Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: trajectories of twentieth-century music
- 1 Peripheries and interfaces: the Western impact on other music
- 2 Music of a century: museum culture and the politics of subsidy
- 3 Innovation and the avant-garde, 1900–20
- 4 Music, text and stage: the tradition of bourgeois tonality to the Second World War
- 5 Classic jazz to 1945
- 6 Flirting with the vernacular: America in Europe, 1900–45
- 7 Between the wars: traditions, modernisms, and the ‘little people from the suburbs’
- 8 Brave new worlds: experimentalism between the wars
- 9 Proclaiming the mainstream: Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern
- 10 Rewriting the past: classicisms of the inter-war period
- 11 Music of seriousness and commitment: the 1930s and beyond
- 12 Other mainstreams: light music and easy listening, 1920–70
- 13 New beginnings: the international avant-garde, 1945–62
- 14 Individualism and accessibility: the moderate mainstream, 1945–75
- 15 After swing: modern jazz and its impact
- 16 Music of the youth revolution: rock through the 1960s
- 17 Expanding horizons: the international avant-garde, 1962–75
- 18 To the millennium: music as twentieth-century commodity
- 19 Ageing of the new: the museum of musical modernism
- 20 (Post-)minimalisms 1970–2000: the search for a new mainstream
- 21 History and class consciousness: pop music towards 2000
- 22 ‘Art’ music in a cross-cultural context: the case of Africa
- Appendix 1 Personalia
- Appendix 2 Chronology
- Index
- References
4 - Music, text and stage: the tradition of bourgeois tonality to the Second World War
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2008
Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction: trajectories of twentieth-century music
- 1 Peripheries and interfaces: the Western impact on other music
- 2 Music of a century: museum culture and the politics of subsidy
- 3 Innovation and the avant-garde, 1900–20
- 4 Music, text and stage: the tradition of bourgeois tonality to the Second World War
- 5 Classic jazz to 1945
- 6 Flirting with the vernacular: America in Europe, 1900–45
- 7 Between the wars: traditions, modernisms, and the ‘little people from the suburbs’
- 8 Brave new worlds: experimentalism between the wars
- 9 Proclaiming the mainstream: Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern
- 10 Rewriting the past: classicisms of the inter-war period
- 11 Music of seriousness and commitment: the 1930s and beyond
- 12 Other mainstreams: light music and easy listening, 1920–70
- 13 New beginnings: the international avant-garde, 1945–62
- 14 Individualism and accessibility: the moderate mainstream, 1945–75
- 15 After swing: modern jazz and its impact
- 16 Music of the youth revolution: rock through the 1960s
- 17 Expanding horizons: the international avant-garde, 1962–75
- 18 To the millennium: music as twentieth-century commodity
- 19 Ageing of the new: the museum of musical modernism
- 20 (Post-)minimalisms 1970–2000: the search for a new mainstream
- 21 History and class consciousness: pop music towards 2000
- 22 ‘Art’ music in a cross-cultural context: the case of Africa
- Appendix 1 Personalia
- Appendix 2 Chronology
- Index
- References
Summary
The old world
In the opening scene of the American musical Music in the Air (1932), with music by Jerome Kern and words by Oscar Hammerstein, we see and hear a provincial German, Dr Walther Lessing, composing straight out of bed on a sunny morning. A linnet sings outside his window, represented by flute and piccolo in the pit orchestra. After silencing competition from his cuckoo clock, Lessing whistles the linnet’s motif, harmonizes it on his on-stage house organ as the first two bars of a 2/4 polka, extends them to an eight-bar period, and stops to write it down, his scribbling represented by orchestral counterpoint to the motif. Trying it over on the organ, he is disturbed by children singing on their way to school, represented as more counterpoint to his music. They end abruptly as he calls on them to stop, with a two-quaver/crotchet rhythm from which he then tries, unconvincingly, to improvise a B section in the dominant for his polka. As he struggles with this at his desk, the pit orchestra telling us that an emotional, Wagnerian motif of a four-quaver upbeat in 4/4 is also very much on his mind (indeed it opened the scene before the curtain went up, and so was probably in his head as he awoke), yet another interruption occurs: his daughter bangs at the door with his breakfast tray. While she kicks, she also speaks: ‘Father dear, let me in. Both my hands are full.’
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- The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music , pp. 90 - 122Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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