Institute of Musicology of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts

Department of Fine Arts and Music of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts

RETHINKING MUSICAL MODERNISM

International musicological conference
Belgrade, 1113 October 2007

ABSTRACTS

Jim Samson (London)

Disciplining Modernism
The paper will explore Modernism in music by way of discourses in both history
and geography, and with a particular focus on the Balkans.
Recent revisions to our understanding of modernism will be placed within a
dialectic of the event (the transformative moment, foregrounding agency) and the kairos
(the point of perfection, foregrounding structure). There are two opposing models of the
dynamics of cultural history here, and they will be explored in the context of ideas from
Badiou, Dahlhaus and Derrida. In the context of the former model I will invoke the
category of nostalgia (Svetlana Boym), which I take to be a dependent of modernist
innovation and more particularly a response to intervention and trauma. In the context of
the latter model I will invoke the category of appropriation (Roger Chartier). In drawing a
line between past and present, I argue, we create an autonomous present that chooses and
then appropriates (rather than assimilates) its past. Some implications for historical
musicology will be explored.
The categories of nostalgia and appropriation, explored under history, will then be
examined in relation to placement and displacement, centres and peripheries, urban and
rural ecologies. It will be argued here that modernism produced an unlikely alliance
between an avant-garde and rural folk music, at the expense of the more hybrid idioms
of urban popular music. Both were authentic, in the sense that they were respectively
innocent of, or wary of, the debasements of mercantile art. The implications for
ethnomusicology, a discipline which (in its formative stages) found cultural hybridity
deeply problematical, will be explored.
The Balkans provide an ideal laboratory for the scrutiny of these ideas. This
territory is part of Europe but has been written out of its culture, and has indeed come to
be viewed either as the dark (oriental) side of European consciousness, or as the
emptiness at its heart; in other words, it has had to accept attributes of inferiority and
backwardness in order to affirm European civilisation. This invites an exploration of
European projects of modernity by way of Balkan alterities. But this can be turned round.
It is not always recognized that we can only revise Modernism by also revising
conservatism.

Melita Milin (Belgrade)

Musical Modernism in the Agrarian Countries of South-Eastern
Europe: The Change of Function of Folklore in the 20th Century

The problem of introducing folk melodies into 20ty century modernist music was
inherited from the previous century. It seems that western composers and musicologists
were surprised at the survival of an interest in the fusion of the two musical cultures after
Romanticism. They regarded the use of folk material mainly as a means of creating a
specific atmosphere or incorporating colourful effects into music, while denying with
few exceptions higher significance to those works, especially if they belonged to
instrumental genres. The appearance of Stravinskys Sacre du printemps, Bartks string
quartets and Janeks late works demonstrated however that the new folklorism which
they represented, had become a vital and stimulating part of modernist tendencies.
Nevertheless, there were still strong oppositions to such an orientation, which was mainly
viewed as an expression of the particularization of the universal a reproach that had
also often been made in the 19th century.
Theodor Adornos well-known foot-note in his Philosophy of New Music, which
contains several interesting and provocative observations on exterritorial composers
and using folk music without shame in their music, will be commented upon. The issue
of the alienating potentiality of folklore and of its critical use was however completely
out of sight for the majority of 20th century composers interested in using folk music in
their works. This was certainly true of Serbian composers of the first half of the century,
whose attitudes, and the possibility of placing them on the map of European modernism
will be discussed in a short overview of the most representative composers: of Petar
Konjovi (18831971), Miloje Milojevi (18841946), Stevan Hristi (18851958), and
Josip Slavenski (18961955).

