Modernism in Music

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Modernism

Music
Dance
Photography
Film
Modernism in music
Bernard Gendron, ‘Music’ in A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture, Blackwell
Publishing, 2006

Three aesthetic philosophies can be seen


at work, either singly or in conjunction, in
any modernist music:
• Formalism;
• Expressionism;
• Avant-garde shock.
• Formalism subordinates descriptive content to
formal design; as in abstract art, it eliminates all
descriptive content, focusing in particular on form.
• Expressionism subordinates descriptive content
to what is expressed by a work, be it inner
feelings, insights, lifestyles,, Weltanschauungen
(a comprehensive conception or apprehension of the world especially from
moving towards the unconscious,
a specific standpoint)
or the dislocations of modern life.
The avant-garde shock seeks to provoke
feelings of outrage, disorientation, disgust,
or irritable comprehension. Its objective is
to undercut the pretenses of institutional
art, to break down the walls between art
and life or between creator and viewer, to
awaken the unconscious or to dramatize
conditions of oppression and injustice.
The evolution in visual arts from realistic
figurative painting towards abstraction is
paralleled by the evolution of music from
tonality through atonality to serialism (music
based on a series of tones in a chosen pattern without regard for
traditional tonality).
By the end of the 19th century, composers
such as Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss,
and Mahler were increasingly testing the
limits of, and subverting, the tonal system,
without abandoning it.
The rhythmically repeated dissonant
chords appeal not primarily because of
their divergence from the prescriptions of
tonal harmony, but because of the violent
Dionysian frenzy which they release.
Emancipation of dissonance
Arnold Schoenberg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-
pVz2LTakM
Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0xNo
2894Fw
One of expressionism’s most important
role in modernist music was to legitimate
primitivism and the turn to the folkloric.

Folk music was a resource for original


formal devices and insights.
What drew modernist composers to folk
music was the prevailing perception of it
as an authentic expression of life form and
spirit of an organic community, a welcome
contrast to the anxiety and disorientation
of modern urban life.
Béla Bartók
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rPsx5i
o4bBs
Some modernists also engaged in a
friendly interchange with popular music.

In the 1940s, jazz transformed itself from a


wholly entertainment music to a modernist
art form, becoming in effect “modern jazz”.
Commercial jazz and blues exhibited in the
eyes of some modernists that ideal
synthesis of the utterly modern and utterly
archaic which they sought to achieve in
their work.
George Gershwin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFHdR
keEnpM
Luigi Russolo in the “Art of Noise”
manifesto of 1913 tried to demolish the
distinction between music and noise so
foundational to European art music.
Privileging the sounds of urbanity – of
streetcars, backfiring automobiles, artillery,
factories – as the real music of the time,
Russolo was actively involved in the
invention and orchestration of noise
instruments designed to mimic these
sounds or explore new ones.
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHLmi
tA3o6g
Modernist Dance
Susan Jones, ‘Dance’

In 1909, the Ballets Russes in Paris and


Sergei Diaghilev initiated a new period of
experimentation in dance.
Dance was celebrated as an art form in its
own right.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmsR8e
R2-MI
In London, performances of the Ballets
Russes provoked polarized responses
from writers and intellectuals. Wyndham
Lewis complained of the decadence and
superficiality of Diaghilev’s “high bohemia”
(Lewis 1927: 30). But he wrote against a
tide of praise from Bloomsbury
intellectuals who were inspired by the
energy and the proliferation of form, color,
and sound associated with the new ballet.
The latter position had been indicated by
Woolf in her biography of Roger Fry when
she remarked that in 1913, the year in
which Fry opened the Omega Workshop,
“He went to see the Russian dancers, and
they, of course suggested all kind of fresh
possibilities, and new combinations of
music, dancing and decoration” (Woolf
1995: 158).
Woolf attended performances of the
Russian Ballet with Lytton Strachey and
Clive Bell, but even after the death of
Diaghilev in 1929, Bloomsbury continued
to engage with the modern ballet
performances offered by Diaghilev’s direct
successors in England: the Camargo
Society and the Vic-Wells Ballet.
Diaghilev’s contribution to dance was
based on his ability to encourage artistic
collaboration.
The choreographers of the Ballets Russes
worked together with the most provocative
experimentalists of the avant-garde in
other art forms.
Diaghilev hired controversial composers
such as Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Ravel,
Debussy, Richard Strauss. He
commissioned décor from artists such as
Picasso, Matisse, Braque, Derain, Miró,
De Chirico, and Rouault.
Yet Diaghilev and his successors were by
no means the only source of
experimentation in dance at the beginning
of the twentieth century.
Individual performers such as the
American artists Loïe Fuller (who first gave
her famous “Serpentine” dance in Paris in
1892),
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNZ4
WCFJGPc
Isadora Duncan (who began performing in
1896 in New York but quickly moved to
Europe),

