The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music

A century on from its first flowering, musical modernism still arouses passions and is riven by controversies. Taking root in the early decades of the twentieth century, it achieved ideological dominance for almost three decades following the Second World War, before becoming the object of widespread critique in the last two decades of the century, both from critics and composers of a ’postmodern’ persuasion and from prominent scholars associated with the ’new musicology’. Those critiques, while challenging both modernism’s overt claims and its tacit assumptions, did little, however, to dampen its ongoing resilience, whether in musicology or music more generally. Modernism continues to be a significant tendency - still, perhaps, the single most readily identifiable tendency - in art music composition. While the Research Companion does not seek to limit what musical modernism might be, it resists an excessive dilution of the term, whereby it might be used almost indiscriminately for practically any and all music composed during a certain period. The idea of ’rupture’ as an expression of the alienation central to the experience of modernity remains fundamental to a critical and historical understanding of modernism, although that rupture may have been expressed and experienced in quite different ways. The Research Companion is intended to be agonistic, but not antagonistic, in nature and redefines modernism by probing its margins at least as much as by restating its supposed essence. Similarly, in addition to new approaches to topics that are relatively familiar, coverage includes issues not commonly associated with modernism in music, such as its connection with emigration, exile and diaspora, its metaphysics of space and its relation to community politics and neoliberalism