Maria Kostakeva (Essen)

Problems of Terminology and the Verbal Mediation of New Music
In this presentation some special problems of the new music terminology will be
taken into consideration.
There was an attitude of protest against the old social and aesthetic norms
concerning the vocabulary of the Music Avant-garde after the Second World War.
Common descriptions, especially those like "kritisch komponieren" or "Verweigerung"
from Lachenmann`s school continued the system of thinking of Theodor Adorno and
Luigi Nono. However, today it is necessary to give the music terminology a new meaning
and to reactivate it as an important means of explanation and mediation regarding recent
times. There are some problems arising in this connection.
The first one is self-reflection as a descriptive category in the new music: this
reflects the composers aim to explain his music to the listener and to make it more
accessible in this way. By such verbal self-reflection most contemporary authors try
simultaneously to discover and distinguish their place in the history of music. This selfreflection might be a potential danger, because it could exert influence on the public and
affect the reception of the music by subjective estimation.
2

Another problem of music terminology in the contemporary epoch is the great

multiplicity of aesthetic directions in the new music, demanding a specific apparatus of
research. Compared to the previous epochs, in which musical grammar was unified, there
is a specific kind of organization of each composer and of each work, which has to be
described through suitable musical terms today. It is not possible to define, for example, a
new sound through the influence of electronics and a new organization of the music after
World War II by means of the classical analysis. The development of computer
technology reflects further in acoustic music, where quasi electronic effects arise. All
these hermeneutic problems have to be taken into consideration in my research.

Helmut Loos (Leipzig)

Paradigmenwechsel in der Musikwissenschaft: Vom Absoluten zum
Konkreten
Die Deutschen sehen sich gern als "Volk der Dichter und Denker" und haben
eine Musikwissenschaft als "Geisteswissenschaft" hervorgebracht, die historischen
Fakten, solange sie sich nicht auf bedeutende Kunstwerke beziehen, eine
bemerkenswerte Gleichgltigkeit entgegenbringt. Welche Bedeutung einer breit
angelegten Repertoireforschung gerade auch fr die Moderne zukommt, wird an einer
Bestandsaufnahme, der Sichtung vorliegender Untersuchungen umrissen.

Jelena Jankovi
Meaning and Usage of the Term Structure
in Theoretical and Musical Structuralism

By examining the selected works and autopoetic texts of several distinguished

representatives of the high modernism in music (above all, Pierre Boulez and Vladan
Radovanovi, but also Iannis Xenakis, Olivier Messiaen and others) I will try to give
arguments for and against the structuralism in music. I will start with a question which
is not new, but it still provokes possible new answers: to what extent did the
characteristics of the theoretical structuralism (developed in the French culture during the
sixth and seventh decade of the 20th century) influence the composers of the time? Or, in
other words, do structural procedures in high modernist music really serve as evidences
of the musical structuralism?

Hartmut Krones (Vienna)

Speech Compositions in the Music of the 20th Century Illustrated by
Means of the Example Austria
Beside the early beginning of the Dadaism scene in the nineteen twenties and
thirties, the connection respectively joining of language, voice and music mainly
appeared in manifold ways in the vocal music of the sixties and seventies. Here you can
find associative pieces, which simulate an action without semantic language (for example
Gyrgy Ligetis Aventures or Mauricio Kagels sur scene) as well as works, where
sounds and materials merge and consciously achieve absurd effects (Kagels
Staatstheater or Karlheinz Stockhausens Originale) up to dadaistic conceptions,
where the musical structures are built by permutations of language or especially
composed asemantic texts and where gesture and theatricality access to the musical
structure (Kagels Anagrama or Dieter Schnebels Glossolalie). Conversely there are
several compositions, where the courses of speech and language form the music itself and
so come to an autonomous structure based on compositional thinking like in Hans Ottes
Alpha-Omega I or in Dieter Schnebels Dt 31 6.
Until now no Austrian composer except the adoptive Austrian Gyrgy Ligety was mentioned although Austrian composers surprised with new conceptions again and
again. Already in the nineteen twenties Raoul Hausmann was one of the advanced
representatives of speech compositions and Ernst Toch was an important combatant from
the nineteen thirties on. Since 1965 the Viennes composers Gerhard Rhm and Otto M.
Zykan as well as the adoptive Viennese Anestis Logothetis have enriched the musical
scene with a wealth of new ideas, which enlarged the genre of speech composition and
modern music theatre to a high extent. The lecture will give a survey of these creations
and point out the immanent musical structure of these works by means of selected
examples.

