5
1
9780226012674
By Daniel Albright
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0226012670
1 Introduction
Terms such as "modern" and "Modernism" seem to possess a certain security, even prestige, but they were long regarded with suspicion. Shakespeare used "modern" to mean commonplace-in his day, the word was uncomfortably close in meaning to "trivial." The culture of the Renaissance, like that of the eighteenth century, tended to revere the classical, the ancient; something that was modern (a word derived from modus, that is, fashion) was merely fashionable, transitory, perhaps gaudy, like an ostrich plume on a hat. To praise an excellent book, one compared it to the work of Horace or Cicero; to praise an excellent sculpture, one compared it to the work of Greek antiquity, which survived (in Roman copies) throughout Europe.
But the situation in music was a little different. Musical compositions could not be judged against models from remote antiquity. Certainly composers could evoke standards of comparison from classical Greece, as when Antoine Busnoys, in his motet In hydraulis (written before 1467), looked to Pythagoras for sanction for the polyphonic art that he, Busnoys, had inherited from Johannes Ockeghem. But no one knew what Greek music sounded like; and Busnoys could scarcely have imagined that Pythagoras, long before the birth of Christ, devised on his one-stringed lyre a music as intricate as that of the fifteenth century. From before the Renaissance until the later eighteenth century, music was usually modern. Plainchant persisted in church services; Gregorio Allegri's Miserere continued to be sung in the Vatican; the operas of Jean-Baptiste Lully held the stage long after the composer's death; but, for the most part, music meant new music. The art of music evolved so rapidly, and with such a strong general presupposition that the newer was better than the older, that the reverence for the classical, so common in other artistic media, was as much a matter of lip service as a matter of actual practice.
When, in the late nineteenth century, the artistic movement we call Modernism began, music was the artistic medium best equipped to participate, since it had always tended to assign privilege to the up to date and the novel. Music has always been the most temporally immediate of the arts, the medium most sensitive to the Now. And it is not surprising that, at the dawn of the twentieth century, music became the vanguard medium of the Modernist aesthetic.
The sudden importance of music was itself something new. For most of the history of Western art, music seemed somewhat slow to respond to advances in the other artistic media: in the words of Pierre Boulez, "we are always being told that musicians lag behind their literary rivals and colleagues." For example, scholars of literature might date the beginning of the Renaissance from the time of Dante and Petrarch, in the fourteenth century, whereas scholars of music might date the beginning of the Renaissance from the time of Guillaume Dufay, a whole century later; similarly, the Romantic movement in literature was losing impetus by the time of the deaths of E. T. A. Hoffmann (1822), Lord Byron (1824), and Jean Paul (1825), that is, approximately the moment when musical Romanticism was catching fire, in the impassioned works of Schubert, Bellini, Berlioz, and others. But in the universe of Modernism, music shook off its belatedness, and took charge.
There are many signs that music is now the instigator, not the sluggish follower. For example, in 1925 T. S. Eliot wrote The Hollow Men ("We are the stuffed men . . . Headpiece filled with straw") partly in response to the eerie energy of the marionette in Stravinsky's 1911 ballet Petrushka; and in 1947, W. H. Auden-arguably the most distinguished English poet of the generation following Eliot-wrote a letter concerning the proposed opera The Rake's Progress in which he told Stravinsky, "I need hardly say that the chance of working with you is the greatest honor of my life." But well before Eliot's or Auden's time, literary folk were starting to bow to composers. When the poet Charles Baudelaire attended, in 1861, the new version of Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser, he felt that he was hearing something that should change the evolution of literature. When the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche published his first book, in 1872, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, he prophesied that Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (1865) would inaugurate a rebirth of the Dionysiac energy that informs all artistic and intellectual achievement. In the next year, 1873, Walter Pater published The Renaissance, in which he argued that "All art constantly aspires toward the condition of music." The italics are Pater's own, and the prose style of his book, sinuously gorgeous, suggests that Pater was himself trying to write a text that sounds like music.
Already by the 1870s the prestige of the composer was so great that some poets, particularly in France, were starting to conceive themselves as surrogate composers, composers manqués: Paul Verlaine begins his "Art poétique" (1874) with the line "Before everything else, music"; and Stéphane Mallarmé writes, in "L'après-midi d'un faune" (1876),
The essays gathered in this anthology reflect a sense, not always present in the pre-Modernist world, that the composer is an important person whose words should be pondered carefully-and not just by other artists, but also by the general public. The Modernist composer is typically an intellectual-a pontificator at large, orating on the largest stages. Some of these composers took a strong interest in politics: Arnold Schoenberg, for example, wrote to a newspaper on the difficulties of writing an international hymn for peace (1928) and even wrote a play, The Biblical Way (1926-27), concerning the establishment of a Zionist homeland in Africa. Charles Ives corresponded with William Howard Taft in 1920 to gain his support for a constitutional amendment to combine presidential elections with a national referendum.
But the twentieth-century composer is rarely a crusader, and still more rarely a successful crusader: Schoenberg's play ends with the failure of the Moses figure to achieve what he worked for; and Taft brusquely dismissed Ives's plan for majoritarian rule. Typically, the composer tries to effect change in the larger culture not by direct action but by illustrating technical possibilities for advancement in the arts and letters-by exploring regions of liberation undreamed of in previous ages. The Modernist composer devises theories, theories that themselves become forms of action, forms of art. As music starts to become self-consciously smart-intricate, cerebral, generated from pre-compositional ideas-the composer starts to become engaged with every sort of intellectual activity, from philosophy to sociology; musical compositions become models for problem-solving, as if music were a species of thinking carried out by other means.
The clearest nineteenth-century prefiguration of the Modernist composer-intellectual can be found in the example of Richard Wagner: not only a political rebel who fled Germany after a warrant was issued for his arrest during the upheavals of 1848 - 49, but also a man who felt free to opine in print on every subject under the sun, such as the origins of classical Greek drama in folk art; the corruption of European culture by Jews; the relation between early Christian asceticism and Buddhist rejection of desire; the psychoacoustics of alliteration in German verse; and the role of dreaming in the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. Before Wagner's time, when composers felt impelled to write, they usually wrote treatises on harmony (Johannes Tinctoris, Jean-Philippe Rameau) or practical advice for instrumentalists (Leopold Mozart, Johann Joachim Quantz). But Wagner was an intellectual-at-large, confrontational and sometimes erudite, whose public presence was more like that of Jean-Paul Sartre than like that of a musician trying to improve performance standards.
