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Musical Communication and the Process of Modernity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Gianmario Borio
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Type
Round Table: Modernism and its Others
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 139 , Issue 1 , 2014 , pp. 178 - 183
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 The Royal Musical Association

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References

1 Georgina Born, Rationalizing Culture: IRCAM, Boulez, and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (Berkeley, CA, 1995); Western Music and its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, ed. Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh (Berkeley, CA, 2000); Susan McClary, ‘Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music Composition’, Cultural Critique, 12 (1989), 57–81, repr. in Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture, ed. David Schwarz, Anahid Kassabian and Lawrence Siegel (Charlotteville, VA, and London, 1997), 54–74 (this essay was originally a 1988 conference paper); Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley, CA, 1995); Derek B. Scott, ‘Postmodernism and Music’, The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, ed. Stuart Sim (London, 2011), 182–93; Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music, 6 vols. (Oxford, 2005), v: The Late Twentieth Century, 411–14; Postmodern Music: Postmodern Thought, ed. Judy L. Lockhead and Joseph H. Auner (New York, 2002); Kenneth Gloag, Postmodernism in Music (Cambridge, 2012). The present overview concentrates on the main bulk of the critique of modernism, leaving out (for reasons of space) some important contributions that show signs of inverting the trend: Alastair Williams, New Music and the Claim of Modernity (Aldershot, 1997); The Pleasure of Modernist Music: Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology, ed. Arved Ashby (Rochester, NY, 2004); Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity, ed. Karol Berger and Anthony Newcomb (Cambridge, MA, 2005); The Modernist Legacy: Essays on New Music, ed. Björn Heile (Aldershot, 2009); David Metzer, Musical Modernism at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, 2009).

2 Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA, 1987); I propose here a different translation of the passage. Karol Berger, in ‘Time's Arrow and the Advent of Musical Modernity’, Music and the Aesthetics of Modernity, ed. Berger and Newcomb, 5–19, explores the concept of ‘time consciousness’ in music.

3 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedeman (London and New York, 2004), 219–23; Carl Dahlhaus, Beethoven: Approaches to his Music (Oxford and New York, 1993), 30–42.

4 See Albrecht Wellmer, The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and Postmodernism, trans. David Midgley (Cambridge, MA, 1991), especially the article ‘The Dialectic of Modernism and Postmodernism: The Critique of Reason Since Adorno’, 36–94.

5 Ästhetische Moderne in Europa: Grundzüge und Problemzusammenhänge seit der Romantik, ed. Silvio Vietta and Dirk Kemper (Munich, 1998), 37.

6 Charles Taylor, ‘Two Theories of Modernity’, Alternative Modernities, ed. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (Durham, NC, 2001), 172–96.

7 Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, ‘On Alternative Modernities’, Alternative Modernities, ed. Gaonkar, 1–23 (p. 14). In the domain of music the idea of hybrid modernity was developed by Steven Feld; see in particular his Jazz Cosmopolitanism in Accra: Five Musical Years in Ghana (Durham, NC, 2012), 201–43.

8 Jonathan D. Kramer, ‘The Nature and Origins of Musical Postmodernism’, Postmodern Music: Postmodern Thought, 13–26 (p. 16).

9 Martin Scherzinger, ‘In Memory of a Receding Dialectic: The Political Relevance of Autonomy and Formalism in Modernist Musical Aesthetics’, The Pleasure of Modernist Music, ed. Ashby, 68–100.

10 Jean-Paul Sartre, What is Literature? and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA, 1988); René Leibowitz, L'artiste et sa conscience: Esquisse d'une dialectique de la conscience artistique (Paris, 1950); Luigi Nono, ‘Presenza storica nella musica d'oggi’, Scritti e colloqui, ed. Angela Ida De Benedictis and Veniero Rizzardi, 2 vols. (Lucca, 2001), i, 46–56 (trans. as ‘The Historical Reality of Music Today’, The Score, 27 (1960), 41–5); Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Commitment’, Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford, CA, 2003), 240–58; Umberto Eco, ‘Del modo di formare come impegno sulla realtà’, Menabò, 5 (1962), 198–237, repr. in Opera aperta: Forma e indeterminazione nelle poetiche contemporanee (Milan, 1976), 235–90 (trans. Anna Cancogni as ‘Form as Social Commitment’, in Eco, Open Work (Cambridge, MA, 1989), 123–57).

11 Heinz-Klaus Metzger, ‘Musik wozu’, Musik wozu: Literatur zu Noten, ed. Rainer Riehn (Frankfurt am Main, 1980), 294–306 (p. 296).

12 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Hullot-Kentor, 295–7. On this topic, see Lydia Goehr, ‘Political Music and the Politics of Music’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 52/1: The Philosophy of Music (winter 1994), 99–112.

13 Dieter Schnebel, ‘Autonome Kunst politisch’, Denkbare Musik: Schriften 1952–1972, ed. Hans Rudolf Zeller (Cologne, 1972), 474–87 (p. 479).

14 Dieter Schnebel, ‘Autonome Kunst politisch’, Denkbare Musik: Schriften 1952–1972, ed. Hans Rudolf Zeller (Cologne, 1972), 480. See also Helmut Lachenmann, ‘Die gefährdete Kommunikation: Gedanken und Praktiken eines Komponisten’ (1973), Musik als existentielle Erfahrung: Schriften 1966–1995, ed. Josef Häusler (Wiesbaden, 1996), 99–103.

15 ‘Les sons ne sont pas des entités indépendantes, détachées du restant de la réalité et utilisables sans tenir compte de celle-ci.’ Henri Pousseur, Musique, sémantique, société (Paris, 1974), 7. Pousseur refers here to the conception of music elaborated in Michel Butor, ‘La musique, art réaliste: Les paroles et la musique’, Répertoire 2 (Paris, 1964), 27–41.

16 ‘C'est toute une petite histoire que chaque son, chaque structure sonore nous raconte.’ Pousseur, Musique, sémantique, société, 8.

17 ‘En fait, toute musique, même la plus prétendument pure et autonome, constitue un véritable théâtre, mental d'abord mais aussi plus “extérieur”, où se jouent les allégories de nostre destin.’ Ibid., 13.

18 Luciano Berio, ‘Du geste et de Piazza Carità’, La musique et ses problèmes contemporains 1953–1963, Cahiers de la Compagnie Madeleine Renaud–Jean-Louis Barrault, 2/41 (Paris, 1963), 216–33; I cite, however, from the Italian version: ‘Del gesto e di Piazza Carità’, Luciano Berio, Scritti sulla musica, ed. Angela Ida De Benedictis (Turin, 2013), 30–6 (p. 31).

19 Luciano Berio, ‘Du geste et de Piazza Carità’, La musique et ses problèmes contemporains 1953–1963, Cahiers de la Compagnie Madeleine Renaud–Jean-Louis Barrault, 2/41 (Paris, 1963), 216–33; I cite, however, from the Italian version: ‘Del gesto e di Piazza Carità’, Luciano Berio, Scritti sulla musica, ed. Angela Ida De Benedictis (Turin, 2013), 30–6 (p. 31).

20 Luciano Berio, ‘Du geste et de Piazza Carità’, La musique et ses problèmes contemporains 1953–1963, Cahiers de la Compagnie Madeleine Renaud–Jean-Louis Barrault, 2/41 (Paris, 1963), 216–33; I cite, however, from the Italian version: ‘Del gesto e di Piazza Carità’, Luciano Berio, Scritti sulla musica, ed. Angela Ida De Benedictis (Turin, 2013), 32.