Alastair Williams (Keele)

Modernism in Germany after 1968: Kagel, Rihm and Lachenmann
From 1946 to the mid-1960s, West Germany was an international centre for
avant-gardism in music, offering it institutional support through festivals and radio
stations. After the first post-war cultural phase, which lasted until about 1968, much of
this infrastructure remained in place, but the discourses and practices of art music in
Germany, as elsewhere, became more fragmented. With its strong socio-political
resonances, I968 offers an interesting transitional point. It covers the end of the first wave

of post-war experimentation, exemplified by Stockhausen, which in many ways tried to

shut out the past. And yet, it also marks the start of a social shift that led to music in
Germany becoming more historically reflective, as composers sought to write music that
connected with this nations illustrious cultural past. This transformation, which affected
many established composers, stemmed partly from frustration with a blinkered belief in
the progress of technology and knowledge, and partly from a reaction against the
previous generations disdain for tradition. The paper will consider Mauricio Kagels
Ludwig Van (1969), Helmut Lachenmanns Staub (1985/87) and Wolfgang Rihms Neue
Alexanderlieder: fnf Gedichte von Ernst Herbeck (1979).

Dragana Jeremi-Molnar and Aleksandar Molnar (Belgrade)

Echoes of Modernism in the Rock Music of the Late Sixties and Early Seventies.
The Influence of Karlheinz Stockhausen on the Early Works of
the German Group "Can"
Musical Modernism played a minor role in the development of so-called progressive
rocknroll music during the second half of the sixties and the first half of the seventies.
However small, this role deserves investigation. In their paper the authors pay attention to
one of the most significant 20th century composers, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and his
influence on his students, Holger Czukay and Irmin Schmidt, who in 1968 formed the
group Can. This was often labeled as one of the leading Kraut-rock groups, but this
label proved to be insufficient because of the groups unique style, in which rocknroll
substance was filled with various important ingredients. The influence of Karlheinz
Stockhausen on the music composed, produced and played by the group Can will be
investigated in their early works from the late sixties Prehistoric Future: The Very First
Session, Delay 1968, Canaxis 5: Studio Demo Tapes, Monster Movies and early
seventies Soundtracks, Tago Mago, Ege Bamayasi and Future Days as well as on
original Holger Czukays solo album Canaxis 5. The authors will argue that
Stockhausens students Czukay and Schmidt, although brought up in the Modernist music
tradition, never succeeded in developing it thoroughly in the direction of, say, Czukays
solo work Canaxis 5 because two other group members, coming from different musical
traditions, had opposing ideas. Young beat-guitarist Michael Karoly secured the groups
orientation toward rocknroll, while drummer Jaki Liebzeit purposely broke away from
free-jazz in order to explore new repetitive rhythm patterns, which soon became the most
distinguished characteristic of Can's music.

Marija Masnikosa (Belgrade)

Radical (Modernist) Minimalism
between Neo-vant-Garde and Musical Postmodernism
5

Having been born into the family of American experimental musical,

minimalism inherited a significant number of American post-war neo-avantgarde characteristics. Early minimalist works by La Monte Young, Riley and
Glass retained the experimental character of pre-minimal experimental
processes, their lack of direction, and unpredictability, but they lost the most
important feature of American postwar neo-avant-garde: those works were
purely musical, so they returned to the concept of modernist music autonomy.
American minimal music, composed before 1974, show a significant
number of typical high-modernist
features: composition "from the
beginning", self-reference, a preoccupation with compositional technique,
"single coding", neutrality of the chosen musical material, a rejection of any
historical musical paradigm, lack of causality in the musical flow, nonhierarchical ordering, and the exclusion of any kind of personal expression.
Beside these modernist features, minimalist compositions anticipate
and introduce several postmodern musical characteristics. Those anticipating
the "transgresive" values of minimalism can be seen in its anti-narrative, in its
"vertical" (musical) time, in its emphasis of the musical surface, in its lack of
structural depth, and, finally, in the undoubtedly postmodernist "birth of the
listener".
The fact that American minimalism (as the last neo-avant-garde
musical movement in the twentieth century) contains and specifically
reconciles the features of postwar American neo-avant-garde, European late
modernism, and even musical postmodernism, makes this trend a historical
turning point in the musical history of the late twentieth century. American
musical minimalism was a real apogee of modernism, and a paradigm shift
toward postmodern practices, as Hal Foster noted about minimalism in visual
arts.

