”Avant-Garde versus Modernist Intermedial Experiments.” Modernism Now!, The British Association for Modernist Studies (BAMS) International Conference 2014, 26-28 June 2014, Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Studies, Senate House, London. (original) (raw)
Signals and noise: art, literature and the avant-garde
2009
One of the most consistent features of the diverse artistic movements that have flourished throughout the twentieth century has been their willingness to experiment in diverse genres and across alternative art forms. Avant-gardes such as Expressionism, Dada, Surrealism, Futurism, Fluxus and Pop were composed not only of painters but also dramatists, musicians, actors, singers, dancers, sculptors, poets and architects. Their works represent a dramatic process of crossfertilization between the arts, resulting in an array of hybrid forms that defy conventional categorisation. This thesis investigates implications of this cross-disciplinary impulse and aims by doing so to open out a site in which to reassess both the manner in which the avant-gardes have been theorised and the impact their theorisation has had on contemporary aesthetics.
Adaptation and Convergence of Media. 'High' Culture Intermediality Versus Popular Culture Intermediality, ed. Lily Diaz, Magda Dragu, Leena Eilitta. Aalto University, Aalto ARTS Books, 2019
In this essay I will test the theory of intermediality as defined by Irina Rajewsky (see Rajewsky 2002, 2005) and Werner Wolf (see Wolf 1999, 2002, 2005) against the domain of abstract musicalized paintings, as they were represented in select visual artworks of the early European avant-garde artists. I will comparatively analyze the transposition of and the resulting formal intermedial reference to the fugue and the theme with variations musical forms in Klee's Fuge in Rot (Fugue in Red) (1912; fig. 1) and Kandinsky's series of prints from the artist's book Kleine Welten (Small Worlds; 1922) respectively. The issues that I want to raise in this article concern the nature of the media put in contact (temporal versus spatial) as well as the nature of the technique being transferred in the study of implicit intermedial reference, and its most specialized case the formal intermedial imitation. Such issues are ignored in the current terminology of intermediality, as defined by Rajewsky and Wolf. I will thus propose to refine the current terms of formal intermedial imitation (" formal and structural analogies " Wolf 1999) and intermediale Bezuge (intermedial reference Rajewsky 2005), with regards to the nature of the technique being transferred, as well as with regards to the nature of the media put in contact (spatial versus temporal media). If the " theme and variations " principle is an artistic form made up of constructive principles easily replicated in other media, the musical form of the fugue is a complex technique, highly specific to the musical medium. The application of the musical form of the fugue to another medium requires the activation of many artistic elements in the target text to be able to trigger in the mind of the reader the illusion of experiencing the primary medium, i.e. music in this instance, and to approximate the structural characteristic of the fugue in a different medium. I would like thus to propose to distinguish between medium specific techniques (such as the fugue) and non-medium specific techniques (such as theme and variations).
Musical Scores and Literary Form in Modernism
Phrase and Subject: Studies in Music and Literature, ed. Delia da Sousa Correa (Oxford: Legenda, 2006), pp. 87-98
Many Anglo-American modernist authors were aware of and associated with their musician counterparts: several wrote as music critics for journals in London, Paris, and New York, and some occasionally attempted musical projects of their own devising, or in collaboration with established musicians. The rich cultural and historical contexts in which literary modernism and music (modernist or otherwise) interacted tell of the aesthetic aspirations of individual writers and, more generally, "of the age." This field of scholarship that has grown around this topic continues to do so with new archival research and critical review. Indeed, the relations between music and literature in modernism have received, for the most part, thorough treatment by literary critics and historians (such as Marjorie Perloff, Steven Adams, and Roger Shattuck). The present essay attempts to explore the relationship between music and modernist text production from the perspective of literary composition and the status of aesthetic objects. Rather than treat the interaction of music and literature as simply a thematic or rhetorical device, this essay will observe how the two media productively cohabit aesthetic space. In particular, the essay will focus on three cases where musical notation actually occurs within a literary text: the violin line of Clément Janequin's Le Chant des Oiseaux in Canto LXXV of Ezra Pound's Cantos, the score of "The Ballad of Persse O'Reilly" in James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, and the threnes and choruses in Samuel Beckett's Watt. The presence of musical scores in such works is entirely in keeping with their eclectic styles and modes, yet is of a quite specific significance: each text interrogates its status as a literary object, and uses musical notation as a means of interrogation. Music signifies a generic crossing-over, a way of developing aesthetic concepts of the Gesamtkunstwerk (the "total artwork" that entails the genres of music, poetry, visual art, etc.) and the paragone (the classical comparison between the arts). But in these particular examples, the embedding of one artwork within another also indicates the way each text questions the grounds of its construction and composition. Each of Canto LXXV, Finnegans Wake and Watt was composed under conditions of exile and dislocation, and each text endured a somewhat ambiguous and difficult journey into print. Their provisional histories as literary objects intersect with the fuzzy ontological boundaries they share with other media. After elaborating the relation between the scores and each text in which they are embedded, this essay will describe the specific way each text interrogates its aesthetic and ontological grounds. The essay will conclude with some remarks on the possibilities for rethinking modernist text status and production, and for situating the complex interactions between music and literature found in these texts more broadly within modernist literary culture. Pound, Joyce and Beckett sought to examine the very fabric of their medium. The presence and location of music within their work provides a mechanism through which the writer and reader can engage in such a meditation.
