2. Triggering Musical Modernism in China: The Work of Wolfgang Fraenkel in Shanghai Exile

2021 ◽  
pp. 167-194
Keyword(s):  
Musical Modernism

Broken Beauty

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Straus
Keyword(s):  
Music Theory ◽  
Valuable Resource ◽  
Mobility Impairment ◽  
Attitudes Toward Disability ◽  
The Core ◽  
Musical Representations ◽  
Dialectical Relationship ◽  
Musical Modernism ◽  
Characteristic Features ◽  
Cultural Constructions

Modernist music is centrally concerned with the representation and narration of disability. The most characteristic features of musical modernism—fractured forms, immobilized harmonies, conflicting textural layers, radical simplification of means in some cases, and radical complexity and hermeticism in others—can be understood as musical representations of disability conditions, including deformity/disfigurement, mobility impairment, madness, idiocy, and autism. Modernist musical representation and narration of disability both reflect and shape (construct) disability in a eugenic age, a period when disability was viewed simultaneously with pity (and a corresponding urge toward cure or rehabilitation) and fear (and a corresponding urge to incarcerate or eliminate). Disability is right at the core of musical modernism; it is one of the things that musical modernism is fundamentally about. This book draws on two decades of work in disability studies and a growing body of recent work that brings the discussion of disability into musicology and music theory. This interdisciplinary enterprise offers a sociopolitical analysis of disability, focusing on social and cultural constructions of the meaning of disability, and shifting attention from biology and medicine to culture. Within modernist music, disability representations often embody pernicious stereotypes and encourage sentimentalizing, exoticizing, or more directly negative responses. Modernist music claims disability as a valuable resource, but does so in a tense, dialectical relationship with medicalized, eugenic-era attitudes toward disability.

Idiocy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph N. Straus
Keyword(s):  
Modernist Literature ◽  
Holy Fool ◽  
Musical Representations ◽  
Natural Man ◽  
Musical Modernism ◽  
The Village ◽  
Music Representations ◽  
Deep Interest

Idiocy, once understood as a mark of divine disfavor, is later medicalized under a variety of seemingly scientific classifications, culminating in a eugenic-era fear of the “menace of the feebleminded” and the widespread institutionalization to which it gave rise. In literature and in music, representations of idiocy have generally fallen into a small number of types: the Holy Fool and the Sentimental Idiot; the Wild Child and the Natural Man; the Village Idiot (often played for laughs); and the Eugenic Idiot (simultaneously pitiable and a feared source of violence, possibly sexual in nature). Modernist music represents idiocy in its tendency toward simplification in all domains; its static, nondevelopmental character; its deliberate cultivation of disfluency and inarticulateness; its interest in generic incongruity; its pleasure in low humor; and above all its deep interest in the childlike, the folk, and the primitive (including the racial primitive). As in modernist literature, musical representations of idiocy enable the sorts of compositional innovations that are widely understood as defining musical modernism.

Madness

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph N. Straus
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Medical Model ◽  
Affective States ◽  
Sociocultural Model ◽  
Human Difference ◽  
Divine Punishment ◽  
Musical Modernism

The sorts of mental or affective states that are understood as madness (or medicalized as “mental illness”) vary with time and place. As with other culturally stigmatized bodily differences (i.e., disabilities), madness has been understood in three ways. First, madness has been understood in religious terms, as a mark of divine punishment or transcendent vision. Second, there is the medical model, which constitutes madness as “mental illness.” Third, in line with the sociocultural model of disability, madness is seen as a (potentially valuable) human difference rather than a deficit, pathology, or disease. Musical modernism represents madness in its divided consciousness (stratification into conflicting layers) and its hearing of voices (quotation of stylistically incongruous music).

Saving Abstraction

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ryan Dohoney
Keyword(s):  
Altered States ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Spiritual Orientation ◽  
Late Modernity ◽  
Religious Feeling ◽  
Religious Sensibility ◽  
History Of ◽  
Spiritual Intervention ◽  
Musical Modernism

Saving Abstraction takes up the conflicted history of Morton Feldman’s most important collaboration—his work with Dominique and John de Menil on music for the Rothko Chapel in Houston. These collaborators struggled over fundamental questions about the emotional efficacy of artistic practice and its potential translation into religious feeling. At the center of this study is the question of ecumenism—that is, in what terms can religious encounters be staged for fruitful dialog to take place? And how might abstraction (both visual and musical) be useful to achieving it? This was a dilemma for Feldman, whose music sought to produce sublime “abstract experience,” as well as for the de Menils, who envisioned the Rothko Chapel as a space for spiritual intervention into late modernity. Saving Abstraction develops two central concepts: “abstract ecumenism” and “agonistic universalism.” The former characterizes a broad spiritual orientation within postwar musical modernism and experimentalism that aspired to altered states of ego-loss. This emerged as a renewed religious sensibility in late modernist experimentalism. The latter concept describes the particular religious form that Feldman’s music achieves within Rothko Chapel—an ascetic mode of existence that endures hopefully the aporia of postwar modernization’s destructiveness and modernism’s failure to effectively counter it.

scholarly journals Voices of earthmen (1995) by Vladan Radovanovic: A review

Muzikologija ◽  
2007 ◽  
pp. 295-302
Author(s):  
Marija Masnikosa
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Rigid System ◽  
Compositional Technique ◽  
Musical Modernism

This paper discusses the compositional technique and the poetic level of the composition Glasovi Zemljana (Voices of Earthmen) composed by Vladan Radovanovic in 1995. The work is based on the composer?s own musical principle, which he called hyperpoliphony, established in his early work Polyphony No. 9, and applied in his entire musical opus to date. The composition contains three movements, although the disposition of each section implies integration at a higher level of its structure, enabling us to interpret this work as an organic, textually unified three-part whole. Even though so-called hyperpolyphony creates and pervades the whole composition, this music is not the outcome of some rigid system. It breathes and it has its own ?warm? and even ?confessing? sections, especially in the unexpected instrumental and vocal ?solo-episodes?. Although this work was composed in an age of musical postmodernism, and shows a very strong imprint of musical expressionism, its atonality and very specific modernist musical technique define it as a modernist work, which places it in the huge trajectory of musical modernism of the second half of the twentieth century.

scholarly journals On the Paths of Béla Bartók’s Modernism Followers and Companions: Josip Slavenski and Marko Tajčević

2016 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-40
Author(s):  
Katarina Tomašević
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Former Yugoslavia ◽  
Musical Modernism

The main aim of this paper is to re-examine the modalities of Béla Bartók’s influence as a composer during the first half of the 20th century to the main, dominantly “nationally oriented style” in the former Yugoslavia, focusing on two of Bartók’s somewhat younger contemporaries – the composers Josip Slavenski (1896–1955) and Marko Tajčević (1900–1984), prominent representatives of European interwar musical modernism.

Music, metaphor and modernism: Barrie Gavin’s composer portraits

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Venn
Keyword(s):  
Half Century ◽  
Treasure Trove ◽  
The Past ◽  
Visual Metaphors ◽  
Musical Modernism

The Royal Philharmonic Society has described the series of composer portraits created by Barrie Gavin as ‘an unprecedented legacy and treasure trove for musicians and curious listeners alike to discover’. These profiles are characterized by their commitment to music of living composers, but also to a repertoire that has become increasingly marginalized in arts coverage in the half century or so since Gavin’s first portrait. This article examines Gavin’s contribution to the filmic presentation of musical modernism of the past 50 years and, in particular, explores his use of creative visual metaphors as a tool for interpretation.

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