Max Paddison (Durham)

Centres and Margins:

Shifting Grounds in the Conceptualization of Modernism
This paper is a consideration of problems of periodization and conceptualization
of modernism, with a particular emphasis on peripheries, drawing on critical theory and
post-colonial theory. It examines notions of modernism and the avant-garde both in
relation to centres of European modernism and their dominant paradigms of what it is to
be modern, and also in relation to the peripheries of the modernist project those
areas which, for historical, cultural and economic reasons, came late to the process of
modernisation. On the one hand the dominant concepts of modernism are examined and
their interconnectedness is explored, especially in relation to key urban centres like Paris,
Berlin and Vienna. Key ideas here are the relation to the past (rejection, but continuation

by other means), and notions of the future (as the unforeseen, the ideal of the not yet
known). On the other hand, concepts of nationalism and the defining and redefining of
national identities are brought to bear on such central notions of modernism, while at the
same time comparing them with the European peripheries - the recovery and
reinvention of traditions and the conflicting cultural need for the critical practices
associated with modernism and the avant-garde. The kinds of conflicts which result,
moving between centres and peripheries, provide the conceptual focus of this paper.
Distinctions are made between concepts of aesthetic modernism (which are multiple, but
united in their relation to the shared problem of cultural fragmentation), and the process
of socio-economic modernisation (which creates the shared context within which
aesthetic modernism exists, together with the various avant-garde movements which have
emerged in response to it).

Katarina Tomaevi (Belgrade)

Musical Modernism at the Periphery? Serbian Music in the First Half
of the 20th Century
The term musical modernism is not broadly accepted in the practice of
the Serbian music historiography. Considered from the position of the style, the music of
the first generation of Serbian modern composers was classified in the frames of the
late or Neo-Romanticism; the elements of Impressionism or Expressionism were
interpreted as the symptoms of the progress towards contemporary western styles.
On the other hand, the music of the second generation of Serbian composers of the XXth
century (born around 1910) was defined both in the terms of Expressionism and of
Avantgarde.
What were the main centers from which the impulses for the new and modern
came into Serbian music? What were the paths of the reception of the modern music in
Serbia? What is the relationship between the new music(s) in Serbia and the new
music(s) in contemporary (Western, Central) Europe? All these questions will be partly
discussed in this paper which's main aim is to reconstruct the map of the most significant
centres of influences to the Serbian music in the first half of the XXth century.

Biljana Milanovi (Belgrade)

Orientalism, Balkanism and Modernism in Serbian Music
of the First Half of 20th century
Text shows critical attitudes towards debates on Orientalism and Balkanism and
then deals with effects of these discourses in the context of Serbian music of the first half
of 20th century. Internalization of Western images on the Balkans and various creative
7

reactions on sterotypes in respect to this region are directly related to the constructions of
Serbian music identities as well as to the antagonisms which denote them. Their critical
observation indicates unsteadiness and relativity of symbolic geography and can
contribute to better understanding of borders and spaces in different positioning of
centre and periphery.

Jarmila Gabrielov (Prague)

Vtzslav Novk (18701949) a Central Figure in Czech Musical
Modernism
Vtzslav Novk (5. 12. 1870 Kamenice nad Lipou 18. 7. 1949 Skute) was one
of the most influential and well-respected Czech composers and pedagogues of his time.
His work now largely neglected and almost forgotten was once considered a
paradigm of Czech musical modernism. In my paper, I want to discuss Novks major
instrumental compositions of 19001912, among them his symphonic poems V Tatrch
[In the Tatra Mountains], O vn touze [Eternal Longing], Toman a lesn panna
[Toman and the Wood Nymph], and Pan, and then concentrate on his top work of that
period, i.e. on his monumental symphony-cantata Boue [The Storm] of 1910.

Nadeda Mosusova (Belgrade)

Modernism in Serbian/Yugoslav Music between two World Wars
Three crucial composers of Serbian modernism Petar Konjovich, Miloje
Milojevich and Stevan Hristich were leading personalities of interwar times in former
Yugoslavia. Deeply interested in the live musical tradition of their land, they tried and
succeeded in bringing together in a modern way the rich folk heritage of Serbia and
Balkans with their own esthetics.