Cultures of the Avant Garde Oxford 21st
This essay considers the early twentieth-century London avant-garde, concentrating specifically on the early poetics of T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, and their circle. In calling for experimentation with 'regular' forms and a new modern mode of composition, these avant-gardistes sought to capture the changing 'spirit' of their time, which, they felt, existing forms and techniques could no longer accommodate. What unites the different avant-garde practices of the time is the belief that poetry (art in general) ought to spearhead all means of communication. This conviction underlies the avant-garde distinction between 'prose' (or conventional language) and 'poetry' (direct, immediate, language), an opposition which, in turn, at least in the case of Hulme and Pound, carries severe ideological implications.
This essay considers the early twentieth-century London avant-garde, concentrating specifically on the early poetics of T. E. Hulme, Ezra Pound, and their circle. In calling for experimentation with 'regular' forms and a new modern mode of composition, these avant-gardistes sought to capture the changing 'spirit' of their time, which, they felt, existing forms and techniques could no longer accommodate. What unites the different avant-garde practices of the time is the belief that poetry (art in general) ought to spearhead all means of communication. This conviction underlies the avant-garde distinction between 'prose' (or conventional language) and 'poetry' (direct, immediate, language), an opposition which, in turn, at least in the case of Hulme and Pound, carries severe ideological implications.
'Musicality and Modernist Form'
Published in Modernist Cultures (May 2013)
Musico-literary questions have long informed modernist studies. 1 Issues of form have been at the heart of such scholarship, which continues to explore intermedial connections between music and literature by examining, in David Michael Hertz's words, 'the ubiquitous dialectic between form and content, structure and meaning.' 2 However, the cultural-historical 'turn' in modernist studies means that investigations of the problem of 'musicalised' literature, for instance, or of literary representations of musical themes and figures, now tend to be inflected by carefully historicised and theoretically informed accounts of modernism's musico-literary implications. Thus, recent work on musico-literary modernism represents an important development of mid-twentieth-century reassessments (undertaken by such philosophers as Theodor Adorno and Ernst Bloch) of music's place in modernity. Hence Ronald Schleifer's recourse to philosophical aesthetics in his recent book Modernism and Popular Music (2011), and his claim that studying modernism from a musico-literary viewpoint requires attention to the material and socio-cultural determinants of twentieth-century subjectivity as well as 'the continuities and discontinuities' by which modernity itself is underpinned. 3 This special issue of Modernist Cultures addresses all of these areas of debate by collecting essays which address the formal, contextual, and philosophical implications of musico-literary modernism. In doing so they expand our sense of modernism's intermedial complexity (and disputed constitution) in work by a diverse range of figures, from Modernist Cultures 8.1 (2013): 1-8
Avant into pop, pop into avant: Interplays between music and visual media
2019
When considered separately from any reference to specific art work or movements, the notion of "avant-garde" calls for a trans-historical, or at least trans-temporal, perspective. Derived from the French warfare lexicon in use since the Middle Ages and originally indicating a contingent of forerunners leading a military formation, the word took a more figurative nuance as early as the midsixteenth century, when literary historian Etienne Pasquier described Renaissance poets as "the avant-garde" in "a war against ignorance". 2 Such a use of the term foreshadowed the romantic meaning it would eventually took up three centuries later among Saint Simon's disciples, for whom it outlined the role of the artists as forerunners, paving the way of the future society by promoting revolutionary changes. 3 In transposing its military semantic field in which it functioned as a spatial concept to a temporal metaphor, the notion posits an understanding of time as a linear and evolutionary progress (an "unexorable march", so to speak) which has deep roots in modern thinking. On a broader level, the very idea of an avant-garde is in fact 'directly indebted to the broader consciousness of modernity-a sharp sense of militancy, praise of nonconformism, courageous precursory exploration, and, on a more general plane, confidence in the final victory of time and immanence over traditions' 4 to the point where it can also be read as a dramatization and radicalization of modernity's main tenets. To simply state that an art-work is 'Advancing through Time. Avant-garde and Mass Culture', François Mouillot wrote the second paragraph 'Moving in Between. Intermedial Art and Networks', and Maria Teresa Soldani wrote the third paragraph 'At the Criss Cross between Music, Art and Visual Media'. 2 Etienne Pasquier, Oeuvres choisies, ed. by Léon Feugère (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1849), vol. 2, p. 21 (our translation). 3 The first acknowledged use of the word in this sense is dated back to Olinde Rodrigues's 'L'artiste, le savant et l'industriel: Dialogue' in Opinions littéraires, philosophiques et industrielles
