Modernism in Music
Modernism in Music
Modernism in Music
Music
Dance
Photography
Film
Modernism in music
Bernard Gendron, ‘Music’ in A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, Blackwell
Publishing, 2006
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kq2Gg
IMM060
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPlN_
gO5TOM
and Maud Allan (débuted in Vienna in
1903) initiated a form of free dance.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdoaF
uPTRn0
• Free dance used
improvisational
methods and
emphasized the
authority of
individual corporeal
expression (Isadora
Duncan).
• The nonverbal
communication of the
dancer implied the
use of a flourishing
array of textiles and
materials, striking
lighting effects,
mirrors, and theatrical
devices. (Loïe Fuller)
• The choreographers expressed through
the choreographic content, rather than the
use of superficial, histrionic gesture, a
presentation of interior psychological
conflict that took inspiration from the work
of literary modernists such as Proust,
Woolf, and Eliot.
• Primitivism had an important impact on
dance, in line with the preoccupations in
painting and literature.
• There was an increased interest in
indigenous dance forms and rituals such
as the Pueblo Indian culture and Black
dance.
While dance aesthetics was transformed
during this period, its impact on modernist
music, painting, and literature was wide-
ranging.
Diaghilev launched Stravinsky’s career
with The Firebird in 1909.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd1xY
KGnOEw
Henri Matisse’s painting of the same year,
The Dance, drew attention to the
metaphorical potential of dance to express
economy of form in the other arts.
Wilde’s Salomé and W. B. Yeats’s Plays
for Dancers owe something to a
Mallarméan or Symbolist account of the
dancer, but they also arise from the idea of
dance as an atavistic force.
In a climate of skepticism about language, the dancer
emerged as a provocative emblem in literature, often
gesturing beyond the limitations of the body ( Jenny’s
“dancing” in Woolf ’s The Waves, for example), or
problematizing the nature of creative authority, as in
Yeats’s famous line from “Among School Children”: “How
can we know the dancer from the dance?” […] the
presence of the dancer in the text merely stands in for
the inarticulable in an argument about semiotics versus
semantics (Lawrence uses the idea of dance as asite of
“unconscious” drives in Women in Love and “The
Woman Who Rode Away”).
One of the most distinctive sources for
modernism in dance came from
Switzerland and Germany, where
Expressionist dance emerged before the
First World War in the physical health
programs and eurhythmics (the art of harmonious
bodily movement especially through expressive timed movements in
of Émile Jaques-
response to improvised music)
Dalcroze and in the work of Rudolph
Laban and Mary Wigman.
Dalcroze devised eurhythmics as a system
of dance in which the “inner harmony” of
the individual aimed to find expression in
spontaneous rhythmic movement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTXzM
6jRMqE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STYiWIZ
-2IQ
Following Dalcroze, Mary Wigman’s Witch
Dance (1914) suggested, in its energy and
chaotic form, a philosophy closer to
Friedrich Nietzsche’s Dionysian principle,
outlined in The Birth of Tragedy (1871).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRlUwa
NwY4c
Dalcroze’s ideology also coincided with that of
several radical exponents of “dissonance” in
dance and in painting, and may be compared to
Nijinsky’s replacement of conventional “beauty”
with that of an angularity of choreographic forms
in L’Après-midi d’un faune (1912) and Rite of
Spring, or of Kandinsky’s emphasis on the equal
expression of inner harmony and discord which
he demonstrated in his own painting.
Modernist Photography
Maggi Humm, ‘Photography’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7GY1X
g6X20
• Charlie Chaplin – The Professor
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaZS0qr
NOIE
Theoretical and critical commentary on the
cinema in its first decades was substantially
devoted to the question of the autonomy of film.
If film was to be established as an art form,
should it be allied to one of the established arts –
sculpture, painting, ballet, theatre, literature,
music – or should the claim be made for its
aesthetic autonomy? Should it claim a lineage
from the older arts, or was it unprecedented?
The film theorist and aesthetician Rudolf
Arnheim wrote in 1931: “For the first time
in history a new art form is developing and
we can say that we were there. . . . All
other arts are as old as humanity, and their
origin is as dark as ours. . . . Film,
however, is entirely new” (Arnheim 1997:
13).