Roksanda Pejovi (Belgrade)

Mihailo Vukdragovi and his Attitude towards
Contemporary Music (1920-1980)
I have tried to examine Mihailo Vukdragovis (1900-1986) view of modernism,
in an interval of sixty years, from 1920, when he started writing about music, until 1980.
The majority of Belgrade musicians who continued to write reviews and articles after
World War II held similar views and most of the younger ones, who appeared

immediately after the liberation, had a fairly similar attitude they accepted works that
were valuable in themselves, both contemporary and modern, while some of them did not
make a distinction between contemporary and modern productions and even referred to
the works of one composer as both contemporary and modern.
Vukdragovis observations on contemporary music can be found in his reviews
through which he followed Belgrade music life, so that the selection of compositions he
wrote about depended on the ones performed in Belgrade in the 1960s. The list of his
contemporaries is long and it started with composers of an impressionistic stylistic
orientation. He was one of the most conservative Serbian musicians. He persistently
struggled against avant-gardism and publicly expressed his dissatisfaction at concerts, by
storming out of concert halls during the performances of compositions of extreme
orientations. It seems unnecessary to point out that he was excessively intolerant.

Aikaterini Romanou (Athens)

Disentangling links between 20th century modernism and politics
Essence and conclusion of this text is the power on music of politics and political
propaganda.
The writer examines how postwar [Wars I and II] modern movements and
tendencies have been presented in the European musical press during three phases of
European history, distinguished by a different balance and imbalance of international
powers. She observes how aesthetic (and even technical) terms alter slickly their meaning
in order to serve conflicting ideologies. She comments on the shortage of expressions in
propaganda, resulting to the existence of identical texts in support of opposite missions
(such as the protection of Germany from Judaism, of the West from Communism, of the
Soviet Union from Capitalism) and of identical descriptions of different musical styles.
Finally, the writer tries to conceive the degree and the ways (through reaction,
through persuasion, through its formative capacity) political propaganda has affected
music itself, the reception of modernistic movements by musical society, and their
presentation in music historiography.

Ivana Medi (ManchesterBelgrade)

Moderated Modernism in Russian Music in the Context of
the Cold War
The main premise of this paper draws on Danielle Fosler-Lussier's notion that the
Cold War drew artists and administrators into parallel circumstances and beliefs through
processes of negation. She uses the analogy with the mathematical operation

multiplication by minus one to describe the phenomenon that Western values, so

vehemently opposed in the East, were at the same time maintained through this very
opposition. I shall analyze here the role of so-called 'moderate(d) modernism' in the
context of the Cold War divide. Moderated modernism is characterized by the artists'
desire to make peace between modern and traditional and between regional and
international, and to approach the dominant courses of international modernism but
without exploring its most radical variants. Although this type of musical discourse can
be identified in various periods before and after the Second World War, throughout
Europe, my aim is to focus on Soviet (and more specifically, Russian) music after the
1953 Thaw, and try to identify the political and artistic ideologies that influenced the
music criticism and historiography of the time.

Vesna Miki (Belgrade)

Aspects of (Moderate) Modernism in Serbian Music After WW II
The paper starts with the assumption that Serbian artistic music of the 1950s
reflects the same ideological and creative features as other artistic fields in Serbia of that
time, which are usually labelled "moderately modern". Although the notion of moderate
modernism has been used in Serbian musicology, its actual relation to the notions of
various neo- styles, more usually applied, has never been considered. Thus, various terms
such as socialist aesthetism, moderate modernism, or socialist modernism will be
considered. However, the central issue of this paper will be some pieces by the
composers of Prague group. Although it is more than expected that some of their
neoclassical pieces would fully adapt to the model of moderate modernism, the question
remains in what ways, and whether some of their so-called neo-romantic or neoexpressionistic pieces, also connected to the notions of the regressive or progressive,
establish moderate modernism, which without doubt remains as the favorite composer
getaway. A further question is whether the introduction of the concept of moderate
modernism could solve the confusion regarding the importance and the achievement of
the pieces that belong to the various neo-trends of the Serbian music of the 1950s.

