The Choreomusical Page-to-Stage Approach: Visual Representations of Musical Modernism Through the Works of Igor Stravinsky and George Balanchine

<p>The musical developments of the Modernist period provided a new understanding and approach to composition. These developments are also seen in ballet, branching into several styles, with many choreographers providing their unique take to staging musical works. In this study, the modernist choreomusical relationship is examined with respect to the possibility of a page-to-stage approach in dance. This thesis examines how this approach is manifested in the complex relationships between the composer, and the choreographer. Drawing on nine examples of modernist era ballets categorised in to three styles (classical, neoclassical, and contemporary ballets), discussion of historical context, analysis of the musical and choreographic relationship, and other ideas surrounding adapting music for a visual medium are explored. This thesis also examines changing attitudes to music/dance relationships. Two lines of enquiry are followed, the first assesses, through the example of Stravinsky, Balanchine, and several other contemporaries, whether a page-to-stage approach exists for ballet. A supplementary enquiry explores how such an approach is manifested within different methods of choreography. This study finds that there are difficulties in applying the choreomusical page-to-stage approach to analysing changing attitudes to music/dance relationships. At another level, this study points to the benefit of incorporating the concept of diegesis in analysing the changing attitudes to music/dance relationships.</p>

The Choreomusical Page-to-Stage Approach: Visual Representations of Musical Modernism Through the Works of Igor Stravinsky and George Balanchine

<p>The musical developments of the Modernist period provided a new understanding and approach to composition. These developments are also seen in ballet, branching into several styles, with many choreographers providing their unique take to staging musical works. In this study, the modernist choreomusical relationship is examined with respect to the possibility of a page-to-stage approach in dance. This thesis examines how this approach is manifested in the complex relationships between the composer, and the choreographer. Drawing on nine examples of modernist era ballets categorised in to three styles (classical, neoclassical, and contemporary ballets), discussion of historical context, analysis of the musical and choreographic relationship, and other ideas surrounding adapting music for a visual medium are explored. This thesis also examines changing attitudes to music/dance relationships. Two lines of enquiry are followed, the first assesses, through the example of Stravinsky, Balanchine, and several other contemporaries, whether a page-to-stage approach exists for ballet. A supplementary enquiry explores how such an approach is manifested within different methods of choreography. This study finds that there are difficulties in applying the choreomusical page-to-stage approach to analysing changing attitudes to music/dance relationships. At another level, this study points to the benefit of incorporating the concept of diegesis in analysing the changing attitudes to music/dance relationships.</p>

Inter-artistic theory of modernism: reflections on the book by Elena Korchova "Musical modernism as terra cognita"

The purpose of the article is to analyze the theoretical aspect of the concept of musical modernism O. Korchova, to identify debatable aspects important for the creation of the inter-artistic theory of modernism. Methodology: used historical, cultural, and comparative methods, with the involvement of philosophy and psychology. The scientific novelty of the study is that the musicological concept of modernism is compared with the literary, which proves the need to create an inter-artistic theory of modernism, necessary in the practice of stylistic analysis of modernist works. Conclusions. An important achievement of O. Korchova's research is the search for a "stylistic formula" of each composer of the epoch. The artist is looking not just for a consonant style or form, but for himself and his style. Individual style does not arise from simple combinations of borrowed. Styles of modernism conflict with each other, to combine them, to avoid eclecticism, you need to find a way and a reason to combine. The way to find your style is never purely artistic, it is always vital. Modernists, putting art in the first place in aesthetics, discovered the concept of life creation, which distinguishes the modernist from the artists of previous eras. Life-creation is a special way of an artist into art, movement simultaneously in two dimensions, external and internal, their constant coordination and gradual transformation of oneself, with life and works together, into a cultural phenomenon. And if this happened - then something unique was formed, unique, completely individual, and at the same time universal, something original and holistic, something that will become a value for contemporaries and descendants, that is, the author's style. Just as it is not easy for every artist to find his style, so it is not easy for a researcher to find a formula for this style. But without such a goal, the study of creativity will be historiographical, descriptive, and rhetorical. It is important for every scholar who studies specific texts of culture to understand the trends of the era and the psychology of the creative process, all the laws that unite.

A Loose Affiliation of Alleluias

This article is written from our perspectives as a performer and a composer, focusing on our violin concerto, “a loose affiliation of alleluias”, which we created and premiered in 2019. Making this concerto was an exercise in excavating the material histories that guide our creative practice. Our purpose in doing so was to work towards a clear and necessarily complex appraisal of how our current practices are motivated by, and reproduce, historically-determined knowledge, authority, and cultural attitudes. We think through our own reproductions of historical knowledge via Ben Spatz’s exegesis of “technique”, and via Edward Said’s notion of “affiliations” as the networks which build up cultural associations and cultural authority. With this theoretical frame, we contextualize some of the musical techniques and tropes engaged in our concerto—for instance polyphony, ornamentation, and the concerto soloist as heroic subject. We contextualize our reflections next to critical positions staked circumscribed by what Ben Piekut calls “elite avantgardism”—an analytical category which we see ourselves as operating within. We discuss, for instance, the critical gestures of musical modernism which (per Adorno’s analysis) conspicuously arrest and negate historical musical grammars and logics – and yet continue to reproduce its structuring values. In our concluding statements we gesture towards some of the pedagogical implications of this work, considering how creative practice can be leveraged to re-appraise the histories shaping our practices of composition, improvisation, and performance.

Review of Broken Beauty: Musical Modernism and the Representation of Disability by Joseph N. Straus

No abstract available.

Introduction

During Alban Berg’s lifetime, Vienna witnessed a change in the outlook for modern music from optimism to pessimism. In the later nineteenth century music flourished in Vienna, supported by a devoted middle-class audience, the talent of the city’s many Jewish musicians, the stimulus provided by other arts, and a general optimism about the future. A pronounced division in musical taste existed in Vienna between conservatives and progressives. The latter developed a controversial harmonic style associated with modernism that came to be termed “atonality.” The collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy and the turbulent aftermath to World War I signaled an end to tolerance for musical modernism.

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

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.