Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: trajectories of twentieth-century music
- 1 Peripheries and interfaces: the Western impact on other music
- 2 Music of a century: museum culture and the politics of subsidy
- 3 Innovation and the avant-garde, 1900–20
- 4 Music, text and stage: the tradition of bourgeois tonality to the Second World War
- 5 Classic jazz to 1945
- 6 Flirting with the vernacular: America in Europe, 1900–45
- 7 Between the wars: traditions, modernisms, and the ‘little people from the suburbs’
- 8 Brave new worlds: experimentalism between the wars
- 9 Proclaiming the mainstream: Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern
- 10 Rewriting the past: classicisms of the inter-war period
- 11 Music of seriousness and commitment: the 1930s and beyond
- 12 Other mainstreams: light music and easy listening, 1920–70
- 13 New beginnings: the international avant-garde, 1945–62
- 14 Individualism and accessibility: the moderate mainstream, 1945–75
- 15 After swing: modern jazz and its impact
- 16 Music of the youth revolution: rock through the 1960s
- 17 Expanding horizons: the international avant-garde, 1962–75
- 18 To the millennium: music as twentieth-century commodity
- 19 Ageing of the new: the museum of musical modernism
- 20 (Post-)minimalisms 1970–2000: the search for a new mainstream
- 21 History and class consciousness: pop music towards 2000
- 22 ‘Art’ music in a cross-cultural context: the case of Africa
- Appendix 1 Personalia
- Appendix 2 Chronology
- Index
- References
10 - Rewriting the past: classicisms of the inter-war period
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: trajectories of twentieth-century music
- 1 Peripheries and interfaces: the Western impact on other music
- 2 Music of a century: museum culture and the politics of subsidy
- 3 Innovation and the avant-garde, 1900–20
- 4 Music, text and stage: the tradition of bourgeois tonality to the Second World War
- 5 Classic jazz to 1945
- 6 Flirting with the vernacular: America in Europe, 1900–45
- 7 Between the wars: traditions, modernisms, and the ‘little people from the suburbs’
- 8 Brave new worlds: experimentalism between the wars
- 9 Proclaiming the mainstream: Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern
- 10 Rewriting the past: classicisms of the inter-war period
- 11 Music of seriousness and commitment: the 1930s and beyond
- 12 Other mainstreams: light music and easy listening, 1920–70
- 13 New beginnings: the international avant-garde, 1945–62
- 14 Individualism and accessibility: the moderate mainstream, 1945–75
- 15 After swing: modern jazz and its impact
- 16 Music of the youth revolution: rock through the 1960s
- 17 Expanding horizons: the international avant-garde, 1962–75
- 18 To the millennium: music as twentieth-century commodity
- 19 Ageing of the new: the museum of musical modernism
- 20 (Post-)minimalisms 1970–2000: the search for a new mainstream
- 21 History and class consciousness: pop music towards 2000
- 22 ‘Art’ music in a cross-cultural context: the case of Africa
- Appendix 1 Personalia
- Appendix 2 Chronology
- Index
- References
Summary
In earlier periods in the history of music the past was either forgotten or else was present as a living, unconsciously handed-down tradition that was not specially thought about. It was only the increasing historical awareness in the eighteenth century, and particularly in the nineteenth, that enabled composers for the first time to forge links with the styles and practices of works that had been forgotten, while at the same time creating contemporary music with a historical subtext. Not by chance, these developments in composition coincided with the upsurge of historical awareness in concert life.
The formation and widening of a repertory that includes earlier works in their due place is a process that has continued to the present; the first half of the twentieth century saw at the same time the evolution of new forms of engagement by composers with the past. The present study is concerned solely with such historical references. It does not embrace other forms of engagement that introduced folksong into modern music as a reflection of popular culture; even if the tunes that are evoked, quoted, and put to new uses have ancient origins, it is not in such instances a matter of music from the past, but rather of music that is felt to be still alive today. My first concern is with developing general characteristics of neoclassicism, particularly in connection with Stravinsky. Next I shall investigate the relationship to neoclassicism of those works whose titles end with the suffix ‘-ana’ or ‘-iana’ (a form of ‘rewriting’ primarily represented in Italy).
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- Information
- The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music , pp. 260 - 285Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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