Mirjana Veselinovi-Hofman (Belgrade)

Revisiting the Serbian Musical Avant-garde: Aspects of the Change of
Reception and of the Keeping History Under Control
In the course of the 1960s and the 1970s, a number of compositions were created in
Serbian music, which bear the sense of its avant-garde novelties. However, these
compositions do not have the sense of avant-garde novelties at the level of European
music, as a whole. Within it, they were not seen as avant-garde according to any features
typical of the nature and kind of effect of an avant-garde event. But they were seen as
artistic results that essentially belonged to the field of the most current compositional
10

tendencies, projects and procedures of that time, thus being part of a geographically and
culturally wider circle of the European avant-garde core.
For those reasons, these compositions were elaborated in our musicology as
examples of the avant-garde of the local type, back at the beginning of the 1980s and
evaluated as highly consistent works through which Serbian music accomplished its
significant avant-garde breakthroughs.
Nearly three decades of life that have unfolded since then, in an era that is quite
different in many of its aspects, not only in the context of the Institution of Art in Serbia
but almost everywhere, have naturally impacted on the reception of these works. Those
decades also brought about some individual reactions: quite predictably, some composers
have tried to modify the musicological reception of their own creative output in
concordance with their own desires. So, they have attempted to shape this reception in
various ways and to keep it under their own control.
In this text, we shall deal with these two 'traces' of the change in the musicological
reception of the Serbian musical avant-garde. One 'trace' shows an essentially natural and
hence a permanent process and the other one reveals a symptomatic, above all,
ideologically and psychologically generated authors surplus of his concern about
securing his own (desired) position within the history of Serbian music.

Leon Stefanija (Ljubljana)

Calibrating Modernisms: the Idea(l)s of Musical Autonomy
in Slovenian Contemporary Music
Accepting the broad perspective of modernity as an unfinished project (J.
Habermas) as a necessity of a musical culture in which appearances are being
continuously transformed, one of the central questions of musical modernism, the
question of musical autonomy, will be addressed as a musicological concept. Three
musical poetics will be compared those by Lojze Lebi, Uro Rojko and Marko
Mihevc with one goal in mind: to offer the specific level of autonomy in music as a
notion regarding its central antinomy revealing modernism as a concept stretched
between the ideas of progress, authenticity and its denial in the ideals of longlasting quality. In other words, beside the premise centred in the opposition historicaltranshistorical and the philosophy of purified aesth/ethical stance, modernism, as
understood by the mentioned composers, reveals itself as a rather subjective set of
imagery, longing for ideal language whilst, at the same time, wavering between
irreconcilable goals of quality and otherness.

Gorica Pilipovi
The Tradition of Opera and New Works for the Musical Stage by
Young Serbian Composers
11

In the last few years, several music theatrical works appearing on the Serbian music
stage have had a significant impact on the traditional opera genre, both formally and in terms of
their content. More specifically, Narcissus and Echo by Aleksandra-Anja orevi, Tesla: the
Total Reflection by a group of composers, Mozart, Luster, Lustig by Irena Popovi and The
Land of Happiness by Vladimir Pejkovi, represent a novelty that has long been awaited. Even
if innovative productions of classical operas had previously existed, these new works all reveal
some significant new tendencies existing in the creative activity i.e. their (by no means)
accidental, if belated appearance, within the context of the wider European musical scene. The
fact that their composers mainly belong to a younger generation of Serbian composers also
speaks of their connection with current European streams and the breakthrough of a new, brave
concept of opera into the fossilized understanding of this genre in Serbia.
If we agree that the turning point in the modern development of opera was the
production of Einstein on the Beach by Philip Glass, and if we accept this as a reference, the
aforementioned works are clearly connected to Glass's basic innovative technique and that of
his director, coauthor Robert Wilson. Primarily it is the lack of narration that dictates the
specific attitude towards the musical score. The work becomes fragmentary, made up of a series
of separate numbers, which are but distant replicas of the traditional elements of the opera form:
arias, ensembles, and ballet scenes. A typical postmodern deconstruction of the genre takes
place in front of the spectator, as it is exposed, and then decomposed into its constituent pieces,
while the mechanism of a theatrical act revealed. Opera is being democratized. It is no longer
an upper class, exclusive art, but rather an art form that incorporates popular entertainment such
as a fashion show or rock-concert. On the other hand, it is a sign of the wish to communicate,
which contemporary music has long gone lost. So, in what way and to what extent are young
Serbian composers willing to meet the demands of the new musical stage? That is the question
that I will try to find an answer to in this paper.

