Communist alternative, ensured that the originally dangerous, oppositional nature of modernism – the forlorn and already much problematized hope that art might respond adequately to, if not change, the world – was increasingly neutralized by its transplantation into pseudo-scientific research paradigms which substituted pragmatic, academic progress for revolutionary change.

At least two features of this narrative deserve comment. The first is that such readings of modernism are prone to identify the term instinctively with one particular phase of the atonal years – specifically, the increasingly institutionalized high culture of the post-war years, or, as Richard Taruskin has recently called it, the ‘new patronage’.⁷ It remains striking that it is this phase of modernism that seems to have provoked more resentment and rejection than any other,⁸ and one of the causes of this resentment is obvious: for it is precisely the institutionalization of this sort of modernism, the sense in which it appeared to migrate to the universities and state-funded institutions whose official culture it thus became, that gave it the aura of power and prestige against which a later generation has felt the need to revolt.⁹ The current reception of musical modernism is heavily influenced by this situation, and a subtle deflection thus occurs, in which criticism that is really targeting a particular post-war configuration – ‘high’ modernism, as David Harvey calls it¹⁰ – ends up despatching the entire period to the dustbin. This entails an important mistake, which is that the particularity of the socio-historical backdrop to high modernism is neglected, and any sense of the way in which, say, an earlier Habsburgian modernism differed from the Cold War politics of the post-war period is lost.

The second significant aspect of this narrative is the philosophy of history projected by such readings. The history that tends to result from consideration of the ideas proposed so far is a lurid tale, and in stylistic terms the underlying generator of this narrative remains, essentially, the twists and turns of tonality as an organizing power in music. The supposedly modernist avoidance of tonality, however, is then read much further back into history to confirm that a longer process of tonal decay can be traced back towards some idealized point when tonality was somehow fresh. This model, simple though it undoubtedly is, is presented in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 A model of modern music?

So whilst equations of musical modernism with atonality project a certain synchronic logic, one which arranges other styles and movements (such as neo-classicism and surrealism) around a self-proclaimed mainstream, they also contain a not-so-secret diachronic scheme, which validates their own position at the vanguard of history. As has been remarked by Brian Hyer in his consideration of the matter in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians article on tonality, the theory of modernism that centres itself on atonality tends to project an organicist model of history based on the ‘development’ of tonality.¹¹ Proponents of such readings establish what might be termed a ‘moment of plenitude’¹² – a period when tonality reached its historical completion and perfection – from which point onwards it decays or declines before reaching atonality. What results is an almost entirely autonomous tale of evolution, one which need not be sullied by any sociohistorical pollution, and which has been much critiqued in recent years: tonality is not just the object of this history but it is frequently cast as the subject too, as if its own demands on its material are what drives the arrow of development forwards. Hyer gives an excellent example when he talks of the ‘energetic tendencies of the semitone’, which supposedly account for the mutation of tonality into atonality; it is not the composers or listeners who are cast as the agency of history in this account, but rather the in-built power of the musical material itself.¹³

This philosophy of history can be unearthed in the work of several recent writers. As we shall see, it heavily underpins Rose Subotnik’s Developing Variations, for instance, but it is a small aspect of a more striking study that I should like to consider first: Brian Etter’s From Classicism to Modernism senses the crisis in historicity that has affected art music, and writes from a perspective that grants particular significance to the divergence between an atonal modernism and the tonal mainstream.¹⁴ His point here is to distinguish between two different understandings of tonality: on one hand, naturalizing conceptions of tonality, in which it is a natural phenomenon; and on the other hand, historicizing conceptions of tonality, in which it is merely one way (amongst so many others) of ordering raw sonic material (Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Two understandings of tonality (after Etter)

Naturalistic	Historicist
Style essentially dependent on natural phenomena: overtone series	Tonality as an ordering of nature: expressive of mercantile society, and thus one historical phase amongst so many others

The urgency of the distinction is caused, of course, by the advent of atonal music, which immediately problematizes or at least questions the naturalistic models, since atonality virtually by definition will eschew the supposedly natural phenomena on which tonality is thought to be based. In itself, this might not necessarily query the correlation of tonality with nature: it might merely suggest that atonal music is unnatural; but this then must be reconciled with the historical trajectories which have been read into the late nineteenth century. Put bluntly, if one understands tonality as natural, then how does this mesh with an understanding of music history in which an evolving tonality leads inevitably into atonality? Is the moment of plenitude primed to self-destruct?

Etter rejects this because none of it accounts for what he sees as the most significant dimension of classical tonality, which is the way in which it can be aligned with conceptions of order and goodness borrowed from ethics. It is usual for classicism to be equated with notions of formal excellence, of course, but Etter’s ethical reading is more normative: classicism is construed as a period of music history in which tonality begins to function as a system which is capable of modulation as well as just tonicity. The importance of this stage of tonality’s development was not its potential for subsequent decline, but rather its simplicity and purity.¹⁵ The point of this deduction is to forge a link with classical philosophy, in which tranquillity and stability of the soul – a Stoic ideal – is opposed to the passion or emotivism of the modern world, much of it unstable and disturbing. The stability of tonality is thus used as a metaphor for Aristotle’s goal of the life of virtue: happiness.¹⁶ Mention of the term ‘goal’ is significant here, because it allows Etter to make another important contention about tonality: the latter needs to be conceived teleologically in this scheme, because the movement of music towards consonance and repose is what mirrors the pursuit of happiness. This connection between the directed order of music and happiness, defended by Etter through reference to Plato, Boethius and Cicero, makes tonality a metaphor of teleological order: it represents the nature of the cosmos and the goodness of existence in the world, all resolved into a unity.

Nowadays such contentions are most notable for their conservatism, as if nearly a hundred years’ discussion of atonality had never happened. They espouse a worldview that many would view as pre-modern: the unity of the whole is guaranteed by transcendence, whether that of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Music Examples
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: New Music and the Modernist Legacy
• Part I New Music, Social Debates and the Aesthetics of Critical Modernism
• Part II Aspects of Compositional Poetics
• Select Bibliography
• Index