Tina Frühauf (Editor) - Postmodernity's Musical Pasts-Boydell Press (2020)

Postmodernity’s Musical Pasts
Published online by Cambridge University Press

Postmodernity’s Musical Pasts
Edited by Tina Frühauf
THE BOYDELL PRESS

© Contributors 2020
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First published 2020

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For Ami Maayani (1936–2019)

Contents
List of Illustrations ix
List of Music Examples xi
List of Contributors xiii
Acknowledgments xvii
About the Cover xix
Introduction 1
Tina Frühauf
Part I. Time and the (Post)Modern

1 Music and Postmodern Time 17
Lawrence Kramer
2 ‘Aesthetic Indigestion’: Alfred Schnittke, Anachronism, and the

Contemporary Cadenza’s Musical Pasts 37
Joshua S. Walden
3 John Adams’s Post-stylistic Approach to the Past: A Response

to the Uncertain Future of a Globalized World? 55
Max Noubel
Part II. Manifestations of History

4 Germany, Post Modernism, and the Sphericity of Time 75
Laurenz Lütteken
5 Visions of the ‘End of History’, ‘1968’, and the Emergence of

‘Postmoderne Musik’ in West Germany 91
Beate Kutschke
Part III. Receptions of the Past

6 (Neo-)Schenkerism and the Past: Recovering a Plurality of
Critical Contexts 119
John Koslovsky

viii CONTENTS
7 From Bach to Neruda: Historicity and Heterogeneous

Temporality in the Chilean Cantata (1941–1969) 138
Daniela Fugellie
8 Time Re-Covered: Double Temporality in Olga Neuwirth’s

Hommage à Klaus Nomi 168
Georg Burgstaller
Part IV. Nostalgias and the Temporalities of Belonging

9 The Past Is Home: Eduardo Martínez Torner in Postwar
London; An Exile’s Nostalgia for Spanish Musicology 195
Susana Asensio Llamas
10 Historical Nostalgia, Nature, and the Future in Three Iconic

Albums from 1971: Aqualung, Who’s Next, and Led Zeppelin IV 225
Caitlin Vaughn Carlos
11 Indie Neofado’s Temporality: A Tale of Two Nostalgias 249

Michael Arnold
Bibliography 273
Index 297

Illustrations
2.1 Gravestone of Alfred Schnittke in the Novodevichy Cemetery,

Moscow, showing a fermata over a whole rest marked fff.
Photo: Wwwrathert (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by-sa/3.0/deed.en). 54
5.1 Luigi Nono, Intolleranza 1960, p. 8. © 1962 by Ars Viva

Publishing House, Mainz; renewed 1990. With kind
permission SCHOTT MUSIC, Mainz. 109
5.2 Wolfgang Rihm, Dritte Symphonie, p. 30. © 1978 by
Universal Edition A.G., Vienna. 111
5.3 Wolfgang Rihm, Andere Schatten, p. 13. © 1985 by Universal
Edition A.G., Vienna. 112
5.4 Detlev Müller-Siemens, Variationen über einen Ländler von
Franz Schubert, first page of variation 3, p. 15. © 1978 by Ars
Viva. With kind permission SCHOTT MUSIC, Mainz. 115
9.1 Opening of ‘El ritmo en los estilos literarios’, Profesionales de la

enseñanza: Hoja de información diaria, 4 April 1939. Torner Papers,
Modesto González Cobas Collection, Real Instituto de
Estudios Asturianos, Oviedo. 197
9.2 Proof from a manuscript being printed in Barcelona and
recovered by Torner in 1939, Seis canciones corales españolas de la
época de Cristóbal Colón. Torner Papers, Modesto González Cobas
Collection, Real Instituto de Estudios Asturianos, Oviedo. 204
9.3 Cover of one of the manuscripts that Torner carried with him
in 1939 to France and to the United Kingdom, Tesoro de la música
española. Torner Papers, Modesto González Cobas Collection,
Real Instituto de Estudios Asturianos, Oviedo. 206
9.4 Cover of one of the manuscripts that Torner carried with him
in 1939 to France and to the United Kingdom, Repertorio coral
español: Canciones inéditas de los siglos XV y XVI. Torner Papers,
Modesto González Cobas Collection, Real Instituto de
Estudios Asturianos, Oviedo. 207
9.5 Torner on the terrace of the Instituto Español de Londres,
1949. Private collection of Jovita Martínez, London. 210

x ILLUSTRATIONS
9.6 A page from the original manuscript of Torner’s Rítmica musical

hispánica. Eduardo Martínez Torner Collection, Centro de
Documentación, Residencia de Estudiantes, Madrid. 218
11.1 Paulo Pedro Gonçalves, 11 June 2017. Reproduced by

permission of Brian Findlay. 258
11.2 Album cover for Ovelha Negra’s second release, Ilumina,
shot by Michael Peters Jr. and designed by the Dead Combo
guitarist Tó Trips, 2012. Reproduced by permission of
Paulo Pedro Gonçalves. 262

Music Examples
1.1 Dmitri Shostakovich, Fugue in F♯ major (1950–1), conclusion.

Moscow: State Publishers ‘Music’, 1972. 23
1.2 Dmitri Shostakovich, Prelude in E major (1950–1), opening.
1.3 Dmitri Shostakovich, Prelude in E major (1950–1), conclusion.
2.1 Alfred Schnittke, cadenza for Beethoven’s Violin Concerto

(1975), movement 1, mm. 2–7. © With kind permission
MUSIKVERLAG HANS SIKORSKI GMBH & CO.
KG, Hamburg. 46
2.2 Ludwig van Beethoven, Violin Concerto (1806), movement 1,
mm. 1–5. 46
mm. 331–5. 46
(1975), mm. 65–73. © With kind permission MUSIKVERLAG
HANS SIKORSKI GMBH & CO. KG, Hamburg. 48
2.5 Alban Berg, Violin Concerto (1935), movement 2, passage based
on Bach, ‘Es ist genug’. © Copyright 1936, 1996 by Universal
Edition A.G., Wien/UE34119. 48
mm. 144–51. 49
(1975), mm. 112–17. © With kind permission MUSIKVERLAG
HANS SIKORSKI GMBH & CO. KG, Hamburg. 49
7.1 Acario Cotapos, Balmaceda (1956), microfilm of the manuscript

score, p. 35, transcription. Archivo de Música, Biblioteca
Nacional de Chile, Santiago de Chile. 152
7.2 Gustavo Becerra-Schmidt, La Araucana (1965), manuscript
score, mm. 78–87, transcription. Gustavo Becerra-Schmidt
Papers, Universität Oldenberg. 155
7.3 Gustavo Becerra-Schmidt, Macchu Picchu (1966), manuscript
score, part VI, systems 1–5, transcription. Gustavo Becerra-
Schmidt Papers, Universität Oldenberg. 157

xii MUSIC EXAMPLES
8.1 Olga Neuwirth, Hommage à Klaus Nomi (1998), ‘Remember’,

mm. 23–31, transcription. © With kind permission G. Ricordi &
Co., Berlin. 182
8.2 Olga Neuwirth, Hommage à Klaus Nomi (1998), ‘Remember’,
mm. 42–54, transcribed reduction without synthesizer 1 and
percussion. © With kind permission G. Ricordi & Co., Berlin. 184

Contributors
Michael Arnold is Lecturer in Spanish and Portuguese Studies at the

University of Minnesota. His publications include articles in TRANSverse,
Nomenclatura, Música y cultura audiovisual: Horizontes, Dissertation Reviews,
and a chapter in the edited volume Talking Back to Globalization: Texts and
Practices (2016).
Susana Asensio Llamas, musicologist, works at the Consejo Superior de

Investigaciones Científicas, in Madrid. She holds the E. M. T. National
Folklore Prize (2012) and is the author of Música y emigración (1997) and
Fuentes para el estudio de la música popular asturiana (2010; UNE Prize in
2011). Among her editions are A. M. Espinosa’s Cuentos populares españoles
(2004/2017), J. B. Aceves’s El Pinar: Factores sociales relacionados con el desar-
rollo rural en un pueblo español (2015), and E. Seroussi’s Ruinas sonoras de la
modernidad (2019).
Georg Burgstaller works as Editor at Répertoire International de Littérature

Musicale in New York. His research on Heinrich Schenker appeared in Music
Analysis and the Journal of Music Criticism. As a Research Associate at Queens
College, City University of New York, he has worked on the correspondence
of Karol Rathaus. He received the 2017 Janet Levy Award from the American
Musicological Society for the research project The Reception of Britten’s Peter
Grimes in Post-War Austria, 1947.
Caitlin Vaughn Carlos is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music History at

the University of Redlands. Her research focuses on nostalgia and pastoral
imagery in British and American rock music of the early 1970s. She is cur-
rently completing her PhD in musicology at the University of California, Los
Angeles.
Daniela Fugellie is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the Universidad

Alberto Hurtado in Santiago de Chile. She is currently in charge of the proj-
ect Alternative Spaces of Contemporary Music in Chile (1945–95), supported
by the Chilean government Fondecyt. She has edited the volume Das Wissen
der Arbeit und das Wissen der Künste (2017, with Marina Gerber) and authored
‘Musiker unserer Zeit’: Internationale Avantgarde, Migration und Wiener Schule
in Südamerika (2018).

xiv CONTRIBUTORS
Tina Frühauf teaches at Columbia University and serves on the doctoral fac-
ulty of the Graduate Center, City University of New York; she is Associate
Executive Editor at Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale in New
York. Among her recent publications are Dislocated Memories: Jews, Music, and
Postwar German Culture (2014, with Lily E. Hirsch), which won the Ruth
A. Solie Award and the Jewish Studies and Music Award of the American
Musicological Society, and Experiencing Jewish Music in America (2018).
John Koslovsky is on the music theory faculty at the Conservatorium van

Amsterdam and holds an affiliate research position in the humanities at
Utrecht University. His research on the history of music theory, Schenkerian
analysis, and music of the Romantic and early modernist periods has appeared
in numerous journals and edited volumes, including the Journal of Musicology,
Intégral, Music Analysis, and Revista di analisi e teoria musicale. As member of
Schenker Documents Online, he has transcribed and translated the complete
correspondence of Walter Dahms.
Lawrence Kramer, Distinguished Professor of English and Music at

Fordham University, is a prizewinning author and composer. His most recent
books are The Thought of Music (2016), winner of the ASCAP Foundation
Virgil Thomson Award for Outstanding Music Criticism, and The Hum of
the World: A Philosophy of Listening (2019), both published by University of
California Press. His Part Songs for mixed chorus premiered in New York in
2019.
Beate Kutschke is currently steering the project Historiography of Musical

Form through MIR at Salzburg University. She is the author of Wildes
Denken in der Neuen Musik: Die Idee vom ‘Ende der Geschichte’ bei Theodor W.
Adorno und Wolfgang Rihm (2002), Neue Linke, Neue Musik: Kulturtheorien
und künstlerische Avantgarde in den 1960er und 70er Jahren (2007) , and
Gemengelage: Moralisch-ethischer Wandel im europäischen Musiktheater um 1700:
Paris, Hamburg, London (2016). Among other volumes, she has edited Music
and Protest in ‘1968’ (2013, with Barley Norton), which won the Ruth A.
Solie Award of the American Musicological Society.
Laurenz Lütteken is Professor and Chair of Musicology at Zurich University.

His latest publication is Mozart: Leben und Musik im Zeitalter der Aufklärung
(Munich, 2nd edn 2018). Two of his books were recently published in English
translation: Music in the Renaissance (2019) and Richard Strauss (2019). He is
the editor in chief of MGG Online.

CONTRIBUTORS xv
Max Noubel is Associate Professor at the University of Burgundy and an

affiliated researcher at the Centre de Recherches sur les Arts et le Langage
/ L’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He has published
numerous journal articles, notably on Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, Aaron
Copland, Elliott Carter, Steve Reich, Leonard Bernstein, John Adams. His
book Elliott Carter, ou le temps fertile (2000/17), with a preface by Pierre
Boulez, won the Prix des Muses in 2001.
Joshua S. Walden is the author of Sounding Authentic: The Rural Miniature

and Musical Modernism (2014) and Musical Portraits: The Composition of
Identity in Contemporary and Experimental Music (2018). He is the editor
of Representation in Western Music (2013) and The Cambridge Companion to
Jewish Music (2015). He has served on the faculty of the Peabody Institute
and held postdoctoral fellowships at Johns Hopkins University and the
University of Oxford.

Acknowledgments
Many institutions and individuals were instrumental in the creation and

completion of this collection of essays. I would like to thank first and fore-
most Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie, Director of the Brook Center for Music
Research and Documentation, who generously sponsored the 2014 confer-
ence ‘Postmodernity’s Musical Pasts: Rediscoveries and Revivals after 1945’.
The Graduate Center of the City University of New York deserves thanks for
opening its facilities and offering a wonderful setting. The conference trig-
gered a scholarly exchange and debate that gave impetus to the rethinking
of terms describing temporal phenomena in music history and culture, and
ultimately led to the conception of this volume. The essays herein could not
have been completed without the many librarians and archivists who assisted
the contributors, or the musicians and informants who engaged in conver-
sations and shared their work—from Chile to Portugal and Spain to the
United States. They greatly contributed to making the essays in this volume
truly original works that bring to light new information, interpretations, and
sources that are significant not only to the study of music, but also to cultural
history, memory studies, and eco- and urban criticism.
This volume brings together the thoughts and work of scholars from three
continents and their topics span four. With this Russian, Spanish, Portuguese,
and French vocabulary entered as well and I am very grateful for the input on
editorial matters in these languages provided by my colleagues at Répertoire
International de Littérature Musicale: Zdravko Blažeković, Desmond
Hosford, James Melo, and Andrés García Molina.
As with all things in my life, I owe sincere thanks to Pryor Dodge for his
continual and generous support of my endeavors. His invaluable advice on the
visual aspects of this volume, inspirational input for cover art, and help with
photo editing have undoubtedly enriched this book. It is a privilege that our
longtime friend Karin Waisman generously granted us permission to use her
work for the cover art.
I am deeply grateful to the Forberg-Schneider Stiftung, known for its
patronage of contemporary music as well as musicology and its relations to
other areas of art. Gabriele Forberg-Schneider not only generously offered
financial support for this volume, but has also shown great interest in my
research questions and objectives, encouraging inquiries into new areas of
music studies.

xviii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
And lastly, I am indebted to the Boydell Press and the anonymous review-
ers they engaged to respond to the volume. Their constructive criticism has
unquestionably improved the content. The editors at Boydell & Brewer have
also shaped the volume in significant ways. I would like to recognize Michael
Middeke and Megan Milan for their sound guidance. I am grateful to the
superbly qualified copyeditor, Marianne Fisher, and to Julia Cook for shep-
herding the book through production.
This volume is dedicated to Ami Maayani, one of Israel’s most prolific
composers of the second generation, a renaissance man who was educated in
architecture and urban planning, well-versed in philosophy, and a thinker and
writer on music. In 1998 Ami contributed much to setting the trajectory of
my life as musicologist and academic. I am writing this dedication in Tel Aviv
two months after his passing, wishing we could have shared the ideas that this
volume seeks to purport.

About the Cover
The cover features Tondo VI (2015/16) by the Argentine-born and New York-
based artist Karin Waisman. Tondo—a Renaissance term for a circular work of
art, either a painting or a sculpture—as embraced by Waisman closely relates
to the content of this collection of essays. Her wall relief transcends time,
evoking old techniques of ornamentation and trompe l’oeil. Monochromatic,
white, it blends with its surroundings, creating depth but also infinity with its
persistent circularity, spirals, caught in continual transformation and seem-
ingly unlimited extension and connection as well as correspondence—as
Claudia Calirman described it, ‘a crescendo of organic growth’. Cast from
resin and ceramic, Tondo is a temporal reflection on evolution and decay.
Embodying the antithetical—minimalism and the past, fragmentation and
totality—it directly relates to the contrasting concepts of history and time so
crucial for this volume. This aside, one can perceive an inherent musicality in
Waisman’s work, as Olivier Berggruen posits: ‘Space is not merely given, it too
is produced; by analogy, we can evoke the space created by a musical chord, its
wave-like expansion producing a tapestry of sound.’

Introduction
Tina Frühauf
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun, 1951
Ancient Egypt had two words for time: neheh and djet. Wholly different from
the Western worldview of modernity, it is difficult to fully grasp these con-
cepts as we have become accustomed to think about time almost solely in
linear fashion, with one event leading to the next—an accumulation of events
that creates a history. Ancient Egyptians never conceived history this way. For
them, events (kherupet) were suspect because they interrupted natural order.
They lived in neheh, the time of cycles, associated with the sun, the seasons,
and the annual flooding of the Nile which repeats, recurs, and renews. Djet,
for its part, is time without motion, the time of the gods, the temples, and
the pyramids, and of art. In this way, djet constitutes something finished, but
not past; it exists forever in the present, an eternal present. As Jan Assmann
captured it: ‘Djet is a time at a standstill; only in neheh does time move.’1 In
contrast, the understanding of temporality throughout the longue durée of
modernity has largely, though not exclusively, remained monolithic, as linear
progression of past, present, and future that gives way to history.
Surely there were and are other ways of thinking about temporality. In
music we can observe the rise of the study of musical temporality, which
explores both durational and spatial models of time in composition, and has
been of central importance to music scholarship since the pioneering work of
Jonathan D. Kramer, Edward T. Cone, David Epstein, and others.2 Indeed,
the concept has acted as a useful platform for scholars concerned with
1 Jan Assmann, The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs,
trans. Andrew Jenkins (Cambridge, MA, 2003), p. 19.

2 See, for example, Jonathan D. Kramer, The Time of Music: New Meanings, New
Temporalities, New Listening Strategies (New York, 1988). Kramer takes as a founda-
tional perspective that temporality rests in the subjective perception of the auditor. His
notion of moment time specifically helps to account for the discernment of connectiv-
ity within a non-linear structure. See also Enrique Gavilán, Otra historia del tiempo: La
música y la redención del pasado (Tres Cantors, 2008). One of the most recent contribu-
tions to this area of research is Jason D.K. Noble, ‘What Can the Temporal Structure
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781787446267.001 Published online by Cambridge University Press

2 TINA FRÜHAUF
different historical periods, traditions, and genres to fruitfully exchange ideas

and approaches regarding time. This volume, however, concerns itself not with
musical temporality, but with the temporality of music history and culture. As
such and by way of narrowing the focus, it takes the twentieth century as its
fulcrum. Specifically, it seeks to understand the meaning of time and history
in music cultures of postmodernity, a subject rarely broached except in such
singular articles as those by Rubert Lug, Stefan Drees, Wolfgang Sanberg,
and Colleen Renihan.3
As the first collection of essays devoted to research on Western musical
practices and cultures after 1945 as representations of historicity and tem-
porality, this volume moves beyond those few rather restricted studies by
providing insight into a multitude of issues. As such, the individual contri-
butions draw together three significant areas of inquiry: musical experiences
and expressions (i.e., aesthetic, stylistic, cultural, and social) of postmodernity,
the role historicity plays therein, and the effect it has on the understanding
of temporality as a (philosophical) concept. This broad approach is motivated
by the wish to think in innovative ways about concepts many scholars deem
established, and to re-evaluate those concepts in the context of postmoder-
nity’s musical pasts.
Postmodernity—a term commonly used by social theorists to designate
a particular period, moment, or state of human society—is understood here
as a distinguishing concept that applies to the second half of the twentieth
century and beyond.4 Given the ongoing debates on post-structural terms
of Auditory Perception Tell Us about Musical “Timelessness”?’, Music Theory Online

24, no. 3 (2018).
3 See Rubert Lug, ‘Zwischen objektiver Historizität, oraler Authentizität und post-
moderner Komposition: Zwölf Bemerkungen zur Seinsweise des mittelalterlichen

Liedes im 20. Jahrhundert’, Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae
31, nos. 1–4 (1989), 45–55; Stefan Drees, ‘“Zusammenfassung und Spiegel der
Geschichte ihrer Zeit und ihres Ortes”: Gedanken zur Musik von Johannes Kalitzke’,
Übergänge: Der Komponist und Dirigent Johannes Kalitzke, ed. Stefan Drees, Frieder
Reininghaus, and Gerhart Baum (Saarbrücken, 2009), pp. 9–20; Wolfgang Sanberg,
‘Identität, Stabilität und Historizität: Der Zyklus Schwankende Zeit (2007–9) von
Isabel Mundry’, Musik-Konzepte: Sonderband Isabel Mundry (December 2011), 73–89;
Colleen Renihan, ‘The Search for the Past: Postmodern Historical Consciousness
in the Operas of Istvan Anhalt’, Journal of the Society for American Music 7, no. 4
(November 2013), 421–44. In turn, there is a notable absence of discussion of tem-
porality and historicity in Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, ed. Judy Lochhead
and Joseph Auner, Studies in Contemporary Music and Culture 4 (New York and
London, 2002).
4 As Zygmunt Bauman asserts, ‘the recently fashionable opposition between “post-
modernity” and “modernity” makes most sense as an attempt to grasp the historical
tendency of the last centuries, and the most crucial discontinuities of recent his-
tory’; Intimations of Postmodernity (London, 1992), p. 23. For similar distinctions, see

INTRODUCTION 3
and categories such as postmodernism, this volume specifically grasps post-

modernity as a time and condition in which both modernism and postmod-
ernism coexist (or are in a liminal space), thus acknowledging the tenacity of
the former as it failed to expire and the emergence and existence of the latter.5
Such thinking is especially pertinent when considering the unique situation
of Latin and South America, where, as Néstor García Canclini explains, few
of the cornerstones of modernist ideology have been fully developed, compli-
cating the notion of the postmodern on the continent.6 This in turn leads to
potentially mixed or hybrid temporalities.7
Additionally, there have been many attempts to draw a line where and
when modernism/modernity ends and postmodernism/postmodernity
begins. Seth Brodsky most recently inquired about the end of musical mod-
ernism, questioning whether it ever really ended.8 In music, modernism has
clearly lingered on, with works still being created that bear signs of its lon-
gevity. Susan McClary asserts the emergence of a ‘twenty-first-century ver-
sion of modernism’; among the works she singles out is George Benjamin
and Martin Crimp’s opera Written on Skin (2012), which is also discussed in
this volume by Lawrence Kramer.9 The American literary critic and theorist
Frederic Jameson notes that the concept of the spatial turn ‘has often seemed
to offer a more productive inroad into distinguishing postmodernism from
modernism proper, whose experience of temporality—existential time, along
with deep memory—it is henceforth conventional to see as dominant of the
high modern.’10 That a discussion of temporality does not exclude discourses
on spatiality is evident in the chapters of Max Noubel on John Adams and his
Madan Sarup, An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Postmodernism, 2nd edn

(Athens, GA, 1993), p. 130; Barry Smart, Postmodernity (London, 1993).
5 Although variously interpreted by the above-mentioned authors, postmodernity
and postmodernism are intricately interconnected; for other authors ‘postmodern-

ism’ and ‘postmodernity’ denote the same thing, e.g. David Harvey, The Condition of
Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford, 1989).
6 See Néstor García Canclini, Culturas híbridas: Estrategias para entrar y salir de la
modernidad (Mexico City, 1989), p. 20.

