Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Foreword
- I Neo-Mythologism: a Hermeneutic Construct and a Historic Trend
- II The Prime Structuring “Molds”of Myth and Music
- III Towards the Universality of Myth
- IV In Search of the Lost Union: Word–Myth–Music
- V Cosmologies
- VI Numerology
- VII “Where Time Turns Into Space”: The Mythologem of a Circle
- VIII Reception and Critique
- Appendix 1 An interview with George Crumb
- Appendix 2 The English translation of the texts by García Lorca from George Crumb's Ancient Voices of Children
- Appendix 3 Text excerpts from Stockhausen's Licht
- Selected bibliography
- List of Illustrations
- Index
IV - In Search of the Lost Union: Word–Myth–Music
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Foreword
- I Neo-Mythologism: a Hermeneutic Construct and a Historic Trend
- II The Prime Structuring “Molds”of Myth and Music
- III Towards the Universality of Myth
- IV In Search of the Lost Union: Word–Myth–Music
- V Cosmologies
- VI Numerology
- VII “Where Time Turns Into Space”: The Mythologem of a Circle
- VIII Reception and Critique
- Appendix 1 An interview with George Crumb
- Appendix 2 The English translation of the texts by García Lorca from George Crumb's Ancient Voices of Children
- Appendix 3 Text excerpts from Stockhausen's Licht
- Selected bibliography
- List of Illustrations
- Index
Summary
In eins verschmolzen sind Worte und Töne— zu einem Neuen verbunden.
Richard Strauss, Capriccio (the countess's monologue)The tendency for re-integration of diverse elements is a tool for remythification, that is, as an attempt to return to the mythic whole and undivided state. Jean-Paul Madou reviewed the ways in which word and music relate to each other through myth in particular styles during the twentieth century. However, this relation has not yet been explored with respect to the entire century. Many scholars have pointed to the deep mutual influences between music and word on a structural level in certain twentiethcentury styles and works, but few have attempted to find a mediator between these two domains in myth. Richard Taruskin, for example, who represents the first approach, sees the opportunity directly to “compare Scriabin's music with the poetry of the contemporary poets in Russia […] not merely on terms of desultory imagery, but on those of morphology, gesture […] and ‘structural rhythm.’” Taking the second approach, Larisa Gerver demonstrated recently how the connection “word-music” was reactivated through myth in Russian poetry and music of the early twentieth century, including that of Scriabin. Moreover, she considered the mythologizing attitude of early twentieth-century Russian poets early toward art music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Indeed, Russian art of the beginning of the century, preoccupied with primitive and universal ways of expression, exemplified the tendency for such a reunification of words and music rooted in myth. Traditionally viewed as the realm of origins, myth presented an especially fascinating subject for many poets since it was related to another obsession of the time, an inquiry into the origins of language. Dreaming of the primordial unity of poetry and music, Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) saw it mythologically in his poem Silentium of 1910:
She who has not yet been born
Is both word and music
And so the imperishable link
Between everything living.
The sea's chest breathes calmly,
But the mad day sparkles
And the foam's pale lilac
In its bowl of turbid blue.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Neo-Mythologism in MusicFrom Scriabin and Schoenberg to Schnittke and Crumb, pp. 113 - 136Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2007