Wagner, of course, wrote a great deal about music, but much of his speculation concerns the music of the past and the music of the future; earlier composers, by contrast, tended to be interested in questions pertinent to the immediate present-questions of writing a fugue that offends no one's ears, or of properly differentiating legato, spiccato, and staccato when playing a violin. For Wagner, music is not an art of evanescent compositions, sounds that reverberate a moment and then die away, but an art of timeless masterpieces: Wagner (and in this respect he resembles Felix Mendelssohn and Johannes Brahms) devoted much energy to rehabilitating the music of the past, by editing Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina's Stabat Mater, or by preparing a new German performing edition of Christoph Willibald Gluck's Iphigenia in Aulis. Even in the eighteenth century there were tentative signs that a canon of classic music was taking shape, immune from time's ravages: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, for example, evidently added his own adagios (K. 404a) to some fugues from J. S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, and certainly rewrote George Frideric Handel's Acis and Galatea and Messiah for the orchestra of his own time; but the nineteenth and twentieth centuries bear most of the responsibility for giving music a history, for making music more than thirty years old part of the normal experience of listening. Sometimes nineteenth- and twentieth-century composers even wrote music about music history: an early example is Louis Spohr's Sixth Symphony (1840), the Historical Symphony, which recapitulates the evolution of the art. The first movement is called the "Bach-Handel Period," the second the "Haydn-Mozart Period," the scherzo the "Beethoven Period," and the finale "The Newest of the New," a movement that sounds perhaps like the operas of Daniel François Auber; it is hard to be certain whether Spohr treats this ultra-modern stuff respectfully or sneers at it for being laboriously trivial. Nowadays we often deplore the fact that the life of the concert hall and opera house is a museum culture, in which recently written works are rarely heard; but the older sort of culture, in which concertgoers sometimes heard only recently written works, was (as Spohr tried to show) a still unhealthier situation.
If the caricature of the Romantic composer is the eccentric genius or mesmerizing satyr-Paganini or Liszt playing with fingers inhumanly long-the caricature of the Modernist composer is a sort of scientist, conducting, with scalpels of sound, research into the darkest regions of the human psyche. Schoenberg seems to join Sigmund Freud (and the painter Edvard Munch and the novelist Joseph Conrad) in a common project to map areas of feeling little explored in previous ages. The Modernist composer is considered the master of an arcane and forbidding art, like tensor calculus; as the elderly Schoenberg wrote, reviewing his career, there was a time "when everybody made believe he understood Einstein's theories and Schoenberg's music." Modernist music (according to the cartoon version) may provide exquisite pleasure to those of refined taste, who enjoy tone clusters, irregular rhythms, and bizarre timbres, but sounds intolerably shrill, aggressive, aimless, banging, to normal people who like good tunes with dominant seventh chords and clear cadences. The nineteenth-century composer always has a full head of hair, or at least a long beard; but the twentieth-century composer has the bald pate of Schoenberg or Igor Stravinsky or Sergei Prokofiev or Paul Hindemith, as well as the severe scowl of Anton Webern, appropriate for a music that seems to reject all ornament and charm in favor of research into the essence of things, the phonic equivalent of the physics of subatomic particles. The purpose of the earlier composers (speaking very roughly) was to praise: to praise God, to congratulate the Hamburg city council, to sing happy birthday to the king's eleven-year-old son, to provide cheer at the local university's commencement ceremony; the purpose of the nineteenth-century composer was to move, to make the audience shudder, weep, break out in laughter; but the purpose of the twentieth-century composer seems to be to think, to provide transcendental philosophy with fretful and opaque analogues in sound.
How much truth is there in these caricatures of Modernism? In order to answer this question, it is necessary to study its central assumption: that Modernist art is difficult.
Perhaps the classic statement of this assumption occurs in T. S. Eliot's essay "The Metaphysical Poets" (1921): "it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results." Those who discuss Modernism in music have tended to agree. The well-informed and taxonomically passionate musicologist Carl Dahlhaus, for example, argues that composers are Modernist if they are progressive:
1. Comprehensiveness and depth. Gustav Mahler's symphonies, for example, aspire to become vehicles for the transmission of universal vibrations into the domain of human perception: as he wrote concerning his Third Symphony of 1895-96, "Now think of a work so great that it actually mirrors the whole world-one is, so to speak, oneself only an instrument on which the universe plays. . . . My symphony will be something that the world has never heard! All nature finds in it a voice, and tells a deep secret, like the tinglings of a dream! I tell you, I get uncanny feelings when I look at certain passages, as if I hadn't written them." To write a symphony that comprised the whole world's music, Mahler agglomerated military fanfares, vulgar dance tunes, whirling gestures of rapture- in Terence's phrase, nothing human was alien to him. He strove for depth as well as for range. Just as Nietzsche located ultimate reality in Dionysiac rending, in which the ego is torn to pieces in order that we may glimpse the terror at the center of things, so Mahler felt possessed. In the words of his wife, "One day in the summer he came running down from his hut in a perspiration and scarcely able to breathe. At last he came out with it: it was the heat, the stillness, the Panic horror. He was often overcome by this feeling of the goat-god's frightful and ebullient eye upon him." The fourth movement of the Third Symphony is a setting of the Midnight Song from Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra, as if to honor Nietzsche as the chief modern prophet of Dionysus. At the very time when Mahler was seized by Pan, Richard Strauss was composing Also sprach Zarathustra (1896), which also climaxes on Nietzsche's vision of the soul's ultimate midnight; soon thereafter Frederick Delius began setting texts from Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra in A Mass of Life (1899-1909).