7 See Fernando Calderón, ‘Latin American Identity and Mixed Temporalities; or,
How to be Postmodern and Indian at the Same Time’, ‘The Postmodernism Debate
in Latin America’, ed. John Beverley and José Oviedo, special issue, Boundary 2 20, no.
3 (Autumn, 1993), 55–64.
8 Seth Brodsky, From 1989; or, European Music and the Modernist Unconscious
(Oakland, CA, 2017).

9 See Susan McClary, ‘The Lure of the Sublime’, Transformations of Musical
Modernism, ed. Erling E. Guldbrandsen and Julian Johnson (Cambridge, 2015), pp.
21–35.
10 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham,
NC, 1991), p. 154.

4 TINA FRÜHAUF
fluid understanding of geographic boundaries, of Caitlin Vaughn Carlos on

three British rock albums of 1971, and of Michael Arnold on indie neofado—
all three take space into consideration. Georg Burgstaller in his chapter on
Olga Neuwirth and the art of covering discusses music as space; and Susana
Asensio Llamas focuses on the space and temporality of exile as exemplified
by the scholarly production of the musicologist Eduardo Martínez Torner.
Zygmunt Bauman underlines that postmodernity is being defined by the
‘post’, which does not indicate the end of modernity, but modernity’s coming
of age. Postmodernity allows for looking at modernity not from the inside but
at a distance. He asserts that ‘Postmodernity is modernity coming to terms
with its own impossibility; a self-monitoring modernity is one that con-
sciously discards what it was once unconsciously doing.’11 Or, as Lawrence
Kramer in his contribution to this volume aptly puts it: ‘The postmodern is
not a chronological effect but a symbolic activity that enacts the return of the
past to the present, and in so doing welcomes the return of the past to every
possible present.’ Indeed, it is not a question of returning to the past but of
going beyond modernity with the very means of modernity.
To be sure, postmodernity not merely signifies the time, state, or condi-
tion of being postmodern—as expressed in undecidability and ambivalence,
the combination of the ‘high’ and ‘low’ (so closely scrutinized in Georg
Burgstaller’s chapter on Klaus Nomi and Olga Neuwirth) and of ‘new’ and
‘old’ (as nearly all essays in this collection reveal), as well as the simultaneous
establishment or ‘parallel constructing’ of the universal and the local (expertly
analyzed in Arnold’s chapter)—but a period that encompasses various con-
ditions simultaneously, including post-1945 dovetailing and overlapping of
modernist and postmodernist ideas, continuities, and breaks. As such, it also
witnesses a broadened understanding of the concept of historicity to which
temporality gives rise.
Historicity, commonly defined as the idea or fact that concepts and prac-
tices have an origin and developed through time, relates to the underlying
concept of history yet without taking for granted linear progression or the
repetition or modulation of the past. In their recent historical-anthropolog-
ical conceptualization, the anthropologists Eric Hirsch and Charles Stewart
have opened historicity to be understood as a complex social and performa-
tive condition, ‘in which persons operating under the constraints of social ide-
ologies make sense of the past, while anticipating the future’.12 In this way
historicity conveys ‘the connections between past, present and future with-
out the assumption that events/time constitute a line between happenings
11 Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and Its Discontents (New York, 1997), p. 272.
12 Eric Hirsch and Charles Stewart, ‘Introduction: Ethnographies of Historicity’,
History and Anthropology 16, no. 3 (2005), 261.

INTRODUCTION 5
“adding up” to history’.13 Unlike history, historicity does not isolate the past,
but ‘focuses on the complex temporal nexus of past-present-future’. Thereby,
and unlike historicism, which promulgates the idea that the past is separate
from the present, historicity offers a conceptual opening of the temporal
focus. Indeed, historicity leans closely on temporality.
Eschewing the notion of a postmodern temporality, this volume acknowl-
edges that the later twentieth century saw a decisive departure from the
linearity and future orientation of the past–present–future paradigm, a devel-
opment noted by Frederic Jameson already in 1984.14 Indeed, theories of
the postmodern offer compelling descriptions of divergence from linearity,
emphasizing the play of simultaneity, synchronicity, and circularity.15 Even
earlier in the twentieth century a number of thinkers and writers—most
notably J.M.E. McTaggart, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and George
Herbert Mead—had proposed alternatives to linear conceptions of temporal-
ity, suggesting processes captured in circular, spiral, transcending, undirected,
and other formations. And before that Gustav Landauer and Martin Buber
had conceived of history as a progression consisting of curves and hairpin
bends, fractures, and interruptions.16
If few musicological studies have identified non-linear processes in pre-
1945 musical thought,17 even fewer have done so for post-1945 develop-
ments, a void that can be ascribed to the persistence of linear thinking in
musicology as evidenced in the perseverance of established terms such as neo-
classicism or revival, which are especially at odds with the idea of the eternal
13 Hirsch and Stewart, ‘Introduction’, pp. 261–74. In order to identify the relevant
ways in which (social) pasts and futures are implicated in present circumstances, the
editors move away from the assumption that the past, or ‘change’, can be accounted for
by history alone.
14 Fredric Jameson, ‘Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism’,
New Left Review 1, no. 146 (1984), 53–92.

15 See David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of
Social Change (Oxford, 1989); Barbara Adam, Timewatch: The Social Analysis of Time
(Cambridge, 1995); Andreas Huyssen, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture
of Amnesia (New York, 1995); and Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time: Modernity and
Avant-Garde (London, 1995).
16 See Gustav Landauer, Die Revolution (Frankfurt am Main, 1907); Martin Buber,
Der Jude und sein Judentum: Gesammelte Aufsätze und Reden (Cologne, 1963).
17 For medieval music, Laurenz Lütteken has shown a fundamental shift in the
way music was experienced, with an undirected temporality, see ‘Zeitenwende: Zeit
und Zeitwahrnehmung in der Musik des Spätmittelalters’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik
160, no. 5 (September/October 1999), 16–21. For an excellent study on temporal-
ity in Western music with focus on Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, see
Karol Berger, Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow: An Essay on the Origins of Musical Modernity
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2007).

6 TINA FRÜHAUF
return, a non-teleological temporality put forward by Friedrich Nietzsche in

Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik.
With this in mind, this volume seeks to depart from established notions
that describe temporal phenomena, among them, first and foremost, that of
revival, which is bound to linear conceptions of an absolute time. Aptly theo-
rized and scrutinized in The Oxford Handbook of Musical Revival, the concept
has been called into question by the editors of that volume and by the author
of the afterword, Mark Slobin, who eschatologically reflects: ‘Now that this
anthology has suitably summarized the state of revival, what happens to the
term? I imagine we appreciate its long years of service, and we move on.’18
And revival is not the only problematic concept still used at liberty. In his
contribution to this volume, John Koslovsky resists the (temporal) catego-
rization of Schenkerian practices by avoiding prefixes or combining forms
such as ‘neo’ or ‘orthodox’, since they reinforce the ideological and metanar-
rative structures aimed at marginalizing various kinds of epistemic positions.
Similarly, Daniela Fugellie advocates in her chapter for a nuanced termino-
logical approach with regard to neoclassicism, as its application to cantata
compositions by Chilean composers between 1949 and 1969 does no quite
hold: there is no ironic distance nor a paradox encounter of different historical
periods. Rather, Chilean composers firmly rooted themselves in the tradition
of Bach and did so without a preexisting reception history. (Similar caution
is necessary for ‘socialist realism’, which Chileans understood as a politically
engaged attitude that was open to avant-gardist experimentation.)
As a critical response to traditional understandings of, and in order to fos-
ter new ways of thinking about, temporality in line with other disciplines in
the humanities and social sciences, this volume brings together studies that
provide a wide range of perspectives and cover an extensive spectrum of topics
from classical compositions conceived in Europe and the Americas to popular
and neotraditional musics, to concerns of the discipline of musicology at large
(including theory). The deliberately broad array of topics mirrors the eclec-
tic and diverse nature of the postwar era itself. Using various methodologies
pertinent to music historians and ethnomusicologists, including (historical)
ethnography and fieldwork, oral history, musical analysis, iconography, and
hermeneutics, the chapters also build on recent scholarship in cultural studies,
memory studies, and eco- and urban criticism.
What binds the chapters tightly together are specific theoretical inqui-
ries that reflect upon the interrelated concepts of historicity and temporality.
Indeed, what connects all the essays in this volume is the guiding thread of
how the present relates to any given histories, in light of the future. In this
way, all chapters address the issue of temporality and historicity in musical
18 Mark Slobin, ‘Re-Flections’, The Oxford Handbook of Music Revival, ed. Caroline
Bithell and Juniper Hill (New York, 2014), p. 670.

INTRODUCTION 7
expression and experience. While these concepts link the multifaceted essays
on a micro-level, they are thematically connected on the macro-level, by
focusing on the themes of time, history, reception, and nostalgia. Following
this, the book is structured in four parts.
The first section focuses on temporality in compositions that consciously
embrace historicity through a contemporary lens. Historicity serves inven-
tion and preservation, historiography and reactionism. The authors spe-
cifically investigate how to understand manifestations of the past in musical
composition with regard to time on the one hand and with regard to genre,
style, and idiom on the other. Lawrence Kramer gives a critical assessment
of the time of the postmodern / postmodern time and its range of relation-
ships to music. Drawing on examples from the Baroque and Classical era,
and juxtaposing them with Dmitri Shostakovich’s preludes and fugues, fol-
lowed by a discussion of works by Morton Feldman, Karlheinz Stockhausen,
Terry Riley, and others, he creates a temporal axis in which he embeds an
analysis of Benjamin Britten’s canticle Abraham and Isaac (1952) and George
Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s Written on Skin. His discussion of instances of
‘temporal twinning’ or ‘progressive regression’ leads him to assess the general
epistemic condition of the postmodern, which is independent of the aesthetic
orientations that share part of its name. In this way, he further develops the
thoughts of the late Jonathan D. Kramer as expressed in the pathbreaking
essay ‘Postmodern Concepts of Musical Time’, which champions the think-
ing that nonlinear conceptions of temporality pre-date postmodernity.19 The
question remains how this non-linearity manifests itself in late-twentieth-
century musical compositions and practices, why, and to what effect. By way
of providing one answer, Joshua Walden’s essay examines Alfred Schnittke’s
first-movement cadenza of 1975 for Beethoven’s Violin Concerto, with its
collage of quotations, to argue that it is precisely the anachronism inherent
in the music that, in a seeming paradox, prevents it from accommodating the
common association of what the composer himself called ‘polystylistic ten-
dencies’ with postmodernism. The charge of anachronism is an accusation of
inaccuracy in the conception or representation of the progression of time, for
instance by depicting historical circumstances in the wrong order or attrib-
uting them to the wrong dates. Schnittke’s cadenza earns this characteriza-
tion because it refers to themes from multiple violin concertos, and it repeats
and varies many of these themes, invoking them in an unanticipated order
within a passage of music performed in the middle of the piece. However,
through his treatment of quotations, Schnittke creates a cadenza that offers
a hierarchical historiography of the violin concerto as genre which upholds,
rather than denies, the conception of the development of musical style as a
19 See Jonathan D. Kramer, ‘Postmodern Concepts of Musical Time’, Indiana Theory

Review 17, no. 2 (Fall 1996), 21–61.

8 TINA FRÜHAUF
progressive narrative. Schnittke’s Beethoven cadenza thus appears to con-

tradict the postmodernist stance with which it is so commonly associated,
because of the very anachronisms that critics frequently cite, anachronisms
that allow Schnittke to convey an ultimately teleological narrative of the
course of the violin concerto’s history.20 Max Noubel’s essay takes the idea of a
historicizing style further by scrutinizing the concept of post-stylism, coined
by John Adams upon rethinking minimalism and as a reaction against mod-
ernism and the avant-garde. Post-stylism designates the absorption of music
history and its rendering in composition through references and allusions, as
well as ephemeral stylistic borrowings all of which preserve the spirit of the
original while diffusing the actual traces. It allows for deliberately taking a
fresh look at the past and counteracts historical ‘amnesia’. Adams’s vehement
non-belief in modernism triggered this reliance on multiple and fragmented
pasts, which serve as the ‘raw material’ for works of re-creation that are inevi-
tably conceived with a distance to history within a fluid understanding of past
and present, geographic boundaries, and artistic and cultural hierarchies. As
such it manifests itself in myriad ways throughout his oeuvre. John Adams’s
post-stylism ultimately is in line with the thoughts of Frederic Jameson, who
asserted that the surest way of grasping the concept of the postmodern is
‘to think the present historically in an age that has forgotten how to think
historically’.21
Following this, the second section confronts more narrowly the trope of
history vis-à-vis the notion of progress on the one hand and ‘posthistoire’,
‘end of history’, and ‘loss of history’ on the other. Historicity as a reaction
against the prevalent zeitgeist of progress is the subject of Laurenz Lütteken’s
essay, which turns to the work of three German composers of two genera-
tions: Wilhelm Killmayer, Jürg Baur, and Isabel Mundry.22 All three faced the
second wave of modernism, which emerged from the cataclysmic atmosphere
that pervaded Europe at the end of World War II. All three turned away from
the most recent historical developments, taking a look farther back at differ-
ent genres, composers, and aesthetic sensibilities that pre-date the twentieth
century. Continuing the legacy of Bernd Alois Zimmermann and transform-
ing his concept of the sphericity of time—which argues for a unity of past,
20 On Schnittke as a postmodernist composer, see Jonathan D. Kramer, ‘The Nature

and Origins of Musical Postmodernism’, Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, ed.
Judy Lochhead and Joseph Auner (New York and London, 2002), p. 13. Reprinted
from Current Musicology 66 (Spring 1999), 7–20.
21 Jameson, Postmodernism, p. ix.
22 Naming as an example the Brahms-Bildnis for piano trio of 1984, Beate Kutschke
has identified Killmayer as postmodernist, see ‘The Celebration of Beethoven’s

Bicentennial in 1970: The Antiauthoritarian Movement and Its Impact on Radical
Avant-Garde and Postmodern Music in West Germany’, The Musical Quarterly 93,
nos. 3–4 (Fall/Winter 2010), 582.

INTRODUCTION 9
present, and future that knows no ‘old’, no contemporary, and no futuristic

music—these composers approach history and time no longer with a fervent
belief in progress, but rather as a reaction against the dogmas of modern-
ism, particularly those of the composers active in Darmstadt. In their creative
output, they attest to the coexistence of modernism and postmodernism as
aesthetic and stylistic movements, thereby representing compositional trends
of the later twentieth century in overlapping shifts. Their work is pertinent
during a time when the notion of progress had begun to collapse, revealing,
according to Lütteken, ‘a peculiar ruin after the twentieth century’, a ruin
which Susan McClary in her essay ‘Reveling in the Rubble’ sees as a moment
of ‘exuberant creativity’.23 This thinking, in turn, recalls Baudrillard’s theory of
the recycling of time and history, which argues that the notion of the end is
part of the fantasy of a linear history and that the very idea of historical prog-
ress had collapsed.24 In her chapter on the emergence of postmodernist music
and its correlation with musicological narratives, Beate Kutschke draws on
end-of-history paradigms, but those preceding Francis Fukuyama’s positive
views and Baudrillard cynical and negative ones. She deepens and comple-
ments Lütteken’s explorations by investigating the musicological discourse in
Germany during a time when it turned to concepts of cultural pessimism,
which served musicologists such as Helga de la Motte-Haber and Ulrich
Mosch to explain the emergence of a postmodern music. With regard to his-
toricity, de la Motte-Haber claimed that contemporaneous composers did not
consider the past in the same way as had those of previous generations and,
therefore, that the past, with its particular compositional styles and idioms,
could be reproduced or emulated in the present, including in composition.
She called this phenomenon the loss of the ‘consciousness of a temporal dis-
tance to the past’. The flawed view of such theoretical explanations becomes
evident in the fact that it was not the apocalyptic concepts, but the subversive,
critical, pluralist, anti-authoritarian, and expressive impetus of New-Leftist
avant-garde that resonated with the new generation of composers in the early
1970s, leading them to develop new styles.
If these authors show how time and history manifest themselves in art
music regardless of whether these works and their composers are categorized
as modernist or postmodernist or something else—as universal phenomena,
as historiography, as reaching beyond the style of minimalism, and as reaction
against modernism/dogmaticism/authoritarianism—the third section takes
the dichotomies and liminalities of post-1945 thought further by narrowly
addressing the role of temporality and historicity within the very reception of
23 See Susan McClary, Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form, Ernest
Bloch Lectures 12 (Berkeley, 2001), p. 167; see also p. 170.
24 See Jean Baudrillard, L’illusion de la fin; ou, La grève des événements (Paris, 1992).

10 TINA FRÜHAUF
the past. Indeed, in reception, routinely associated with temporality, pastness

and presentness are inherently linked.
To this extent, John Koslovsky shares how Schenkerian practices since
World War II have related to the general intellectual culture of postmoder-
nity. He puts the encounters between the so-called ‘neo-Schenkerism’ and
temporality into focus by understanding the combining form ‘neo-’ not just
as a categorical assessment of Schenker, but also as a temporal one—it seeks
to distinguish a ‘new’ Schenkerian practice from an ‘old’ one. Indeed, in the
postwar era, Schenkerism has morphed into something different, where past
and present do not follow from one another but remain inescapably inter-
twined—we might think of it as a spiral temporality—and in very different
ways: Milton Babbitt and the so-called Princetonians (Narmour, Kerman,
and Cook) paint a picture of neo-Schenkerism that eschews diachroneity,
historicity, and temporality. Felix Salzer and the Schenker extenders’ use
of the ‘neo’ label is detrimentally different, indicating a more flexible use
of Schenkerian principles and its application to music beyond Schenker’s
canon of masterpieces, especially to pre- and post-tonal repertoires—a
broadened historicity and temporality. Other neo-Schenkerian practices
show that there is no singular or unifying conception of the so-called ‘neo-
Schenkerian’ theory and no clear line between ‘neo’ and other Schenkerian
practices—old and new, past and present. If Kutschke has shown how
German musicologists, who (distortedly) adopted the general intellec-
tual culture of the postmodern to describe newly emerging compositional
expressions, have been at odds with the actual inspiration of the new gen-
eration of composers, a similar phenomenon can be observed in Koslovsky’s
study. Schenkerism’s pasts and manifestations in the present suggest a fluid
concept of time that defies the notion of a single inherited tradition and
its progression in a monolithic and linear-historical fashion. Rather, the
reception and evolution of Schenkerism suggest a seamless overlap between
practices, strategies, critiques, and viewpoints, both past and present, with
the potential to promote a freer intertextual and temporal interplay between
them, and the musical works and experiences they seek to address.
Taking Koslovsky’s elaborations further, Daniela Fugellie shows how
reception by way of continued and transformed practices can create a dichot-
omous process, in this case the coexistence of linear and layered temporality.
Her assessment of historical and temporal influences on the Chilean cantata
in its pre-popular manifestations takes into consideration the music of Johann
Sebastian Bach and the poetry of the Chilean poet, diplomat, and politician
Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto, who is better known under his pen
name, Pablo Neruda. With these two very different influences, a heteroge-
neous temporality entered the cantata that became increasingly multilayered,
in parallel to introducing different ethical and moral values in light of a politi-
cally engaged future. The cantatas demonstrate the genre’s temporal flexibility

INTRODUCTION 11
and ability to express historical processes and experiences in a way that liter-
ary accounts alone cannot. Uninfluenced and undeterred by the contempora-
neous trends that were taking hold in Europe, the Chilean cantata absorbed
and conveyed different histories to an audience at a critical juncture, an audi-
ence facing a future that was to be transformed in line with social goals. In
this way, the cantata performances converged past, present, and future into a
whole, in a similar way as Zimmermann’s conception of a sphericity of time
suggests. Such temporality, however, should not imply that Chilean compos-
ers were consciously deconstructing the presumed linearity of past, present,
and future. They used histories of struggle and repression in order to aid the
creation of a better future. Here, historicity functions as agent of future trans-
formation—the present is transitory, a pivotal time.
The thinking of layeredness is taken further in Georg Burgstaller’s chap-
ter and its leaning on the concept of double temporality, first put forward
by the French-Bulgarian philosopher Julia Kristeva and further developed
by Homi K. Bhabha, which posits the coexistence of the historical and ahis-
torical beyond hierarchy and binarism. To unravel this layeredness and dual-
ity, Burgstaller scrutinizes a compositional approach in which the ‘high’ and
‘low’ dissolve—the art of covering as exemplified by Olga Neuwirth’s work
Hommage à Klaus Nomi. Neuwirth addresses and to a degree reconciles two
temporalities: an adulthood marked by dissatisfaction with institutionalized
superstructures that concern Neuwirth as a woman composer, and a play-
ful, gender-neutral childhood marked by a heterogeneous exposure to music.
Given the composer’s perception of cultural collusion within her profes-
sional sphere, this corresponds with the marginalization of women in society
acknowledged in Kristeva’s concept of double temporality, an otherness aris-
ing from the ‘migration’ from childhood to adulthood and the formation of
identity within that process. This process also reveals the deeper meaning of
historicity in the temporality of reception, namely that musics of the past can
serve as a ‘space into which to backfill biographical experiences’, a thought
that departs from linear conceptions of covering. If Lütteken’s chapter recalls
the concept of ars memoriae, that concept surely moves to the center in Georg
Burgstaller’s chapter. Ars memoriae as a way to find oneself by going back in
time through enlisting the act of memory, which is essential in making con-
nections between disparate historical moments, can be observed in compo-
sitions consisting of patchwork and collages as seen in Neuwirth. Fragility
is evident through a breakdown in structure (a reaction to modernism and
formalism) and the expression of marginality as female. Ars memoriae uni-
fies instances of temporality—in the case of Burgstaller, past and present as
rendered in double temporality. The subtext of ars memoriae that emerges in
these chapters is explored in greater depth in the fourth section, which draws
together essays that closely look at nostalgia as both conjunctive and disjunc-
tive temporalities of belonging.

