Revisiting the Historiography of Postwar Avant-Garde Music

Anne-Sylvie Barthel-Calvet, Christopher Brent Murray, Anne-Sylvie Barthel-Calvet, Christopher Brent Murray

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781138091207
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351609258
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Classical Music

This collection of essays delves into the historiographical traditions that have dominated how the stories of European postwar avant-garde music are told, seeking to approach commonplaces of that history writing from new perspectives. The contributors revisit subjects as varied as the impact of long-playing records on the emergence of open works, Messiaen's interest in non-European musical traditions, Xenakis's turn to information theory, Kagel's strategic invention of a new genre, Berio's dependence on funding from American foundations, and the ways in which figures like Boulez, Stockhausen, Pousseur, and Nono constructed their musical ancestries. Leading experts in their respective fields, the volume's authors have sought to rethink the historiography of European experimental music of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s in ways that resituate that small but influential milieu in broader historical and cultural contexts. In doing so, they suggest new directions and insights for students and specialists of twentieth-century music and music historiography.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Revisiting the Old Stories of New Music
• 2 Recent Histories of Twentieth-Century Music and the Historiographical Tradition
• 3 Continuity in the Creative Auto-Genealogies of Boulez, Stockhausen, Pousseur, and Nono
• 4 Inventing a Genre: Mauricio Kagel and Instrumental Theater
• 5 The Songs of Koma Pio and Hele Marsiale in Olivier Messiaen’s Île de feu Etudes
• 6 A New Patronage Model in Postwar America: Luciano Berio, Philanthropy, and the Economics of Culture
• 7 Iannis Xenakis and the Men of Information Theory
• 8 Open Works on Record: An Unsung Mediation
• 9 Making Audible the Mysteries of Sound: An Alternative Historiography for the Musical Avant-Garde from Varèse to Grisey
• List of Contributors
• Index