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  3. Music in the Twentieth Century

This series - now called Music Since 1900 - offers a wide perspective on music and musical life in the twentieth century. Books range from historical and biographical studies concentrating on the context in which composers were writing, to analytical and critical studies concerned with the nature of musical language and questions of compositional process. The importance given to context is also reflected in studies dealing with, for example, the patronage, publishing, and promoting of new music, and in accounts of the musical life of particular countries.

  • General Editors: Arnold Whittall

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8 results in Music in the Twentieth Century

Edward Elgar, Modernist
  • J. P. E. Harper-Scott
  • Published online:
    03 May 2010
    Print publication:
    24 August 2006
  • The first full-length analytical study of Edward Elgar's music, this book argues that Elgar was a modernist composer, and that his music constitutes a pessimistic twentieth-century assessment of the nature of human being. Focusing on Elgar's music rather than his life, Harper-Scott blends the hermeneutic and existential philosophy of Martin Heidegger with music-analytical methods derived from Heinrich Schenker and James Hepokoski. In the course of engaging with debates centred on duotonality in musical structures, sonata deformations, meaning in music, the nature of tragedy, and the quest narrative, the book rejects poststructuralist and literary-theoretical interpretations of music, radically interprets Schenkerian theory, and tentatively outlines a new space - a Heideggerian 'clearing' - in which music of all periods can be understood to operate, be experienced and be understood. The book includes a detailed glossary which provides the reader with clear definitions of important and difficult terms.

The Twelve-Note Music of Anton Webern
  • Old Forms in a New Language
  • Kathryn Bailey
  • Published online:
    23 December 2009
    Print publication:
    30 May 1991
  • This important new study reassesses the position of Anton Webern in twentieth-century music. The twelve-note method of composition adopted by Anton Webern had profound consequences for composers of the next generation such as Stockhausen and Boulez, who saw Webern's music as revolutionary. In her detailed analyses, however, Professor Bailey demonstrates a fundamentally traditional aspect to Webern's creativity, when describing his own music. Professor Bailey analyses all Webern's twelve-note works (from Op. 17 to Op. 31) i.e. the instrumental and vocal music written between 1924 and 1943. These analyses draw on sketch material recently made available at the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel and include transcriptions of little-known drafts and sketches. A most valuable aspect of the book is the inclusion in appendices of such materials as a complete explanation of the row content of each work, the correct prime form of each of the rows from Op. 20 onwards, with a matrix constructed for each, and exhaustive row analyses.

The Music and Thought of Michael Tippett
  • Modern Times and Metaphysics
  • David Clarke
  • Published online:
    13 October 2009
    Print publication:
    25 October 2001
  • Tippett is often cast as a composer with a strong visionary streak, but what does that mean for a twentieth-century artist? In this multi-faceted study, David Clarke explores Tippett's complex creative imagination - its dialogue between a romantic's aspirations to the ideal and absolute, and a modernist's sceptical realism. He shows how the musical formations of works such as The Midsummer Marriage, King Priam, and The Vision of Saint Augustine resonate with the aesthetic and theoretical ideas of key figures in modern Western culture - some known to have been influential to the composer (such as Jung, Wagner and Yeats), others not usually associated with him (such as Kant, Nietzsche and Adorno). Analyses of late works such as the Triple Concerto and Byzantium also speculate on Tippett's sexuality as a (literally) critical element in his creative and political consciousness.

Schoenberg's Musical Imagination
  • Michael Cherlin
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    07 June 2007
  • No composer was more responsible for changes in the landscape of twentieth-century music than Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951) and no other composer's music inspired a commensurate quantity and quality of technical description in the second half of the twentieth century. Yet there is still little understanding of the correlations between Schoenberg's musical thought and larger questions of cultural significance in and since his time: the formalistic descriptions of music theory do not generally engage larger questions in the history of ideas and scholars without understanding of the formidable musical technique are ill-equipped to understand the music with any profundity of thought. Schoenberg's Musical Imagination is intended to connect Schoenberg's music and critical writings to a larger world of ideas. While most technical studies of Schoenberg's music are limited to a single compositional period, this book traces changes in his attitudes as a composer and their impact on his ever-changing compositional style over the course of his remarkable career.

Britten's Musical Language
  • Philip Rupprecht
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    10 January 2002
  • Blending insights from linguistic and social theories of speech, ritual and narrative with music-analytic and historical criticism, Britten's Musical Language offers interesting perspectives on the composer's fusion of verbal and musical utterance in opera and song. It provides close interpretative studies of the major scores (including Peter Grimes, Billy Budd, The Turn of the Screw, War Requiem, Curlew River and Death in Venice) and explores Britten's ability to fashion complex and mysterious symbolic dramas from the interplay of texted song and a wordless discourse of motives and themes. Focusing on the performative and social basis of language, Philip Rupprecht replaces traditional notions of textual 'expression' in opera with the interpretation of topics such as the role of naming and hate speech in Peter Grimes; the disturbance of ritual certainty in the War Requiem; and the codes by which childish 'innocence' is enacted in The Turn of the Screw.

The Music of Louis Andriessen
  • Yayoi Uno Everett
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    04 January 2007
  • For much of his career, the internationally known and still active Dutch composer Louis Andriessen has been understood as an iconoclast who challenged and resisted the musical establishment. This book explores his compositions as a case study for exploring the social and aesthetic implications of new music. Everett chronicles the evolution of Andriessen's music over the course of five decades: the formative years in which he experimented with serialism and collage techniques; his political activism in the late 1960s; 'concept' works from the 1970s that provide musical commentary on philosophical writings by Plato, St Augustine and others; theatrical and operatic collaborations with Robert Wilson and Peter Greenaway in the 1980s and 1990s; and recent works that explore contemplative themes on death and madness. Everett's analysis of Andriessen's music draws on theories of parody, narrativity, and intertextuality that have gained currency in musicological discourse in recent years.

Polish Music since Szymanowski
  • Adrian Thomas
  • Published online:
    22 September 2009
    Print publication:
    17 March 2005
  • This book looks at Polish music since 1937 and its interaction with political and cultural turmoil. In Part I musical developments are placed in the context of the socio-political upheavals of inter-war Poland, Nazi occupation, and the rise and fall of the Stalinist policy of socialist realism (1948–54). Part II investigates the nature of the 'thaw' between 1954 and 1959, focusing on the role of the 'Warsaw Autumn' Festival. Part III discusses how composers reacted to the onset of serialism by establishing increasingly individual voices in the 1960s. In addition to a discussion of 'sonorism' (from Penderecki to Szalonek), it considers how different generations responded to the modernist aesthetic (Bacewicz and Lutoslawski, Baird and Serocki, Górecki and Krauze). Part IV views Polish music since the 1970s, including the issue of national identity and the arrival of a talented generation and its ironic, postmodern slant on the past.

The Music of Toru Takemitsu
  • Peter Burt
  • Published online:
    18 August 2009
    Print publication:
    26 July 2001
  • Toru Takemitsu (1930–1996) was the best-known Japanese composer of his generation, bringing aspects of Eastern and Western traditions together, yet he remained something of an elusive figure. The composer's own commentaries about his music, poetic and philosophical in tone, have tended to deepen the mystery and much writing on Takemitsu to date has adopted a similar attitude, leaving many questions about his compositional methods unanswered. This book is the first complete study of the composer's work to appear in English. It is also the first book in this language to offer an in-depth analysis of his music. Takemitsu's works are increasingly popular with Western audiences and Peter Burt attempts for the first time to shed light on the hitherto rather secretive world of his working methods, as well as place him in context as heir to the rich tradition of Japanese composition in the twentieth century.