12 TINA FRÜHAUF
Nostalgia, routinely associated with the postmodern and temporality,

which it registers, denaturalizes the teleological relationship between past and
present. This can be observed in Susana Asensio Llamas’s contribution on the
life and work of Eduardo Martínez Torner (1888–1955). An analysis of his
years in London exile gives way to thinking about how a musicologist’s dis-
placement affects the temporality of research and scholarship. If the careers
of contemporaneous displaced Europeans—one might think of Curt Sachs
or Ernst Hermann Meyer—turned out very differently given their circum-
stances, Torner faced obstacles on several fronts: returning to his homeland
was dangerous because of its repressive regime; and continuing his work in
the UK was challenging because his research interests were rooted in Spain,
and he was not fluent in English. His exile exemplifies a departure from mod-
ernist conceptions in that it was a temporary condition that turned into a
permanent state; he also eschewed exile’s in-betweeness, neither being here
nor there, by suspending himself in time. Historicity manifests itself in his
exile to different extents: he re-embraced the pasts of his research topics and
he contemplated his own past as a scholar. Displacement led him to newly
inhabit his own past and the past of his homeland. As such nostalgia would
accompany him until his last day in a disjunctive temporality that turned to a
past ‘conceived fuller and more authentic than the present’.25 Indeed, Torner’s
temporality of exile solely relied on the past, eschewing the painful present
and suspending an uncertain future. As scholar and researcher, he created an
idealist place suspended in time, where time itself had no meaning beyond its
own past. His exilic presence highlights the consequences of displacement for
musical research and ideas, thus connecting the meaning of space (and the
loss thereof ) with the temporality of nostalgia.
Caitlin Vaughn Carlos puts into focus a different facet of nostalgia and
temporality as evident in three iconic albums successively released in 1971:
Jethro Tull’s Aqualung, The Who’s Who’s Next, and Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin
IV. Aside from being examples of urban and social criticism in mainstream
popular culture, the albums embody what Barbara Stern has termed historical
nostalgia in a conjunctive temporality where past, present, and future operate
almost simultaneously. They offer a retreat from the present by way of ideal-
izing or romanticizing a distant yet unspecified past. Being rooted in a myth-
ological sense of pastness while rejecting the utopianism embraced by the
generation of the previous decade, they ultimately express and convey diver-
gent conceptions of time with different emphasis—Led Zeppelin focuses on
the past, Jethro Tull on the present, and The Who on the future. Moreover,
the albums’ nostalgia is not only temporal, it is also spatial—the search for
25 See Linda Anderson, ‘Autobiographical Travesties: The Nostalgic Self in Queer

Writing’, Territories of Desire in Queer Culture, ed. David Alderson and Linda
Anderson (Manchester, 2000), p. 71.

INTRODUCTION 13
a better place. Ultimately, the albums reflect the complex, if not uncertain,
relationship between this new generation and their vision for a better future
through divergent imaginings of time and space, in which pseudo-historical
fantasies mingle with mystical symbolisms and even futuristic, science-fiction
visions. If historical nostalgia turns toward a past perceived as fuller and more
promising than the dystopic present, other forms of nostalgia conceive of the
past differently, but also with a view on future.
Michael Arnold’s essay interrogates how the recently emerged genre of
indie neofado uniquely communicates past, present, and future through
expressions of what Svetlana Boym has termed reflective and restorative nos-
talgia. But there are different temporal connections of indie versus fado val-
ues, as two representative bands—Ovelha Negra and Dead Combo—reveal.
Ovelha Negra comments on past and present while looking to the future as
the black sheep trickster bent on revolutionizing what the band consider a
stale and fixed form. In turn, Dead Combo negates fado in its present guise,
deconstructing the genre’s musical offshoots while performing a caricature
of fado’s cultural yesteryear. Both groups embody reflective and restorative
nostalgias in sound and style but with different emphasis. Whereas Ovelha
Negra represents a reflective nostalgia of Salazar-era restorative-nostalgic
fado, Dead Combo aims at a nostalgic restoration of fado’s pre-Salazarian
reflective nature. As such indie neofado relies on multiple layers of pastness,
beginning with the pre-fado past of the Lusophone urban folk pioneers, the
birth of fado in the early nineteenth century, its rejection upon the foundation
of the First Republic in the early twentieth century, its acceptance during the
Estado Novo as the song of Portugal, and its vindication by the novo fadistas
of late-twentieth-century Lisbon. Indie neofado bands embrace fado’s history
as a Portuguese patrimony, transform it, and, drawing from the different nos-
talgias, cultivate and preserve it for future generations.
The temporalities unraveled by Arnold, as well as by Fugellie and Carlos,
show an overall emphasis on the future. They evoke the image of horizon
temporality so aptly described by Zora Neal Hurston in her 1937 novel Their
Eyes Were Watching God (which echoes Heidegger’s conception of temporality
as a horizon for the explicit understanding of being as such), a model of time
in which the temporal horizons of past, present, and future cyclically converge
upon one another. In this, of course, lies an inherent linearity, but no longer as
an end in itself. Indeed, a cycle never ends and neither does temporality.
In 2003 Frederic Jameson put forward the idea of ‘the end of temporal-
ity’. He deemed modernism to be temporality-dominant and proposed to
shift observations on the postmodern to the spatial.26 On music specifically,
he wrote:
26 Frederic Jameson, ‘The End of Temporality’, Critical Inquiry 29, no. 4 (Summer
2003), 695–718.

14 TINA FRÜHAUF
The ‘system’ of the postmodern (which claims not to have one) is uncodified
and harder to detect, but I suspect it culminates in the experience of the space
of the city itself—the renovated and gentrified post urban city, the new crowds
and masses of the new streets—as well as from a music that has been spatial-
ized by way of its performance frameworks as well as of its delivery systems,
the various boomboxes and Walkmans that inflect the consumption of musical
sound into a production and an appropriation of sonorous space as such.27
While discourses on spatiality have concerned musicologists from early on

and in myriad ways, discussions on non-linear manifestations of temporality
have hardly begun. With the hope of creating the beginning of such temporal-
ity discourse for music history and culture, this volume puts forward concep-
tualizations of temporality that are in essence conjunctive (in which two or
more times follow one another or coincide), disjunctive (a mixture of times
beyond any notion of linearity), and heterogeneous. As the chapters herein
propose, temporal connections can manifest themselves beyond this and in
various ways, in concentric circles that imply a fluidity between past, present,
and future without closure, and in which the previous is also a new beginning;
they can render themselves in more distinct circular formations (conceived by
or related to space)—in spiral or curvilinear formations in which music his-
tories go forth and return, creating moments of simultaneity and coeval-ness
of diverse experiences of time, signifying repetition but with a difference. As
such temporality and historicity discourses cut across established boundar-
ies of music-historical eras and propose an approach to comprehending the
history, experience, and expression of music that counteracts the preponder-
ance of single-period thinking. They cultivate an understanding of music and
culture in general, how music history of the later twentieth and twenty-first
centuries, but also of the longue durée, may be grasped. Indeed, as any past is
a key to understanding any present in light of the future, this discourse might
apply to other periods as well.
27 Ibid., pp. 696–7.

Part I
Time and the (Post)Modern

1
Music and Postmodern Time
Lawrence Kramer
The term ‘postmodernism’ hovers between two usages, one referring to an

aesthetic of pastiche and self-conscious eclecticism, the other to a concep-
tual orientation averse to what Jean-François Lyotard famously called grand
narratives.1 The two are linked, however, by their non-hierarchical character
and by their disregard for chronological or generic boundaries. The relevant
traits are familiar, even clichéd: an emphasis on surface rather than depth, a
preference for juxtaposition at the expense of expository or narrative continu-
ity, a penchant for quotation and for the recycling of cultural material. These
traits typically combine with each other while remaining detached from the
imperatives of a central point of reference or controlling consciousness. It is
the detachment that most distinctly uncouples the ‘post’ from the ‘modern’,
although the difference is not always clear or, for that matter, real. Similarly, it
is an affirmative, anxiety-free, or playful attitude toward that detachment that
typifies a ‘postmodernist’ style in the art worlds of the late twentieth century.
Otherwise the traits I have just listed as familiarly postmodernist are equally
typical of much art throughout history, though perhaps most emphatically so
since 1900. It is important to state at the outset that my concern in this essay
is neither with postmodernism as an aesthetic trend nor with postmodernist
styles of art or music but with the general epistemic condition of the post-
modern, which is independent of the aesthetic orientations that share part of
its name. My topic is not postmodern times but the time of the postmodern
and its range of relationships to music.
In order to inquire about the time of the postmodern, if there is such a
(single) thing, we need to situate the postmodern itself in time. As many
observers have noted, the category is not chronological, although, one
might add, it became possible only at a certain late point in the history of
the modern, along with a certain conception of postmodern knowledge.2
1 See Jean-François Lyotard, La condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (Paris,

1979), published in English as The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans.
Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1984).
2 Thus, for example, Umberto Eco: ‘We could say that every age has its own post-
modern, just as every age has its own form of mannerism (in fact, I wonder if post-
modern is not simply the modern name for “Manierismus”)’; quoted in Stefano Rosso,

18 LAWRENCE KRAMER
Understanding the postmodern is in that respect a retrospective enterprise,

even when it is most closely attuned to the present. Understanding the post-
modern is a postmodern project.
How then is the phenomenon to be understood? The postmodern is a
latent condition within the modern itself. The modern in turn is a category
that recurs throughout history. At its simplest, the modern, whenever it occurs,
is fixed by the understanding that the present has broken irrevocably with the
past. The postmodern, accordingly, counters with the understanding that the
modern in this sense is a fiction and that the past continues to infiltrate every
present. This infiltration is not a consequence of historical trauma but a phe-
nomenon inherent to historical time. The postmodern is not a chronological
effect but a symbolic activity that enacts the return of the past to the present,
and in so doing welcomes the return of the past to every possible present.
For the French philosopher Bruno Latour, the modern misunderstand-
ing of time persists in the fashionable postmodernism of the late twentieth
century. For Latour there is no time of the postmodern. Modernity and its
antitype are not recurrent schemas but singular historical illusions originat-
ing in the seventeenth century. Postmodernism continues the modernist folly
in disguise. But despite Latour’s caricature of the hapless ‘postmods’ who
vainly struggle to get past a modern condition that has never been present
in the first place, the time of the postmodern is in essence the realization of
what Latour himself means by the statement ‘We have never been modern.’
Latour dismisses the idea of time as a continuous stream of events broken by
moments of decisive change that irrevocably divide past from present. He also
dismisses the postmodernist penchant for ‘collages and citations’, which, he
‘A Correspondence with Umberto Eco’, trans. Carolyn Springer, Boundary 2 12, no.
1 (1983), 1–13. And elsewhere: ‘Hellenistic literature was a postmodern reflection
upon the past literature. Open and closed forms are returning episodes in the history
of art, and I think that the postmodern attitude is not a typical feature of our time
but an attitude returning cyclically in different eras’; quoted in Harvey Blume, ‘Fuse
Interview: Postmodernism with the Late Umberto Eco’, The Arts Fuse, 26 February
2016, http://artsfuse.org/141261/fuse-interview-a-talk-about-postmodernism-with-
umberto-eco/. The best-known expression of the contrary view is Frederic Jameson,
Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC, 1991). Jürgen
Habermas construes (and condemns) conceptual postmodernity as a recurrent reflex
action within the modernity produced by the European Enlightenment. He famously
poses the rhetorical question, ‘Is ‘postmodern’ a slogan which unobtrusively inherits
the affective attitudes which cultural modernity has produced in reaction against itself
since the middle of the nineteenth century?’ Habermas, ‘Modernity: An Unfinished
Project’, trans. Nicholas Walker, Habermas and the Unfinished Project of Modernity,
ed. Maurizio Passerin d’Entrèves and Seyla Benhabib (Cambridge, MA, 1997), pp.
38–9. The literature on this topic is extensive and contradictory—sometimes self-
contradictory. For an overview with specific reference to music, see Kenneth Gloag,
Postmodernism in Music (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 1–52.

MUSIC AND POSTMODERN TIME 19
argues, preserve the modern concept of time that they ostensibly challenge
by treating the recycled materials as outdated. Postmodernists still regard the
past as finished and recycle it only as inert matter: ‘It is a long way from a pro-
vocative quotation extracted out of a truly finished past to a reprise, repetition
or revisiting of a past that has never disappeared.’3
Nonetheless, Latour’s positive claim that ‘the past is not surpassed but
revisited, repeated, surrounded, recombined, reinterpreted, and reshuffled’ is
entirely consistent with the practices and attitudes of thinkers whose rela-
tionship to the past cannot easily be measured by either rupture or continu-
ity.4 Derrida—one of Latour’s bêtes noires—might just as well have written
the sentence. The Ariadne’s thread in this labyrinth is the recognition that
time is constitutively incomplete. Its past always lies ahead of it and its pres-
ent is a form of anticipation. It remains to be seen, however, exactly how this
necessary reanimation of the past in the unfinished present is to be achieved,
recognized, and interpreted.
Retrievals
If we now want to ask what all of this means for music, we need to begin with
a negative. It is best to avoid looking for distinctively postmodern traits in the
years after 1945, or around the millennium, or at some other iconic moment.
As we will see below in connection with Stockhausen and others, there is no
such thing as an inherently postmodern temporality. Innovation is no guaran-
tee. Any work, any structure, can be postmodern or not, depending on how it
is deployed. Nor, contrary to Jonathan Kramer (no relation), should we read
putatively postmodern concepts of time counterclockwise, so to speak, from
later into earlier music.5 The character of postmodern time in music stems
not from the way a musical work of the past may be understood to import
something from the future, but from the way the work, any work, at any time,
retrieves something from the past.
Such retrievals, it will quickly become evident, are not simple reinstate-
ments. They are perhaps best understood as instances of what Heidegger in
Being and Time called Wiederholung, which may be translated as ‘retrieval’.
3 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge,
MA, 1993), p. 74.
4 See ibid., p. 75.
5 Jonathan D. Kramer, ‘Postmodern Concepts of Musical Time’, Indiana Theory
Review 17 (Fall 1996), 21–61. Kramer’s specimen case is Beethoven’s String Quartet
in F, op. 135; the problem with the ‘multiple temporalities’ that he finds in Beethoven’s
technique is not that they are not present (they might well be there); it is that they are
not ‘postmodern’, or, more specifically, that their putative anticipations of latter-day
conceptions of time does not make them so.

20 LAWRENCE KRAMER
This ‘fetching back’ occurs when one has ‘handed down to oneself a possi-
bility that has been [before]’, not merely to ‘actualize [it] all over again’, but
rather both to reciprocate (erwidern) and revoke (widerrufen) ‘that which in
the present is working itself out as “past”’.6
To hear postmodern temporality in music, therefore, we should attend
throughout musical history to instances of temporal twinning or progressive
regression: a movement into a condition of modernity that remains in force
precisely because it is unwilling or unable to hear the past as finished. Or,
since this movement is in principle always at work, and in that sense is unre-
markable, we should attend to those relatively infrequent instances in which
the movement becomes audible, as if rising to consciousness of itself.
Survivals
There is no one way to do this; no simple model or protocol is possible. For

one thing, there is a difference between a past that persists as something
which the present has preserved or recaptured, and a past that persists despite
its presumed incompatibility with the present—the difference, say, between
Mozart in 1782 making string-trio transcriptions of fugues from Bach’s Das
wohltemperirte Clavier while also composing new preludes for them in his
own classical (that is, modern) style, and Dmitri Shostakovich in 1950 and
1951 writing a complete set of twenty-four preludes and fugues for piano on
the model of Bach’s collection. One way to frame this difference would be
to draw a distinction between a past that may still (or again) be a source of
present possibility and a past marked as impossible in the present—but that
infiltrates the present anyway.
Pace Marshall Brown (who nonetheless makes an intriguing case to the
contrary), the preludes and fugues in Mozart’s hybrid pieces for string trio
(K. 404a, nos. 1–3) do not interact with each other in what one might term a
soft encounter with otherness.7 The conjoined pieces are incongruous, period,
especially to ears trained on a tradition in which the composers involved are
exalted canonical figures: the preludes sound like Mozart and the fugues like
Bach. ‘Sound like’, it should be added, is the operative term here. Mozart’s
authorship of the preludes (and likewise of the transcriptions) is conjectural,
6 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson
(Oxford, 1962), pp. 387–8. For more on Wiederholung, with specific reference to twen-
tieth-century musical narrative, see Lawrence Kramer, ‘Narrative Nostalgia: Modern
Art Music Off the Rails’, Music and Narrative since 1900, ed. Michael Klein and
Nicholas Reyland (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2012), pp. 163–88.
7 Marshall Brown, ‘Mozart, Bach, and Musical Abjection’, The Tooth that Nibbles at
the Soul: Essays on Music and Poetry (Seattle and London, 2014), pp. 141–65.

though they continue to be widely attributed to him and have been much
recorded under his name. So ‘Mozart’ composed these preludes even if
Mozart did not, and I will continue with the fiction here, which in this con-
text is just as good as the elusive fact. Even better perhaps: without Mozart
as a fictitious author, this music would probably have been relegated to the
obscurity of the finished past.
The incongruity between the preludes and the fugues does not mean that
Mozart was ‘oblivious’ to the difference (as Brown rightly chastises Stanley
Sadie for claiming).8 It does, however, mean that the difference was not suf-
ficiently important to Mozart for him to mark it. We cannot know what his, or
anyone’s, eighteenth-century ears would have heard, but we can know what he
wrote. Mozart, the real one, was certainly alert to the differences between what
we call the Classical and the Baroque idioms (he simply called them the ‘old’
and the ‘modern’), as his arrangements of several works by Handel, including
Messiah, make perfectly clear.9 But the sequence of prelude and fugue seems to
have provided a means to reclaim the value of fugue as something other than
learned affectation, and this precisely by the act of introducing it with music
written in a modern idiom. The incongruity paradoxically functions as a valida-
tion by the simple means of not mattering as much as it might have. Mozart’s
own perfectly genuine Prelude and Fugue for Piano, K. 394, contemporaneous
with the preludes and fugues of K. 404a if 1782 is their true date, transfers
the same relationship to the sphere of original composition.10 So too does the
Adagio and Fugue for Strings, K. 546, which combines a prelude composed in
1788 with a fugue composed for two pianos in 1783. In the 1790s Beethoven
follows a similar logic by not marking the difference between writing variations
on a theme by Handel and variations on a theme by Mozart.
In the pieces of K. 404a, the validation has an exact focal point. As Brown
observes, the preludes are classical slow introductions (Adagios) that end on
the dominant; they are not pieces closed in themselves. In other words, they
8 See ibid., p. 153.