2. Semantic specificity and density. Not only did the new music of the 1890s appeal to an astonishing range of experience, but it also arrested its listeners through vividness of detail. The bleating sheep (flutter-tonguing winds) and the pair of strolling Benedictines (bassoons exchanging lines) in Don Quixote (1898) are among the most conspicuous examples of the remarkable extension of musical onomatopoeia and metaphor that Strauss achieved in this decade. It seemed possible that music could go beyond imitation to an actual embodiment of the outer world; perhaps a powerfully reified music could compete with literature and painting as a direct seizure of reality. Another form of detailed acoustic realism could be found in certain violently heterogeneous works of Charles Ives: for example, Ives created an interweaving of popular tunes in Central Park in the Dark (1906). As Ives explained, "The piece purports to be a picture-in-sounds of the sounds of nature and of happening that men would hear . . . when sitting on a bench in Central Park on a hot summer night. The strings represent the night sounds and silent darkness-interrupted by sounds (the rest of the orchestra) from the Casino over the pond-of street singers coming up from the Circle singing, in spots, the tunes of those days. . . . A street car and a street band join in the chorus."
3. Extensions and destructions of tonality. When a hostile critic said of the young Schoenberg's sextet Verklärte Nacht (1899) that "it sounds as if someone had smeared the score of Tristan while it was still wet," he provided a clever description for the Jugendstil (or art nouveau) way in which Schoenberg's melodies seem to curl themselves in continuous tendrils, instead of pausing on harmonically significant notes. In his next work, the tone poem Pelleas und Melisande, Schoenberg invented (or so he claimed) the trombone glissando; and the texture of much of his early work can sometimes sound like a general gliss, as if themes were generated by something more like finger painting than like the normal method of arranging finite notes on staves. Schoenberg's verticals are just as chromatically charged as his horizontals: soon after Debussy began to write with sonorous puddles of ninth chords, Schoenberg was experimenting with all sorts of nontriadic formations, sometimes full of such exotic intervals as major sevenths, major and minor seconds, and augmented fourths. This exploration of the gaps between the notes of the diatonic scale is strongly related to the Expressionist desire to investigate subtler, more intimate, more powerful emotions that those expressible by diatonic means- musical dissonance is an attractive metaphor for emotional dissonance. Just as there are notes that dwell in the forbidden gaps of the scale, so there are feelings that hide in the cracks between such familiar and acceptable feelings as love, anger, rage, sadness, and so forth. Mahler's marital troubles led him to consult Sigmund Freud in 1910, and Freud was struck by Mahler's quick comprehension of the principles of psychoanalysis; the author of the libretto for Schoenberg's Erwartung (1909)-which sounds like the monologue of a psychoanalyzed patient-was an Austrian medical student, Marie Pappenheim. Pappenheim was a relative of Bertha Pappenheim, one of psychoanalysis's most closely investigated patients, called in Freud's case history "Anna O."; and a certain strain of Modernist music can be best understood as an investigation of music's unconscious. What onomatopoeia is to outer realism, chromaticism is to inner realism.
So it seems that the motto of Modernism is the poet Ezra Pound's favorite slogan, "Make it new." On the other hand, "Make it new" is an extremely old slogan: Pound discovered it in the Great Digest of Confucius, who noted that it was written in letters of gold on the Emperor T'ang's bathtub. Against this ancient call for novelty, we should remember King Solomon's warning: "there is no new thing under the sun."
Each of the three sorts of originalities listed above can be shown to be nothing new. The world-comprehending symphonies of Mahler have a number of old precedents, especially in the domain of world theater-a name for the sort of theater developed in the medieval mystery and morality plays in order to embrace the whole range of human experience, from the temptations of the flesh to the soul's departure for heaven or hell; from the creation of the world to the Last Judgment. The Elizabethan stage was a world theater, in that the ceiling of the stage's overhang was painted with stars and called heaven; and the part of the stage beneath the trap door was called hell. World theater has often been associated with music: a very early example is Hildegard's Ordo Virtutum (ca. 1152), a morality play in which every speech, except the devil's, is set to plainchant. It is perhaps odd to think of Hildegard as a precursor of Mahler, but they had similarly vast ambitions for their music. Other examples of composers with strong aspirations toward comprehensiveness include Orlando Gibbons in his madrigal The Cries of London (the closest approach in the world of Elizabethan music to rich Shakespearean disorder), Heinrich Schütz in the Psalmen Davids, Joseph Haydn in The Creation, and Beethoven in his Ninth Symphony-a work that comprises gestures of immediate rage, a toy march for Turkish soldiers, a plunge into the abyss, and swells of interplanetary harmony.
Continues...
