Transformations of Musical Modernism

This collection brings fresh perspectives to bear upon key questions surrounding the composition, performance and reception of musical modernism.

Erling E. Guldbrandsen (Edited by), Julian Johnson (Edited by)

9781107127210, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 26 October 2015

368 pages, 50 music examples
24.4 x 17 x 2.1 cm, 0.88 kg

Profound transformations in the composition, performance and reception of modernist music have taken place in recent decades. This collection brings fresh perspectives to bear upon key questions surrounding the forms that musical modernism takes today, how modern music is performed and heard, and its relationship to earlier music. In sixteen chapters, leading figures in the field and emerging scholars examine modernist music from the inside, in terms of changing practices of composition, musical materials and overarching aesthetic principles, and from the outside, in terms of the changing contextual frameworks in which musical modernism has taken place and been understood. Shaped by a 'rehearing' of modernist music, the picture that emerges redraws the map of musical modernism as a whole and presents a full-scale re-evaluation of what the modernist movement has all been about.

Introduction Julian Johnson and Erling E. Guldbrandsen
Part I. Rethinking Modernism: 1. The lure of the sublime: revisiting the modernist project Susan McClary
2. Return of the repressed: particularity in early and late modernism Julian Johnson
3. Expressionism revisited: modernism beyond the twentieth century Arnold Whittall
4. Erik Bergman, cosmopolitanism and the transformation of musical geography Björn Heile
5. Sharing a stage: the growing proximity between modernism and popular music David Metzer
Part II. Rewriting Modernism: 6. Ritual and Eros in James Dillon's Come live with me Michael Cherlin
7. Montage in modernity: scattered fragments, dynamic fragments Jean-Paul Olive
8. Transformations of appearance: suddenness and the modernist fragment Marion Hestholm
9. Rethinking Boulez: schemes, logics and paradigms of musical modernity Edward Campbell
10. Remembrance and prognosis in the music of György Ligeti Peter Edwards
11. Valentin Silvestrov and the symphonic monument in ruins Samuel Wilson
Part III. Replaying Modernism: 12. Playing with transformations: Boulez's Improvisation III sur Mallarmé Erling E. Guldbrandsen
13. Performance as critique Arnulf Christian Mattes
14. 'Unwrapping' the voice: Cathy Berberian and John Cage's Aria Francesca Placanica
15. Radically idiomatic instrumental practice in works by Brian Ferneyhough Anders Førisdal
16. The ethics of performance practice in complex music after 1945 Tanja Orning.

Subject Areas: Creative therapy [eg art, music, drama MQTC], Philosophy: aesthetics [HPN], Individual composers & musicians, specific bands & groups [AVH], Musicals [AVGM], 20th century & contemporary classical music [AVGC6], Early music [up to c 1000 CE AVGC1], Music reviews & criticism [AVC], Music [AV], Performance art [AFKP]