Jonathan Cross (Oxford)

Paradise Lost: Neoclassicism and the Melancholia of Modernism
The late-modern subject is characterised by a sense of alienation from the past.
(This is what distinguishes it from the post-modern subject.) This manifests itself in a
profoundly melancholic nostalgia, an ultimately fruitless yearning for a return to a
(paradisiacal) lost past. Schoenbergs uneasy relationship between past and present
(between tradition and the new) is clearly to be heard in many of the works of his
atonal period, from the Three Piano Pieces Op. 11 to Pierrot lunaire. But in Stravinskys
neoclassical works, too, the unbridgeable chasm between the past and the fragmented
reality of the present is realised as a deep conflict between the expectations of old
musical forms and the priorities of the new avant-garde. Despite their playful surface,
these works are not mere (post-modern) play or pastiche, but melancholic expressions of
the late-modern condition. Using Stravinskys Symphony in C (193840) and Orpheus
(1947) as exemplars, this paper proposes a new version of the story of twentieth-century

12

modernism seen from the perspective of the alienated subject. It is a theme that weaves
its way across the entire century, from Mahler to Birtwistle.

Lszl Vikrius (Budapest)

A novarum rerum cupidus in Search of Tradition: Bla Bartks
Attitude towards Modernism
My music is not modern at all. This is what Bartk stated in a well-known letter
in 1924, a composer who, one and a half decades earlier, was self-confident enough to
sign a letter as an ultra-hyper-neo-impressio-secessionist, the musician of Tomorrow,
who is an opponent of todays public but whose music should be listened to not only
according to Roman Law but also because the Law of Art demands it. In fact, Bartk
remained desirous after novelty in almost all his life. It is so characteristic of him that
some analysts have tended to find weakness in his continuing interest in new music.
The paper will discuss Bartks changing attitude towards modernism as well
as the deeper roots of his ideas about tradition and his search for noveltythe former
more in harmony while the latter more in opposition to his friend Zoltn Kodly, who
wrote some of the most revealing passages describing Bartk, including the phrase
novarum rerum cupidus. As Kodlys 125th anniversary is being celebrated this year, an
attempt at a comparison of their different approach might be apposite.

Vlastimir Trajkovi (Belgrade)

Thinking the Rethinking (the Notion?)
of Modernity in Music
Scientific theories are retractable, while stylistic categories are subject to sporadic
reinterpretations. Hence follows a discussion on circumstances which nowadays render
the notion of musical modernity particularly susceptible of a reinterpretation. The very
notion of modernity has never been defined in a satisfactory way. Itself it refers rather to
a loose concept based on an arbitrary consensus than to a phenomenon observable from a
theoretical standpoint. A hypothesis is established which tells that, out of many stylistic
paradigms intrinsically reffering to musical poetics of their own and characterizing
artistic attitudes in recent epochs, it is not necessarily the most promising syndrome
which wins the evolutionary process for the subsequent future. Musical legacies of
Debussy and Schoenberg are brought into focus. Particular aesthetics and an insight into
the musical structure inherent to oeuvre of the two composers have been considered as
characteristic enough of the two main antagonistic and objectively competitive musical
approaches, evaluated in a way through activity of the next generations of composers if
not wholesomely, then implicitly. That is, from a strictly historical point of view, their

13

predilections might be indicative of a status of an intrinsic, would be modernistic

relevance of the two mentioned approaches. The notorious controversy Schoenberg /
Stravinsky has been replaced by a more indicative one, which is, by the controversy
Debussy / Schoenberg. An attempt has been made (1) to answer whether an evaluation of
the past would be legitimate at all and (2) to put the whole question of historical
rethinking music in a context of a basic legitimacy of rethinking the corresponding course
of history in general, and, very much so, not only as considers nature of
correspondences between the two parallel courses of historical strata and
developments, but also as regards the process of evaluation, inevitably implied by putting
the said question in such a context of postulated theoretical legitimacy.

14