Turning Art Into a Literary Communication Tool
The Paris Conference on Arts & Humanities 2023 Official Conference Proceedings, 2023
The paper investigates the unity of theatrical and musical arts as supplementary communication tools employed by the literary medium. The literary practice of integrating music and drama into a novel is seen through the prism of intermediality-based processes employed by modernist writers, namely E. M. Forster in his novel Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905). It is revealed that the integration of a dramatic-musical medium and theatre-based conflict into the literary work enhances and deepens the intercultural conflict depicted by the writer, as well as links supporting artistic layers through the intermedia-based principle of fragmentation. Even though the matters under study refer to the beginning of the XX century, the principles applied by Forster remain unchanged and similar literary practices can be seen both in contemporary literature and new media forms, including digital media, pop art and mass art. The paper concludes that integrating other arts into literary forms supports the multi-layer depictions, the extension of the context of a creative artefact, as well as helps establish the polyphonic arts and art forms.
Of Tradition and Experiment VIII: What’s Avant-Garde in the 21st Century?
Tears in the Fence (Dorset, UK), 2013
This column for Tears in the Fence magazine reflects on the notion and definition of the contemporary Avant-Garde. Bouncing off ideas and articles by Marjorie Perloff, David Lehman and Alain Badiou, this short article discusses the role and possibility of naming and classifying material as part of defining or categorizing avant-gardism. The presence or absence of pop culture, normative speech, disjunctive speech or punctuation, and other formal techniques at the heart of aesthetic debates on poetic practice are also discussed, in particular as presented in works published by presses such as Wave books or Ugly Duckling Presse. The column ends responding to Perloff's claim that the new avant garde is lyric conceptualism, claiming instead that the new has not yet arrived, though perhaps "Authors interested in the potential for the unknown are almost waiting for an art to emerge that has the potential to surprise, scandalize, and radicalize their view." This article does not attempt to answer as much as to meander around and mull over some of the core debates about definition and position of avant gardism today.
Special Section: Literary Modernism and Melody: An Avant-Propos
Texas Studies in Literature & Language, 2013
In one of his eager attempts to impose classifications on poetry, Ezra Povmd, in 1914, identified a kind of verse in which "sheer melody seems as if it were just bursting into speech" {Gaudier-Brzeska 82). Such melopoeic poetry, as he labeled it elsewhere, was not a marginal curiosity, he claimed, but "marked only the best lyric periods" {Selected Prose 27). In Pound's definition, melos does not equal melody or song, "the arrangement of single notes in expressive succession. .. [o]ften contrasted with harmony," but musicality in general ("melody"). Melopoeia thus refers to a poetry that is governed by conspicuous soimd patterns and rhythms. Defined in this way, the melopoeic qualities of modernist literature have received ample attention from literary scholars. In the articles in this special section, however, we wish to trace the implications of melos for literary modernism when it is conceived of specifically as melody. Borrowed from the realm of music, melody belongs to a field of which the ties to modernist literature are undisputed. Modernism witnessed a peak of musico-literary collaborations and cross-fertilizations. To begin with, writers drew inspiration from musical forms: T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, for instance, famously solicits comparisons with Beethoven's late string quartets, and James Joyce reputedly modeled the Sirens chapter from Ulysses on a fugue. Others coupled their work with actual music. Edith Sitwell enlisted the musical skill of William Walton to write an accompaniment to her poetry cycle Façade, and W. B. Yeats recruited young composer and modernist enfant terrible George Antheil to furnish musical intermezzos for his play Fighting the Waves. Conversely, composers not only let themselves be inspired by the work of literary colleagues, but also paid renewed attention to the century-old debate on the hierarchy between words and music. Schoenberg's epitomic Pierrot Lunaire, written
Between aesthetics and politics : music in James Joyce, Ezra Pound and Sylvia Townsend Warner
PhD thesis, 2016