Arnold Schoenberg, "The Future of the Opera" (1927)
Sergei Prokofiev, from From My Life (1944)
2. Testing the Boundaries between Speech and Music
Harry Partch, from Genesis of a Music (1949)
Arnold Schoenberg, Foreword to Pierrot Lunaire (1912)
Arnold Schoenberg, "The Relationship to the Text" (1912)
Alban Berg, "Voice in Opera" (1929)
James Joyce, "Sirens" (1922)
Virginia Woolf, from The Waves (1931)
T. S. Eliot, "The Music of Poetry" (1942)
Carl Nielsen, from "Words, Music, and Program Music" (1925)
Paul Hindemith, from A Composer's World (1949-50)
3. Testing the Boundaries between the Visual Arts and Music
Painting and Architecture
Arnold Schoenberg, from Harmonielehre (1911)
George Antheil, Letter to Nicolas Slonimsky (1936)
George Antheil, "Composer's Notes on 1952-53 Re-Editing" [of Ballet Mécanique] (1953)
Theodor Adorno, from Philosophy of Modern Music (1948)
Morton Feldman, [Time-canvas] (1983)
Iannis Xenakis, from Formalized Music (1971)
Embodying Physical Movement: Ballet and FilmJaques-Dalcroze, "The Technique of Moving Plastic" (1922)
Hanns Eisler, from Composing for the Films (1947)
4. The New Music Theater
Friedrich Nietzsche, from The Birth of Tragedy (1872)
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Letter to Richard Strauss (1911)
Kurt Weill, "Shifts in Musical Composition" (1927)
Kurt Weill, "Opera—Where To?" (1929)
Alban Berg, "The 'Problem of Opera'" (1928)
Ernst Krenek, from "Is Opera Still Possible Today?" (1936)
W. H. Auden, from "The World of Opera" (1967)
5. Fuller Universes of Music
Abolishing the Old Rules
Claude Debussy, Monsieur Croche antidilettante (1901)
Ferruccio Busoni, from Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music (1907)
Max Reger, "Degeneration and Regeneration in Music" (1907)
Charles Ives, from Essays before a Sonata (1920)
Charles Ives, "Postface to 114 Songs" (1922)
Charles Ives, "Music and Its Future" (1929)
Percy Grainger, "Free Music" (1938)
Pantonality
Arnold Schoenberg and Vassily Kandinsky, Correspondence (1911)
Noise
Luigi Russolo, "The Art of Noises: Futurist Manifesto" (1913)
Edgard Varèse, "Music and the Times" (1936)
John Cage, Fragments from Silence (1961)
6. New Discipline: The Twelve-Tone Method
Arnold Schoenberg, from "Composition with Twelve Tones": fiat lux (1941)
Anton Webern, from "The Path to Twelve-Note Composition" (1932)
Thomas Mann, from Dr. Faustus (1947)
Arthur Honegger, [The Twelve-Tone Method] (1951)
Leonard Bernstein, [The Twelve-Tone Method] (1976)
Benjamin Britten, [The Twelve-Tone Method] (1963)
7. Isms
Symbolism
Charles Baudelaire, from Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser in Paris (1861)
Marcel Proust, from Swann's Way (1913)
Primitivism and Exoticism
Igor Stravinsky, "What I Wished to Express in The Consecration of Spring" (1913)
Igor Stravinsky, from An Autobiography (1934)
Béla Bartók, "The Influence of Peasant Music on Modern Music" (1931)
Expressionism
Richard Wagner, "Beethoven" (1870)
Oskar Kokoschka, Murderer, Hope of Women (1907, 1917)
Arnold Schoenberg, Letter to Wassily Kandinsky on Die glückliche Hand (1910-13)
Theodor Adorno, from Philosophy of Modern Music (1948)
Neoclassicism and the New Objectivity
Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus 1.3 (1922)
Igor Stravinsky, from An Autobiography (1936)
Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, from Expositions and Developments [Expressivity] (1962)
Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, from Expositions and Developments [Pulcinella] (1962)
Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, from Dialogues (1968)
Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, from Themes and Conclusions (1969)
Arnold Schoenberg, from Three Satires (1925)
Ernst Krenek, from "New Humanity and Old Objectivity" (1931)
Ernst Krenek, "Music and Mathematics" (1937)
Constant Lambert, "The Age of Pastiche" (1934)
Constant Lambert, [Stravinsky as Pasticheur] (1934)
Gertrude Stein, from Lectures in America (1935)
Maurice Ravel, Interview: [Ravel's Toys] (1933)
Maurice Ravel, Interview: "Finding Tunes in Factories" (1933)
Dadaism and Surrealism
Kurt Schwitters: Ursonate: Rondo (1921-32)
Guillaume Apollinaire, Program Note for Parade (1917)
Erik Satie, Memoirs of an Amnesiac (1912)
Jean Cocteau, from Cock and Harlequin (1918)
Erwin Schulhoff, "For General Intelligibility as a Confession" (1919)
Edith Sitwell, "Hornpipe" (1922)
Ernst Krenek, "What Is Called the New Music, and Why?" (1937)
8. Music, Social Responsibility, and Politics
Hanns Eisler, "On Old and New Music" (1925)
Bertolt Brecht and Peter Suhrkamp, "The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre" (1930)
Friedrich Hollaender, Münchhausen (1931)
Friedrich Hollaender, "Cabaret" (1932)
Paul Hindemith, from A Composer's World (1949-50)
Peter Kien, Der Kaiser von Atlantis: Final Scene (1943-44)
Arnold Schoenberg, A Survivor from Warsaw (1947)
L. N. Lebedinski, from Rayok: The Music Lesson (1957)
9. Testing the Boundaries between Popular and High Art
Ernest Ansermet, "On a Negro Orchestra" (1919)
Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (1940)
Langston Hughes, "Moon-Faced, Starry-Eyed" (1946-47)
Ivan Goll, "The Negroes Are Conquering Europe" (1926)
Daniel Gregory Mason, from Tune In, America (1931)
George Gershwin, "The Composer and the Machine Age" (1933)
George Antheil, "The Negro on the Spiral, or A Method of Negro Music" (1934)
Gene Krupa and Leonard Bernstein, "Has Jazz Influenced the Symphony?" (1947)
Elliott Carter, "Once Again Swing" (1939)
Elliott Carter, "The Rhythmic Basis of American Music" (1955)
Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources / Edition 1 available in Paperback
Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources / Edition 1
by Daniel Albright
Daniel Albright
- ISBN-10:
- 0226012670
- ISBN-13:
- 9780226012674
- Pub. Date:
- 02/03/2004
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0226012670
- ISBN-13:
- 9780226012674
- Pub. Date:
- 02/03/2004
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources / Edition 1
by Daniel Albright
Daniel Albright
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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226012674 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 02/03/2004 |
| Series: | Chicago History of American Religion Ser. |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 440 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.62(w) x 9.38(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
Daniel Albright (1945-2015) was the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University. He was the author or editor of many books, including Untwisting the Serpent and Modernism and Music, both published by the University of Chicago Press.
Daniel Albright (1945-2015) was the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University. He was the author or editor of many books, including Untwisting the Serpent and Modernism and Music, both published by the University of Chicago Press.
Daniel Albright (1945-2015) was the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University. He was the author or editor of many books, including Untwisting the Serpent and Modernism and Music, both published by the University of Chicago Press.
Read an Excerpt
Modernism and Music: an Anthology of Sources
By Daniel Albright
University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2004 Daniel AlbrightAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0226012670
1 Introduction
Terms such as "modern" and "Modernism" seem to possess a certain security, even prestige, but they were long regarded with suspicion. Shakespeare used "modern" to mean commonplace-in his day, the word was uncomfortably close in meaning to "trivial." The culture of the Renaissance, like that of the eighteenth century, tended to revere the classical, the ancient; something that was modern (a word derived from modus, that is, fashion) was merely fashionable, transitory, perhaps gaudy, like an ostrich plume on a hat. To praise an excellent book, one compared it to the work of Horace or Cicero; to praise an excellent sculpture, one compared it to the work of Greek antiquity, which survived (in Roman copies) throughout Europe.
