Musical Modernism, Sanitized

These three books on musical modernism—or music and modernism—cover, chronologically, the period from 1860 to the immediate past and, geographically, the area from Britain through Western Europe (excluding the Iberian Peninsula) to Central and Eastern Europe. This breadth is testimony to what Ben Earle in British Music and Modernism, 1895–1960 aptly calls an “odd counter-movement” to the anti-modernism which dominated Anglo-American musicology during the late 1980s and 1990s, whereby “recent commentators have been falling over each other in their haste to make more or less any late nineteenth-or twentieth-century music available to receive this label [modernism]” (301). Earle is more concerned with the fraying edges that appear in considerations of earlier periods of music, as well as with the genre of the symphony, but the same note of caution could be raised regarding the opposite chronological boundary. Music studies have traditionally employed a broader concept of modernism than most neighboring disciplines, typically, for instance, regarding postmodernism as an aspect of modernism and concurrent with it, rather than as its successor. Although I broadly sympathize with this position, there is a danger that the label may lose its critical edge as the historical as well as stylistic and generic boundaries of musical modernism become ever wider. Aspects of these books under review illustrate the danger of such a position.

Let us begin with Stephen Downes’s book on decadence. There is no mistaking the significance of this work. Downes argues that “decadence is a crucial yet often misunderstood aspect of European modernism” (back cover). It should be viewed, he argues, not only as a form of degeneration but also as one of renewal. This runs the danger of reinstating the conventional morality that decadence so signally rejected, a paradox that is probably unavoidable in any study of the subject and one that Downes, despite addressing it intelligently, doesn’t entirely escape. The breadth of the material discussed and the depth of the scholarship brought to bear by Downes on this matter are astounding, as are the subtlety of his readings. There is one major qualification though: as impressive as his bibliography is, both in sheer size and in intellectual ambition, it is overwhelmingly dominated by English-language titles. It’s as if Downes refers to publications in the language of the particular culture under study only if and when he absolutely has to. We seem to have reached a stage where what members of a community think about their own culture no longer needs to concern us; only the thoughts of Anglophone writers, or those selected to be translated into English (in whatever quality) are taken into account.

The core of the book is arguably made up of the triad: Wagner—Nietzsche—(Thomas) Mann. This opens up another slight problem, one that is surprising considering that Downes built his reputation on authoritative studies of the Polish composer Karol Szymanowski: the model of cultural change and innovation that is implicit in this book is that of center and periphery, with ideas emanating from the Austro-German musical and intellectual “heartlands” being adopted, usually with a time lag, in the far-flung provinces of the Austro-Hungarian or Russian empire. I assume that this wasn’t Downes’s intention, but it is instructive to see how all chapters either begin with or go back to at least one of the central figures named above, and how most if not all the critical terms and analytical concepts are derived from a discussion of their work and are subsequently applied to other figures. To be sure, Downes covers a broad range of “non-Germanic” composers, both canonical and not—Tchaikovsky, Karłowicz, Bartók, Rachmaninov, Lyadov, Szymanowski (curiously...