9 ‘Wir lieben uns mit allen möglichen Meistern zu unterhalten;—mit alten und mit
Modernen.’ (We love to entertain ourselves with all possible masters—with the old
and with the modern); Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to Leopold Mozart, 29 March
1783, Mozart Briefe und Dokumente—Online-Edition, Bibliotheca Mozartiana,
Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum, Salzburg, http://dme.mozarteum.at/DME/
briefe/letter.php?mid=1302&cat= (accessed 8 October 2018). The arrangement of
Messiah (an explicit effort to modernize the work) dates from 1789.
10 In 1782 Mozart engaged in intensive study of scores by Bach and Handel at the
behest of one of his chief patrons, Gottfried Von Swieten. His K. 394 grew directly out
of this activity, and it is possible, though far from certain, that the string trio pieces,
together with fugue transcriptions for string quartet (K. 405, for which there exists a
Mozart autograph) did so as well, though the extent of Mozart’s hand in the former, if
any, remains unknown.

22 LAWRENCE KRAMER
are not the Bach preludes that fill the pages of Das wohltemperirte Clavier. The
Mozartian preludes annex the pastness of Bach by assimilating it to the later
era’s present procedure of tonic–dominant shifting on a ‘structural’ scale, or, in
more humanistic terms, the procedure of articulating potentiality as an unfin-
ished state to which the music proper acts as both fulfillment and remedy.
Only in the incongruity as it sounds to later ears does the postmodern tempo-
rality of the music decline to the modern mode in the form of anachronism.
And even in that case there is a countervailing force, which stems from the
slow tempo of the preludes. The slow–fast design is a basic affective feature of
the Baroque. To the extent that the preludes incorporate static affect rather
than dynamic feeling, they return themselves to the past almost as much as
they retrieve the fugues on behalf of the present.
The Shostakovich preludes and fugues confront the issue of possibility with
a fictitious naiveté that for a long time was mistaken as real. They insist on the
viability of Bach’s forms in a modern tonal language. They mark the postmod-
ern not by showing what is still possible or possible again but by taking the
‘impossible’ as possible without apology. They do so by recurrently constructing
tonal forms that would have been ‘impossible’ for Bach without at the same
time being ungrammatical. One of the main guiding threads is a trope of tonal
simplicity or purity based on restriction to the notes of a scale. Long stretches
of music that are ‘pure’—that is, devoid—of accidentals project a wider sense
of musical, aesthetic, and even ethical purity. Follow the thread, and Bach, the
canonical master of so-called pure composition—said to be unrivaled in his
ability to wed harmony and counterpoint, and thought to write music unbur-
dened by merely sensory influences in its integrity of conception—will have
become the forerunner of a more absolute, more monadic purity.11
Thus the first fugue, in C major, is in four voices and of substantial length,
but it employs not a single accidental. It is therefore not ‘in’ C major at all by
eighteenth-century standards, or rather: not yet in it. The yet never arrives. The
fugue is a kind of never-ending opening statement which finally closes over a
tonic pedal as the motion of the upper voices outlines a progression to what
would, except for the pedal, be a six-four chord.
Further instances abound. The E-minor prelude maintains the same kind
of undiluted scalar texture for sixteen Andante measures before abruptly
becoming richly chromatic; it remains so through to the end. The slow
F♯-major fugue, in five voices, remains free of accidentals for thirty-eight
measures before gradually allowing complexities to slip in and multiply. A
chromatic descent in the deep bass brings about a limpid close after reach-
ing musical bedrock on C♯1 (example 1.1). (The visual design of the score is
iconic here, as it is in examples 1.2 and 1.3.)
11 On the twentieth-century reception of Bach in these terms, see Walter Frisch,

German Modernism: Music and the Arts (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2005), pp. 138–85.

Example 1.1 Dmitri Shostakovich, Fugue in F♯ major, conclusion. Moscow: State

Publishers ‘Music’, 1972.
G G
K K Ç K
K Ç
G
K K Ç ÇÇ
.
K K Ç
Ç K K ÇÇ ÇÇ
dim.
(

K @
K K K K K Ç Ç
Ç

ÇÇ ÇÇ ÇÇ ÇÇ Ç Ç ÇÇ
Ç Ç
Ç Ç Ç
Ç Ç
8

Ç Ç Ç
Ç Ç Ç

The G♯-minor prelude, in similar tempo, waits until measure 30 before

admitting its first accidental and scatters only three more, widely spaced,
over its 118-measure span. The B♭-minor fugue, also slow, maintains scalar
purity throughout its substantial length except for a five-measure episode
that exchanges G♭ for G; at the close, the fugue purifies its own purity, so to
speak, by shifting to the major mode, thus anticipating the final fugue.
The pattern diversifies. The A-major fugue constructs its subject entirely
from the tones of the tonic triad and maintains its accidental-free texture for
fully forty-two measures before switching to equally ‘pure’ segments on B♭
major and E♭ major. These tonal excursions act as fictitious tonic and domi-
nant, B♭ for A, E♭ for E. The substitutions yield a mirror reversal: B♭ falling
to E♭, dominant to tonic, in lieu of A rising to E, tonic to dominant. Only
then does a genuine dominant arrive with the help of extended pedal points.
The fugue closes with a return to the pure texture of its opening.
The E-major prelude alternates between bare melodic statements in the
bass doubled two octaves lower, and bare statements of a contrasting melody
in the treble with similar doubling, the latter over two-octave pedal points
carried over from the bass (example 1.2). Once again the process begins in a
tonal space unmarred by accidentals, this one sustained for twenty-six mea-
sures before admitting any other coloration. The ending restores the texture

Example 1.2 Dmitri Shostakovich, Prelude in E major, opening. Moscow: State

Moderato non troppo D

A »

A ( ( »

M
A T T
G G

T T

Ç
6

Ç
6
T T T T
T T T T

10

10
(
M
G


Example 1.3 Dmitri Shostakovich, Prelude in E major, conclusion. Moscow: State
Ç
Ç

A ( ±
DD
DD
G
Ç A ÇÇ ±
Ç
M
A »

ÇÇ ÇÇ
ÇÇ Ç A
6
Ç Ç
M
Ç
dim.
Ç A
6
A
Ç
Ç Ç Ç Ç
G G
ritenuto
G G
TT T T T
TT
T T
A
10 DD
T T
A » T T
10

A
Ç Ç T T
Ç Ç T T
attacca

26 LAWRENCE KRAMER
of the opening while paring away the octaves in the treble (example 1.3).
Empty registral spaces grow full; complete triads replace the notes that for-
merly implied them. The tonal space of this prelude opens into a vacuum
that Bach would obviously have abhorred. On a perfectly tuned instru-
ment, the registral gaps produce a strong, harmonious resonance, but as
Mark Mazullo has observed, ‘any slight out-of-tuneness on the piano will
yield a high degree of discordance between the two lines’.12 At three points
Shostakovich writes out grand pauses, which lends credence to Mazullo’s
further remark that, old out-of-tune pianos being common in Russia, the
possibility of a ‘wolfish’ effect may have been calculated. The contraction of
registral space at the close acts as a resolution of this phantom discord.
Frequent though it is, the abstraction of primary tonal entities used in
these pieces is not all-pervasive in the cycle, nor does it need to be. It estab-
lishes an ideal sonority against which the actions of the varied preludes and
fugues are to be heard: aspiring, gaining, losing, spurning, transforming, and
so on. The pieces that conspicuously defer the appearance of notes outside
their scale internalize this process, which otherwise plays out from one piece
to another. The last fugue, in D minor, issues a culminating statement on both
sides of the equation. The fugue sustains scalar purity for sixty-one slow mea-
sures, as if to echo the perfect purity of the first fugue. Then a reversal begins.
The music goes on to evolve a fantastic tapestry of expressive chromaticism,
spun out at length, seemingly inexhaustible, until a second reversal intervenes.
The fugue and the cycle swerve to D major for a triple forte climax and fortis-
simo conclusion: a gargantuan Picardy third.
Shostakovich’s preludes and fugues do not appropriate Baroque forms to
an alien idiom in the manner of Schoenberg’s Suite for Piano, op. 25, nor do
they coolly mimic a historical style, as do Stravinsky’s neoclassical works. For
Schoenberg and Stravinsky the past is recoverable only in estranged forms,
and it thus remains subordinate to the force of the present. The past as such
is finished. For Shostakovich, it is anything but. His personal Bach revival
affirms the force of the postmodern present as the power of reinvention,
which in this case means invention reflecting equally on both what it retrieves
and its process of retrieval.
For Shostakovich, this power seems to have extended to the power of
music to override distinctions of nation and era. For a Russian composer just
a few years after World War II, Bach the German master remains the exem-
plar of musical art. Scanned more closely, this act of progressive regression
produces something highly charged in the sphere of Soviet art: a suspension
of the political. And it does so at a moment when the wounds inflicted by
the brutal treatment of Shostakovich (and others, including Prokofiev) by
12 Mark Mazullo, Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues: Contexts, Style, Performance

(New Haven and London, 2010), pp. 76–7.

the ‘anti-formalist’ campaign of 1948—a sweeping purge of the arts—under

Stalin’s Minister of Culture, Andrei Zhdanov, were still fresh.
The preludes and fugues enact the bracketing, but not the canceling, of
Shostakovich’s responsibility to the regime’s historical narrative as demanded
by his position as a Soviet composer. As Mazullo rightly says, shopworn
tropes of complicity with oppression and/or covert dissidence are irrelevant
to this predicament.13 A good measure of the situation, which Shostakovich
pointedly places up front, is the quotation in the first fugue of a recently com-
posed patriotic song, ‘Patrioticheskaya pesnya’—a song composed by none
other than Shostakovich. The quotation absolves the fugue of ‘formalism’, and
precisely by that means releases the music into the apolitical haven of form.
The purely instrumental fugue both recalls the words of the song (in English
translation: ‘The war ended with victory’) and erases them by the restatement
of their melody in a new medium. The erasure, by the way, was too much for
the watchdog Union of Soviet Composers, which issued the predictable cen-
sure of the cycle as formalistic, Western, and archaic. But even in the formal-
istic West it took decades for the music to win the high esteem it currently
enjoys; its postmodern time seemed too old-fashioned.
Inventions
Another axis on which progressive regression makes itself audible is the dif-
ference between showing the effect of the past’s infiltration of the present,
whether deliberately or not, and remarking and welcoming the infiltration as
a mode of being. Another still is the difference between simple intertextual-
ity on the one hand—which is a universal condition, nothing to be dressed
up by acquiring the label of postmodern time—and, on the other hand, the
presented or represented collapse of the nominal line of demarcation between
the possible and the impossible, the possible and the necessary, in the rela-
tionship between past and present. The criterion for recognizing postmod-
ern time thus seems to be the presence of a mark or index that something
is ‘impossible’, coupled, nonetheless, with the production of that very thing.
This coupling corresponds to what Derrida describes as the logic or rhythm
of invention, taking the term in the double sense of creative inventiveness and
the production of something deemed impossible (‘The only possible inven-
tion’, he writes, ‘is the invention of the impossible’).14 All the modes of (im)
possibility are in play here: what can or may no longer be done, what can or
13 Mark Mazullo, ‘Shostakovich’s Preludes and Fugues: Fashioning Identities,

Representing Relationships’, College Music Symposium 46 (2006), pp. 77ff.
14 Jacques Derrida, ‘From Psyche: Invention of the Other’, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek
Attridge (New York and London, 1992), pp. 310–43.

28 LAWRENCE KRAMER
may not yet be done, or never, or only once. Whatever the conditional form,
postmodern time is the time of invention. More exactly, it is the time told by
invention as invention reflects upon itself.
The pastoral Scherzo of Mahler’s Symphony no. 3 includes a storied
instance: a serene offstage solo ‘in the manner of a post horn’ (generally played
by a flugelhorn) that on several occasions suspends the action of a move-
ment alternately vibrant and violent. The post horn in Mahler’s day could still
be heard in parts of rural Austria, but with increasing rarity; in the rapidly
urbanizing world of the 1890s, its sound is a thing of the past. The offstage
location says as much; the post horn, or faux-post horn, can be heard only
from afar, as if it were more a memory than an event. The music’s distance in
space acts as a withdrawal from time. In the past the sound of the post horn
signaled an approach in space that cannot occur in the present, no matter how
much time is allotted to it. The post horn remains fixed in place: apart, spec-
tral, acousmatic. The irony is compounded by the simple fact that the function
of real post horns was to announce the arrival of the mail. This post horn
announces a message that will never arrive. But the past thus registered in its
loss is anything but finished, as Mahler’s lyricized reproduction of its charac-
teristic call reveals: this is the message that does arrive. What has disappeared
as a congenial reality returns as a fantasy with real acoustic substance that
becomes the object of nostalgic longing. Mahler hammers the point home
by having the final departure of the post horn collide with a violent eruption
from an onstage trumpet.15
There remains (there emerges) the need, or at least the opportunity, to ask
why inherent or immanent postmodernity coalesced so fully with the histori-
cal postmodernism of the era(s) following World War II. Any answer must
be conjectural, but it is at least noteworthy that the heyday of postmodern-
ism coincided with the exponential increase in the proliferation and diffusion
of media that had already been unfolding throughout the twentieth century.
Writing at an early phase in the process, T.S. Eliot famously imagined that
the cultural riches of European history (a projection of ‘the mind of Europe’)
formed a simultaneous order confronting the serious artist whose work would
both draw upon and change it.16 By the end of the century, this image had
become a material, technologically grounded reality, except that Europe had
15 On the importance of messages by post in this passage, and the connection of

the post horn to Nikolaus Lenau’s poem ‘The Postillion’, see Lawrence Kramer,
Interpreting Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2010), pp. 223–5. The topic of the
supervening chapter is modernity; for more on that aspect of the post-horn episode,
see Richard Leppert, Aesthetic Technologies of Modernity, Subjectivity, and Nature:
Opera, Orchestra, Phonograph, Film (Oakland, CA, 2015), pp. 246–50.
16 Thomas Stearns Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ [1919], The Sacred
Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism (New York: Alfred A. Knpof, 1921), http://www.
bartleby.com/200/sw4.html.

given way to the whole world and the serious artist to everyone. The default
condition of temporality had changed; the postmodern had become a figure of
the present and the era’s aesthetic postmodernism had become its symptom.
Reversions
In connection with this historical development it is important to make a fur-

ther distinction between modernist or late-modernist experiments with scale
and periodicity on the one hand, and registrations of postmodern temporali-
ties on the other. The experiments—works such as Karlheinz Stockhausen’s
Momente (soprano, four mixed choirs, and instrumental ensemble, 1962–9),
Terry Riley’s In C (open instrumentation, 1964), and Morton Feldman’s six-
hour String Quartet no. 2 (1983)—do not necessarily affect the temporality
of time. (That phrase is not a mistake. Part of the point at issue is that time
has modes of temporality just like everything else.) Such music can, and these
pieces arguably do, enact the modern conception of time that so vexes Latour.
One cannot get rid of modern temporality so easily. Conversely, music com-
posed in what seems like ordinary linear fashion, following a narrative arc
and set within standard limits of duration, may be saturated with postmodern
temporality.
Thus with the Feldman string quartet, for example, time becomes over-
whelmingly immersive as small bits of music endlessly gather, combine, and
disappear. The tempo is slow (MM 60–63 to the quarter note) and it never
changes. Typically for Feldman, the music is mostly subdued; one strains to
hear. For some listeners the immersion sooner or later becomes too suffocat-
ing for them to continue listening; at the rare concert performances, peo-
ple often come and go as they please. But the time of the music nonetheless
remains the time of the unbroken present. Indeed, it becomes especially that.
Feldman’s quartet implicitly understands the past as finished and thus keeps it
waiting as the hours pass but the music does not.
Similar observations can be made about the Riley and the Stockhausen
works. Stockhausen even declares as much in the music, which is strik-
ingly traditional in its ends despite the elaborate modernism of its means.
It enjoins the listener to ‘Hört die Momente, Musik der Liebe . . . die Liebe,
die das ganze Universum zusammenhält (Hear the moments, music of
love . . . the love that holds the whole universe together), and goes on to set
William Blake’s epigram ‘He who kisses the joy as it flies / Lives in Eternity’s
sunrise.’17 The moments keep the joys flying. In the work’s final form, reached
17 ‘Hear the moments . . .’, quoted in ‘Stockhausen: Momente (Moments) 1962–

64/69’, http://home.earthlink.net/~almoritz/momente.htm (accessed 3 July 2019);
‘He who kisses . . .’, from William Blake, ‘Eternity’, The Complete Poetry and Prose of

30 LAWRENCE KRAMER
after a complex genesis, there are thirty such moments, which, together with
seventy-one ‘inserts’ (excerpts from preceding or following moments), may
be arranged in a variety of sequences. Any of the sequences exemplifies the
‘moment form’ referred to by the title, which enhances the momentariness of
the constituent moments by negating all goal-directed movement, narrative
or cumulative.
A further source of heightened immediacy and immersion in the present
is the division of the moments into three types, designated as M for Melodie
(melody), K for Klang (sound or chord), and D for Dauer (duration), which
appear in both unadulterated and mixed forms. The moments of each type
share a constellation of expressive and acoustic traits, but the moments do not
repeat each other. The result is to turn the absence of repetition into a positive
trait: because each moment ‘remembers’ the configuration of others but does
not recover them, each moment appears haloed by its own singularity and
transitoriness. The listener is thus asked to fulfill Blake’s maxim and kiss the
joy as it flies: a kiss of farewell that, for Stockhausen as for Blake, paradoxi-
cally endows the present with eternity.
Moment forms, Stockhausen writes, are those in which:
the moments are not merely consequents of what precedes them or anteced-
ents of what follows; rather the concentration [is] on the NOW—on every
NOW—as if it were a vertical slice dominating over any horizontal concep-
tion of time and reaching into timelessness, which I call eternity: an eternity
which does not begin at the end of time, but is attainable in every moment.18
But this eternity comes with a price that Stockhausen declines to recognize,
or at least to acknowledge. The finished past is its residue. To some extent,
the inserts, which were not a part of the work’s original conception, serve to
diminish (but cannot prevent) the mortifying effect of each new moment on
those that have passed.
In C has its own version of ‘moments’ in Stockhausen’s sense. The piece
consists of fifty-three short phrases to be played in sequence by an indetermi-
nate number of musicians. The temporality of the music stems from the effort
to keep the finished past waiting. Although each segment may be repeated as
many times as the individual players wish, once a segment is finished it stays
finished; it cannot return. ‘It is important’, say Riley’s performance directions,
William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman, rev. edn (New York, 1982), p. 470; the last line of
the original text reads ‘sun rise’ and does not capitalize ‘eternity’.
18 Karlheinz Stockhausen, ‘Momente: Material for the Listener and Composer’,
trans. Roger Smalley, Musical Times 115 (1975), 25–6. For the German original text,
see Texte zur Musik, 4 vols (Cologne, 1963), I, p. 250.

not to hurry from pattern to pattern but to stay on a pattern long enough
to interlock with other patterns being played. As the performance progresses,
performers should stay within 2 or 3 patterns of each other. It is important not
to race too far ahead or to lag too far behind.19
The aim is to reach the end, but not too soon. Time must be given for the
flourishing of the ‘quite fantastic shapes [that] arise and disintegrate as the
group moves through the piece when it is properly played’. When the end
comes, after anywhere from 45 to 90 minutes, its arrival is ambivalent. It takes
the form of a mounting petrification followed by dissolution: ‘In C is ended
in this way: when each performer arrives at figure #53, he or she stays on
it until the entire ensemble has arrived there. The group then makes a large
crescendo and diminuendo a few times and each player drops out as he or
she wishes.’20 This ending, however, brings about a swerve in the direction of
postmodern time, whether or not it was meant to. There is a famous piece of
classical music that ends in much this way. No sooner does one say that than
the ‘Of course!’ kicks in: Haydn’s ‘Farewell’ Symphony.
These pieces by Feldman, Stockhausen, and Riley act on the principle that
the only defense against the finished past is an immersive present. The prin-
ciple is both internal and external. It applies equally to the immediate experi-
ence of hearing the music performed and to the music’s relationship to the
musical past against which it defines its modernity.
Mysteries
A counter-example to the modern temporality of these otherwise innova-

tive pieces can be found in the seemingly straightforward musical narra-
tive of Benjamin Britten’s canticle Abraham and Isaac (1952), for alto, tenor,
and piano. This piece produces a double temporal transformation. The first
instance stems from Britten’s choice of text: not the biblical narrative, but a
medieval play, part of a cycle of so-called mystery plays (c. 1325) performed
annually in the city of Chester in northern England. The Bible generally
enjoys an exemption from chronology except among scholars; its unique cul-
tural position renders it timeless more or less independent of translation or
belief. The text of the Chester play, on the contrary, is very much of its time,
and its time is remote, divided from Britten’s not only by many centuries of
linguistic change but also by most of the history of Western music. The can-
ticle sets the words of the play in an expressive idiom utterly foreign to it.
19 Terry Riley, instructions for In C in the handwritten score of 2005; quoted in

Robert Carl, Terry Riley’s ‘In C’ (New York, 2009), p. 59.
20 Ibid.

