And I'm willing to bet that you would never guess which ones I have in mind. The first is possibly easier as he has been remarked on previously: Ezra Pound a famous figure in early 20th century modernist poetry. Here is the most famous example. the first instance of what became known as Imagist poetry:
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
That's the modernist side, on the antiquarian side we might cite his study of the Provençal dialect and attraction to Dante, Homer and Anglo-Saxon poetry. He also translated Confucius and Chinese poetry and spent a lot of time in the Royal Library in Madrid. Some might say that what I claim is antiquarian, which I define as a deep interest in things that are old, of our or of other cultures, is simply one aspect of modernism.
Now for my second example that I'm sure you would never guess: guitarist/composer Leo Brouwer. In the early 1970s he was awarded a scholarship to study in Berlin where he worked with Hans Werner Henze and studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen. Something not as well known (it is not mentioned in the Wikipedia biography) is that he also studied performance practice with harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt and the fruits of this relationship can be found in his second set of studies where he notates many ornaments suitable for Baroque music and in his recording of Scarlatti sonatas (and published guitar arrangements) where he exhibits a marvelous creative brilliance in ornamentation. Here is an example:
By mere happenstance, I have connections to both of these figures. As an undergraduate at the University of Victoria in the early 1970s I met Basil Bunting, a poet and friend of Ezra Pound. I was delighted to have had a number of conversations with him about the relation between poetry and music. He shared with me his love for the playing of Andrés Segovia. Like Pound he was also an antiquarian and once said that at his age he was starting to lose his Persian. I also took two master classes with Leo Brouwer as a guitarist and in Salzburg in 1988 I met Karlheinz Stockhausen and had some interesting discussions with him about live performance versus recordings.
I have always had antiquarian leanings as well, so perhaps it is a component of contemporaneity. In my early days as a classical guitarist I took a summer course in lute-playing and later on, as part of my work as a concert guitar performer I had a lot of interest in performance practice of early (and 20th century) music. As part of that project, I put a lot of research into how to play the music of the Spanish vihuelistas and as a guide to that I studied the treatise of Tomás de Santa María titled Arte de tañer fantasía published in Valladolid in 1556. Luis de Narváez' book of compositions was published in the same city in 1538. I chose, however, a fantasia by Luys Milan to apply Tomás de Santa María's ornamental suggestions to. Here is the second page of the Milan Fantasía 10 in the edition of Emilio Pujol with my ornaments pencilled in:
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Was this a component of my approach as a modernist? Or was this an antiquarian impulse? How can we tell the difference? Is someone who spends their entire life studying and performing 16th century music still a closet modernist? Obviously there are lots of modernists that have no interest in things antiquarian. Looking into my own heart, I really don't know how to answer these questions.
Before I really got into classical music, my prejudice was that the modernists were utopian noise-makers who were looking to shatter the past. And it was interesting to discover how wrong this was. Twentieth-century composers reached further back into musical history than the generations before. And anecdotally, I can think of a number of people I've met or know of (including myself) who are really into new classical music and also really into early music -- more so than the stuff in between. There seems to be a fundamental and obvious connection, but I can't at this moment express it (or at least not when Sleep is beckoning me...)
ReplyDeleteAnd someone like Gubaidulina can call herself an 'archaic' composer and we understand what she means. There is something almost primitive about quite a bit of modernist music. A lot of it is religious too.
A Canadian composer friend of mine has mentioned that some big influences on his musical thinking come from the organum of the Notre Dame composers as well as other Medieval music and English viol music up to 1700. I guess that a significant component of modernism, the rejection of 19th century musical ideas, can well involve looking to music from earlier times. Other important places to look have been gamelan music (Debussy and Ravel), drumming from Ghana (Steve Reich) and, in my case at least, biwa music from Japan and mbira music from Africa. Mind you, this very diversity makes defining modernism in music a bit tricky! "Anything but the 19th century in Europe" is a bit broad, don't you think?
ReplyDeleteI don't know if it is too broad. It would be too broad (and rather eccentric) if it were, say, 'anything but the 16th century'. However, the 19th century was and still is central to classical music -- it dominates the repertoire. (Especially if we think of the 'long nineteenth-century'.) So to be anti-19th century music makes sense, no? It's a natural counter-cultural position.
ReplyDeleteSteve Reich said something once about disliking and avoiding all that dark brown 19th century music. I have had similar feelings even as I recognize how wonderful a lot of it is.
ReplyDeleteBut the definition is too broad in that it is exclusively negative: this is what modernism is not. But what would a positive definition be? What characteristics does modernism have as opposed to what does it avoid?
I can't think of a way to describe modernism positively. Would you also say that 'unbelief in God' is too broad a definition for atheism?
ReplyDeleteThere isn't a common modernist style, which is a problem composers then and now have had to grapple with. Maybe the only way to get to a positive definition of modernism is to break it down into its parts.
Just looked up the definition of 'modernism' in Grove (given by Leon Botstein), which is unhelpful:
A term used in music to denote a multi-faceted but distinct and continuous tradition within 20th-century composition. ... Modernism is a consequence of the fundamental conviction among successive generations of composers since 1900 that the means of musical expression in the 20th century must be adequate to the unique and radical character of the age. ... The word ‘Modernism’ has functioned throughout the century both polemically and analytically; although it is applied loosely to disparate musical styles, what links its many strands is a common debt to the historical context from which it emerged.
The Oxford Companion of Music (Paul Griffiths) gives this definition:
A current of compositional thought and practice characterized by innovation. Modernism was in evidence as an idea and as a term by the second decade of the 20th century, in association with Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring (1913), with Schoenberg's move into atonality (in about 1908), with the music of the Italian Futurists and Russian followers of Skryabin, and with Busoni's Sketch for a New Aesthetic of Music (1907). But although so many new hopes and endeavours were born at the same time, there was no unanimity of motivation or outlook.
It goes on, but only to expand on the heterogeneity of modernist music.
Atheism: excellent riposte!
ReplyDeleteI should be able to nail it, as I have recently been reading Taruskin, but alas, I just have too many things in my head to remember the specifics. I'm pretty sure he would reject both of these, especially the second one. He is of the opinion that the long, long 19th century extended to after WWI. The last stage of late, late 19th century music was the maximalism of Mahler, Scriabin, some Schoenberg, some Stravinsky and son on. After the war was the big shift towards sparer music, trimmed down, Neo-classical, an emphasis on rhythm and away from the sea of harmony, an acerbic cynicism rejecting the idealism of the 19th century, atonality--yes, but joined with a crystalline clarity and spareness. And so on.
There was a great essay titled "When was Modernism?" but I forget the argument!