Stoppard engages with the legacy of the historical avant-garde throughout his writing; literary history energises and informs his theatre. It is modernism, though, that paves the way for Stoppard’s view of the artist as one who reorganises material into meaning. In Travesties, Stoppard uses Joyce to reaffirm the modernist tenet that authorial labour produces texts worth attending, events worth staging, and fictions that revise fictions.

Introduction

Methodological Considerations

Between March 1958 and October 1960, no fewer than six major works by prominent European avant-garde composers for multiple spatially distributed orchestral groups (with or without electronic sounds) received their first performances: Boulez's Doubles (which would later be expanded into Figures doubles prismes) and Poésie pour pouvoir; Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gruppen and Carré ; and Henri Pousseur's Rimes pour multiples sources sonores were sometimes premiered days apart, in key musical centers such as Paris, Cologne, and Donaueschingen. It is instructive to regard these key postwar modernist works as owing their existence in part to the specific characteristics of the historical era into which they were launched. One of the important developments of this era concerns music recording and sound reproduction, specifically the commercial introduction of stereo long-playing records that led to the mass distribution of stereo sound technology into homes throughout the Western world, including the introduction of commercially available stereo long-playing records in 1958. Stereo radio transmission also started to come of age over the course of the decade beginning in that year, and multichannel cinema sound systems were already commonplace in major urban centers around the world. To what extent were listeners’ experiences of the aforementioned spatialized works informed by their new familiarity with stereo sound? To what extent did composers respond to listeners’ expectations about, and understanding of, stereo in their spatialized works? The answers to these seemingly naive questions will require evaluating the extent to which an allusion to the technology of stereophony may have been inscribed into these works. This inscription might include both ways in which audiences were inclined to hear stereophonic effects in these works and ways in which composers might have reacted in their works to these expectations. Answering these questions also requires, on the poietic side of things, an evaluation of these composers’ constantly evolving discourses on their works’ relationship with technology (in order to reveal the ways in which they aim to position themselves strategically with respect to technological innovations of their time). On the esthesic flank, it requires an analysis of the extent to which the experience of two-channel stereophony lay at the horizon of contemporary listeners’ expectations.

The aim of this book is to present some of the latest thinking about the nature and purpose of music semiology. It is not only a repository of new scholarship in an exciting area of general musicology but also a tribute to Jean-Jacques Nattiez, who in anyone's account of the last half century would be considered the founder of this discipline.

The word dawn in the title of this book refers to the fact that music semiology— which arrived on the musicological, and particularly the musictheoretical, scene in French, in 1976, through Nattiez's pioneering study Fondements d'une sémiologie de la musique—is young, vibrant, and certainly not fully formed. In recent decades other strands of musicological thinking have emerged that can be regarded as spawned by music semiology, explicitly or otherwise. These alone are indications of the labile state of the recent history of ideas as discernible in current musical scholarship. Although the boundaries are anything but clear, as some of the present book indicates, music semiotics, which has aimed to distinguish its methods from those of music semiology, could hardly have emerged as the prodigious research field it now is without the impetus that came from the poststructuralist thinking of the 1980s, largely stimulated by Fondements and Nattiez's other publications from the earliest days of music semiology. Similarly, the development, especially in music theory circles in recent years, of “narrative” approaches to musical explanation has been riding the same wave of hermeneutical explorations of music as the semiologist Jean Molino, Nattiez's principal influence. The development of narrative approaches will be discussed further, as will Molino's concept of the “total symbolic fact.” It is no accident that it was Nattiez himself, according to one authority, who first used the term new musicology in print, applying it to research revealing the antistructuralist urges that had begun to characterize the work of younger historical musicologists. In Nattiez's view, these scholars lacked the aesthetic conviction that would have lent them some enduring hermeneutical value.

Celebrity reverberates throughout Bernard Shaw's writings and reception, animating his authorial persona and inflecting his work. The degree to which such components of celebrity as repute and recognisability shape Shaw's legacy is apparent from his contemporaries’ encounters with him. Hugh Kingsmill, for example, depicts the power of Shaw's celebrity in a 1931 anecdote: ‘I entered the lift, which contained three women, and as it began to descend, I saw Mr. Shaw smiling benignly down on me. “Bernard Shaw,” the three women gasped. It was an impressive moment’. Kingsmill had been visiting Shaw to challenge Frank Harris's defamation of Oscar Wilde as a ‘drunkard and swindler’. His account thus reads as a rumination on renown; it points to a cultural fascination with celebrity, the phenomenon emerging, during the late 1800s and the first half of the 1900s, in the form we recognise it now.

Shaw's life and career coincided with this explosion of twentieth-century celebrity culture: a drastic shift in the way celebrities are created, who gets created as one, and the significance of renown. Literary fame, especially the brand of modernist authorship practiced in and around the 1920s, a flagship decade for Shaw, participated in these transformations. Shaw, not immune to cultural sea change, became a totem of individuality, an icon whose self-production parallels that of the greatest celebrities and the most exemplary modernist writers of his time. In a typical, if hyperbolic, instance of Shaw celebrification, a 1930 magazine feature terms him ‘as venerable an institution as Queen Victoria at the time of her diamond jubilee’. Shaw's renown is measurable by his 1923 Time cover, and his Nobel and Oscar awards – a cross-section of acclaim achieved by only him, still. It is graspable from his public associations, across diverse spheres of influence, with Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Margaret Sanger, Danny Kaye, and Gene Tunney – and from his dummy at Madame Tussaud's.

During Shaw's lifetime, fame increasingly settled itself on people and professions that would earlier have been unlikely to achieve widespread recognition: figures from cultures of mass entertainment rather than state- or society-authorised hierarchies of achievement. Probably the most seminal account of this change is Leo Löwenthal's 1943 study of twentieth-century biographies, which notes a ‘considerable decrease of people from the serious and important professions and a corresponding increase of entertainers’.