Traditionally, ideas about twentieth-century 'modernism' - whether focused on literature, music or the visual arts - have made a distinction between 'high' art and the 'popular' arts of best-selling ...fiction, jazz and other forms of popular music, and commercial art of one form or another. In Modernism and Popular Music, Ronald Schleifer instead shows how the music of George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Thomas 'Fats' Waller and Billie Holiday can be considered as artistic expressions equal to those of the traditional high art practices in music and literature. Combining detailed attention to the language and aesthetics of popular music with an examination of its early twentieth-century performance and dissemination through the new technologies of the radio and phonograph, Schleifer explores the 'popularity' of popular music in order to reconsider received and seeming self-evident truths about the differences between high art and popular art and, indeed, about twentieth-century modernism altogether.
Deep Refrains Gallope, Michael
2017, 2017-11-16
eBook
We often say that music is ineffable, that it does not refer to anything outside of itself. But if music, in all its sensuous flux, does not mean anything in particular, might it still have a special ...kind of philosophical significance?In Deep Refrains, Michael Gallope draws together the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari in order to revisit the age-old question of music's ineffability from a modern perspective. For these nineteenth- and twentieth-century European philosophers, music's ineffability is a complex phenomenon that engenders an intellectually productive sense of perplexity. Through careful examination of their historical contexts and philosophical orientations, close attention to their use of language, and new interpretations of musical compositions that proved influential for their work, Deep Refrains forges the first panoptic view of their writings on music. Gallope concludes that music's ineffability is neither a conservative phenomenon nor a pious call to silence. Instead, these philosophers ask us to think through the ways in which music's stunning force might address, in an ethical fashion, intricate philosophical questions specific to the modern world.
The music of Gustav Mahler repeatedly engages with Romantic notions of redemption. This is expressed in a range of gestures and procedures, shifting between affirmative fulfilment and pessimistic ...negation. In this groundbreaking study, Stephen Downes explores the relationship of this aspect of Mahler's music to the output of Benjamin Britten, Kurt Weill and Hans Werner Henze. Their initial admiration was notably dissonant with the prevailing Zeitgeist – Britten in 1930s England, Weill in 1920s Germany and Henze in 1950s Germany and Italy. Downes argues that Mahler's music struck a profound chord with them because of the powerful manner in which it raises and intensifies dystopian and utopian complexes and probes the question of fulfilment or redemption, an ambition manifest in ambiguous tonal, temporal and formal processes. Comparisons of the ways in which this topic is evoked facilitate new interpretative insights into the music of these four major composers.
One of the finest literary critics of her generation, Maud Ellmann synthesises her work on modernism, psychoanalysis and Irish literature in this important new book. In sinuous readings of Henry ...James, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, she examines the interconnections between developing technological networks in modernity and the structures of modernist fiction, linking both to Freudian psychoanalysis. The Nets of Modernism examines the significance of images of bodily violation and exchange - scar, bite, wound, and their psychic equivalents - showing how these images correspond to 'vampirism' and related obsessions in early twentieth-century culture. Subtle, original and a pleasure to read, this 2010 book offers a fresh perspective on the inter-implications of Freudian psychoanalysis and Anglophone modernism that will influence the field for years to come.
Eduard Steuermann (1892–1964), Austrian-Polish-Jewish pianist from Galicia, student of Busoni, teacher and friend of Adorno, exiled American, sought-after soloist and pedagogue between Vienna, New ...York and Darmstadt, sought throughout his life the "almost impossible": to reconcile truth and beauty in uncompromising "devotion to music". The esteem in which he was held as the most important pianist for the establishment of New Piano Music, not only by the Viennese Schoenberg circle, has had a lasting effect on an appreciation of his person that goes beyond this. In 14 contributions that look at Steuermann from very different angles – discussing his life, his family and artistic ties, his music-making and composing, his work as a teacher and witty author – the view of the breadth of his work is widened on the basis of numerous previously unexplored materials, and the portrait of an artist who, according to Adorno, embodied the "conscience" of music itself is drawn.
