The ‘Beautiful’ in Music Today

Tempo ◽  
1980 ◽  
pp. 20-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helmut Lachenmann
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
Temporal Experience ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Pierre Boulez ◽  
Promised Land ◽  
Value Judgements ◽  
The Aesthetic

In 1948, Pierre Boulez ended one of his articles thus: ‘I have a horror of dealing in words with what is so prettily called the aesthetic problem. Besides, I don't want to make this article any longer; I prefer to turn back to my MS paper.’That attitude was to become characteristic of young avant-garde composers in the 1950's. A new world of sonic and temporal experience had been sighted from the standpoint of Webern's serial technique—a world centred on the organization of sound-material. Amid the bustle of striking camp and heading for the new Promised Land, the question of Beauty was not merely out of place; it was downright suspect. For it involved those criteria and taboos, value judgements and ideals, on whose ruins everyone was then standing. And yet—as Boulez's pronouncement show—a belief in the possibility of proceeding (yet again!) from neutral ‘sound-values’ involved a secret dialectic with the aesthetic considerations that had ostensibly been excluded from the discussion.

scholarly journals Constructing the Monk: Francis Poulenc and the Post-War Context

2013 ◽  
Vol 32 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 203-230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Moore
Keyword(s):  
Olivier Messiaen ◽  
Entire Body ◽  
Francis Poulenc ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Pierre Boulez ◽  
Compositional Language ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Work Up ◽  
Second World

Following the Second World War Francis Poulenc took a keen interest in the music of the French avant-garde and was compelled to react in both his music and his writings to the aesthetic and technical experiments of the younger generation. Although the music of composers like Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez did not elicit a profound change on the substance of Poulenc’s compositional language, he did grow to the realization that the style he had embraced during the interwar period—one generally described as light-hearted and ironic—had become largely out of sync with new critical trends and concerns. Poulenc’s self-conscious aim to assert a personal form of “seriousness” in his works—one constructed with recourse to religiosity, stylistic homogeneity and the ostensibly concomitant values of sincerity and authenticity—formed the backbone of a new tone and persona that emerged following the war and which inflected his entire body of work up to his death in 1963. Poulenc’s desire to reinvent himself during this period forces us to re-examine his works, writings, and elements of his biography for the way in which they were constructed as a means of facilitating the discursive emergence of this new, more “serious,” persona.

scholarly journals a vital past

2021 ◽  
pp. 67-67
Author(s):  
Elena Grigoryeva ◽  
Konstantin Lidin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Family Relations ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past ◽  
Special Meaning ◽  
Design And Construction

We lived and lived. But then, whoops!We found ourselves in other times…Timur Shaov. “Other times (listening to Galich once again)”Crises shaking our reality in the last decades happen so often that they overlap each other like roof tiles. Linear development of the second half of the twentieth century gave way to the era of cardinal changes. While building a new world, we strongly feel the need to preserve and comprehend the past. It is possible to understand the new only in comparison with the past. The disappearing world that consists of separate, isolated and selfcontained fragments is embodied in monuments of architecture. Images, techniques and practices of design and construction acquire a special meaning and new relevance in these new times. Wooden architecture of Siberia and stone merchant houses in Yalutorovsk, ancient churches and Leonidov’s avant-garde project, ruins of Stalin’s camps and the Korean Garden in Irkutsk are elements of the past that we need to understand the present. Protesting against the unification of tastes, breach of family relations and destruction of traditions, glocalization is on the rise.

Theoretical Problems of Soviet Underground Culture

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Lipovetsky ◽  
Tomáš Glanc ◽  
Maria Engström ◽  
Ilja Kukuj ◽  
Klavdia Smola
Keyword(s):  
Communicative Practices ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Central Focus ◽  
Cultural Phenomenon ◽  
Relational Art ◽  
Theoretical Hypothesis ◽  
Historical Specificity ◽  
The Aesthetic