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’

• The history of modernist photography starts in


1900.
• Although photography was invented in 1839 and,
in a sense, predates modernism, photographic
technologies and modes of perception are vital
to the history of modernism and its visual
cultures. In addition, much of twentieth-century
art was either made as photography or
experienced through photographic reproductions.
• Photography contributed photograms (exposing sensitive
paper to light), photomontage (cuttings), and abstractions
to art movements including Futurism, Dada, Surrealism,
and Russian Suprematism.
• In the 1920s and 1930s the key photographers,
Alexander Rodchenko, Man Ray, and László Moholy-
Nagy were also avant-garde artists.
• After World War I, the work of four photographers –
Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Alvin Coburn, and Edward
Weston - marks American photography’s most modernist
moment.
• Modernist literature warmly embraced photography.
Succeeding Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman’s
celebration of the daguerreotype in the nineteenth
century, in the twentieth century Virginia Woolf ’s deep
knowledge of photography, her constant photographic
practice and use of photographic referents inspired her to
choose photography as a generative medium in many
books, particularly in Three Guineas (Humm 2002).
• Modernist artists as much as writers utilized photography.
From 1919 Matisse had photographs taken of his works
in progress. In turn the American photographer Walker
Evans, who married a painter, was inspired by
Surrealism in Paris in 1926 and loved the high
modernism of Joyce and Pound.
Stieglitz’s use of
formal structures
in the Steerage
(1907) was
praised by
Picasso.
By photographing
close up everyday
objects and textures,
Paul Strand produced
abstract photos that
were not
“documentary” but a
new modern form.
Alvin Coburn’s
Vortograph (1917),
a portrait of his
friend Ezra Pound
fragmented by
mirrors, also
mirrored Cubism.
• Photography brought together art, nature and
technology in unprecedented ways.
• Photography could extend our understanding of
the material world also providing access to
subjectivity, by capturing gestures and details.
• The “new” style involved formal simplicity and
patterning, dramatic viewpoints, a use of close-
ups, dramatic differences.
• Subjects included machinery, tall skyscrapers
and everyday objects and plants shaped into anti
-realistic images.
• Modernist photography’s extreme formal
close-ups or oblique shots of the female
nude are its main innovation.
• Edward Weston used a sexually charged
language to make the body’s surface
erotic.
• He experimented
with abstract
patterns of
vegetables, shells,
and nudes using
light and texture.
• He focused on
landscape
abstraction in
Mexico.
• Weston’s portrait
of his naked son,
Neil, Nude (1925),
rejects the child’s
specificity in favour
of an idealized
image.
• Consuelo Kanaga
was the photographer
of African-Americans,
who had discovered
negritude in Paris.
• James van der Zee
created a style of
urban modernity to
visualize the “New
Negro” with
psychological depth
and social pluralism.
• For Walker
Evans, poverty
was made
aesthetically
beautiful.
• Man Ray was the
pioneer of European
photography in
following his invented
rayograms with the
promotion of
photography as an art
form.
• In his Glass
Tear (1930),
the
subjective, as
much as the
formally
objective,
creates the
photographic
effect.
Modernist Film
Laura Marcus, ‘Film’

Film is a quintessentially modernist


form. The visuality of cinema, at its
most intense before the coming of
sound film in the late 1920s, and its
singular appeal to the eye, allowed for
a rendering of Pound’s modernist
dictum “Make it new” as “See it new.”
Film, according to many modernist and
avant-garde writers and artists, was a
break with habituated perception. Such
accounts of seeing the world brought
about a concept of cinematic
representation as both the absolutely new
and the archaic or primitive, a double
temporality at the heart of modernist
culture in general.
Film took photography into a new
dimension by putting the still image into
motion and thus representing a world of,
and in, movement.
Movement had been placed at the heart of
modernist and avant-garde artistic practice. Artists
attached to the various avant-garde groupings –
Futurism, Cubism, Dada, Constructivism – aspired
to bring into their work kinesis (motion), rhythmic
pattern, collage, simultaneity, “motor space” (in
which multiple views of an object are captured in
the art work), and a “qualitative space” which
broke with traditional perspective and introduced
subjective perception.
The “movement” of cultural modernity has
become inseparably linked to modern
urban experience and to a model of time
defined by the momentary, the fleeting,
and the ephemeral.
As the German novelist Alfred Döblin, author of Berlin
Alexanderplatz, wrote in a 1928 review of James Joyce’s
Ulysses:

