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03-10-2008: 3rd October 2008 17:56
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#23
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TSR Royalty
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Join Date: Jan 2004
Location: London
Posts: 15,201
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Re: An Introduction to Music of the Long Twentieth Century [AN ONLINE COURSE ON TSR]
Originally Posted by oriel historian
Fascinating Jacob, nice work! Takes me back to the days when I took music seriously. However, I have a question for you - why not a long nineteenth century?
You've identified the bourgeois triumphalism in Beethoven's 9th (currently reflected as the EU Anthem!) but that tradition as a political movement emerges from the French Revolution and loses itself on the fields of Flanders. I feel that in the prominence of Brahms and Mahler in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century you have a continuity in musical adherence to the Beethoven tradition which is intimately related the bourgeois revolution of the 1789 - 1848 period - Beethoven's 3rd anyone!?
Well we can have a long nineteenth century too - the two are not necessarily contradictory. Yes, there are traditions that are particularly 19th century phenomena, and the symphony is certainly one of them (seen, of course, from the lack of Western European symphonies after the first decades of the twentieth century.) This will come up in this week's offering. That being said, these later works can just as easily be read as consequences of musical movements in the mid-nineteenth century. There is no Mahler without Wagner, and similarly there's no Schoenberg without Brahms. Whilst I agree that WWI is a massive turning point (one in which, for most art, leaves no option but modernism), one could just as easily argue that this modernist tendency in fact grew out of artistic and political movements of the 19th century: the key example here is the ideas around sexuality that grew from the likes of Nietzsche, and it is simply false to say that this lost itself in the first world war. It is both these musical and ideological lineages that, I believe, allow me to treat the first world war not just as the destruction of an era, but also as the coming of age of various artistic, cultural, and political trends in the preceding decades, and in fact as an exposition of their power (therefore the need for modernism to become "self-conscious".)
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