But the situation in music was a little different. Musical compositions could not be judged against models from remote antiquity. Certainly composers could evoke standards of comparison from classical Greece, as when Antoine Busnoys, in his motet In hydraulis (written before 1467), looked to Pythagoras for sanction for the polyphonic art that he, Busnoys, had inherited from Johannes Ockeghem. But no one knew what Greek music sounded like; and Busnoys could scarcely have imagined that Pythagoras, long before the birth of Christ, devised on his one-stringed lyre a music as intricate as that of the fifteenth century. From before the Renaissance until the later eighteenth century, music was usually modern. Plainchant persisted in church services; Gregorio Allegri's Miserere continued to be sung in the Vatican; the operas of Jean-Baptiste Lully held the stage long after the composer's death; but, for the most part, music meant new music. The art of music evolved so rapidly, and with such a strong general presupposition that the newer was better than the older, that the reverence for the classical, so common in other artistic media, was as much a matter of lip service as a matter of actual practice.
When, in the late nineteenth century, the artistic movement we call Modernism began, music was the artistic medium best equipped to participate, since it had always tended to assign privilege to the up to date and the novel. Music has always been the most temporally immediate of the arts, the medium most sensitive to the Now. And it is not surprising that, at the dawn of the twentieth century, music became the vanguard medium of the Modernist aesthetic.
The sudden importance of music was itself something new. For most of the history of Western art, music seemed somewhat slow to respond to advances in the other artistic media: in the words of Pierre Boulez, "we are always being told that musicians lag behind their literary rivals and colleagues." For example, scholars of literature might date the beginning of the Renaissance from the time of Dante and Petrarch, in the fourteenth century, whereas scholars of music might date the beginning of the Renaissance from the time of Guillaume Dufay, a whole century later; similarly, the Romantic movement in literature was losing impetus by the time of the deaths of E. T. A. Hoffmann (1822), Lord Byron (1824), and Jean Paul (1825), that is, approximately the moment when musical Romanticism was catching fire, in the impassioned works of Schubert, Bellini, Berlioz, and others. But in the universe of Modernism, music shook off its belatedness, and took charge.
There are many signs that music is now the instigator, not the sluggish follower. For example, in 1925 T. S. Eliot wrote The Hollow Men ("We are the stuffed men . . . Headpiece filled with straw") partly in response to the eerie energy of the marionette in Stravinsky's 1911 ballet Petrushka; and in 1947, W. H. Auden-arguably the most distinguished English poet of the generation following Eliot-wrote a letter concerning the proposed opera The Rake's Progress in which he told Stravinsky, "I need hardly say that the chance of working with you is the greatest honor of my life." But well before Eliot's or Auden's time, literary folk were starting to bow to composers. When the poet Charles Baudelaire attended, in 1861, the new version of Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser, he felt that he was hearing something that should change the evolution of literature. When the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche published his first book, in 1872, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, he prophesied that Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (1865) would inaugurate a rebirth of the Dionysiac energy that informs all artistic and intellectual achievement. In the next year, 1873, Walter Pater published The Renaissance, in which he argued that "All art constantly aspires toward the condition of music." The italics are Pater's own, and the prose style of his book, sinuously gorgeous, suggests that Pater was himself trying to write a text that sounds like music.
Already by the 1870s the prestige of the composer was so great that some poets, particularly in France, were starting to conceive themselves as surrogate composers, composers manqués: Paul Verlaine begins his "Art poétique" (1874) with the line "Before everything else, music"; and Stéphane Mallarmé writes, in "L'après-midi d'un faune" (1876),
Inerte, tout brûle dans l'heure fauve
Sans marquer par quel art ensemble détala
Trop d'hymen souhaité de qui cherche le la
Torpid, all things burn in that wild hourThese lines are so shadowy, so evacuated of solid objects and determinate meaning, that they become correspondingly rich in musical suggestiveness; the only conspicuous feature in the poem is the faun's piercing A. Debussy's famous Prélude (1894) seems designed to tease out of Mallarmé's poem the music already latent within it.
Not noting how the too-much-marriage slipped away
Desired by the one who seeks the A
The essays gathered in this anthology reflect a sense, not always present in the pre-Modernist world, that the composer is an important person whose words should be pondered carefully-and not just by other artists, but also by the general public. The Modernist composer is typically an intellectual-a pontificator at large, orating on the largest stages. Some of these composers took a strong interest in politics: Arnold Schoenberg, for example, wrote to a newspaper on the difficulties of writing an international hymn for peace (1928) and even wrote a play, The Biblical Way (1926-27), concerning the establishment of a Zionist homeland in Africa. Charles Ives corresponded with William Howard Taft in 1920 to gain his support for a constitutional amendment to combine presidential elections with a national referendum.
But the twentieth-century composer is rarely a crusader, and still more rarely a successful crusader: Schoenberg's play ends with the failure of the Moses figure to achieve what he worked for; and Taft brusquely dismissed Ives's plan for majoritarian rule. Typically, the composer tries to effect change in the larger culture not by direct action but by illustrating technical possibilities for advancement in the arts and letters-by exploring regions of liberation undreamed of in previous ages. The Modernist composer devises theories, theories that themselves become forms of action, forms of art. As music starts to become self-consciously smart-intricate, cerebral, generated from pre-compositional ideas-the composer starts to become engaged with every sort of intellectual activity, from philosophy to sociology; musical compositions become models for problem-solving, as if music were a species of thinking carried out by other means.
The clearest nineteenth-century prefiguration of the Modernist composer-intellectual can be found in the example of Richard Wagner: not only a political rebel who fled Germany after a warrant was issued for his arrest during the upheavals of 1848 - 49, but also a man who felt free to opine in print on every subject under the sun, such as the origins of classical Greek drama in folk art; the corruption of European culture by Jews; the relation between early Christian asceticism and Buddhist rejection of desire; the psychoacoustics of alliteration in German verse; and the role of dreaming in the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. Before Wagner's time, when composers felt impelled to write, they usually wrote treatises on harmony (Johannes Tinctoris, Jean-Philippe Rameau) or practical advice for instrumentalists (Leopold Mozart, Johann Joachim Quantz). But Wagner was an intellectual-at-large, confrontational and sometimes erudite, whose public presence was more like that of Jean-Paul Sartre than like that of a musician trying to improve performance standards.
