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
19 - Ageing of the new: the museum of musical modernism
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
The cultural event that most conspicuously marked the turn of the millennium in Britain was the opening of London’s Tate Modern, the refurbished power station that is now, spatially, the world’s largest museum of modern art. The building itself is significant since it marks a transformation from an industrial utility to a cultural space; together with its contents, it signifies a commitment to modern art at the end of the twentieth century. It is even able to include a replica of Marcel Duchamp’s celebrated urinal – an object designed to test institutional limits. So reconstructed, museums no longer instil a dominant view of culture, nor do they display artists as overbearing bastions of authorial rectitude: they are more likely to present contrasting outlooks and leave spectators to find ways of accommodating them. Like the exhibits in the Tate, modernist musical artefacts cannot survive without support, yet their institutions can evolve and need not be governed by the curatorial attitudes normally associated with museum culture. Institutions, like music, are embodiments of human ideas and are therefore potentially mobile and subject to interpretation.
Institutions and performers
The most remarkable institution of twentieth-century music must surely be IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique). Adjacent to the Centre Georges Pompidou in central Paris, IRCAM is devoted to the technical and creative advancement of music. Remarkably, it derives from the vision of one man, Pierre Boulez, whose stature as a musician enabled him to secure funding from the French government for the development of a music research institute.
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- Information
- The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music , pp. 506 - 538Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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