California Studies in 20th-Century Music

Series · 11 books · 2007-2022

By Jessie Fillerup, Christopher Chowrimootoo, Arnold Schoenberg, and more

Books in series

Music Divided

Bartók’s Legacy in Cold War Culture

2007

Music Divided explores how political pressures affected musical life on both sides of the iron curtain during the early years of the cold war. In this groundbreaking study, Danielle Fosler-Lussier illuminates the pervasive political anxieties of the day through particular attention to artistic, music-theoretical, and propagandistic responses to the music of Hungary’s most renowned twentieth-century composer, Béla Bartók. She shows how a tense period of political transition plagued Bartók’s music and imperiled those who took a stand on its aesthetic value in the emerging socialist state. Her fascinating investigation of Bartók’s reception outside of Hungary demonstrates that Western composers, too, formulated their ideas about musical style under the influence of ever-escalating cold war tensions. Music Divided surveys Bartók’s role in provoking negative reactions to “accessible” music from Pierre Boulez, Hermann Scherchen, and Theodor Adorno. It considers Bartók’s influence on the youthful compositions and thinking of Bruno Maderna and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and it outlines Bartók’s legacy in the music of the Hungarian composers András Mihály, Ferenc Szabó, and Endre Szervánszky. These details reveal the impact of local and international politics on the selection of music for concert and radio programs, on composers’ choices about musical style, on government radio propaganda about music, on the development of socialist realism, and on the use of modernism as an instrument of political action.

#18

Making New Music in Cold War Poland

The Warsaw Autumn Festival, 1956-1968

2016

Making New Music in Cold War Poland presents a social analysis of new music dissemination at the Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music, one of the most important venues for East-West cultural contact during the Cold War. In this incisive study, Lisa Jakelski examines the festival’s institutional organization, negotiations among its various actors, and its reception in Poland, while also considering the festival’s worldwide ramifications, particularly the ways that it contributed to the cross-border movement of ideas, objects, and people (including composers, performers, official festival guests, and tourists). This book explores social interactions within institutional frameworks and how these interactions shaped the practices, values, and concepts associated with new music.

#20

Apropos Doktor Faustus

Briefwechsel Arnold Schönberg -- Thomas Mann 1930-1951

2008

Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann, two towering figures of twentieth-century music and literature, both found refuge in the German-exile community in Los Angeles during the Nazi era. This complete edition of their correspondence provides a glimpse inside their private and public lives and culminates in the famous dispute over Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus. In the thick of the controversy was Theodor Adorno, then a budding philosopher, whose contribution to the Faustus affair would make him an enemy of both families. Gathered here for the first time in English, the letters in this essential volume are complemented by diary entries, related articles, and other primary source materials, as well as an introduction by German studies scholar Adrian Daub that contextualizes the impact these two great artists had on twentieth-century thought and culture.

#21

Middlebrow Modernism

Britten’s Operas and the Great Divide

2018

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Situated at the intersections of twentieth-century music history, historiography, and aesthetics, Middlebrow Modernism uses Benjamin Britten’s operas to illustrate the ways in which composers, critics, and audiences mediated the “great divide” between modernism and mass culture. Reviving mid-century discussions of the middlebrow, Christopher Chowrimootoo demonstrates how Britten’s works allowed audiences to have their modernist cake and eat to revel in the pleasures of consonance, lyricism, and theatrical spectacle even while enjoying the prestige that came from rejecting them. By focusing on moments when reigning aesthetic oppositions and hierarchies threatened to collapse, this study offers a powerful model for recovering shades of grey in the traditionally black-and-white historiographies of twentieth-century music.

#23

Stravinsky in the Americas

Transatlantic Tours and Domestic Excursions from Wartime Los Angeles

2019

Stravinsky in the Americas explores the “pre-Craft” period of Igor Stravinsky’s life, from when he first landed on American shores in 1925 to the end of World War II in 1945. Through a rich archival trove of ephemera, correspondence, photographs, and other documents, eminent musicologist H. Colin Slim examines the twenty-year period that began with Stravinsky as a radical European art-music composer and ended with him as a popular figure in American culture. This collection traces Stravinsky’s rise to fame—catapulted in large part by his collaborations with Hollywood and Disney and marked by his extra-marital affairs, his grappling with feelings of anti-Semitism, and his encounters with contemporary musicians as the music industry was emerging and taking shape in midcentury America. Slim’s lively narrative records the composer’s larger-than-life persona through a close look at his transatlantic tours and domestic excursions, where Stravinsky’s personal and professional life collided in often-dramatic ways.