Wagner, of course, wrote a great deal about music, but much of his speculation concerns the music of the past and the music of the future; earlier composers, by contrast, tended to be interested in questions pertinent to the immediate present-questions of writing a fugue that offends no one's ears, or of properly differentiating legato, spiccato, and staccato when playing a violin. For Wagner, music is not an art of evanescent compositions, sounds that reverberate a moment and then die away, but an art of timeless masterpieces: Wagner (and in this respect he resembles Felix Mendelssohn and Johannes Brahms) devoted much energy to rehabilitating the music of the past, by editing Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina's Stabat Mater, or by preparing a new German performing edition of Christoph Willibald Gluck's Iphigenia in Aulis. Even in the eighteenth century there were tentative signs that a canon of classic music was taking shape, immune from time's ravages: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, for example, evidently added his own adagios (K. 404a) to some fugues from J. S. Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, and certainly rewrote George Frideric Handel's Acis and Galatea and Messiah for the orchestra of his own time; but the nineteenth and twentieth centuries bear most of the responsibility for giving music a history, for making music more than thirty years old part of the normal experience of listening. Sometimes nineteenth- and twentieth-century composers even wrote music about music history: an early example is Louis Spohr's Sixth Symphony (1840), the Historical Symphony, which recapitulates the evolution of the art. The first movement is called the "Bach-Handel Period," the second the "Haydn-Mozart Period," the scherzo the "Beethoven Period," and the finale "The Newest of the New," a movement that sounds perhaps like the operas of Daniel François Auber; it is hard to be certain whether Spohr treats this ultra-modern stuff respectfully or sneers at it for being laboriously trivial. Nowadays we often deplore the fact that the life of the concert hall and opera house is a museum culture, in which recently written works are rarely heard; but the older sort of culture, in which concertgoers sometimes heard only recently written works, was (as Spohr tried to show) a still unhealthier situation.
If the caricature of the Romantic composer is the eccentric genius or mesmerizing satyr-Paganini or Liszt playing with fingers inhumanly long-the caricature of the Modernist composer is a sort of scientist, conducting, with scalpels of sound, research into the darkest regions of the human psyche. Schoenberg seems to join Sigmund Freud (and the painter Edvard Munch and the novelist Joseph Conrad) in a common project to map areas of feeling little explored in previous ages. The Modernist composer is considered the master of an arcane and forbidding art, like tensor calculus; as the elderly Schoenberg wrote, reviewing his career, there was a time "when everybody made believe he understood Einstein's theories and Schoenberg's music." Modernist music (according to the cartoon version) may provide exquisite pleasure to those of refined taste, who enjoy tone clusters, irregular rhythms, and bizarre timbres, but sounds intolerably shrill, aggressive, aimless, banging, to normal people who like good tunes with dominant seventh chords and clear cadences. The nineteenth-century composer always has a full head of hair, or at least a long beard; but the twentieth-century composer has the bald pate of Schoenberg or Igor Stravinsky or Sergei Prokofiev or Paul Hindemith, as well as the severe scowl of Anton Webern, appropriate for a music that seems to reject all ornament and charm in favor of research into the essence of things, the phonic equivalent of the physics of subatomic particles. The purpose of the earlier composers (speaking very roughly) was to praise: to praise God, to congratulate the Hamburg city council, to sing happy birthday to the king's eleven-year-old son, to provide cheer at the local university's commencement ceremony; the purpose of the nineteenth-century composer was to move, to make the audience shudder, weep, break out in laughter; but the purpose of the twentieth-century composer seems to be to think, to provide transcendental philosophy with fretful and opaque analogues in sound.
How much truth is there in these caricatures of Modernism? In order to answer this question, it is necessary to study its central assumption: that Modernist art is difficult.
Perhaps the classic statement of this assumption occurs in T. S. Eliot's essay "The Metaphysical Poets" (1921): "it appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be difficult. Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex results." Those who discuss Modernism in music have tended to agree. The well-informed and taxonomically passionate musicologist Carl Dahlhaus, for example, argues that composers are Modernist if they are progressive:
The year 1890 . . . lends itself as an obvious point of historical discontinuity. . . . The "breakthrough" of Mahler, Strauss, and Debussy implies a profound historical transformation. . . . If we were to search for a name to convey the breakaway mood of the 1890s (a mood symbolized musically by the opening bars of Strauss's Don Juan [1888]) but without imposing a fictitious unity of style on the age, we could do worse than revert to [the] term "modernism" extending (with some latitude) from 1890 to the beginnings of our own twentieth-century modern music in 1910. . . . The label "late romanticism" . . . is a terminological blunder of the first order and ought to be abandoned forthwith. It is absurd to yoke Strauss, Mahler, and the young Schönberg, composers who represented modernism in the minds of their turn-of-the-century contemporaries, with the self-proclaimed anti-modernist Pfitzner, calling them all "late romantics" in order to supply a veneer of internal unity to an age fraught with stylistic contradictions and conflicts.Dahlhaus presents a strong case for restricting the term Modernism to a somewhat narrow spectrum of musical activity, and to a short chronological span, only twenty years. I believe that Modernism embraces a broader bandwidth, but Dahlhaus's nice strictures deserve serious attention. If Modernism is a movement confined to the progressive music of 1890-1910, then its main features are:
1. Comprehensiveness and depth. Gustav Mahler's symphonies, for example, aspire to become vehicles for the transmission of universal vibrations into the domain of human perception: as he wrote concerning his Third Symphony of 1895-96, "Now think of a work so great that it actually mirrors the whole world-one is, so to speak, oneself only an instrument on which the universe plays. . . . My symphony will be something that the world has never heard! All nature finds in it a voice, and tells a deep secret, like the tinglings of a dream! I tell you, I get uncanny feelings when I look at certain passages, as if I hadn't written them." To write a symphony that comprised the whole world's music, Mahler agglomerated military fanfares, vulgar dance tunes, whirling gestures of rapture- in Terence's phrase, nothing human was alien to him. He strove for depth as well as for range. Just as Nietzsche located ultimate reality in Dionysiac rending, in which the ego is torn to pieces in order that we may glimpse the terror at the center of things, so Mahler felt possessed. In the words of his wife, "One day in the summer he came running down from his hut in a perspiration and scarcely able to breathe. At last he came out with it: it was the heat, the stillness, the Panic horror. He was often overcome by this feeling of the goat-god's frightful and ebullient eye upon him." The fourth movement of the Third Symphony is a setting of the Midnight Song from Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra, as if to honor Nietzsche as the chief modern prophet of Dionysus. At the very time when Mahler was seized by Pan, Richard Strauss was composing Also sprach Zarathustra (1896), which also climaxes on Nietzsche's vision of the soul's ultimate midnight; soon thereafter Frederick Delius began setting texts from Nietzsche's Also sprach Zarathustra in A Mass of Life (1899-1909).
