Literary Modernism and the Aging of the New Music: Ballets Russes to Bebop

This study examines the contribution made by literary modernism to the institutional legacy of the avant-garde music of the first half of the twentieth century. At the same time, it considers the vice versa – the role played by the institutionalization of avant-garde music in shaping literary modernism’s sense of its own aesthetic mission and institutional destiny. The musical developments in question include the European “New Music” theorized by Theodor W. Adorno and Carl Dahlhaus, typified by works such as Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps and the tonal experiments of the so-called Second Viennese School, as well as the African-American jazz avant-garde of the 1940s and ‘50s. Subject at first to fierce controversy, the New Music had, by the middle of the century, amassed a sizable audience and considerable bourgeois prestige, and its repertory had achieved a secure place in the academy. The institutional entrenchment of the New Music in the American academy would have a decisive influence on the emerging technical grammar and artistic self-conception of modern jazz, which itself was to undergo a similar, if smaller-scale, process of institutionalization in the decades to follow. The authors discussed – among them Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Siegfried iii Sassoon, Djuna Barnes, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Ralph Ellison, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Alain Locke, and Adorno himself – at once bear witness to the New Music’s growing cultural privilege, and help give shape to the institutional discourses by which that privilege is constituted. Certain of these authors identify with or admire the music more than others, but all of them recognize that the reception of the experimental modern art exemplified by the New Music is a process on which their own institutional legacy depends. This recognition manifests itself in the texts both discursively and formally. For the literary artists of modernism, criticism of the New Music is almost inescapably an act of, necessarily provisional, self-criticism, an assessment of their own artistic and cultural ambitions or, retrospectively, their achievements. And since literature, whose materials are discursive, is most readily positioned among the arts to directly shape institutional discourses about art, and in this case discursive constructions of the modern, the reverberations of these literary judgments continue to be felt in the present-day academy.Ph