#26

In Stravinsky's Orbit

Responses to Modernism in Russian Paris (California Studies in 20th-Century Music)

2020

The Bolsheviks’ 1917 political coup caused a seismic disruption in Russian culture. Carried by the first wave of emigrants, Russian culture migrated West, transforming itself as it interacted with the new cultural environment and clashed with exported Soviet trends. In this book, Klára Móricz explores the transnational emigrant space of Russian composers Igor Stravinsky, Vladimir Dukelsky, Sergey Prokofiev, Nicolas Nabokov, and Arthur Lourié in interwar Paris. Their music reflected the conflict between a modernist narrative demanding innovation and a narrative of exile wedded to the preservation of prerevolutionary Russian culture. The emigrants’ and the Bolsheviks’ contrasting visions of Russia and its past collided frequently in the French capital, where the Soviets displayed their political and artistic products. Russian composers in Paris also had to reckon with Stravinsky’s disproportionate if they succumbed to fashions dictated by their famous compatriot, they risked becoming epigones; if they kept to their old ways, they quickly became irrelevant. Although Stravinsky’s neoclassicism provided a seemingly neutral middle ground between innovation and nostalgia, it was also marked by the exilic experience. Móricz offers this unexplored context for Stravinsky’s neoclassicism, shedding new light on this infinitely elusive term.

#27

Zoltan Kodaly's World of Music

2020

Hungarian composer and musician Zoltán Kodály (1882–1967) is best known for his pedagogical system, the Kodály Method, which has been influential in the development of music education around the world. Author Anna Dalos considers, for the first time in publication, Kodály’s career beyond the classroom and provides a comprehensive assessment of his works as a composer. A noted collector of Hungarian folk music, Kodály adapted the traditional heritage musics in his own compositions, greatly influencing the work of his contemporary, Béla Bartók. Highlighting Kodály’s major music experiences, Dalos shows how his musical works were also inspired by Brahms, Wagner, Debussy, Palestrina, and Bach. Set against the backdrop of various oppressive regimes of twentieth-century Europe, this study of Kodály’s career also explores decisive, extramusical impulses, such as his bitter experiences of World War I, Kodály’s reception of classical antiquity, and his interpretation of the male and female roles in his music. Written by the leading Kodály expert, this impressive work of historical and musical insight provides a timely and much-needed English-language treatment of the twentieth-century composer.

#28

Awangarda

Tradition and Modernity in Postwar Polish Music (California Studies in 20th-Century Music)

2020

In Awangarda, Lisa Cooper Vest explores how the Polish postwar musical avant-garde framed itself in contrast to its Western European counterparts. Rather than a rejection of the past, the Polish avant-garde movement emerged as a manifestation of national cultural traditions stretching back into the interwar years and even earlier into the nineteenth century. Polish composers, scholars, and political leaders wielded the promise of national progress to broker consensus across generational and ideological divides. Together, they established an avant-garde musical tradition that pushed against the limitations of strict chronological time and instrumentalized discourses of backwardness and forwardness to articulate a Polish road to modernity. This is a history that resists Cold War periodization, opening up new ways of thinking about nations and nationalism in the second half of the twentieth century.

#29

Magician of Sound

Ravel and the Aesthetics of Illusion (California Studies in 20th-Century Music)

2021

French composer Maurice Ravel was described by critics as a magician, conjurer, and illusionist. Scholars have been aware of this historical curiosity, but none so far have explained why Ravel attracted such critiques or what they might tell us about how to interpret his music. Magician of Sound examines Ravel's music through the lens of illusory experience, considering how timbre, orchestral effects, figure/ground relationships, and impressions of motion and stasis might be experienced as if they were conjuring tricks. Applying concepts from music theory, psychology, philosophy, and the history of magic, Jessie Fillerup develops an approach to musical illusion that newly illuminates Ravel's fascination with machines and creates compelling links between his music and other forms of aesthetic illusion, from painting and poetry to fiction and phantasmagoria. Fillerup analyzes scenes of enchantment and illusory effects in Ravel's most popular works, including Boléro, La Valse, Daphnis et Chloé, and Rapsodie espagnole, relating his methods and musical effects to the practice of theatrical conjurers. Drawing on a rich well of primary sources, Magician of Sound provides a new interdisciplinary framework for interpreting this enigmatic composer, linking magic and music.