2. Semantic specificity and density. Not only did the new music of the 1890s appeal to an astonishing range of experience, but it also arrested its listeners through vividness of detail. The bleating sheep (flutter-tonguing winds) and the pair of strolling Benedictines (bassoons exchanging lines) in Don Quixote (1898) are among the most conspicuous examples of the remarkable extension of musical onomatopoeia and metaphor that Strauss achieved in this decade. It seemed possible that music could go beyond imitation to an actual embodiment of the outer world; perhaps a powerfully reified music could compete with literature and painting as a direct seizure of reality. Another form of detailed acoustic realism could be found in certain violently heterogeneous works of Charles Ives: for example, Ives created an interweaving of popular tunes in Central Park in the Dark (1906). As Ives explained, "The piece purports to be a picture-in-sounds of the sounds of nature and of happening that men would hear . . . when sitting on a bench in Central Park on a hot summer night. The strings represent the night sounds and silent darkness-interrupted by sounds (the rest of the orchestra) from the Casino over the pond-of street singers coming up from the Circle singing, in spots, the tunes of those days. . . . A street car and a street band join in the chorus."
3. Extensions and destructions of tonality. When a hostile critic said of the young Schoenberg's sextet Verklärte Nacht (1899) that "it sounds as if someone had smeared the score of Tristan while it was still wet," he provided a clever description for the Jugendstil (or art nouveau) way in which Schoenberg's melodies seem to curl themselves in continuous tendrils, instead of pausing on harmonically significant notes. In his next work, the tone poem Pelleas und Melisande, Schoenberg invented (or so he claimed) the trombone glissando; and the texture of much of his early work can sometimes sound like a general gliss, as if themes were generated by something more like finger painting than like the normal method of arranging finite notes on staves. Schoenberg's verticals are just as chromatically charged as his horizontals: soon after Debussy began to write with sonorous puddles of ninth chords, Schoenberg was experimenting with all sorts of nontriadic formations, sometimes full of such exotic intervals as major sevenths, major and minor seconds, and augmented fourths. This exploration of the gaps between the notes of the diatonic scale is strongly related to the Expressionist desire to investigate subtler, more intimate, more powerful emotions that those expressible by diatonic means- musical dissonance is an attractive metaphor for emotional dissonance. Just as there are notes that dwell in the forbidden gaps of the scale, so there are feelings that hide in the cracks between such familiar and acceptable feelings as love, anger, rage, sadness, and so forth. Mahler's marital troubles led him to consult Sigmund Freud in 1910, and Freud was struck by Mahler's quick comprehension of the principles of psychoanalysis; the author of the libretto for Schoenberg's Erwartung (1909)-which sounds like the monologue of a psychoanalyzed patient-was an Austrian medical student, Marie Pappenheim. Pappenheim was a relative of Bertha Pappenheim, one of psychoanalysis's most closely investigated patients, called in Freud's case history "Anna O."; and a certain strain of Modernist music can be best understood as an investigation of music's unconscious. What onomatopoeia is to outer realism, chromaticism is to inner realism.
So it seems that the motto of Modernism is the poet Ezra Pound's favorite slogan, "Make it new." On the other hand, "Make it new" is an extremely old slogan: Pound discovered it in the Great Digest of Confucius, who noted that it was written in letters of gold on the Emperor T'ang's bathtub. Against this ancient call for novelty, we should remember King Solomon's warning: "there is no new thing under the sun."
Each of the three sorts of originalities listed above can be shown to be nothing new. The world-comprehending symphonies of Mahler have a number of old precedents, especially in the domain of world theater-a name for the sort of theater developed in the medieval mystery and morality plays in order to embrace the whole range of human experience, from the temptations of the flesh to the soul's departure for heaven or hell; from the creation of the world to the Last Judgment. The Elizabethan stage was a world theater, in that the ceiling of the stage's overhang was painted with stars and called heaven; and the part of the stage beneath the trap door was called hell. World theater has often been associated with music: a very early example is Hildegard's Ordo Virtutum (ca. 1152), a morality play in which every speech, except the devil's, is set to plainchant. It is perhaps odd to think of Hildegard as a precursor of Mahler, but they had similarly vast ambitions for their music. Other examples of composers with strong aspirations toward comprehensiveness include Orlando Gibbons in his madrigal The Cries of London (the closest approach in the world of Elizabethan music to rich Shakespearean disorder), Heinrich Schütz in the Psalmen Davids, Joseph Haydn in The Creation, and Beethoven in his Ninth Symphony-a work that comprises gestures of immediate rage, a toy march for Turkish soldiers, a plunge into the abyss, and swells of interplanetary harmony.
Continues...
