The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music

,

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367733032
• eBook ISBN: 9781317042457
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Classical Music

Modernism in music still arouses passions and is riven by controversies. Taking root in the early decades of the twentieth century, it achieved ideological dominance for almost three decades following the Second World War, before becoming the object of widespread critique in the last two decades of the century, both from critics and composers of a postmodern persuasion and from prominent scholars associated with the 'new musicology'. Yet these critiques have failed to dampen its ongoing resilience. The picture of modernism has considerably broadened and diversified, and has remained a pivotal focus of debate well into the twenty-first century. This Research Companion does not seek to limit what musical modernism might be. At the same time, it resists any dilution of the term that would see its indiscriminate application to practically any and all music of a certain period.

In addition to addressing issues already well established in modernist studies such as aesthetics, history, institutions, place, diaspora, cosmopolitanism, production and performance, communication technologies and the interface with postmodernism, this volume also explores topics that are less established; among them: modernism and affect, modernism and comedy, modernism versus the 'contemporary', and the crucial distinction between modernism in popular culture and a 'popular modernism', a modernism of the people. In doing so, this text seeks to define modernism in music by probing its margins as much as by restating its supposed essence.

Part 1

Foundations

1
The birth of modernism – out of the spirit of comedy

James R. Currie

The attempt to summarize something as geographically pervasive as comedy within something as temporally extensive as the historical time covered by musical modernism could easily come across as being prey to hubris. Since in comedy one of the fates of those seduced by hubris is to be reduced to comedy’s great paradigm – of a king slipping up on a banana peel and landing on his arse – the attempt therefore runs the risk of becoming comic itself. More than any other, comedy is the genre that appears in the plural: both in-and-of itself, through its characteristic tendency towards stylistic mixture and diversity, but also in terms of the wide range of variations produced in the genre through the strong attendance it gives to the highly specific temporal and geographical configurations in which it is brought into being. In the words of Laurent Berlant and Sianne Ngai, comedy is a ‘vernacular form’, and thus, ‘[w]hat we find comedic (or just funny) is sensitive to changing contexts’.¹ There are comedies, not comedy. The point is almost empirical, easily registered in the difficulty we can have in accessing the nuance of humour when learning another language, or how oddly lame the jokes appear of other countries and times past. As Henri Bergson wrote in his justly famous 1900 essay on laughter: ‘how often has the remark been made that many comic effects are incapable of translation from one language to another, because they refer to the customs and ideas of a particular social group!’ Indeed, for Bergson there is even a hint of the sinister about this, for ‘[h]owever spontaneous it seems, laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers, real or imaginary’.² In a lighter vein, we might simply say that comic works are homebodies, relishing neither foreign vacations nor time travel except as a source of material for comic working. The comic is seemingly allergic to grand narratives. It is a kind of hilarious gravitational force that precludes transcendent flight, forcing subjects to remain anchored to their material limitations, broadly conceived, and to learn somehow to live with humour within human finitude.

As such, comedy has often made a good fellow traveller for postmodern discourse, which is similarly anti-metaphysical and insistent in its demands that the particularity of specific contexts and their histories should preside over our understanding of human cultural endeavours. It is therefore unsurprising how easily comedy has come to be lauded by postmodern musicologists.³ But if postmodernism and comedy go well together, so do modernism and comedy too, and since modernism has so regularly functioned as postmodernism’s determinative antagonist, particularly in musicological discourse, then comedy is perhaps a less clear indicator of allegiances than some might once have hoped. The conjunction of modernism and comedy, whilst historically interesting in and of itself, is also thus an expedient location from which to disturb some of the presumptions that have prevailed in musicology for the past quarter-century. And although this theme is not the presiding focus of the following essay, its provocation is an abiding pressure throughout. To that degree, my speculations can be thought of as a contribution to our increasingly complex understanding of our modernist inheritance at a moment when, faced with the extraordinary challenges of our contemporary moment, the certainties that our postmodern worldview had once seemed to offer now wither.

As a starting point, we can note how well postmodernism’s comic ethos matches up with broad patterns that emerged into discourse in the middle of the nineteenth century, when the proclivities and contentions that were to become characteristic of modernist modalities first started to sprout. Both, after all, exhibit a strongly anti-transcendental agenda that is frequently communicated by means of comedy. For postmodern thinking, fuelled by the negative examples provided by the totalitarian projects of the twentieth century, this agenda is part and parcel of its across-the-board radical democratic critical tendency, which sees the transcendent as the means by which power shores up its forces and thus works to exclude rather than embrace.⁴ With regard to the mid-nineteenth century, the antipathy towards the transcendental position develops in the wake of the 1848 revolutions amidst the profound questioning of Romanticism and the culture and politics of the first half of the nineteenth century that arose in the bathos following that moment of political failure.⁵ Criticism of Romanticism was, of course, as old as Romanticism itself. The common post-1848 claim was that Romanticism must now be rejected since, crudely put, it was but a form of transcendental escapism, and thus too distracted by gazing at the stars to be able to forge a credible politics on the ground at a moment of crisis. But this was something that early on Romanticism had already self-reflexively woven into the texture of its own discourse by means of, among other things, the fragment and its own particular brand of irony. Irrespective of precedent, however, the strategic flourishing of anti-Romantic sentiment at the mid-century point resulted in a strongly materialist swerve which tended to sacrifice transcendental and metaphysical claims to the exigencies of a kind of positivistic pragmatism, and whose broadly defined artistic impulse came under the aegis of realism and its various analogies. As is well known, in visual arts, for example, the painter’s gaze started to turn away from the epic horizons of Romanticism, beyond which utopia might one day emerge, and to redirect its attention back towards the everyday of modern life, as in the paintings of Manet and, in the comic vein, in the caricatures of Daumier. In the novel we see plots increasingly driven by a sense that the motor of causality in human affairs is of a broadly scientific bent – sociological, psychological, economic – a tendency epitomized in Zola’s famous assertion in Le roman expérimental (1880) that his novels should be thought of more as a scientific experiment. Romantic notions of musical transcendence did, of course, remain a powerful force in European musical culture in the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly in German-speaking lands.⁶ But even in Germanic musical discourse there likewise developed a competing materialist strain. When in other countries, notably in France, that strain became all-consuming then, as with postmodernism, comedy was often not far behind.

