Content area
Full text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Marginalized in the wake of musicology's belated postmodernist turn and the object of frequent criticism from the now not-so-new 'new musicology', late-modernist music studies may have seemed destined to follow new music into the silence that Theodor Adorno famously prophesied. Yet in addition to the incontestable persistence of modernist outlooks in today's contemporary music scene, the past decade has also seen several scholarly attempts to reassess modernism's - especially post-war modernism's - continued relevance and repercussions. 1 The Modernist Legacy: Essays on New Music furthers this project by bringing together twelve essays, most of which began life as papers delivered at the Fourth Biennial International Conference on Twentieth-Century Music at the University of Sussex in 2005. Focusing mainly on music written since 1970, a repertoire which, according to editor Björn Heile, has thus far been considered mostly from either analytical or journalistic standpoints, the essays address a range of familiar works and composers as well as lesser-known niches of new music under the general aesthetic rubric of late modernism.
Heile's introduction argues strongly against consigning the concept of modernism to the dustbin of history. He suggests that by assessing late twentieth-century new music from various perspectives this collection brings together 'socially, historically and aesthetically oriented approaches with analytical methods in imaginative ways; it almost seems as if this music is being discussed in its full historical context for the first time' (4). This particular claim to a wider historiographical scope may be somewhat overstated. Nevertheless, the contributions of British, European, and North American musicologists, theorists, composers, and critics combine to create a diverse set of essays that appraise aspects of modernist music from the recent past.
As with any such collected volume, conceptual coherence can prove elusive. The book is divided into two rather broad sections ('New Music, Social Debates and the Aesthetics of Critical Modernism' and 'Aspects of Compositional Poetics'), though the reader may be more inclined to draw connections based on the four critical approaches that tend to stand out: discourse analysis, historical contextualism, close readings and formal analysis, and aesthetics and poetics. These are not strictly distinguished or divided; rather, they constitute the coordinates of the authors' various methodological constellations.
Certain themes emerge alongside the...