Excerpted from Modernism and Music: an Anthology of Sources by Daniel Albright Copyright © 2004 by Daniel Albright. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
1. IntroductionArnold Schoenberg, "The Future of the Opera" (1927)
Sergei Prokofiev, from From My Life (1944)
2. Testing the Boundaries between Speech and Music
Harry Partch, from Genesis of a Music (1949)
Arnold Schoenberg, Foreword to Pierrot Lunaire (1912)
Arnold Schoenberg, "The Relationship to the Text" (1912)
Alban Berg, "Voice in Opera" (1929)
James Joyce, "Sirens" (1922)
Virginia Woolf, from The Waves (1931)
T. S. Eliot, "The Music of Poetry" (1942)
Carl Nielsen, from "Words, Music, and Program Music" (1925)
Paul Hindemith, from A Composer's World (1949-50)
3. Testing the Boundaries between the Visual Arts and Music
Painting and Architecture
Arnold Schoenberg, from Harmonielehre (1911)
George Antheil, Letter to Nicolas Slonimsky (1936)
George Antheil, "Composer's Notes on 1952-53 Re-Editing" [of Ballet Mécanique] (1953)
Theodor Adorno, from Philosophy of Modern Music (1948)
Morton Feldman, [Time-canvas] (1983)
Iannis Xenakis, from Formalized Music (1971)
Embodying Physical Movement: Ballet and FilmJaques-Dalcroze, "The Technique of Moving Plastic" (1922)
Hanns Eisler, from Composing for the Films (1947)
4. The New Music Theater
Friedrich Nietzsche, from The Birth of Tragedy (1872)
Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Letter to Richard Strauss (1911)
Kurt Weill, "Shifts in Musical Composition" (1927)
Kurt Weill, "Opera—Where To?" (1929)
Alban Berg, "The 'Problem of Opera'" (1928)
Ernst Krenek, from "Is Opera Still Possible Today?" (1936)
W. H. Auden, from "The World of Opera" (1967)
5. Fuller Universes of Music
Abolishing the Old Rules
Claude Debussy, Monsieur Croche antidilettante (1901)
Ferruccio Busoni, from Sketch of a New Esthetic of Music (1907)
Max Reger, "Degeneration and Regeneration in Music" (1907)
Charles Ives, from Essays before a Sonata (1920)
Charles Ives, "Postface to 114 Songs" (1922)
Charles Ives, "Music and Its Future" (1929)
Percy Grainger, "Free Music" (1938)
Pantonality
Arnold Schoenberg and Vassily Kandinsky, Correspondence (1911)
Noise
Luigi Russolo, "The Art of Noises: Futurist Manifesto" (1913)
Edgard Varèse, "Music and the Times" (1936)
John Cage, Fragments from Silence (1961)
6. New Discipline: The Twelve-Tone Method
Arnold Schoenberg, from "Composition with Twelve Tones": fiat lux (1941)
Anton Webern, from "The Path to Twelve-Note Composition" (1932)
Thomas Mann, from Dr. Faustus (1947)
Arthur Honegger, [The Twelve-Tone Method] (1951)
Leonard Bernstein, [The Twelve-Tone Method] (1976)
Benjamin Britten, [The Twelve-Tone Method] (1963)
7. Isms
Symbolism
Charles Baudelaire, from Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser in Paris (1861)
Marcel Proust, from Swann's Way (1913)
Primitivism and Exoticism
Igor Stravinsky, "What I Wished to Express in The Consecration of Spring" (1913)
Igor Stravinsky, from An Autobiography (1934)
Béla Bartók, "The Influence of Peasant Music on Modern Music" (1931)
Expressionism
Richard Wagner, "Beethoven" (1870)
Oskar Kokoschka, Murderer, Hope of Women (1907, 1917)
Arnold Schoenberg, Letter to Wassily Kandinsky on Die glückliche Hand (1910-13)
Theodor Adorno, from Philosophy of Modern Music (1948)
Neoclassicism and the New Objectivity
Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus 1.3 (1922)
Igor Stravinsky, from An Autobiography (1936)
Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, from Expositions and Developments [Expressivity] (1962)
Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, from Expositions and Developments [Pulcinella] (1962)
Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, from Dialogues (1968)
Igor Stravinsky and Robert Craft, from Themes and Conclusions (1969)
Arnold Schoenberg, from Three Satires (1925)
Ernst Krenek, from "New Humanity and Old Objectivity" (1931)
Ernst Krenek, "Music and Mathematics" (1937)
Constant Lambert, "The Age of Pastiche" (1934)
Constant Lambert, [Stravinsky as Pasticheur] (1934)
Gertrude Stein, from Lectures in America (1935)
Maurice Ravel, Interview: [Ravel's Toys] (1933)
Maurice Ravel, Interview: "Finding Tunes in Factories" (1933)
Dadaism and Surrealism
Kurt Schwitters: Ursonate: Rondo (1921-32)
Guillaume Apollinaire, Program Note for Parade (1917)
Erik Satie, Memoirs of an Amnesiac (1912)
Jean Cocteau, from Cock and Harlequin (1918)
Erwin Schulhoff, "For General Intelligibility as a Confession" (1919)
Edith Sitwell, "Hornpipe" (1922)
Ernst Krenek, "What Is Called the New Music, and Why?" (1937)
8. Music, Social Responsibility, and Politics
Hanns Eisler, "On Old and New Music" (1925)
Bertolt Brecht and Peter Suhrkamp, "The Modern Theatre Is the Epic Theatre" (1930)
Friedrich Hollaender, Münchhausen (1931)
Friedrich Hollaender, "Cabaret" (1932)
Paul Hindemith, from A Composer's World (1949-50)
Peter Kien, Der Kaiser von Atlantis: Final Scene (1943-44)
Arnold Schoenberg, A Survivor from Warsaw (1947)
L. N. Lebedinski, from Rayok: The Music Lesson (1957)
9. Testing the Boundaries between Popular and High Art
Ernest Ansermet, "On a Negro Orchestra" (1919)
Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (1940)
Langston Hughes, "Moon-Faced, Starry-Eyed" (1946-47)
Ivan Goll, "The Negroes Are Conquering Europe" (1926)
Daniel Gregory Mason, from Tune In, America (1931)
George Gershwin, "The Composer and the Machine Age" (1933)
George Antheil, "The Negro on the Spiral, or A Method of Negro Music" (1934)
Gene Krupa and Leonard Bernstein, "Has Jazz Influenced the Symphony?" (1947)
Elliott Carter, "Once Again Swing" (1939)
Elliott Carter, "The Rhythmic Basis of American Music" (1955)
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