This thesis explores the relationships between music, literature, aesthetics and politics in the novels of James Joyce, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and the poetry of Ezra Pound, to show the political relevance of how discourses of musical transcendence appear in these texts. These authors were notably political: Pound was involved with Italian fascism, Warner a Communist Marxist, while Joyce critics have been invested in claiming for him a liberal, humanist political position that is reflected in his writing. This allows me to analyse their engagement with music in light of their politics in order to make connections between aesthetics and politics through music in modernist literature. The texts analysed in this thesis are Joyce's Chamber Music and Ulysses, Pound's Cantos, his early essays and articles, and his musical theories 'absolute rhythm' and 'Great Bass', and finally Warner's Mr Fortune's Maggot, 'The Music at Long Verney', and The Corner That Held Them. I use a methodology, informed by the musicology and philosophy of T.W. Adorno, that moves between aesthetic and social approaches to music. I analyse the political significance of Joyce's and Pound's appropriation of musical forms as part of a radical departure from traditional aesthetic practices to articulate a newly modern subjectivity, and arrive at an analysis of Warner's exploration of the tension between music as both transcendent aesthetic paradigm and material object with political meanings and functions. I argue that the extent to which writers and scholars continue to refer to discourses of musical transcendence as a way of exploring and representing humanity's relationship with the world means that analyses of music's social grounding, which can reject problems of signification and meaning, are not sufficient to explain the variety of functions music can fulfil in writing and in thought.
Music, A Motif in Modernism: An Examination of the Musical Design in “Four Quartets”
Postgraduate English a Journal and Forum For Postgraduates in English, 2012
The urge to be free from confinement characterized the modernist sensibility and many modernist writers attempted to transcend artistic disciplines. Crucially, the modernists' striving from restriction towards freedom was often seen in relation to music. Ezra Pound called for poets 'to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome', and many modernists often aspired towards the liberation they associated with 'the musical phrase'. 1 For example, Virginia Woolf's love for music led her to consider words in the same light as music. 2 Indeed, music was central to Woolf's writing and she believed that the writing of literature was 'nearly allied to the art of music'. 3 Moreover, music provided Woolf with much inspiration in experimenting with a new form for the novel, and it was music to which she aspired: 'It's music I want; to stimulate and suggest'. 4 Evidently, then, the modernists were greatly preoccupied with music and Pound captured the significance of music to the modernist movement when he boldly stated: Diaper Postgraduate English: Issue 25 3 Poets who are not interested in music are, or become, bad poets. I would almost say that poets should never be too long out of touch with musicians. Poets who will not study music are defective. 5 In this article I shall begin by considering the rise of musico-literary criticism within the context of literary modernism, and reflect on the plethora of criticism which engages in this type of interdisciplinarity. I shall then briefly consider the implications that the current critical climate has for the future of musico-literary criticism, before turning to a brief discussion of the influence of music on T. S. Eliot. Finally, I shall carry out a musico-literary examination of Eliot's Four Quartets (1943). Given the urge of the modernist writers to explore music, perhaps it is unsurprising that modernist literature has been analysed increasingly in relation to music. The interdisciplinary comparisons between literature and music gathered considerable speed after Calvin Smith Brown's seminal study entitled Music and Literature: A Comparison of the Arts (1948), and it would seem that in recent critical debate, the drawing of analogies between music and literature has been steadily increasing. In Literary Modernism and Musical Aesthetics: Pater, Pound, Joyce and Stein (2001) Brad Bucknell elucidated each author's interest in music, both in terms of theory and practice. This was followed shortly by Literature and Music (2002) ed. by Michael J. Meyer, which contained a wide-ranging number of articles by various critics, including an investigation of Samuel Beckett's serialist music technique and Pound's Cantos.
The Synthesis of the Arts: from romanticism to postmodernism
LAPLAGE EM REVISTA
The article devoted to the genesis of the synthesis of the arts. The main research method is the cultural-historical approach, which allows considering this phenomenon in a historical perspective. Four stages were identified in the development of the arts: the primary syncretism of arts in primitive cultures; the separation of certain types of art and their acquisition of independence; the synthesis of the arts; the postmodern synesthesia of arts. The main ways of interaction of arts are determined: dominance, fusion, inclusion and juxtaposition. The authors of the article concluded that globalization, the development of technology, new types of communication contribute to the further complication and transformation of the synthesis of the arts, and such concepts close to it as “pluralism”, “interaction of arts”, “synesthesia” and “intermediality”. Broad prospects are opening up for the study of intermediality and multimedia as new heterogeneous semiotic systems.