The pleasure of modernist music : listening, meaning, intention, ideology

Author(s)

• Ashby, Arved Mark

Bibliographic Information

The pleasure of modernist music : listening, meaning, intention, ideology

edited by Arved Ashby

（Eastman studies in music）

University of Rochester Press , Boydell & Brewer [distributor], 2010, c2004

• : pbk

Note

Originally published: 2004

Includes bibliographical references and index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

An exploration of the meaning and reception of "modernist" music. The debate over modernist music has continued for almost a century: from Strauss's Elektra and Webern's Symphony Op.21 to John Cage's renegotiation of musical control, the unusual musical practices of the Velvet Underground, and Stanley Kubrick's use of Ligeti's Lux Aeterna in the epic film 2001. The composers discussed in these pages -- including Bartok, Stockhausen, Bernard Herrmann, Steve Reich, and many others -- are modernists inthat they are defined by their individualism, whether covert or overt, and share a basic urge toward redesigning musical discourse. The aim of this volume is to negotiate a varied and open middle ground between polemical extremes of reception. The contributors sketch out the possible significance of a repertory that in past discussions has been deemed either meaningless or beyond describable meaning. With an emphasis on recent aesthetics and contexts-- including film music, sexuality, metaphor, and ideas of a listening grammar -- they trace the meanings that such works and composers have held for listeners of different kinds. None of them takes up the usual mandate of "educated listening" to modernist works: the notion that a person can appreciate "difficult" music if given enough time and schooling. Instead the book defines novel but meaningful avenues of significance for modernist music, avenues beyond those deemed appropriate or acceptable by the academy. While some contributors offer new listening strategies, most interpret the listening premise more loosely: as a metaphor for any manner of personal and immediate connection with music. In addition to a previously untranslated article by Pierre Boulez, the volume contains articles (all but one previously unpublished) by twelve distinctive and prominent composers, music critics, and music theorists from America, Europe, Australia, and South Africa: Arved Ashby, Amy Bauer, William Bolcom, Jonathan Bernard, Judy Lochhead, Fred Maus, Andrew Mead, Greg Sandow, Martin Scherzinger, Jeremy Tambling, Richard Toop, and Lloyd Whitesell. Arved Ashby is Associate Professor of Music at the Ohio State University.

Table of Contents

Intention and Meaning in Modernist Music The End of the Mannerist Century A Fine Analysis In Memory of a Receding Dialectic: The Political Relevance of Autonomy and Formalism in Modernist Musical Aesthetics Twentieth-Century Tonality, or, Breaking Up Is Hard to Do "Tone-Color, Movement, Changing Harmonic Planes": Cognition, Constraints and Conceptual Blends in Modernist Music Sexual and Musical Categories Listening to Schizophrenia: The Wozzeck Case The Musician Writes: The Deaf Man Looks On? "Are You Sure You Can't Hear It?": Some Informal Reflections on Simple Information and Listening A Fine Madness "One Man's Signal is Another Man's Noise": Personal Encounters with Post-Tonal Music The "Modernization" of Rock & Roll, 1965-75 Refiguring the Modernist Program for Hearing: Steve Reich and George Rochberg Modernism Goes to the Movies

by "Nielsen BookData"

• NCID: BB0495180X
• ISBN:
  • 9781580463751
• Country Code: us
• Title Language Code: eng
• Text Language Code: eng
• Place of Publication: Rochester, N.Y.,Woodbridge
• Pages/Volumes: viii, 404 p.
• Size: 24 cm
• Classification:
  • DC22 : 780.904
• Subject Headings:
  • LCSH : Music -- 20th century -- History and criticism
• Parent Bibliography ID:
  • BA27676296