After Everything
in Music in the Late Twentieth Century
July 2009; p ublished online July 2010 .
Chapter. Subjects: Romantic Music. 25281 words.
Because it was often relatively consonant in harmony and employed ordinary diatonic scales, minimalist music was frequently attacked as “conservative” by academic modernists, for whom the...
The Apex
in Music in the Late Twentieth Century
July 2009; p ublished online July 2010 .
Chapter. Subjects: Romantic Music. 26429 words.
One effect of the postwar avant-garde, in both its “total serial” and its “indeterminate” phases, was to put the more moderate techniques of prewar twelve-tone music much nearer the middle...
Aristocratic Maximalism
in Music in the Early Twentieth Century
July 2009; p ublished online July 2010 .
Chapter. Subjects: Romantic Music. 20409 words.
It is time to confess to a scandalous omission. An entire genre, with a history extending back as far as the sixteenth century, has been virtually missing from this account of European art...
Artist, Politician, Farmer (Class of 1813, II)
in Music in the Nineteenth Century
July 2009; p ublished online July 2010 .
Chapter. Subjects: Romantic Music. 19746 words.
These remarks about Wagner, by turns admiring and impatient, generous and resentful, were made at various points during the latter part of his career by Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901), Wagner's...
Containing Multitudes (Transcendentalism, II)
in Music in the Early Twentieth Century
July 2009; p ublished online July 2010 .
Chapter. Subjects: Romantic Music. 19980 words.
The two epigraphs from the Essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) may seem to be in contradiction. One places a proud and (it might be thought) typically American emphasis on...
Critics
in Music in the Nineteenth Century
July 2009; p ublished online July 2010 .
Chapter. Subjects: Romantic Music. 20802 words.
The same explosion of musical activity into public life that gave rise to the new virtuosity (or found an outlet in it) also gave rise to a new musical profession altogether: that of...
The Cult of the Commonplace
in Music in the Early Twentieth Century
July 2009; p ublished online July 2010 .
Chapter. Subjects: Romantic Music. 12107 words.
On 18 May 1917, at the very height of the Great War, Sergey Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes unveiled a new work—a “ballet réaliste” in one scene, called Parade—at the Théâtre du Châtelet in...
Cutting Things Down to Size
in Music in the Nineteenth Century
July 2009; p ublished online July 2010 .
Chapter. Subjects: Romantic Music. 22448 words.
To continue the argument of the previous chapter, the concept of “comedization” can accommodate without contradiction not only realism but also some other developments in European musical...
Deeds of Music Made Visible (Class of 1813, I)
in Music in the Nineteenth Century
July 2009; p ublished online July 2010 .
Chapter. Subjects: Romantic Music. 32006 words.
A specter has been haunting the last six chapters of this narrative—the specter of Richard Wagner. We met him first as the pseudonymous author of a violent and rancorous tract, published in...
Extinguishing the “Petty ‘I’ ” (Transcendentalism, I)
in Music in the Early Twentieth Century
July 2009; p ublished online July 2010 .
Chapter. Subjects: Romantic Music. 20177 words.
The “Sacrificial Dance” at the end of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring reaches its dénouement in a massive crunch, denoting a strain the body of the Chosen One can no longer bear. Afterward...