32 LAWRENCE KRAMER
This textual difference tracks the difference in faith that is the primary
subject of the canticle. The use of the medieval text Christianizes the Old
Testament story (prefiguring the sacrifice of Christ) but at the same time
throws doubt on the story’s message of submission to divine will. The set-
ting, whether Britten intended it to or not, frames the faith celebrated by the
Chester play as naive, in both the good and the bad senses of the term. The
faith of a world in which modern forms of religious skepticism and existential
despair are absent, even unthinkable, is no longer possible in the mid-twen-
tieth century. Could Abraham say he was just following orders? Was Britten
aware of Kierkegaard’s Frygt og bæven (Fear and trembling) with its equivocal
indictment of Abraham as a ‘murderer’? Some of his listeners would be. In any
case, Britten was certainly aware of Wilfred Owen’s rewriting of the story’s
ending to fit World War I. A setting of the poem appears in the ‘Offertorium’
of Britten’s War Requiem (1961): as we know, God tells Abraham to substitute
a ram for Isaac, ‘But the old man would not so, but slew his son, / And half
the seed of Europe, one by one.’
One aim of the canticle is to reclaim the play’s impossible naiveté. The
primary means to that end is the second temporal transformation, which,
speaking of double things, is the double speaking of the double voice of God.
The voice is double because, in a famous stroke of invention, Britten writes
it as a compound of Abraham’s tenor and Isaac’s alto, singing in rhythmic
unison but frequent disharmony. The divine voice speaks out twice: once to
begin the work, enjoining Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, and again to rescind the
injunction.
The different plane of voice is also a different plane of time. God sees
the action as allegory or ritual, knowing that he will avert the sacrifice he
demands. Abraham and Isaac suffer the uncertainty of not knowing the
future, not knowing they are figures or exemplars; their time is at once that
of drama and that of lived life. Britten’s vocal arrangements thus mean that
the human participants assume their identities as decompositions of divine
time and voice, and then lose those same identities again at the very moment
of salvation. Neither character shows the slightest awareness of the fact that
God ventriloquizes through them; the shift from one plane to the other is
registered only by the piano.
It is not clear how Britten’s God should be heard, or even if the question is
relevant. His voice is as consistent with the image of a cruel, capricious master
as it is with the idea of an exacting but ultimately merciful father. His most
prominent—perhaps his only—quality is his inexplicable otherness. That oth-
erness, however, overlaps with the historical otherness of the text. Its power
in the present testifies to the power of the past. Unlike Stockhausen’s one-
size-fits-all invocation of a love that holds the universe together (apologies to
Dante, who took pains to get there), Britten’s presentation of God bears the
full burden of history. It so to speak restores the mystery to the mystery play.

If one hears the canticle as a (re)affirmation of faith, one can do so only by

submitting in the manner of Abraham, acting, or rather feeling, as if unques-
tioning faith were still possible while knowing—while hearing—perfectly
well that it is not.
Tenses
A more recent instance, coincidentally also British, also medieval in part, and
also split between human and divine or, more exactly, human and angelic
modes of time, is George Benjamin and Martin Crimp’s opera Written on
Skin (2012). The narrative is an adaptation of a twelfth-century Provençal
legend in which a jealous husband kills his wife’s lover and feeds her his heart
at supper. The opera recasts this update of the Thyestean feast (recorded by
Boccaccio and later echoed by Shakespeare in Titus Andronicus and by Ezra
Pound in his Cantos) as a source of affirmation. The wife, here called Agnès,
after being told she has eaten the heart of her lover, the Boy, tells her hus-
band, the Protector, that nothing he can do and nothing she will eat or drink
again ‘will ever take the taste of that boy’s heart out of this body’. In saying
so she symbolically takes possession of herself (dispossessing the Protector)
by sweeping the breadth of her voice into a single extended gesture, begin-
ning with a pair of enormous leaps (D4 to A5, C4 to G5, with the high notes
on ‘I’) and touching on A4 during a long answering descent (G5 to D4, via
another big leap, C4 to G5, on ‘boy’s heart’). Agnès then follows—in the nar-
rative, prefigures—Floria Tosca and throws herself to her death from above.
The final moment of the opera captures her in mid-flight, literally suspended
in both space and time. The libretto presents Agnès’s defiance as a knowing
protest against future atrocities (to be) committed by avatars of the Protector.
(The events predictably include the Holocaust, in a rare but disconcerting slip
into glibness.)
In the original staging, by Katie Mitchell, the action occurs on a split-level
set.21 The upper level is occupied by present-day angels (one doubling the
Boy) who frame and comment on the narrative; the stage level is home to the
medieval characters. As the Boy’s alternate locations suggest, however, this
division is porous. The dialogue on stage recurrently introduces splits in tem-
poral perspective, so that, implicitly or explicitly, and without the fact being
especially marked, events coexist in the medieval past and modern present.
21 The staging Mitchell devised for the premiere in Aix-en-Provence in 2012 has
since been observed by the Royal Opera House production at Covent Garden (2013)
and the Mostly Mozart production at Lincoln Center (2015). Mitchell’s design is
more than usually integral to the opera conceived as a musical work and should prob-
ably be regarded as part of it.

34 LAWRENCE KRAMER
The most important instance emerges during the back-and-forth of a

prosecutorial interview.22 The Protector awakens from dreams of rebellion
and infidelity and reaches out for his wife, only to find that she is standing by
the window. Worried by what she might see, he asks her about it. Her reply is
evasive at first, then quietly accusatory: ‘Nothing. Sunrise. Plum trees flower-
ing. And smoke. Why that black smoke in May?’ As she sings, her vocal line
shifts from long notes and lyrical phrasing to clipped phrases centered on a
monotone. Told that ‘We’re burning villages’, she continues in detached single
syllables: ‘Oh. Why?’ When the Protector replies with a justification in line
with his name, ‘To protect the family’, she interrupts him with more spit-out
syllables, rejecting the justification before he can get it out: ‘Ah. Yes. Good.
From what?’ Tellingly, ‘From what?’ is sung to the same semitone, C♯ to C, as
she used for ‘And smoke’. Unable to give a good answer, the Protector shifts
to commanding Agnès not to watch. She ignores him, instead describing a
prophetic atrocity (the window at this point has become a page or a screen,
and Agnès a version of Tennyson’s Lady of Shallot): ‘And in the meadow
I saw a guard reach down into the buttercups to pick up a baby—to pick
it up, how odd, on the point of a stick.’ Her phrasing continues in its dis-
jointed, monotone-oriented vein, its conspicuously flat affect becoming an act
of repudiation. The Protector wants to speak as if with the Canticle’s voice
of God; unlike Britten’s Abraham, Agnès refuses to hear him that way. Her
framing her judgment of him in music reduced to the bare minimum of song
constitutes a decisive refusal to participate in a history that will lead to burn-
ing villages and impaled babies, and at the same time a sullen resignation to
the inevitability of such things—because, as the audience knows but she does
not, they have already happened again many times over.23
These temporal shifts are narrative projections of the libretto’s self-ref-
erential mode of dialogue. The opera is designed as an Escher-like exercise
in meta-theater in which the action and the distancing commentary contain
each other. At times the major characters, especially Agnès and the Boy, frame
what they say by citing their own utterances in the third person: ‘says the
Boy’, ‘says the woman’. At other times they use the third person to narrate the
actions they are engaged in performing; the Protector, whose once and future
history the Boy has been employed to illustrate in a manuscript, prefers this
self-captioning technique. Each singer-narrator thus occupies a time that is
22 The libretto has not been published. All quotations stem from the Faber perusal
score, http://scorelibrary.fabermusic.com/Written-On-Skin-24505.aspx (accessed 8
October 2018).
23 It is worth noting that the libretto sees this moral judgment as requiring a sexual
re-enactment. Later in the same scene, Agnès (still willing to conform desire to law)
makes an explicit erotic appeal to the Protector, which he spurns contemptuously. Only
after that is Agnès’s rejection of him irrevocable. From a musical standpoint, however,
the issue is already settled; the dialogue at the window is the point of no return.

simultaneously present and past: performatively present and narratively past.

The characters consciously live out their own allegory, as Agnès affirms openly
just before she dies; they never coincide with themselves.
Benjamin’s music does not reflect any of these temporal disjunctions or
indeed even acknowledge them. It simply embraces them. It works just by
being what it is and belonging to its own day. It acts like an omniscient narra-
tor. Its time simply passes. The music flows in the kind of continuous present-
tense stream that Latour abhors: operatic standard time. It unapologetically
excludes the temporal manipulations of the old avant-garde. It adheres to a
late-modernist style that freely moves toward and away from traditional idi-
oms, with no hints of supposedly postmodernist pastiche. (Berg’s Lulu, to
which Written on Skin has been compared, is much more ‘postmodernist’ in
that respect despite its twelve-tone origins.) The result, depending on one’s
point of view, is a counterpoint or a contradiction: time out of joint versus
time running its course. Either way, the music is compelling (though to real-
ize as much is to raise the question of controlling authority from a new angle).
The justly celebrated orchestration carries much of the opera’s expressive
burden with power and nuance. But more than in most operas the music of
Written on Skin cannot be disentangled from its libretto. Its temporal consis-
tency (in both senses: texture and regularity) is significant because the post-
modern logic of (im)possibility in the opera is not internal to the music but
located between the music on one hand and the text and staging on the other.
Within this interval, which is both spatial and temporal, the dialectic of post-
modern time becomes a simultaneity.
Clocks
In conclusion, a self-contradiction. Postmodern time, or so I have been claim-

ing, is a potentiality immanent in history, not the chronological outcome of
historical change, far less of historical narratives. But the question of what
sorts of time tend to prevail at certain historical moments is perfectly rea-
sonable. Time may not have ‘become’ postmodern after the mid-twentieth
century, but can we identify prevalent forms of time, postmodern or not, as
characteristic of the era?
Except in one respect, the answer to that question might be a perhaps
surprising ‘No.’ For one thing, temporalities are specific to the circumstances
in which they arise. Repeating them from event to event, discourse to dis-
course, artwork to artwork, is possible only with the loss of that specificity.
Shostakovich revisiting Bach is different from Prokofiev revisiting Haydn
in the ‘Classical’ symphony or Ravel revisiting Schubert in Valses nobles et
sentimentales, let alone Luciano Berio revisiting Mahler in his Sinfonia, even
though in a loose sense they are all doing the ‘same’ thing. Temporalities

36 LAWRENCE KRAMER
associate with each other in clusters of family resemblances rather than in

categories.
For another thing, temporalities are anachronistic in principle. The con-
ceptual means of identifying them, as noted at the outset, may become
available only at certain historical junctures. Once identified, however, tem-
poralities have a strong tendency to demonstrate their presence in the past.
Debussy’s ballet Jeux (1913) is often cited as a forerunner of Stockhausen’s
Momente, but the relationship actually goes the other way: once ‘moment
form’ has been innovated and described, it turns out to have been there all
along—but with the proviso that it has only ‘been there’ since the thought
of moment form was realized. The clock runs in reverse; Beethoven’s String
Quartet in C♯ minor, op. 131, with its seven continuous movements, one of
which is a series of seven diverse variations, turns out to be a self-mirroring
array of thirteen moments. More exactly, it turns out to be a work that will
have become that array.
What seems historically ‘postmodern’ about latter-day time is (or was,
depending on your point of view) not a collection of temporal forms or pro-
cedures, but the self-consciousness of the question about its postmodernity/
ism. Whatever form it takes in the given instance, time has become multiple,
contingent, and malleable; it presents itself less as a condition than as a ques-
tion, a question we must both ask and answer. Perhaps that too has always
been possible, but today, in the early twenty-first century, it seems necessary.
That necessity, in music as elsewhere, is the mark of postmodern time.

2
‘Aesthetic Indigestion’: Alfred Schnittke,

Anachronism, and the Contemporary
Cadenza’s Musical Pasts
Joshua S. Walden
The history book on the shelf

Is always repeating itself.
ABBA, ‘Waterloo’
In 1983 a concert review appeared in the Los Angeles Times under the title
‘Kremer Plays Bizarre Beethoven Cadenzas’. In that review of a concert
given by the English Chamber Orchestra, Martin Bernheimer states that
there was nothing in the program to prepare the listener for the ‘shock’ of the
cadenzas by Alfred Schnittke that the violinist Gidon Kremer interpolated
into his rendition of Beethoven’s 1806 Violin Concerto.1 He writes: ‘Poor
Beethoven stops dead in his first-movement tracks, as the fiddler, heretofore
reticent, embarks on a bold, bizarre, and convoluted exploration [of ] motivic
digressions that embrace Shostakovich and, I think, P.D.Q. Bach, and disso-
nances that might have made the composer deaf before his time.’ Schnittke’s
cadenzas left Bernheimer with a case of ‘aesthetic indigestion’, though he
was not immune to their charms; he continues: ‘The anachronistic indul-
gence was grotesque in a heroic, amusing, beguiling, patently schizophrenic
way.’ Bernheimer was hardly alone in responding to the cadenzas in this way:
the notion of anachronism is recurrent in references to them. In 2005 James
Oestreich, reminiscing about Kremer’s 1982 recording of the same cadenzas,
uses language that overlaps with Bernheimer’s in describing them as ‘glee-
fully anachronistic’, and in an article from several years later he again terms
them ‘joyously anachronistic’.2 In academic writing, too, the scholar Alan J.
1 Martin Bernheimer, ‘Kremer Plays Bizarre Beethoven Cadenzas’, Los Angeles Times,
9 November 1983.
2 James R. Oestreich, ‘Alfred Schnittke’, New York Times, 12 August 2005; James R.
Oestreich, ‘Making a Dramatic Case for a Soviet-Era Composer’, New York Times, 2
February 2014.

38 JOSHUA S. WALDEN
Clayton has applied a similar vocabulary, labeling the cadenzas ‘controversial

(and anachronistic)’.3
Schnittke composed his cadenza for Beethoven’s first movement in 1975
and completed a cadenza for the second and two versions for the third in
1977.4 The first-movement cadenza includes a part for timpani to accompany
the violin soloist, while the two alternative third-movement cadenzas involve
roles for the timpanist and an ensemble of ten violinists. The incorporation
of additional instruments into a genre traditionally reserved for the soloist
alone, as well as the often jarring dissonances in Schnittke’s writing, are likely
among the triggers of Bernheimer’s ‘indigestion’. The charge of anachronism,
however, is clearly elicited by Schnittke’s multiple quotations of classics from
the period that intervenes between Beethoven’s work and Schnittke’s addition
to it—a period of over a century and a half. The cadenza for the first move-
ment is a veritable ‘drop-the-needle’ examination of the listener’s knowledge
of the violin concerto repertoire, with the expected references to themes from
the first movement of Beethoven’s concerto jostling and merging with quota-
tions of concertos by Brahms, Bartók, Berg, and Shostakovich, as well as of
J. S. Bach’s chorale ‘Es ist genug’ and Beethoven’s own Symphony no. 7.
In this assemblage of musical juxtapositions, Schnittke’s cadenza for the
first movement of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto exemplifies the collage-like
compositional method that can be found in many of the composer’s works.
Schnittke referred to this technique as ‘polystylistic’ and characterized it as
building on ‘the interaction of musical material in different styles’ through
quotation, allusion, and adaptation.5 In describing how musicians before him
had engaged in polystylistic compositional practices, Schnittke argues in his
1971 essay ‘Polystylistic Tendencies in Modern Music’ that the technique ‘has
always existed in concealed forms in music’.6 But he notes that it had recently
‘become a conscious device’ employed for a variety of purposes, including ‘the
shock effect of a clashing collage of music from different times, a flexible glide
through phases of music history, or the use of allusions so subtle that they
3 Alan J. Clayton, Writing with the Words of Others: Essays on the Poetry of Hans
Magnus Enzenberger (Würzburg, 2010), p. 42.
4 An account of the compositional history of these cadenzas appears in Mark
Lubotsky, ‘Schnittke as Remembered by Mark Lubotsky’, A Schnittke Reader, ed.

Alexander Ivashkin, trans. John Goodliffe (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 2002), pp.
253–4.
5 Alexander Ivashkin, ed., A Schnittke Reader, trans. John Goodliffe (Bloomington
and Indianapolis, 2002), p. 17. Schnittke also composed cadenzas for Mozart’s piano
concertos K. 491 (1975), K. 467 (1980), K. 503 (1983), and K. 39 (1990), and for
Mozart’s Bassoon Concerto, K. 191 (1983).
6 Alfred Schnittke, ‘Polystylistic Tendencies in Modern Music’ [c. 1971], A Schnittke
Reader, ed. Alexander Ivashkin, trans. John Goodliffe (Bloomington and Indianapolis,
2002), p. 89.

‘AESTHETIC INDIGESTION’ 39
seem accidental’.7 Schnittke’s first-movement cadenza accomplishes the first

two of these purposes, producing the ‘shock effect’ of juxtaposition that the
critics refer to while ‘gliding’ through the history of the violin concerto since
Beethoven.
Scholars of music history and theory often associate musical juxtaposi-
tion and quotation of the sort found in Schnittke’s polystylistic composi-
tions with the so-called ‘postmodernist’ sensibility, generally understood as
the post-World War II tendency toward representing and reviving the past
through parody, pastiche, and allusion. Kenneth Gloag, for example, writes
in Postmodernism in Music that Schnittke is a postmodernist composer
whose polystylistic technique demonstrates, borrowing words from Alastair
Williams, ‘ambivalence towards modernist systems’.8 As discussed in greater
detail below, theorists of postmodernism including Jean-François Lyotard,
Linda Hutcheon, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari often invoke the
term to imply a metaphorical flattening of history and a rejection of metanar-
ratives and of the notion of teleology, in favor of a more dispersive and equal-
izing conception of the relationship between past and present.9 In writings on
musicology by Jonathan Kramer, Lawrence Kramer, and others, postmodern-
ism thereby leads to a leveling and intermixing of historical musical styles in
rejection of the notion of progress in stylistic innovation.
In studies of music, ‘postmodernism’ also denotes an espousal of stylis-
tic disorder over coherence and unity. Robin Hartwell writes that in post-
modernism, ‘the integrity of a single musical language is no longer tenable, so
that the plurality of contemporary musical languages are juxtaposed within
the same frame . . . [P]ostmodernism emphasised the consistent incompat-
ibilities of musical discourses’.10 For Jonathan Kramer, musical postmodern-
ism similarly involves a movement ‘beyond unity’.11 And Lawrence Kramer
characterizes musical postmodernism as a ‘conceptual order in which grand,
synthesizing schemes of explanation have lost their place and in which the
traditional bases of rational understanding—unity, coherence, generality,
7 Schnittke, ‘Polystylistic Tendencies’, p. 89.

8 Kenneth Gloag, Postmodernism in Music (Cambridge and New York, 2012), p. 132.
9 See, for example, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Mille plateaux: Capitalisme et
schizophrénie (Paris, 1980), published in English as A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism

and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (London and New York, 2004).
10 Robin Hartwell, ‘Postmodernism and Art Music’, The Last Post: Music after
Modernism, ed. Simon Miller (Manchester, 1993), p. 45.

11 Jonathan Kramer writes that postmodernism poses ‘serious challenges to the
necessity of unity’. Jonathan D. Kramer, ‘Beyond Unity: Toward an Understanding of

Musical Postmodernism’, Concert Music, Rock, and Jazz since 1945: Essays and Analytical
Studies, ed. Elizabeth West Marvin and Richard Hermann (Rochester, 1995), p. 11.

40 JOSHUA S. WALDEN
totality, structure—have lost their authority’.12 As Schnittke himself argued,

however, as much as he may subvert expectations in his cadenza, his aim in
juxtaposing references to the violin concertos of his predecessors was to locate
points of consistency and compatibility, rather than their opposites, among
musical styles and works of the past.13 According to this view, quotation and
pastiche are not necessarily signs of a ‘postmodernist’ approach to composi-
tion, but can be perceived instead to imply a considerably more conventional
and historically consistent view of musical style and influence and of the rela-
tionship between the musical present and its pasts.
This essay examines the collage of musical quotations in Schnittke’s first-
movement cadenza for Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in the context of theories
of postmodernism from within and beyond the field of musicology, to argue
that it is precisely the anachronism inherent in Schnittke’s music that, in a
seeming paradox, prevents it from accommodating the common association
of what Schnittke called ‘polystylistic tendencies’ with postmodernism. This
is the case for two reasons. First, these cadenzas conform in surprising ways
to the standards of cadenza practice as they had developed by Beethoven’s era
out of early-eighteenth-century conventions as described in treatises on per-
formance. Indeed, the cadenza, as a genre that from its inception was linked
to improvisation, has always depended on and even foregrounded a certain
degree of anachronism, a dialogue in the present moment of the performance
with a past memorialized through the notated score of the concerto. Second,
in his treatment of quotations, Schnittke creates a work that offers a kind of
historiography of the genre of the violin concerto that upholds, rather than
denies—as ‘postmodernist’ art works are commonly held to do—the concep-
tion of the development of musical style as a progressive narrative. While
theories of postmodernism should prompt us to rethink the assumption that
Schnittke’s cadenza, and more generally his polystylism, are necessarily post-
modernist, they do support a reading of some other late-twentieth-century
cadenzas as staunchly postmodernist, including one by Schnittke himself.
But these cadenzas do not achieve a postmodernist sound through the simple
mixing and matching of quotations and stylistic references. Instead they do so
by silencing one voice—the orchestra or the soloist—to remove the cadenza
fully from its historical role in the concerto movement.
12 Lawrence Kramer, Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 1995), p. 5.
13 See Schnittke’s discussion of his cadenzas in Dmitrij Šul’gin, Gody neizvestnosti
Al’freda Šnitke: Besedy s kompozitorom (Moscow, 1993), pp. 73–4. The second edition
(2004) was revised by Schnittke himself.