This article presents a spectrum of theoretical problems associated with the Soviet artistic underground as a historical and cultural phenomenon. The central focus is on constellating issues of terminology and definition around the borders of underground culture in the USSR, within scholarship about it. As a theoretical hypothesis of the handbook, the chapter introduces the concept of the lifeworld, which the volume editors and contributors interpret as a synthetic multimedia nexus of a given nonconformist circle’s activities, both artistic and cultural. The underground lifeworld manifests the aesthetic discourse idiosyncratic for each artistic circle and serves as the source of semi-spontaneous “relational art” that absorbs and generates artworks, along with performative and communicative practices. Through the concept of the aestheticized lifeworld, the authors of this article define the historical specificity of the Soviet artistic underground in relation to the Russian historical avant-garde and Western neo-avant-garde.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 522-538
Author(s):  
Jonathan Walley
Keyword(s):  
Avant Garde ◽  
Medium Specificity ◽  
Expanded Cinema ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Experimental Films

The conclusion argues that while expanded cinema might seem radically opposed to conventional, popular, and mainstream cinema, it nonetheless attempts to articulate and specify the aesthetic qualities that define all cinema. This parallels a trait of conventionally made avant-garde/experimental films; the assertion of cinema’s nature and essences, which constitute all forms of cinema regardless of how different one kind of film appears from another. The conclusion also draws upon the notions of the “essentially cinematic” explored across the book to counter theoretical arguments against such specificity positions (e.g. medium specificity) that have been advanced by critics and scholars in the worlds of cinema and art. The conclusion argues that these anti-specificity positions are overly simplistic, and that expanded cinema represents a more nuanced and sophisticated notion of what a medium specific theory—or work of cinema—can be.

Boulez, Pierre (1925-2016)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Goldman
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Personal Development ◽  
Work Of Art ◽  
Going Public ◽  
Concert Music ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Central Concern ◽  
Pierre Boulez ◽  
History Of ◽  
Listening Habits

French composer Pierre Boulez was one of the most influential composers of the second half of the twentieth century. His personal development mirrored the history of Western concert music. An essential figure in the history of artistic modernism, he was perceived as a leader of the musical avant-garde since 1945. In addition, through his international career as a conductor, he sought to change the listening habits of the concert-going public by initiating them, through concerts and recordings, into the classics of modernism from the first half of the twentieth century (Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, Bartók, Berg, etc.). From serialism, open forms, the interface between instrument and machine, the concern with perceptibility, Boulez’s catalog forms a rich and varied corpus. Although Boulez dispensed with total serialism after a brief but decisive period, his concern with the formal unity of a work of art remained a central concern throughout his career.

Secessionist Movement

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Fine Art ◽  
Art Nouveau ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Secessionist Movement ◽  
Applied Arts ◽  
Modern Movement

The Secessionist Movement is the name applied to a range of artistic splinter groups that began to emerge in the 1890s. Objecting to what they saw as the inherent conservatism of established academies, these groups ‘seceded’ or broke away from their parent institutions and launched their own, avant-garde approach. The first secessionist group appeared in Munich in 1892 under the leadership of Franz von Stuck and Wilhelm Trübner. Among the most influential secessionist groups was that founded in Vienna by a coalition of artists, architects and designers who resigned from the Association of Austrian Artists in 1897. United by the urge to elevate the applied arts to the status of fine art, members of the Vienna Secession produced exquisite work across a spectrum of creative disciplines. The aesthetic initially resembled the curvilinear Art Nouveau style, but it increasingly moved towards abstraction and geometric simplicity. The founding of the Vienna Secession thus marked the beginning of a new artistic era in Austria and heralded the birth of the Modern Movement.

Widersprüchliche Optionen: Stationen der Künste 1913

2013 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Asendorf
Keyword(s):  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Rich ◽  
The Aesthetic

AbstractApart from their rather coincidental origin year, 1913, there is no apparent connection between a monument like the “Völkerschlachtdenkmal” in Leipzig (“Monument to the Battle of the Nations”) and the aesthetic manifestations of the avant-garde. These artistic expressions oscillate between opposite poles: weakness and desire for stability, refinement and primitivism, immanence and transcendence. It might be assumed that precisely these contradictory impulses lie at the heart of the rich and widely influential artistic outcome of this pre-war year.

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