Eduard Steuermann (1892–1964), österreichisch-polnisch-jüdischer Pianist aus Galizien, Schüler Busonis, Lehrer und Freund Adornos, Exil-Amerikaner, gefragter Solist und Pädagoge zwischen Wien, New York und Darmstadt, hat zeitlebens das "beinahe Unmögliche" gesucht: in kompromissloser "Hingabe an die Musik" Wahrheit und Schönheit zu versöhnen. Die Wertschätzung, die ihm als dem wichtigsten Pianisten für die Etablierung Neuer Klaviermusik nicht nur des Wiener Schönberg-Kreises entgegengebracht wurde, hat einer darüber hinausgehenden Würdigung seiner Person nachhaltig entgegengewirkt. In 14 Beiträgen, die Steuermann von sehr unterschiedlichen Seiten betrachten – sein Leben, seine familiären und künstlerischen Bindungen, sein Musizieren und Komponieren, sein Wirken als Lehrer und geistvoller Autor erörtern –, wird anhand zahlreicher bisher unerschlossener Materialien der Blick auf die Breite seines Schaffens geweitet und das Porträt eines Künstlers gezeichnet, der nach Adorno das "Gewissen" der Musik selbst verkörperte.
Die Anton Bruckner Privatuniversität Linz veranstaltete vom 15.-17. November 2018 ein Symposium zu Leben und Werk des (nicht nur) für seine Interpretationen der Klaviermusik Arnold Schönbergs hoch ...gerühmten Pianisten, Komponisten und Lehrers Eduard (Edward) Steuermann (1892-1964).
Während Steuermanns Bedeutung als Interpret der Wiener Schule in Fachkreisen außer Frage steht, ist sein Klavierspiel nur in geringem Ausmaß auf Tonträgern überliefert und einer breiteren Öffentlichkeit heute ebenso wenig bekannt wie seine anspruchsvollen Kompositionen. Musikforscher aus Österreich, Deutschland und der Schweiz nähern sich der Künstlerpersönlichkeit Steuermanns aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven an und ergründen seine bis heute weitgehend unterschwellig andauernde Wirkung.
- Vorwort
- Grußwort von Alfred Brendel
- Lars E. Laubhold: "… Musiker und gleichzeitig 'Klawiervirtuose' zu sein … ". Eduard Steuermann – ein Porträt
- Karin Wagner: "Gedanken über die Dauer des Exils". Steuermann in den USA
- Irene Suchy: Leerstelle Eduard Steuermann. Tangentiale Berührungen und bürokratische Vermeidungen
- Anton Voigt: "… eine ganz hervorragende Wiener Schule …". Steuermann als Klavierpädagoge
- Reinhard Kapp: Noch einmal: Espressivo, insbesondere "Wiener Espressivo"
- Werner Unger: Eduard Steuermanns phonographischer Nachlass. Aktuelle Situation und Perspektiven
- Eike Feß: Lebens- und Schaffensdokumente. Zur Edward Steuermann Collection am Arnold Schönberg Center, Wien
- Jürg Stenzl: Eduard Steuermanns Interpretation von Ludwig van Beethovens "Veränderungen über einen Walzer von Anton Diabelli", op. 120
- Lars E. Laubhold: "… some Bach, some Mozart …". Steuermann interpretiert Musik des 18. Jahrhunderts
- Thomas Glaser: "'Intellektuelles' Musizieren gegen 'spontanes', musikantisches …". Schönbergs "Phantasy for Violin with Piano Accompaniment" op. 47 in den Einspielungen mit Kolisch und Steuermann
- Christian Utz: Zur Plastizität verklanglichte Form. Tempo-, Klang- und Formgestaltung in Eduard Steuermanns Einspielungen von Arnold Schönbergs "Sechs kleinen Klavierstücken" op. 19 im Kontext der Interpretationsgeschichte des Werkes
- Matthias Schmidt: "Alpenkräuter-Duft". Zu Eduard Steuermann und Anton Webern
- Volker Rülke: Nur im Banne Schönbergs? Zu Eduard Steuermanns Klavierwerken
- Martin Zenck: "… das 'Wirre' ist ja nicht ungewollt …". Zum zweiten Streichquartett "Diary" (1960–61) in der Uraufführung mit dem Juilliard String Quartet 1963 in New York
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Drawing together the estrangement theories of Viktor Shklovsky and Bertolt Brecht with Leo Tolstoy's theory of infection, Douglas Robinson studies the ways in which shared evaluative affect regulates ...both literary familiarity—convention and tradition—and modern strategies of alienation, depersonalization, and malaise.