Schnittke’s Cadenza in Context
The charge of anachronism is an accusation of inaccuracy in the conception

or representation of the progression of time, for instance by depicting histori-
cal circumstances in the wrong order or attributing them to the wrong dates.
Schnittke’s cadenza earns this characterization because it refers to themes
from multiple violin concertos, invoking them in no apparent order within a
passage of music performed in the middle of a piece by Beethoven. The his-
torian Zachary Sayre Schiffman locates the advent of the concept of anach-
ronism in the Renaissance and understands it to depend on a notion of time
according to which the past does not merely precede the present, but dif-
fers from it.14 In its jumble of musical allusions, Schnittke’s first-movement
cadenza is anachronistic because it emphasizes its historical distance and sty-
listic difference from the era in which Beethoven composed his concerto, by
jumbling themes written more than three quarters of a century earlier as well
as works from over a century and a half later. But in spite of the cadenza’s
unusual length and thematic unpredictability, it is notable for the many ways
that it in fact coheres with the cadenzas of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. Neither a repudiation of earlier conventions in favor of an entirely
new approach to old genre forms nor a regressive return to techniques from
the past that rejects the modernist innovations that intervened, Schnittke’s
cadenza seems, through its embrace of anachronism, to pay homage to the
historical development of the genre and offer itself as a plausible ‘next step’.
The term ‘cadenza’ was often used in the early eighteenth century to con-
note both the harmonic closing that we call the ‘cadence’ in English and the
improvised passagework that embellished the cadences that fell either at the
end of the movement or at structurally important moments.15 As the eigh-
teenth century progressed, the distinction was increasingly made between
cadence and cadenza.16 The cadenza-as-embellishment at the conclusion of
the movement typically occurred as a prolongation of the tonic 6/4 chord
prior to the resolution of the final full cadence from dominant to tonic. Joseph
Joachim Quantz estimates in his 1752 treatise Versuch einer Anweisung, die
Flöte traversiere zu spielen (translated as On Playing the Flute) that the prac-
tice originated somewhere between 1710 and 1716, when the standard tech-
nique of attaching what he called ‘a good shake’ above a moving bass at the
14 Zachary Sayre Schiffman, The Birth of the Past (Baltimore, 2011), pp. 3–4.
15 Philip Whitmore, Unpremeditated Art: The Cadenza in the Classical Keyboard
Concerto (Oxford, 1991), p. 3.
16 Joseph P. Swain, ‘Form and Function of the Classical Cadenza’, Journal of
Musicology 6, no. 1 (Winter 1988), 29.

42 JOSHUA S. WALDEN
concluding cadence was replaced with a pause to allow the soloist to impro-
vise a longer virtuosic passage.17
The cadenza has always been a symbiotic genre that is ‘out of time’ with
the composition it inhabits. In this way, the cadenza is by its nature rooted
in part on the recognition of a difference between past and present, on the
temporal chasm between a piece’s composition and its performance. In the
eighteenth century, cadenzas were typically marked in the score by a fermata,
leaving performers to devise the content of the cadenza after the concerto was
completed. The cadenza could be improvised or written out in advance, but
when it was pre-composed and memorized, many eighteenth-century theo-
rists agreed that, in the words of Daniel Gottlob Türk’s 1789 Clavierschule, the
cadenza must sound ‘as if it were merely invented on the spur of the moment,
consisting of a choice of ideas indiscriminately thrown together which had
just occurred to the player’.18
The eighteenth-century cadenza was not stylistically indistinguishable
from the concerto, but rather displayed the imagination of the performer, in
a self-consciously hybrid multiplication of authorial musical voices. While
eighteenth-century treatises call for cadenzas that demonstrate the quality of
unity by working within the harmonic, expressive, and thematic constraints of
the movement into which they are inserted, they also argue that it is impor-
tant that cadenzas feature variety by being performed in a way that sounds
impromptu and thus original and personal, while displaying a diversity of
themes and affects.19 Quantz advises that meter should be irregular and
themes should not follow predictably from one to the next.20 Thematic variety
is deemed important, ‘For the more the ear can be deceived with fresh
17 Joseph Joachim Quantz, On Playing the Flute, trans. Edward R. Reilly, 2nd edn
(New York, 1985), pp. 179–80.
18 Daniel Gottlob Türk, School of Clavier Playing; or, Instructions in Playing the Clavier
for Teachers and Students, trans. Raymond H. Haggh (Lincoln, NE, 1982), p. 301.
19 According to theoretical writings of the early and mid-eighteenth century, the
cadenza was supposed to adhere closely to the movement for which it was composed.
It was generally limited to the principal harmonies of the surrounding music. For
Quantz, the cadenza performer ‘must not roam into keys that are too remote, or touch
upon keys which have no relationship to the principal one’. Quantz, On Playing the
Flute, p. 184. The cadenza’s motivic material and expressive quality were also to be
largely circumscribed by the concerto movement. Quantz advises that the cadenza
must ‘stem from the principal sentiment of the piece, and include a short repetition
or imitation of the most pleasing phrases contained in it’. Ibid., pp. 181–2. For Türk,
too, the cadenza must accord with the expressive mode of the concerto movement and
employ its themes, ‘consist[ing] of such thoughts which are most scrupulously suited
to the main character of the composition’, to ‘reinforce the impression made by the
composition’. Türk, School of Clavier Playing, pp. 298 and 299.
20 Quantz, On Playing the Flute, p. 185.

inventions, the greater the pleasure it feels.’21 According to Türk, cadenzas

should combine an ‘abundance of ideas’, such as by linking fragments in
disparate meters and tempos, unity in variety being ‘an essential quality of
beauty’.22 He explains that while unity is essential, ‘so also is variety neces-
sary if the attention of the listener is to be held. Therefore as much of the
unexpected and the surprising as can possibly be added should be used in
the cadenza.’23 Türk adds that the cadenza resembles a dream: ‘One often
dreams through in a few minutes, and with the liveliest Empfindungen, but
without coherence and subconsciously, events that were actually experienced
and which made an impression on us.’24 This notion of the music as a sponta-
neous, dream-like series of feelings made for a cadenza that would sound ‘out
of time’—indeed, anachronistic—in the context of the music around it. It was
an invention, resolutely associated with the present moment of performance,
on music composed sometime before, and often by someone else.
In Beethoven’s day, cadenzas still followed many of these principles,
though at greater length and variety, sometimes producing striking con-
trasts with the concerto movements into which they were incorporated. For
example, the cadenza Beethoven composed in 1836 for the first movement
of Mozart’s Piano Concerto K. 466 clashes spiritedly with the surrounding
music. Richard Kramer writes that this cadenza, ‘mocking the uneasy com-
poser of Mozart’s Concerto . . ., threatens to dismember its host. The tunes are
Mozart’s but the touch, the rhetoric, is emphatically Beethoven’s.’25 Rather
than an ‘engagement’ with Mozart’s concerto movement, Beethoven’s cadenza
comes across as a ‘rebuke’.26 The cadenzas Beethoven wrote in later years
for his own first two piano concertos also, in the words of Denis Matthews,
‘produce their own milder anachronisms’.27 Beethoven’s cadenzas in these
instances foreground their connection to an immediate present distinct from
the earlier time in which the concerto movements originated. The anachro-
nism of this stylistic juxtaposition was thus a crucial aesthetic element of their
position at once within and outside of the music.
Though Mozart and other eighteenth-century composers sometimes
wrote cadenzas for their concertos, often for students or amateur performers
21 Ibid., p. 182.
22 Türk, School of Clavier Playing, pp. 300–1 and p. 498, n. 16.
23 Ibid., p. 300.
24 Richard Kramer, ‘Diderot’s Paradoxe and C.P.E. Bach’s Empfindungen’, C.P.E.
Bach Studies, ed. Annette Richards (Cambridge and New York, 2006), p. 13.
25 Richard Kramer, ‘Cadenza Contra Text: Mozart in Beethoven’s Hands’, 19th-Cen-
tury Music 15, no. 2 (Autumn 1991), 116.

26 Ibid., p. 124.
27 Denis Matthews, ‘Beethoven and the Cadenza’, Musical Times 111, no. 1534
(December 1970), 1206.

44 JOSHUA S. WALDEN
unschooled in improvising cadenzas, it was not until the nineteenth century

that many composers began to print their own cadenzas in the scores of their
concertos, where earlier scores would simply mark the cadenza’s place with a
fermata. In such instances, the likelihood of stylistic clash between concerto
and cadenza was finally avoided by retaining the composer’s voice in both. This
new, forced coherence between concerto and cadenza is exhibited in the first
movement of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 5, ‘The Emperor’, where, for
the first time, instead of leaving space for an ad libitum cadenza, Beethoven
writes an obbligato passage in the score, preceded by an Italian phrase mean-
ing, ‘Do not play a cadenza, but proceed directly with the following.’28 In
the violin concerto repertoire, such cadenzas are later found in the contribu-
tions by Mendelssohn and Brahms, and, in the twentieth century, Sibelius,
Berg, and Shostakovich. In a number of such pieces, notably Sibelius’s only
Violin Concerto and Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto no. 1 (which is quoted
in Schnittke’s cadenza for the Beethoven concerto), the cadenza extends well
beyond its conventional length and adopts an uncharacteristically prominent
function in the music. In Sibelius’s hands, for example, the cadenza, no longer
an embellishment on a closing cadential chord, instead takes on the position
of the development section of the first movement.
In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the cadenzas most com-
monly played in performances of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto included those
by the violinists Joseph Joachim and Fritz Kreisler. Writing their cadenzas
in the second half of the nineteenth century ( Joachim in 1853, Kreisler in
1894), these musicians composed in a Romantic idiom of virtuoso violin styl-
ing that contrasted considerably with the sound of Beethoven’s turn-of-the-
century work. Many additional cadenzas for Beethoven’s Violin Concerto
were composed around the beginning of the twentieth century. Ferruccio
Busoni’s cadenza, from 1914, stands out from this crowd by incorporating
timpani and a string section that enter halfway through the first-movement
cadenza. This formed a precedent to Schnittke’s use of timpani and strings
to accompany his set of cadenzas. But for all the apparent innovation of this
instrumentation, both Schnittke and Busoni are linked through it to none
other than Beethoven himself. In the arrangement of the Violin Concerto
that Beethoven wrote for piano and orchestra in 1807 (op. 61a), at the sug-
gestion of Muzio Clementi, he composed a cadenza for the first movement
that incorporated an extensive timpani part inspired by the movement’s four-
note rhythmic motif.29
28 Whitmore, Unpremeditated Art, p. 186.

29 Lubotsky recalls that the presence of the timpani in Beethoven’s cadenza for his
piano arrangement of the concerto was a conscious model for Schnittke’s cadenza; see
‘Schnittke as Remembered’, p. 253.

The Structure of Schnittke’s Cadenza
Schnittke’s first-movement cadenza follows a harmonic trajectory, like most

earlier cadenzas, from the tonic 6/4 to key areas related to those in the con-
certo, then to those increasingly distant, until it delivers the closing cadence
to the tonic with the return to Beethoven’s music. Also typical of the rela-
tionship between conventional cadenzas and their concerto movements,
Schnittke’s composition always remains attuned to the melodic and rhythmic
motifs Beethoven composed, and it becomes ever more virtuosic and inventive
as the piece progresses. As Schnittke stated in an interview with his student,
the composer Dmitrij Iosifovič Šul’gin (1944–), his first-movement cadenza
follows a two-part structure.30 In the first measures (mm. 1–43), Schnittke
remains closest to the Beethoven source material, opening with a reference to
the four-beat motif first played by the timpani that begins Beethoven’s move-
ment and recurs persistently throughout. By the fourth measure he layers this
opening motif with a theme from the development section of Beethoven’s
movement. As this part of the cadenza progresses, Schnittke gradually pep-
pers in references to several additional melodic figures from the concerto’s
development, and he derives virtuosic passagework from all of these (exam-
ples 2.1–2.3).
It is in the second part of the cadenza (mm. 44–117) that Schnittke
begins to incorporate references to other works. In all of his quotations and
transformations of thematic material, Schnittke foregrounds similarities to
Beethoven’s principal motifs; the cadenza thus never loses sight of its host
movement.31 As Schnittke explained to Šul’gin, the task he set for himself in
this passage was to ‘build a house without nails’ by connecting quotations of
the concertos he selected in the style of Beethoven with the aim of empha-
sizing their coherence, but without creating musical transitions that would
strengthen the seams between these disparate elements.32 The first reference
in the cadenza, and the only one to a work in a genre other than the violin
concerto, draws on similarities between the persistent chordal motif of the
funeral march in the second movement of Beethoven’s Symphony no. 7 and
the four-note motif from the Violin Concerto’s first movement. This is fol-
lowed by adaptations of fragments of Beethoven’s concerto movement inter-
spersed with melodic passages, interval patterns, rhythmic figures, and
30 Šul’gin, Gody neizvestnosti Al’freda Šnitke, pp. 73–4.

31 See detailed analyses of the cadenza in Aaron Rapaport, ‘An American Encounter
with Polystylism: Schnittke’s Cadenzas to Beethoven’ (unpublished master’s thesis,
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2012); and Joachim Hansberger, ‘Alfred
Schnittkes Kadenz zum ersten Satz des Violinkonzertes von Ludwig van Beethoven’,
Zeitschrift für Musikpädagogik 29 (March 1985), 28–40.
32 Šul’gin, Gody neizvestnosti Al’freda Šnitke, p. 74.

Example 2.1 Alfred Schnittke, cadenza for Beethoven’s Violin Concerto (1975),
movement 1, mm. 2–7.

Example 2.2 Ludwig van Beethoven, Violin Concerto (1806), movement 1, mm.
1–5.

331–5.


more explicit quotations of phrases from the first movement of Brahms’s

Violin Concerto (1878), the first movements of Bartók’s two violin concer-
tos (1907–8 and 1937–8), the first and second movements of Berg’s Violin
Concerto (1935), and the first movement and third-movement cadenza of
Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto no. 1 (1947–8). These themes abut and even
merge into one another, as Schnittke elides quotations together in a tran-
sitionless sequence apparently dictated by his observations of patterns of
pitches and rhythms shared among them (example 2.4). Through his refer-
ence to Berg, Schnittke also reaches back, as Berg does, to Bach, in quoting
the theme Berg borrowed from Bach’s chorale ‘Es ist genug’. For Schnittke,
this motif resonates with Beethoven’s concerto in two ways. Rhythmically, it
begins with a pattern of four notes that resembles Beethoven’s opening four
strikes of the timpani. And melodically, these four notes ascend as a whole-
tone tetrachord, a pattern found in Beethoven’s second theme, beginning
from the second note (examples 2.5 and 2.6).33
In the concluding twenty measures of the cadenza (mm. 98–117),
Schnittke, in an echo of Beethoven’s own cadenza for his arrangement of the
concerto for piano and orchestra, introduces the timpani, which beats the
concerto’s opening four-note motif. The timpanist plays in alternation with
the violinist, who performs continued and varied repetitions of thematic
material from Berg and, in an ossia, a quotation of Brahms of striking rhyth-
mic similarity to a particular passage from Berg.34 At the conclusion of the
cadenza, the standard extended trill, typically played by the soloist to mark the
orchestra’s impending return, is taken up by the timpani instead. The last four
notes in the violin, as an anacrusis to the return to Beethoven’s movement,
are a transposition of the B-A-C-H musical monogram (from B♭–A–C–B♮
to F♯–E♯–A♭–G). This offers a cryptic acknowledgement that Bach, whose
significant influence on Schnittke is well documented, represents the single
source binding all the later compositions Schnittke quotes (example 2.7).35
Throughout the cadenza, and through all of its dissonances and juxta-
positions, Schnittke adheres to a number of the conventions of the cadenza
from its eighteenth-century origins through the era in which he composed
his own contribution to Beethoven’s concerto. In addition to following the
overall harmonic and formal structures of earlier cadenzas, Schnittke writes a
final section that resonates with Türk’s description of the cadenza as a dream-
like mixture of remembered musical gestures, though in this case the gestures
33 Ibid.
34 See Hansberger, ‘Alfred Schnittkes Kadenz’, p. 35.
35 The B-A-C-H monogram appears in multiple works by Schnittke, including the
Violin Sonata no. 2. For discussion see Peter J. Schmelz, Such Freedom, if Only Musical:
Unofficial Soviet Music during the Thaw (New York, 2009), pp. 254–5; and Alexander
Ivashkin, Alfred Schnittke (London, 1996), p. 111.

48 JOSHUA S. WALDEN
mm. 65–72.

!

Example 2.5 Alban Berg, Violin Concerto (1935), movement 2, passage based on
Bach, ‘Es ist genug’.

are recalled not only from the adjoining concerto movement but from
other canonic works as well. The concluding passage is also reminiscent of
Beethoven’s own cadenza to his piano arrangement of the concerto, with tim-
pani accompaniment and a renewed focus on the movement’s persistent four-
beat motif. In quoting his modernist predecessors in the cadenza, Schnittke
depicts them as Beethoven’s musical inheritors, by finding points of similarity
between Beethoven’s concerto and their contributions to the genre. At the
same time, he postulates that these works and Beethoven’s concerto share

144–51.

mm. 112–17.


50 JOSHUA S. WALDEN
melodic affinities with a common predecessor, Bach’s ascending whole-tone

tetrachord in ‘Es ist genug’. Throughout this musical fantasy, Schnittke com-
bines his various ‘anachronistic’ references into a unified whole by acting as a
musical analyst, finding unity and coherence in music history by identifying
attributes that are shared among the assembled musical passages.
Polystylistic and Postmodernist Approaches to the Musical Past
The polystylistic technique that can be heard in much of Schnittke’s oeuvre, as

it can in this cadenza, is often associated in scholarly work with the postmod-
ernist tendencies toward pastiche, adaptation, and parody. Jonathan Kramer’s
study ‘The Nature and Origins of Musical Postmodernism’ lists Schnittke’s
Symphony no. 1 (1974) alongside works by other composers that represent
what he identifies as a ‘postmodern attitude’.36 Similarly, Hermann Danuser
considers Schnittke’s music to be postmodernist in its use of quotation and
pastiche in a manner that does not reflect modernist preoccupations with
innovation.37 In her entry on postmodernism in the Grove Dictionary of Music
and Musicians, Jann Pasler likewise finds a postmodernist approach to quota-
tion in Schnittke’s String Quartet no. 3 (1983), with its references to Orlando
di Lasso’s Stabat Mater and Beethoven’s Große Fuge, among other sources.
Rather than demonstrating ‘a desire to overcome and surpass one’s predeces-
sors’ as one might expect in a work of modernism, she writes, the polystylistic
references in this work operate ‘without any desire to assert the dominance of
one element over the other’. The work ‘construct[s] a sense of time as embody-
ing many times, a self made of many memories’.38 Finally, Jörn Peter Hiekel’s
entry on postmodernism in Musik Geschichte und Gegenwart treats Schnittke’s
polystylistic technique as a postmodernist reconciliation of different cultural
spheres and a way out of the restrictions imposed by modernism.39
On the other hand, there are compelling arguments against the association
of Schnittke with postmodernism. Peter Schmelz is critical of the tendency
to label Schnittke’s work postmodernist on historical and cultural grounds,
36 Jonathan D. Kramer, ‘The Nature and Origins of Musical Postmodernism’,

Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, ed. Judy Lochhead and Joseph Auner (New
York and London, 2002), p. 13.
37 Hermann Danuser, Hannelore Gerlach, and Jürgen Köchel, eds, Sowjetische Musik
im Licht der Perestroika: Interpretationen, Quellentexte, Komponistenmonographien

(Laaber, 1990), pp. 406–7. On the application of the label ‘postmodernism’ to
Schnittke’s music in German musicology, see Joakim Tillman, ‘Postmodernism and
Art Music in the German Debate’, Lochhead and Auner, eds, Postmodern Music/
Postmodern Thought, pp. 80–4.
38 Jann Pasler, ‘Postmodernism’, Grove Music Online.
39 Jörn Peter Hiekel, ‘Postmoderne’, MGG Online.

as this requires treating the music in relation to Western musical and philo-
sophical trends, rather than more properly in its Soviet aesthetic context.40
Schnittke himself, in characterizing his polystylism, links it not to post-
modernist composers and philosophies but to modernists including Mahler
and Ives.41 And Richard Taruskin writes that the composer’s polystylism is
‘pigeonholed (quite unnecessarily, I think) as postmodern’.42 He does find a
sense of finality in Schnittke’s backward glance, however: Schnittke’s music,
he writes, conveys ‘postism, after-everythingism, it’s-all-over-ism’.43
Quotation and pastiche in art are generally interpreted as postmodernist
when they imply an approach to history and style that differs from the mod-
ernist view: the postmodernist perspective holds history to be, metaphorically,
flattened rather than linear, directionless rather than progressive. In the classic
example of architectural postmodernism, Philip Johnson’s New York City sky-
scraper at 550 Madison Avenue (completed 1984), a steel-framed high-rise
reflecting the innovations of the modernist ‘International Style’ leads the eye
upward to a set of columns and a pediment resembling a classical temple; and
the pediment is broken at its peak to recall the top of a Chippendale armoire.
This cheeky mixture of elements from the histories of architectural and fur-
niture design evinces a postmodernist sensibility in creating a bricolage of
disparate elements without offering any clear logic for their accumulation.44
Jean-François Lyotard explains that in postmodernist aesthetics, the ‘high
frequency of quotations from previous styles or periods’ announces ‘the disap-
pearance of this idea of progress within rationality and freedom’.45 Modernism
still involved the persistent search for continuity, for evidence of the ways the
past leads to something new in the present, an outlook reliant on what Lyotard
calls ‘metanarratives’.46 This notion is based on a view of history in which the
juxtaposition of elements from different periods is considered anachronis-
tic, because it is rooted in a conception of the past as fundamentally different
from the present. By contrast, postmodernist thought is incredulous toward any
40 Schmelz, Such Freedom, if Only Musical, p. 320.

