From: Everdell-AT-aol.com
Date: Tue, 12 Dec 2000 13:18:51 EST
Subject: Re: Modernist and Postmodernist music



In a message dated 12/11/00, Bruce Mcpherson wrote of his work on Henry 
Cowell and began:

<< I hope this post will not seem utterly self-serving. >>

Long a pleased reader of Cowell and McPherson's Cowell, I didn't think it 
was; and therefore hope the same for my own post.  I wrote a lot on what I 
thought were the beginnings of Modernism in music in three chapters of my 
book, The First Moderns (Chicago, 1997), arguing that it is closely 
associated with "discontinuity": the separation of individual tones from 
their keys and staccato juxtapositions of them rather than legato 
combinations.  The chapters are #14 (on rag to jazz), #18 (Ives, and 
Schoenberg's 2nd String Quartet) and #21 (Stravinsky's Rite of Spring).  
Other interesting sources on this question are Richard Taruskin's writings 
and the following works by Robert P. Morgan:

_______, “‘A New Musical Reality’: Futurism, Modernism, and ‘The Art of 
Noises’” Modernism/Modernity 1:3(Sep94) p129-151

_______, “Ives and Mahler: Mutual Responses at the End of an Era,” 
19th-Century Music 2(1978), p72-81

_______, “Rewriting Music History: Second Thoughts on Ives and Varèse,” 
Musical Newsletter 3:1(Jan, 1973), p3-12 and 3:2(Apr, 1973), p15-23, 28 (Ives 
and Varèse rather than Stravinsky & Schoenberg “represented the true center 
of twentieth-century music history.”)

_______, Twentieth-Century Music, NY: Norton, 1991


-Bill Everdell, Brooklyn