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  • Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources
  • Arnold Whittall
Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources. By Daniel Albright. pp. viii + 428. (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 2004, £21. ISBN 0-226-01267-0.)

For Daniel Albright, 'the defining moment of Modernism—not just in music, but in all the arts—took place on 29 May 1913, at the première of Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring' (p. 236). The question then follows: what source documents best serve to illuminate the nature of that work's modernism? Albright's commentary notes that 'Stravinsky's music was built up, as Richard Taruskin has shown, out of fragments of folk tunes'. So should Taruskin be regarded as a source? Albright's answer is no: indeed, he doesn't even provide any references to guide his readers to Taruskin's writings. His extracts are confined to the composer's own views, in comments made at the time of the premiere, and later by way of his ghost-writer Walter Nouvel in An Autobiography (1934). Wider perspectives are excluded, and the effect is more like a documentary of how what some people (rarely the cited writers themselves) have termed 'modernism' was discussed at the time.

Despite its status as 'the defining moment', The Rite of Spring is dealt with in under eight pages within a section, 'Primitivism and exoticism', itself part of a chapter called 'Isms' which is the seventh in a sequence of nine. The chapters are organized by topic rather than by chronology, and although the focus supports Albright's understanding of modernism as a term most relevant to the arts in the first half of the twentieth century he is more inclined to give space to voices from modernism's pre-history (Baudelaire, Nietzsche), and also—very extensively—to prominent modernists in arts other than music (Proust, Woolf, Schwitters, Langston Hughes) than to those able to comment with hindsight on the phenomenon from the era of late (or post)modernism. This is a text aimed—the swashbuckling style of the introduction and commentaries would suggest—at students following general arts or cultural history courses. Albright himself is a professor of literature at Harvard, and would have been well aware that to include an extract from Woolf's The Waves, and poems by Rilke and Edith Sitwell, is to 'excerpt' modernism in ways that leave his musical discussions (no printed music examples, no CD of extracts) at a relatively distant remove. [End Page 310]

It is easy enough to imagine how a more musicologically oriented anthology might have differed from this one. When it comes to 'Abolishing the old rules'—the first subsection of a chapter called 'Fuller Universes of Music'— there is no hint of sober theorizing, and where 'Pantonality' is concerned (the second section of the same chapter) only letters between Schoenberg and Kandinsky (1911-12) appear, to reinforce the inter-arts perspective, after a distinctly informal editorial prelude which describes Schoenberg as giving voice to 'an almost Surrealist hope that spasms of disconnected musical dissonances could imitate the authentic nature of inner reality' (p. 169). An even more hectic foreshortening is found in the chapter 'New Discipline: The Twelve-Tone Method', which juxtaposes familiar (but not untechnical) outlines by Schoenberg and Webern with brief expressions of distaste from Honegger, Bernstein, and Britten; in between come five and a half pages from Thomas Mann's Dr. Faustus that are of considerable interest as an indication of how an issue in composition and aesthetics could infiltrate contemporary fiction. All the same, the space might have been more productively devoted to an indication of how twelve-note and serial techniques have evolved into the wider world of late modernist pluralism, especially in the light of Albright's own bias against anything that doesn't cling on to traditional concepts of tonality. A throwaway comment claims that 'it's hard to see how a stochastic composition can root itself in the earth of tonality' (p. 223): perhaps some citations from Bálint Varga's Conversations with Iannis Xenakis (London, 1996)—to complement the rebarbative prose of Formalized Music, which not even musicologists enjoy reading—would have helped...

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