41 Ivashkin, ed., Schnittke Reader, p. 17.
42 Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays
(Princeton, NJ, and Oxford, 1997), p. 99.

43 Ibid.
44 See, for example, Jane Piper Clendinning, ‘Postmodern Architecture/Postmodern
Music’, Auner and Lochhead, eds, Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, p. 124.

45 Jean-François Lyotard, ‘Defining the Postmodern’, The Norton Anthology of Theory
and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch (New York and London, 2001), pp. 1612–13.
46 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans.
Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

1984), p. xxiv.

52 JOSHUA S. WALDEN
single metanarrative, favoring instead the notion of multiple ‘micronarratives’.47

According to Linda Hutcheon, the parodic aspect of much postmodernism
finds ‘ironic discontinuity . . . revealed at the heart of continuity’.48
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari describe the difference between new
postmodernist and earlier, standard notions of knowledge and history through
contrasting botanical metaphors. The traditional view—the one reliant on the
conception of historical metanarratives—takes the form of a tree growing
upward and outward progressively from its roots.49 The postmodernist con-
ception, by contrast, resembles a rhizome, a plant form like bamboo and many
grasses that grows in all directions from a root system continually spreading
outward along a plane. Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘unlike trees or their roots,
the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not nec-
essarily linked to traits of the same nature’.50 This perspective is ‘nonhierarchi-
cal’: it denies chronological directionality, beginnings and endings, and thus
progress and teleology.
In Deleuze and Guattari’s nonhierarchical conception of history, according
to which one can connect ‘any point to any other point’, any understanding of
artistic style as inherently bound up with its time is erased, with the denial of
metanarratives, of progressive, teleological processes of change and influence.
This postmodernist view of history, with its altered conception of the rela-
tionship between eras, rejects the notion that past and present are meaning-
fully different, rather than simply temporally distant, from one another. There
can, therefore, be no anachronism, if history is to be conceived of in a post-
modernist sense, because there is no chronological hierarchy; the past simply
emerges alongside the present in the flattened plane of the rhizomatic root
system. The juxtapositional ordering of temporally distant techniques will not
be considered incorrect—anachronistic—to the postmodernist listener who
rejects metanarratives and considers history to fan outward in all directions
rather than progress in a straight line.
Schnittke’s cadenza does mix and match references like much postmod-
ernist art, but it posits a hierarchical, chronological historiography of music,
and particularly of the violin concerto. In Schnittke’s system of musical
anachronisms, Beethoven’s iconic Violin Concerto is presented as a model
for later works in the genre by composers who developed styles as disparate
as did Brahms, Bartók, Berg, and Shostakovich; and their most important
shared predecessor is none other than ‘Papa Bach’ himself. The connections
Schnittke draws between his multiple references in the first-movement
47 Ibid., p. xxiv.
48 Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (New York
and London, 1988), p. 11.
49 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.
50 Ibid, p. 23.

cadenza, therefore, do not support Lyotard’s rejection of metanarratives or

uphold the rhizomatic perspective of history associated with postmodernism
in the writings of Deleuze and Guattari. Rather, in his cadenza Schnittke
argues for a traditional view of knowledge and history, dependent on a notion
of progress in the development of musical style, of unidirectional influence, by
representing Bach’s impact on Beethoven; Bach’s and Beethoven’s influence
on Brahms, Bartók, Berg, and Shostakovich; and, finally, the way all of these
composers inspired Schnittke himself.
In its adherence to cadenza conventions, Schnittke’s work also refuses to
follow so much postmodernist art in repudiating modernism. Hal Foster, in
defining postmodernism, distinguishes between a postmodernism of resistance,
‘which seeks to deconstruct modernism and resist the status quo’, and a post-
modernism of reaction, which ‘repudiates’ modernism in order to ‘celebrate’ the
status quo.51 Schnittke’s work conforms to neither of these approaches, because
it is starkly contemporary in its harsh dissonances while it pays respectful hom-
age to its musical past. Schnittke’s fealty to conventional cadenza structures
does not evince a reactionary stance against the intervening innovations of
modernist composers, nor does his extensive use of quotations resist the con-
temporary status quo. To the contrary, the work continues in the cadenza tradi-
tion with quotations of modernist contributions to the violin concerto in a way
that emphasizes historical and stylistic continuity and teleology.
The Cadenza’s Postmodernist Moment
Schnittke’s famous—or infamous—Beethoven cadenza thus appears to con-

tradict the postmodernist stance with which it is so easily associated, because
of the very anachronisms that critics frequently cite, anachronisms that
allow Schnittke to convey an ultimately teleological narrative of the course
of the violin concerto’s history. But the cadenza did receive its postmodern-
ist moment elsewhere in the second half of the twentieth century. Originally
improvised by the performer or composed and printed sometime after the
concerto, the cadenza has since its genesis always relied on anachronism—on
the temporal distinction between the composer’s finished work and the per-
former’s out-of-time interpolation in the middle of his or her rendition of
the movement. This course of events can be flattened, so to speak, only when
51 Hal Foster, ‘Postmodernism: A Preface’, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern

Culture, ed. Hal Foster (New York, 1998), p. xii. This distinction forms the basis of
Jonathan Kramer’s concept of opposing ‘neoconservative and radical’ styles of musical
postmodernism, the former involving a return to tradition and rejection of modern-
ism, the latter a rejection of metanarrative and notions of organic unity. See ‘Beyond
Unity’, pp. 21–2.

54 JOSHUA S. WALDEN
one of these voices is silenced, thus extinguishing the sense of chronological

distance that emphasizes the difference between a composition’s past and its
performance’s present. One finds this juxtaposition in the loss of the orches-
tral voice in Krzysztof Penderecki’s 1984 Cadenza for Solo Viola, a stand-alone
work that was not written for performance within any concerto movement.
No longer a virtuosic interpolation into another composer’s creation, nor even
a cadence, this work recalls the Cheshire Cat: Alice might remark, ‘I’ve often
heard a concerto without a cadenza, but a cadenza without a concerto! It’s the
most curious thing I ever heard in my life!’
Perhaps the most compelling instance of such a ‘postmodernist’ cadenza,
however, is the one Schnittke created for the second movement of his 1984
Violin Concerto no. 4. Where the cadenza is usually the violinist’s opportu-
nity to separate his voice from the pack by interrupting the orchestra with an
extended flight of fancy in the form of an intensification of its final cadence
to the tonic, here the orchestra fails to relent, instead growing louder and
increasingly aggressive where it usually fades away, until it silences the violin-
ist entirely. Flailing wildly, the violinist plays what Schnittke labels a ‘Cadenza
visuale’, moving his arms dramatically and ad libitum but producing no sound.
By denying the performer an opportunity for improvised (or quasi-impro-
vised) musical interruption in this instance, Schnittke refuses the moment
of anachronism standard in the genre of the concerto. In doing so, finally,
he offers his listeners the ultimate postmodernist sound of the cadenza: ear-
splitting silence, a sound evoked on Schnittke’s tombstone (figure 2.1).
Figure 2.1 Gravestone of Alfred Schnittke in the Novodevichy Cemetery,

Moscow, showing a fermata over a whole rest marked fff.

3
John Adams’s Post-stylistic Approach to

the Past: A Response to the Uncertain
Future of a Globalized World?
Max Noubel
John Adams’s piano piece Phrygian Gates of 1977, his first mature composi-
tion and his acknowledged opus 1, initiated the composer’s minimalist period,
which exhibits a musical style primarily based on a steady refusal of expres-
siveness and pathos in favor of a pure contemplation of repetitive sound
architecture. For Adams, minimalism was above all a radically new means to
escape from the musical academism and conformism of the East Coast com-
posers without resorting to Cageian alternatives or to the ideological hege-
mony of European post-serialism embodied by Pierre Boulez’s famous 1952
anathema: ‘Any composer who has not experienced . . . the absolute necessity
of the serial system of composition is USELESS.’1 In fact, Adams countered
that Boulez ‘could only see music from a dialectical point of view. A new cre-
ative idea was “useless” unless it fitted into his historical tunnel vision. That
particular continuum I found ridiculously exclusive, being founded on a kind
of Darwinian view of stylistic evolution.’2 To be sure, for Adams minimalism
was also a way to erase the disappointment of his own artistic involvement
in the spheres of musical experimentalism and live-electronic music, even
though they played a significant role in his artistic development. For him,
following the path paved by minimalist composers was a saving grace: ‘Riley,
Reich, and Glass . . . all influenced me positively to a way out of the cul-de-
sac in which I seemed to be stuck.’3
From Harmonielehre (1984–5) onward, John Adams gradually freed him-
self from minimalism, integrating a wide range of musical styles from both
1 Pierre Boulez, ‘Possibly . . .’, in Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, coll. Paule

Thévenin, trans. Stephen Walsh (Oxford, 1991), p. 113. For the original French
(‘Tout musicien qui n’a pas ressenti . . . la nécessité du langage dodécaphonique est
INUTILE’), see Pierre Boulez, ‘ . . . éventuellement . . .’, La revue musicale 212 (April
1952), p. 119.
2 John Adams, Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life (New York, 2008), p.
32.
3 Ibid., pp. 89–90.

56 MAX NOUBEL
art music and popular music. Moreover, he built his musical thought and his
philosophy on a dynamic and inventive integration of musical references from
the past. This compositional approach is rooted in Western musical heritage,
but without seeking to demythologize it or to reproduce it faithfully with
unreserved veneration. Adams’s artistic evolution has led commentators and
musicologists to consider him first a postminimalist composer, then a post-
modernist one.4 And as for Adams himself, in 1990 the musicologist Edward
Strickland summarized the composer’s self-perception as follows: ‘Adams has
described himself variously as “a Minimalist who is bored with Minimalism”
and “more a postmodernist than a Minimalist”’.5 This was over two decades
ago, at a time when the composer himself could not foresee how his artistic
approach would evolve. By 1997 Kyle Gann, one of America’s leading music
critics, categorized Adams as one of the composers of new tonality and new
Romanticism. He declared that ‘The return to tonality that began with early
minimalism held an enormous attraction even in musical circles that did not
acknowledge minimalism as a valid style.’6 He further explained that compos-
ers who abandoned dissonant, complex, modernist, twelve-tone music adopted
a more accessible musical language based on the return to tonality and a style
which could be considered a new form of Romanticism. He illustrated this by
referring to the series of orchestral music organized by Jacob Druckman as
composer-in-residence at the New York Philharmonic (1982–6). Kyle Gann
asserts that the series of the first season, which contained ‘works by Rochberg,
Schwantner, Rzewski, Adams, Del Tredici, Harbison, Foss, Lerdahl and oth-
ers—was accompanied by the question “Since 1968: A New Romanticism?”’7
Even if Adams shared with these composers a desire to reject serialism but
without being locked into a minimalist stream, his creative independence
kept him away from ideologies and fashions. Indeed, it would be simplistic
and reductive to place John Adams in the spheres of neo-Romanticism and
neo-tonality.
In the 2006 film Hail Bop! A Portrait of John Adams, directed by Tony
Palmer, Adams refuses to be confined to a specific compositional style. He
favors an approach that he terms ‘post-stylism,’ which he understands to be
nonrestrictive, therefore allowing him to gain true creative independence.
4 Among the first to label Adams a postminimalist was Robert Schwarz, Minimalists
(London, 1996). Schwarz goes so far as to say that ‘the term post-minimalism has
been invented to describe Adams’s eclectic vocabulary, one in which the austerity of
minimalism now rubs shoulders with the passion of Romanticism’ (p. 170).
5 Edward Strickland, American Composers: Dialogues on Contemporary Music
(Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1991), p. 177.

6 Kyle Gann, American Music in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1997), p. 218.
7 Ibid., p. 221.

JOHN ADAMS’S POST-STYLISTIC APPROACH TO THE PAST 57
When composers write a piece now the first question he or she has to answer
is: what style is it? [and] I’ve reached the stage where I simply don’t answer the
question anymore because I think we have now arrived at a somewhat post-
style style. We’re in an era of post-stylism—not postmodernism, not postmini-
malism, not post anything, and that’s a very healthy thing.8
It might be surprising that in his writings Adams did not try to concep-
tualize what he termed ‘post-stylism’, as such composers as Milton Babbitt,
Elliott Carter, or even Steve Reich might have done. Moreover, he did not
subsequently use this term, at least not pervasively. The fact that Adams did
not feel the need to unfold this concept further does not mean that his post-
stylistic vision is not extant or should be considered superficial or marginal. A
careful reading of John Adams’s writings and thoughts on music and a study
of his musical output reveal the continuing importance of this idea.
This essay aims to elucidate the concept of post-stylism. In order to do so,
and on the assumption that post-stylism manifests itself in different ways in
his works, it contextualizes and analyzes works composed by Adams during
different periods. It does so by looking at time and space as important factors.
It is my contention that Adam’s evolution toward post-stylism was a means of
giving a personal response to a globalized world in which values and artistic
landmarks are ceaselessly moving.
Composing in a Globalized World: Adams’s Cultural and Temporal Space
The cultures from which Adams draws his musical inspiration remain within
the Western world. He specifically self-identifies as an American composer,
who fully absorbs the cultural pluralism of his country as well as the enor-
mous legacy of old Europe.9 His attachment to his New England roots, to
which the symphonic triptych My Father Knew Charles Ives (2003) bears
witness, is counterbalanced by his affection for California. This is where he
has been living since 1972 and where he has developed his interest in the
Spanish language and, by extension, in Latin American cultures.10 This inter-
8 Hail Bop! A Portrait of John Adams, dir. Tony Palmer (Warner Music Division /
NVC Arts, 2006), DVD. All quotations taken from this film are based on the English
subtitles.
9 For more information on John Adams’s self-definition, see his autobiography,
Hallelujah Junction, pp. 3–79.

10 John Adams’s opera Girls of the Golden West (2017) takes place in the min-
ing settlement of Rich Bar (now Diamondville, California) during the Gold Rush.
The events and characters in the opera are drawn from miners’ ballads, the letters
of the writer Louise Clappe (‘Dame Shirley’), the diary of Ramón Gil Navarro, the
memoirs of fugitive slaves, poems by Chinese immigrants, Shakespeare, Mark Twain,

58 MAX NOUBEL
est, however, did not manifest itself as much in the music (unlike in Aaron
Copland’s compositions, or Leonard Bernstein’s) as in his absorption of poetic
and literary texts. This is especially evident in El Niño: A Nativity Oratorio
(1999–2000), whose libretto (co-written with Peter Sellars) adapts poems
by Rosario Castellanos (1925–74) from Mexico, Sor Juana Inès de la Cruz
(1648–95) from what was then New Spain (Mexico today), the Chileans
Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957) and Vicente Huidobro (1893–1948), and the
Nicaraguan writer Rubén Darío (1867–1916). Similarly, the libretto for The
Gospel According to the Other Mary (2012), also written by Peter Sellars, relies
on texts by Rosario Castellanos and Rubén Darío.
Unlike John Cage, Lou Harrison, Terry Riley, La Monte Young, and
Steve Reich (or Karlheinz Stockhausen in Europe), Adams’s music has hardly
been influenced by the distant lands of Africa or Asia, even if some of his
works relate to their musical cultures. Nixon in China (1987), The Death of
Klinghoffer (1990/1), A Flowering Tree (2006), and even Scheherazade 2
(2014), all carefully avoid any exoticism or borrowing from ‘Oriental’ or Far
Eastern musical languages. As the music critic Mark Swed notes: ‘World
music began to influence his works in the 1990s, but not in obvious ways. The
Violin Concerto, one of his greatest pieces, has the long, meandering lines of
Indian raga, although there is no indication of Indian scales or rhythms, just
the sense of rambling into distant territories.’11
Adams also showed a predilection for certain popular types of music, as
he confirmed in Hail Bop!: ‘So for me, jazz and American ethnic music and
rock, in a way pop music, is the ethnic music of our time and informs all of
my music.’12 This statement is testimony to Adams’s awareness of the bound-
ary between mainstream and ‘marginal’ music becoming fuzzy, a process that
began in the 1980s and that led to categories such as ‘ethnic’ music being
replaced by world music, a pseudo-genre taking into its sweep diverse styles.
The process reflects the ongoing process of globalization, which has facilitated
the expansion of world music’s audiences and scope.
Historical influences on John Adams are relatively narrow, even though
over the decades they have been considerable. Bach’s Passions inspired The
Gospel According to the Other Mary and the polyphonic choruses of The Death
the Argentine poet Alfonsina Storni, a speech by Frederick Douglass, biographies

of Lola Montez, and the works of the pre-eminent nineteenth-century California
historians Hubert Howe Bancroft and Josiah Royce; see ‘John Adams: Girls of
the Golden West; World Premiere, San Francisco Opera (2017–2018 Season)’, San
Francisco Opera Magazine 94, no. 3 (2017), 38, https://encorespotlight.com/program/
san-francisco-opera-girls-of-the-golden-west-2017/.
11 Mark Swed, ‘On Top, But Ever the Risk-Taker’, Los Angeles Times, 28 January
2001; reprinted in Thomas May, ed., The John Adams Reader: Essential Writings on an
American Composer (Pompton Plains, NJ, 2006), pp. 49–50.
12 Palmer, dir., Hail Bop!

of Klinghoffer; Handel’s Messiah influenced El Niño—these are his farthest

incursions into the past. Unlike Arvo Pärt or even Steve Reich, Adams’s evo-
lution toward post-stylism has not led him to incorporate archaic and medi-
eval models that could have more deeply anchored his work in the history of
Western music. Nonetheless, he remains attached to compositional processes
of classical music, such as canonic polyphony, melodic theme developments,
ABA form, etc. His models are rooted in the nineteenth century (Beethoven,
Wagner, and Sibelius, among others); they also leave room for the great fig-
ures of the twentieth century (Ives, Ravel, Stravinsky, Gershwin, Ellington,
Copland, and Bernstein).
To understand the importance of Adams’s evolving concept of post-styl-
ism one must consider that it is in part a product of an increasingly global-
ized world, in which the speed of transport, and that of images transmitted
by satellite, has abolished distances between the most remote places on the
planet; where immense digital storage capacities have the potential to access
the cultures of practically all the peoples of the world and the entire history
of civilizations and cultures. Having at one’s disposal vast and diverse cultural
possibilities (particularly through new media developments) is partly ham-
pered by an increasingly hegemonic power of merchandization that perme-
ates modern societies. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard analyzed this
condition in his theory of implosion, which is a key component of his post-
modernist social theory.13 Steven Best and Douglas Kelner elaborate on it in
Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogation:
Baudrillard’s theory of implosion describes a process of social entropy leading

to a collapse of boundaries, including the implosion of meaning in the media
and the implosion of media and the social in the masses. The dissemination
of media messages and semiurgy saturated the social field, and meaning and
messages flatten each other out in a neutralized flow of information, enter-
tainment, advertising and politics. Baudrillard argues that the masses become
bored and resentful of their constant bombardment with messages and the
constant attempts to solicit them to buy, consume, work, vote, register an opin-
ion, or participate in social life.14
Baudrillard claimed that in the arts every possible form and function has been
exhausted. In this deconstructed universe ‘all that are left are pieces. All that
13 Jean Baudrillard developed the theory of implosion in numerous writings, most

notably À l’ombre des majorités silencieuses; ou, La fin du social (Fontenay-sous-Boisie,
1978) and Simulacres et simulation (Paris, 1981), respectively published in English as
In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, trans. Paul Patton and John Johnston (New York,
1983), and Simulations, trans. Phil Beitchman, Paul Foss, and Paul Patton (New York,
1983).
14 Steven Best and Douglas Kelner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations
(Houndmills and London, 1991), p. 121.