“The cinema has penetrated the sphere of literature;


newspapers must become the most important, most
broadly disseminated form of written testimony,
everybody’s daily bread. To the experiential image of a
person today also belongs the streets, the scenes
changing by the second, the signboards, automobile
traffic. . . . A part of today’s image is the
disconnectedness of his activity, of his existence as
such, the fleeting quality, the restlessness.” (Döblin 1994:
514)
One of the best-known accounts of these
far-reaching changes in the nature of
modern experience is that of Walter
Benjamin, in his 1936 essay “The Work of
Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction.”
Benjamin explored the power of film and
photography to transform reality and to go
beyond the limits of human perception.
• “Our taverns and our metropolitan streets, our offices
and furnished rooms, our railroad stations and our
factories appeared to have us locked up hopelessly.
Then came the film and burst this prison-world asunder
by the dynamite of the tenth of a second, so that now, in
the midst of its far-flung ruins and debris, we calmly and
adventurously go travelling. With the close-up, space
expands; with slow motion, movement is extended. . . .
Evidently a different nature opens itself to the camera
than opens to the naked eye – if only because an
unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a
space consciously explored by man.” (Benjamin 1968:
236–7)
The 1920s were the decade of the city film, developed by
filmmakers including King Vidor, Cavalcanti, Paul Strand,
Joris Ivens, Fritz Lang, and Walter Ruttmann.
Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a City (1927), which
used editing as a way of representing the rhythms of a
day in the life of the city, mapping Berlin through
montage, has striking affinities with the literature of the
period, including Ulysses and Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.
When the question of making a film of Ulysses first
arose, Joyce named Ruttmann (whose films prior to
Berlin were highly abstract and experimental) and
Eisenstein as the filmmakers appropriate to the endeavor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ej84nN1WcE
Virginia Woolf’s essay “The Cinema,” first
published in 1926, rejected film adaptations of
literary works, arguing that cinema’s fascination
lies both in its early documentary impulse, its
recording of reality or actuality, and in its
potential to create a new visual “language,”
which would be abstract and experimental and
yet capable of “capturing” the life of the streets
and the experience of modernity (Woolf 1950).
Léger wrote of the “fundamental mistake” of
filming a novel, and of the ways in which such an
endeavor represents “a completely wrong point
of departure” for the “incredible invention” of
cinema, “with its limitless plastic possibilities.”
Directors, he argued, “sacrifice that wonderful
thing, ‘the image that moves,’ in order to present
a story that is so much better in a book. . . . It is
such a field of innovations that it is unbelievable
they can neglect it for a sentimental scenario”
(Léger 1924).
Léger’s “Dadaist” film Ballet Mécanique (1924) is
composed of images of everyday objects in
movement, machine imagery, and the repetitive
movements of human figures. It opens and
closes with a fractured and recomposed graphic
representation of the figure of Charlie Chaplin,
whose intense appeal both to mass audiences
and to the French avant-garde is revealing of the
new configurations between mass and minority
culture that cinema brought into being.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrfibt6Bkwc
Léger […] and Gertrude Stein found in the
early Chaplin films forms of rhythm,
repetition, and automatization which they
saw as performances of the essence of
the cinematic machine and of modernity
itself, and as profoundly at odds with the
movements of plot and story.
When Stein and Chaplin met in 1931 (after the
making of his first sound film, City Lights), Stein
seems to have suggested to Chaplin that he was
working against his own rhythms and those of
essential cinema. As Chaplin later recorded their
encounter: “She theorized about cinema plots:
‘They are too hackneyed, complicated and
contrived.’ She would like to see me in a movie
just walking up the street and turning a corner,
then another corner, and another” (Chaplin 1966:
302).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2NTUnujk1I
Charlie Chaplin – The Mirror Maze
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G09dfRr
UxUM
• Charlie Chaplin The Final Speech from the
Great Dictator

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).

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