Take, for example, the first full-length operetta, Jacques Offenbach’s magnificent Orphée aux enfers (Orpheus in the Underworld), premiered in 1858 in Paris at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiennes. This is a comic assault that takes no prisoners, sacrificing anything in its path that claims truth can only be grasped by floating above the odour and texture of contemporary life. If Zola could refer to his novels as scientific experiments then, following the lead of Siegfried Kracauer in his famous Jacques Offenbach and the Paris of His Time of 1937, we can think of Offenbach here as a kind of satirical journalist. With all the hilarity of a bruiser in drag as an ingénue, Offenbach’s masterpiece dons the garb of antiquity and of European opera’s hallowed mythological origins, and taking hefty swipes en route at, among others, the corny acting at the Comédie Française and, beloved of the French, Gluck’s Orphée et Eurydice, it enacts an extraordinarily damning portrait of Napoleon III, the early years of the Second Empire in France, and the bourgeoisie’s complicity with his reign and resulting self-betrayal of their own radical political past. At the very beginning of his virtuosic analysis of the 1851 coup d’état that led to Louis Napoleon being declared emperor in 1852, Karl Marx famously wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1851–52) that ‘Hegel observes somewhere that all the great events and characters of world history occur twice, so to speak’. Adopting the formula of a stand-up comedian telling a joke, he then concludes: ‘He forgot to add: the first time as high tragedy, the second time as low farce.’⁷ In Marx’s essay, the triumph of Louis Napoleon, a distant nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, is but a pitiful re-enactment of the events by which Napoleon himself gained power in November of 1799 during the Revolution. Offenbach’s operetta is the unofficial musical based on Marx’s thesis, for here music history, like its political counterpart, happens twice: first time as opera, second time as operetta.⁸

As with certain strains in postmodernism, there is the sense in Offenbach’s operetta that modern life is, in part, one of worn out, enervated historical repetition, a costume drama of flimsy garments that either fails fully to cover up the obscenities of the contemporary or is simply all there is to the contemporary.⁹ In broad daylight we are robbed of our belief in the eternal validity of the truths of the past. The epic theatre of history collapses, leaving the masterpieces of Western culture to roam aimlessly along the hall of funhouse mirrors left in its wake – which, interestingly, were invented during this period by Charles Frances Ritchel.¹⁰ What is of note for our purposes is less that Offenbach, via the mode of satire, uses comedy in order to enact this disenchantment. As Kracauer points out, by 1858 satire of antiquity was a French tradition stretching back at least two hundred years, and was particularly in vogue in the early years of the Second Empire.¹¹ Rather, it is that by employing comedy to do so, Offenbach repeatedly sidesteps despair and heads straight to the party, most obviously in the infamous ‘can-can’, the ‘Infernal Galop’ from Act 2 scene 2.¹²

In terms of the lofty ethical and spiritual claims made for high art, the conceptualization of music brought to the stage in this work is extraordinarily raw. Everything about the art is shown to be instrumental, void of possibility of redemption into aesthetic autonomy. It is as if musical material were simply a tool available in order to get something done. Orpheus is recast as a virtuoso concert violinist. Yet in comparison with the myth, where his musical gifts are imbued with the possibilities of transcending the boundary between life and death, when we first encounter him in Act 1 the practice of his art functions predominantly within an inane psychic economy: a means to the end of the narcissistic validation that he thereby receives from his audiences. No longer the mysterious and somewhat mute shade, Eurydice is now a crass and highly vocal Philistine, unmoved by the music of her husband – who evidently leaves her unmoved in other departments too, since she is having an affair. Rather than the redemptive medium through which humans seek to transcend the barriers separating themselves from each other and the world, music here reinforces divisions, shoring up the dam of the individual against the threat of being swept away by oceanic feelings. In the hilarious ‘Duo du Concerto’ of Act 1, when Orpheus starts to play his hour-and-a-quarter-long violin concerto at Eurydice, she first finds it boring, and then agonizing. It is as if the basic distinction between what should be music and what is noise has been transgressed. Music is here mere stuff, like a rock: something that might leave one either indifferent or, should someone think to smash it against one’s skull, damaged. And yet rather than leaving us feeling bereft, the effect of Offenbach’s masterpiece is almost joyous. Music is simply us, in all our limitation and self-serving...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Music examples
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Foundations
• Part 2 Positions
• Part 3 Practices