#30

Art of Appreciation

Music and Middlebrow Culture in Modern Britain (California Studies in 20th-Century Music)

2021

From the BBC Proms to Bernstein's Young People's Concerts, initiatives to promote classical music have been a pervasive feature of twentieth-century musical life. The goal of these initiatives was rarely just to reach a larger and more diverse audience but to teach a particular way of listening that would help the public "appreciate" music. This book examines for the first time how and why music appreciation has had such a defining and long-lasting impact—well beyond its roots in late-Victorian liberalism. It traces the networks of music educators, philanthropists, policy makers, critics, composers, and musicians who, rather than resisting new mass media, sought to harness their pedagogic potential. The book explores how listening became embroiled in a nexus of modern problems around citizenship, leisure, and education. In so doing, it ultimately reveals how a new cultural milieu—the middlebrow—emerged at the heart of Britain's experience of modernity.

#31

Terrible Freedom

The Life and Work of Lucia Dlugoszewski

2022

From her childhood in Detroit to her professional career in New York City, American composer Lucia Dlugoszewski (1925-2000) lived a life of relentless creativity as a poet and writer, composer for dance, theater, and film, and, eventually, choreographer. Forging her own path after briefly studying with John Cage and Edgard Var�se, Dlugoszewski tackled the musical issues of her time. She expanded sonic resources, invented instruments, brought new focus to timbre and texture, collaborated with artists across disciplines, and incorporated spiritual, psychological, and philosophical influences into her work. Remembered today almost solely as the musical director for the Erick Hawkins Dance Company, Dlugoszewski's compositional output, writings on aesthetics, creative relationships, and graphic poetry deserve careful examination on their own terms within the history of American experimental music.

Authors

Jessie Fillerup

Author · 1 books

Christopher Chowrimootoo

Author · 1 books

Arnold Schoenberg

Author · 8 books

Noted Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg abandoned traditional tonality and developed the twelve-tone system for atonal music. Associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, he led the second Viennese school. He used the spelling Schönberg until his move to the United States in 1934, whereupon he altered it to Schoenberg "in deference to American practice." His approach in terms of harmony developed among the major landmarks of 20th-century thought; at least three generations of composers in the European and American traditions consciously extended his thinking or in some cases passionately reacted in opposition. During the rise of the Nazi party in Austria, people labeled his music alongside jazz as degenerate art. People widely knew Schoenberg early in his career for his success in simultaneously extending the traditionally opposed German romantic styles of Johannes Brahms and Richard Wagner. Later, his name came to personify pioneering innovations, the most polemical feature of 20th-century art music. In the 1920s, the Schoenberg technique, a widely influential method, manipulated an ordered series of all notes in the chromatic scale. He also coined the term variation, and this first modern embraced ways of motifs without resorting to the dominance of a centralized melodic idea. Schoenberg, an important music theorist, also painted and influentially taught his students, who included Alban Berg, Anton Friedrich Wilheim von Webern, Hanns Eisler, Egon Wellesz, and later John Milton Cage, Lou Harrison, Earl Kim, and many other prominent musicians. Avant-garde musical thought throughout the 20th century echoes many of practices, including the formalization of method and his habit of openly inviting audiences to think analytically. His crucial, often polemical views of music history and aesthetics influenced many significant musicologists and critics, including Theodor Adorno, Charles Rosen, and Carl Dahlhaus,of the 20th century. His thought also considerably influenced the pianists Rudolf Serkin, Artur Schnabel, Eduard Steuermann, and later Glenn Gould. The Arnold Schönberg center in Vienna collects his archival legacy.

Danielle Fosler-Lussier

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information. See also: Serbian: Tomas Man Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and Nobel Prize laureate in 1929, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer. His older brother was the radical writer Heinrich Mann, and three of his six children, Erika Mann, Klaus Mann and Golo Mann, also became important German writers. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Mann fled to Switzerland. When World War II broke out in 1939, he emigrated to the United States, from where he returned to Switzerland in 1952. Thomas Mann is one of the best-known exponents of the so-called Exilliteratur.