This book begins with two assumptions, both taken from Tolstoy's late aesthetic treatise What Is Art? (1898): that there is a malaise in culture, and that literature's power to infect readers with the moral values of the author is a possible cure for this malaise. Exploring these ideas of estrangement within the contexts of earlier, contemporary, and later critical theory, Robinson argues that Shklovsky and Brecht follow Tolstoy in their efforts to fight depersonalization by imbuing readers with the transformative guidance of collectivized feeling. Robinson's somatic approach to literature offers a powerful alternative to depersonalizing structuralist and poststructuralist theorization without simply retreating into conservative rejection and reaction.
Both a comparative study of Russian and German literary-theoretical history and an insightful examination of the somatics of literature, this groundbreaking work provides a deeper understanding of how literature affects the reader and offers a new perspective on present-day problems in poststructuralist approaches to the human condition.
An analysis of the novels of Maturin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Mann, Lovecraft and Pelevin through the prism of their interest in investigating the nature of the nightmare reveals the unstudied features of ...the nightmare as a mental state and traces the mosaic of coincidences leading from literary experiments to today's culture of nightmare consumption.
Philip Weinstein explores the modernist commitment to unknowing by addressing the work of three supreme experimental writers: Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner. In their novels, the ...narrative props that support the drama of coming to know are refused. When space turns uncanny rather than lawful, when time ceases to be linear and progressive, objects and others become unfamiliar. So does the subject seeking to know them. Weinstein argues that modernist texts work, by way of surprise and arrest, to subvert the familiarity and narrative progression intrinsic to realist fiction. Rather than staging the drama of coming to know, they stage the drama of coming to unknow. The signature move of modernism is shock, just as resolution is the trademark of realism.Kafka, Proust, and Faulkner wrought their most compelling experimental effects by undermining an earlier Enlightenment project of knowing. Weinstein draws on major Enlightenment thinkers to identify constituent components of the narrative of coming to know—the progressive narrative underwriting two centuries of Western realist fiction. The book proceeds by framing modernist unknowing between prior practices of realist knowing, on the one hand, and, on the other, certain later practices—postmodern and postcolonial—that move beyond knowing altogether. In so doing, Weinstein proposes a metahistory of the Western novel, from Daniel Defoe to Toni Morrison. Philip Weinstein explores the modernist commitment to unknowing by addressing the work of three supreme experimental writers: Franz Kafka, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner. In their novels, the narrative props that support the drama of coming to know are refused. When space turns uncanny rather than lawful, when time ceases to be linear and progressive, objects and others become unfamiliar. So does the subject seeking to know them. Weinstein argues that modernist texts work, by way of surprise and arrest, to subvert the familiarity and narrative progression intrinsic to realist fiction. Rather than staging the drama of coming to know, they stage the drama of coming to unknow. The signature move of modernism is shock, just as resolution is the trademark of realism. Kafka, Proust, and Faulkner wrought their most compelling experimental effects by undermining an earlier Enlightenment project of knowing. Weinstein draws on major Enlightenment thinkers to identify constituent components of the narrative of coming to know—the progressive narrative underwriting two centuries of Western realist fiction. The book proceeds by framing modernist unknowing between prior practices of realist knowing, on the one hand, and, on the other, certain later practices—postmodern and postcolonial—that move beyond knowing altogether. In so doing, Weinstein proposes a metahistory of the Western novel, from Daniel Defoe to Toni Morrison.
