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.