60 MAX NOUBEL
remains to be done is to play with the pieces. Playing with the pieces—that is
postmodern.’15
Even with a less pessimistic or even dystopic vision of the cultural evo-
lution of modern societies, the situation described by Baudrillard poses a
danger for the creation of a contemporary art music attempting to survive in
a ‘world-village’ where the immense power of the media and market forces
tends to homogenize if not standardize tastes, cultural behaviors, and ways
of thinking. These forces increasingly marginalize musical creation, but what
is worse, there is a permanent risk that they will contaminate and pervert it.
In such a framework the value of any musical composition would become
relative, because of the collapse of artistic hierarchies and the leveling of cul-
tural references—present and past, erudite and popular—caused by the com-
modification of art on a worldwide scale. Still, scholars such as the cultural
sociologist and anthropologist Arjun Appadurai refuse to take a fatalistic and
pessimistic view of globalization, in spite of real threats to cultural diversity.16
In the same vein, John Adams’s music belongs to a cultural sphere protected
by cultural institutions that are still relatively independent of the hegemonic
power of mass commodification (in the United States one might think of
philanthropic, artistic, or cultural foundations; the great symphonic orches-
tras; and opera houses), and where the influence of the well-educated or the
‘honnête homme’ is still taken into account. The purpose of this discussion is
not to take a stand for or against global evolution, but to consider how an art-
ist positions himself and finds his audience in a global context without adopt-
ing a radical position and without going astray.
Turning toward the Past and Simplicity
In the 1980s some music critics doubted Adams’s ability to resist artistic stan-
dardization and ‘corruption’. They perceived his first opera, Nixon in China,
as proof of his complacency with American consumerism, as it simplified a
clearly tonal musical language. After the 1987 premiere in Houston, Donal
Henahan wrote in the New York Times that ‘Mr. Adams has done for the
arpeggio what McDonald’s did for the hamburger.’17 France, always con-
cerned about the preservation of ‘cultural exception’, saw in this work a real
threat to erudite art, as evident in the following comment taken from the
15 Jean Baudrillard, ‘Game with Vestiges’, interview with Salvatore Mele and Mark
Titmarsh, On the Beach 5 (Winter 1984), 19–25; repr. in Jean Baudrillard, Baudrillard
Live: Selected Interviews, ed. Mike Gane (London and New York, 1993), pp. 81–95.
16 See Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
(Minneapolis, 1996).
17 Donald Henahan, ‘Nixon in China’, New York Times, 24 October 1987.

French magazine Le nouvel observateur: ‘This is the lowest degree of music. A

sort of typically American product, like Coca-Cola, Disneyland, and the new
international order . . . And they want to export it. Help!’18
Looked at more closely, Nixon in China is a straightforward combina-
tion of high and popular genres as well as barely veiled references to music
of the past, which emerge from a minimalist sound fabric in over-simplified
forms, thus suggesting an ironic, demythologized vision of established musi-
cal models. These models seem to have lost some of their substance and are
reduced to easily exportable consumables in a (sound)world heading toward
standardized cultural practices. But is this really the case with John Adams?
Is it not an unreflective interpretation that sees in his presumed simplicity a
demagogic ‘easy way out’ that masks an absence of inspiration? This simplicity
might refer to something even more profound, namely the redefinition of aes-
thetic criteria and functionalities of musical language that have always been
fully embedded in the value of a work of art.
In Grand Pianola Music for orchestra, Adams takes inspiration from
Beethoven’s Chorfantasie, op. 80, and the Piano Concerto no. 5, ‘Emperor’,
op. 73. The arpeggio cascades played on the two pianos are reminiscent of the
emphatic pianistic style of the American music-hall pianist Liberace (1919–
87). In the same vein, the only melodic theme in the work resembles a hymn
as much as a popular tune. Ultimately the style is completely regenerated by
the way John Adams begins with ‘neutral’ minimalist material consisting of
lengthily repeated patterns and continues to gradually release this rigorous
repetitive structure with the emphatic introduction of heterogeneous materi-
als that he himself calls ‘detritus’.19 For instance, the major or minor triads
played at full strength by the brass in the second movement seem to evoke
the rise of the gods in Valhalla, but are much simpler chord progressions
than those found in Wagner’s operas. Through such harmonic simplification,
Adams avoids creating a kind of stylistic hiatus within the minimalist context,
but also avoids limiting the work to the realm of simple pastiche. Thus by a
very subtle loosening of the minimalist ‘corset’, the past is reborn in an extro-
vert manner with a freshness of expression that is literally unprecedented.
In her aria ‘I am the wife of Mao Tse Tung’, in Nixon in China (act II, scene
2), Chiang Ch’ing reveals herself to be a kind of Brünnhilde, but without
18 ‘C’est le degré zéro de la musique. Une sorte de produit typiquement améric-
ain, comme le Coca-Cola, Disneyland ou le nouvel ordre international. Et ils veu-

lent l’exporter. Au secours!’ Renaud Machart, ‘La cote d’Adams’, Le nouvel observateur
(December 1992), 60.
19 ‘The piece could only have been conceived by someone who had grown up sur-
rounded by the “detritus” of mid-twentieth century recorded music. Beethoven and

Rachmaninoff soak in the same warm bath with Liberace, Wagner, the Supremes,
Charles Ives, and John Philip Sousa.’ John Adams, ‘Pianola Music’, http://www.ear-
box.com/grand-pianola-music/ (accessed 6 September 2018).

62 MAX NOUBEL
the mystery or psychological subtleties of Wagner’s character. She appears

rather like Roy Lichtenstein’s Mona Lisa, taken straight from a comic and
with none of the mysterious landscape that surrounds the original portrait by
Leonardo da Vinci. Here too, in the context of this ‘theater within the the-
ater’ scene in which the Nixon couple attends a propaganda show supervised
and controlled by Mao’s wife, the simple harmonies suggest an archetype of
the cold, fundamental, triumphant power of totalitarianism. This totalitarian-
ism is no longer seen through the prism of late-nineteenth-century German
Romanticism, but through a contemporary lens that has fully absorbed and
understood its expressive and stylistic substance to transmute it into a sound
universe that has been completely renewed.
If Pierre Boulez, in his musical referencing of Paul Klee in Structure Ia,
navigated ‘the border of the fertile land’ of serialism, and then escaped rap-
idly from this land to go toward more abundant, as yet unexplored, regions in
the subsequent compositions, John Adams explored minimalism to its limits,
then gradually moved away to conquer new horizons fertilized by a new look
at history.20 Here minimalism does not imply poverty of musical language,
but sheer simplicity. As minimalism (more precisely, the first stage of mini-
malism with its repetitive patterns) represents sparse musical expressivity and
turns away from phraseology or the art of melodic drive, it served Adams as
an ideal starting point from which to regain the expressivity that especially
required the rehabilitation of melody. On the basis of minimalism, Adams
was able to gradually integrate and then fully assimilate all the stylistic aspects
of musical discourse formerly considered essential in the great tradition
of art music, but generally neglected or even banished by the avant-garde.
Minimalism, which through a seeming simplification of musical vocabulary
shifts the focus onto musical parameters such as timbre and time, was like a
screen whose mesh Adams gradually removed to admit discursive elements
of the past and allow their expressive power to penetrate without importing
the obsolescence of their inherent musical grammar. He was at once a filter
and a distiller, but he was also a safeguard guaranteeing an ever-regenerated
use of these pasts or vernacular references to nourish a truly personal creation
that was oriented toward the future. Adams understood that abandoning the
simplicity of minimalism was essential if he was to preserve his own stylistic
identity. He asserts:
20 Pierre Boulez subtitled his Structure Ia, a piece for two pianos, ‘À la limite du
pays fertile’ (At the border of the fertile country, 1951), named after Monument im
Fruchland (1929) by Paul Klee, an abstract watercolor relying on orthogonal shapes.
Boulez saw in this subtitle a metaphor for testing serial method that relied on a strict
algorithm, which eliminated subjectivity and personal taste. In the piece he extended
serialism to rhythm and articulation; see Karlheinz Essl, ‘Algorithmic Composition’,
Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music, ed. Nick Collins and Julio d’Escrivan
(Cambridge, 2007), p. 114.

Here I go again criticizing my own work, but . . . one of the things that struck
me in Nixon was that through the first two acts the orchestra tends to act like
a ukulele: the singers sing along and the orchestra strums away. Only in the
third act does the orchestra really achieve a contrapuntal complexity with the
voices. I was in danger of becoming a composer who functions on one level. So
recently I’ve been working on adding levels of complexity to my music. I’m not
talking about making it inaccessible or becoming Elliott Carter but making
the experience deeper.21
Even if it might have been partially subconscious, Adams’s artistic evolution

avoided the risk of being trapped by a cultural homogenization and standard-
ization that has increasingly threatened globalized societies.
Toward a Complexification of Musical Language
An important milestone in Adams’s artistic evolution is Harmonielehre. In

its title, the orchestral work makes explicit reference to Schoenberg’s famous
eponymous harmony textbook (1909–11), first published in English in 1948
as Theory of Harmony.22 But Harmonielehre is not a second reading of the
Schoenberg treatise. It is more a counter-reading, in that Adams takes lib-
erties in changing tonality very freely, without following the conventional
rules of modulation. Indeed, Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder (1911) served as one of
Adams’s models for composing his orchestral piece.23
Ultimately, Harmonielehre represents the culmination of Adams’s studies
of harmony, partly self-taught after his music education at Harvard (1965–
71). It sets the starting point for works that employ dissonance and blurred
tonality. In the third movement Adams accomplishes this by subtly quoting
Franz Liszt’s La Lugubre Gondola II, which is a particularly ambiguous work
on a tonal level.24 With regard to melody, Harmonielehre relies on the expres-
sive intensity of Romanticism, but without creating it out of a hyper-modulat-
ing harmonic language. The intensely expressive lengthy melodies that unfold
in the first movement are vaguely reminiscent of Mahler or Wagner, and those
in the second movement of Sibelius. Still, the piece does not turn its back on
its own time, as Adams’s language remains original and far from the harmonic
grammar of these composers. The insertion of Romantic expressiveness into a
21 Strickland, American Composers, p. 189.

22 The first translation of Schoenberg’s Harmonielehre was abridged and Adams was
most likely familiar with Roy E. Carter’s translation, based on the third edition and
published as Theory of Harmony (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1978).
23 See May, ed., The John Adams Reader, p. 103.
24 Adams would orchestrate Liszt’s piano piece in 1989, giving it the English title
The Black Gondola.

64 MAX NOUBEL
late-twentieth-century musical structure strongly influenced by minimalism

does not contradict Adams’s fascination with the harmonic subtlety of the
great Romantic composers. (He would take inspiration from Romantic chro-
maticism in a very free and individualistic way in his second opera, The Death
of Klinghoffer.) For Adams, musical legacy is no longer the special reserve of
the erudite cultural sphere. He asserts:
The harmonic language developed by Schumann and Wagner did not die out
with the advent of Modernism. It simply moved across the Atlantic, where it
was appropriated by composers, many of them African Americans and émigré
Jews, who created one of the great musical traditions of all time, the American
popular song.25
Adams fully embraces the fact that, as an American composer, he is a link

in a chain of successive acculturation facilitated by past transoceanic cultural
exchanges.
The steady evolution of Adams’s music out of minimalism was accompa-
nied by significant developments in the realm of elaborate polyphonic and
polyrhythmic writing. His works were inspired by, among others, the great
vocal polyphonies of Bach and Handel; the melodic interweaving of Mahler;
the polyrhythms of Conlon Nancarrow; and the heterophonies of Charles
Ives. In the course of his evolution Adams also opened up to other languages
than conventional tonality. In Absolute Jest (2011) and The Gospel According to
the Other Mary, Adams conceived passages that are reminiscent of the ato-
nality of the Second Viennese School. On the Transmigration of Souls (2002),
for orchestra, chorus, children’s choir, and pre-recorded tape, features disso-
nant harmonies that are comparable to those used by avant-garde composers,
but without seeking to reject consonant chords. When Anthony Tommasini
reviewed the piece for the New York Times he asserted that ‘The richness and
solemnity of this music come primarily from its harmony, a subtle mix of
sturdy tonality and anxious, stacked-up orchestra chords spiked with shards
of dissonance.’26 In The Gospel, Adams’s play with tone color and orchestration
was particularly elaborate. Due to the exceptional diversity of atmospheres it
creates, the orchestra is the main protagonist in the work. The orchestral pas-
sage illustrating the death of Lazarus consists of lengthy sustained sounds,
which are in line with some orchestral pages of so-called ‘modernist’ com-
posers interested in the ‘exploration’ of sound (Giacinto Scelsi, among many
others); the scene of Mary’s awakening is accompanied by a rich orchestration
that recalls the ‘Daybreak’ of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé.
25 Adams, Hallelujah Junction, pp. 103–4.

26 Anthony Tommasini, ‘Washed in the Sound of Souls in Transit’, New York Times,
21 September 2002.

The complexification and undeniable enrichment of musical language

must not be understood as a qualitative ‘improvement’ of Adams’s music. It
is also not a continuous artistic ‘redemption’ expiating the liking for mini-
malism and the simplicity of its compositional processes. It can be rather
seen as a coherent evolution of a demanding and independent creative
journey that refuses historical amnesia as much as it does ‘scientific’ her-
meticism, with a complex theoretical substrate to justify its existence. John
Adams has always refused to make a distinction between the high and the
common, the present and the past; he has always mixed genres and styles,
flowing smoothly from one to the other. For him, it was out of the ques-
tion that he might abandon his aspirations for a highly elaborate though
accessible art, because those aspirations involved the enrichment of the lis-
tener’s mind and sensitivity. Adams’s creative approach becomes especially
evident in his use of Beethoven’s music as a model and source of inspiration,
twenty-five years after Grand Pianola Music.
In Search of Accessibility: Playing with Detritus
Adams has indicated that his main interest lies not in those of Beethoven’s
works that are greatly appreciated by the world-wide general public (par-
ticularly the symphonies and concertos), but in the late string quartets and
the late piano sonatas, which exhibit most clearly Beethoven’s originality and
inventiveness. Some of these works are almost inaccessible, particularly in
their form and ‘control’ of musical ideas. Yet Adams has loved the Beethoven
string quartets since he was a teenager.27 This early interest, however, mani-
fests itself only in later compositions, such as Absolute Jest for string quartet
and orchestra, and his String Quartet no. 2 (2014). In both pieces Adams
explicitly references Beethoven through quotations. In Absolute Jest, a half
dozen quotations of brief fragments stem from the Scherzo of the Symphony
no. 9 and the scherzos from the late string quartets in C♯ minor, op. 131, and
in F major, op. 135.28 Before Absolute Jest, quotations were relatively infre-
quent in Adams’s music and, within one work, had never been taken almost
exclusively from one single composer.
As in many of Adams’s works, the Beethoven quotations in Absolute Jest
are not an end in themselves. There is a certain amount of humor and irony in
the way he skillfully juggles them, almost like a jester, as indicated in the title.
27 John Adams, ‘On Absolute Jest’, http://www.earbox.com/absolute-jest/ (accessed 6

September 2018).
28 In this work, Adams also refers to Beethoven’s Große Fuge in B minor, op. 133, to
the opening fugue of the String Quartet no. 14 in C♯ minor, op. 131; and to the Piano
Sonata in C major, ‘Waldstein’, op. 53.

66 MAX NOUBEL
Adams clearly plays with the meaning of the Italian word scherzo, that is joke
or jest. But there is nothing new or very surprising in this ironic, humoristic,
and slightly provocative use of classical music. Adams does not seek to destroy
prestigious icons (consider, by way of contrast, the more iconoclastic approach
of Mauricio Kagel in his Ludwig van of 1969, even if this work is ultimately
a tribute to the great German composer). Adams’s interest lies in capturing
the unique dynamism of the Beethovenian scherzo and combining it with the
energy inherent in his own music. He asserts that ‘if the combination of solo
and tutti forces in Absolute Jest succeeds, it’s likely due to the fact that the solo
quartet’s music is firmly anchored in Beethoven’s original gestures, creating a
dynamic tension with its orchestral counterpart’.29
Ultimately, Adams is interested in creating a work that transforms
the musical material of the Beethovenian quartets into a sound uniquely
Adamsian while never denying the influence of many different sources.
When Adams composed Absolute Jest he was thinking about Igor Stravinsky’s
Pulcinella, in which the composer skillfully selected, arranged, and occasion-
ally transposed music by Pergolesi. If Pergolesi began then to sound like
Stravinsky, in Absolute Jest Beethoven sounds like Adams. In neither work
does the musical ‘spirit’ of the illustrious model disappear, nor is the trans-
formation rooted in a respective style, since the music diffuses more or less
ephemeral traces of the past in the course of the work.
Adding to the complexity of Absolute Jest are subtle references to
Schoenberg and Stravinsky (among others). Well-informed music lovers
will be able to hear these traces of the past and may be able to identify the
influence of these composers. Still, it is not always easy to connect the traces
to specific works as they are not literal quotes, just stylistic allusions that at
times approximate the spirit of a specific work. Certain passages, for instance,
are reminiscent of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and Pétrouchka, or Arnold
Schoenberg’s Kammersymphonie, op. 9. Only in the finale does Adams allow
himself to make a clear reference to a specific work that is not Beethovenian.
He quotes a few measures from the fifth and final movement of Béla Bartók’s
Concerto for Orchestra.30 That aside, in spite of all the stylistic heterogene-
ity rooted in compositions of the past, the work does not lose its unity but
maintains stylistic singularity. Indeed, Adams is not seeking to summarize
moments of music history through the highly erudite development of ref-
erences to Beethoven scherzos, and allusions or ephemeral stylistic borrow-
ings from other composers. His approach differs from that of Luciano Berio,
who recomposed a sort of history of orchestral music in the third movement,
29 John Adams, ‘Adams on Adams’, in Absolute Jest; Grand Pianola Music, CD liner
notes, SFS media 821936-0063-2 (2015), p. 6.
30 Adams quotes the string passage of measure 8 of Bartók’s piece in his prestissimo
passage, measure 955, also played by the strings.

‘In ruhig fließender Bewegung’, of his Sinfonia (1968/9). In Berio’s work

there are many transitory musical quotations, from Bach to Globokar, with
the Scherzo from Gustav Mahler’s Symphony no. 2, ‘Resurrection’, played in
its entirety in the background. The coherence and sense of unity in Berio’s
work stem from the kaleidoscopic effect produced by the rapid succession of
numerous fragments of works from different eras. In contrast, the coherence
of Adams’s work is part of a wider, more discursive, and truly pluristylistic
approach to borrowed materials that appear in a ‘musical scenario’ composed
of various events and atmospheres.
In this way Adams’s music is based on the oxymoron of plural unicity.
Indeed, its coherence and its deep originality are to be found in the way it
absorbs and ‘digests’ the great diversity of Western styles—all this ‘detritus’,
all this déjà vu—to regenerate their power of expression without debasing
the material and without remaining at a superficial level. Adams’s work is not
based on a mere manipulation or collage of this detritus, these ‘lost objects’.
His post-stylism seems to want to leave the beaten tracks of postmodernism
by showing us that, in this global ‘world-village’, so culturally interpenetrated,
the uses of a near or more remote past no longer need to be as ostentatious,
and sometimes militant, as they were in the 1960s, 1970s, and even in the
1980s. References to the past have circulated and acted in many ways in the
most varied of cultural spheres, from the most commercial to the most experi-
mental and most independent. Today, historicism, which the American liter-
ary critic Fredric Jameson has called the ‘cannibalization of all the styles of
the past’, no longer has any real reason to worry.31
Post-stylism as Collective Cultural Subconscious
Adams wisely avoids claiming that his music has universal impact—a claim
that would not hold anyway in a globalized world of perpetual change. His
post-stylism is a means of reaching the collective cultural consciousness of
the Western sphere, which is geographically and culturally variable. But it can
also reach a part of its collective cultural subconscious as evident in two more
examples.
The second movement of the piano concerto Century Rolls (1997),
‘Manny’s Gym’, evokes the slow movement of Maurice Ravel’s Concerto in G
major; its title refers to Érik Satie’s Gymnopédies and to Emanuel Ax’s nick-
name, ‘Manny’. But what Adams manages to do here goes beyond a nostal-
gic and sentimental attachment to these famous French works; it is not just
about imitation or pastiche either. It is not just ‘playing with the pieces’. The
31Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham,
NC, 1991), p. 18.

68 MAX NOUBEL
movement is more about the subtle creation of an ineffable and, maybe, partly
subconscious feeling in the listener of going to the very heart of a certain
spirit of French music; a feeling aroused by the transparency of the sound
material and the slightly melancholic delicacy of the melodic lines. Each lis-
tener will feel in his or her own way this ineffable feeling—a learned or imag-
ined knowledge of the French spirit. This middle movement is framed by two
movements that, in expression, are completely different from it. Indeed, they
invoke American piano music by Gershwin, Nancarrow, or Jelly Roll; they
are extrovert in nature and full of rhythmic vitality. Still, Adams does not
treat these allusions superficially, with clichéd prototypes and gestures. When
he feels the need to use them, they always appear in a discreet and ephem-
eral way. In these framing movements full of rhythmic energy, he plays sensi-
tively on something more ineffable, something that belongs specifically to the
American spirit but, due to the phenomenon of cultural globalization, can be
understood and appreciated beyond the shores of North America.
The great symphonic triptych City Noir (2009) also exhibits different sty-
listic traces that can be interpreted in various ways. It represents Adams’s read-
ing of Kevin Starr’s comprehensive cultural and social history of California,
Embattled Dreams, and particularly of ‘Black Dahlia’, a chapter that covers the
sensational journalism and film noir of the late 1940s and early 1950s.32 In the
program note to his work, Adams quotes the following passage from Starr:
the underside of home-front and post-war Los Angeles stood revealed. Still,
for all its shoddiness, the City of Angels possessed a certain sassy, savvy energy.
It was, among other things, a Front Page kind of town where life was lived by
many on the edge, and that made for good copy and good film noir.33
Adams was also inspired by the works of the photographer and photojournal-
ist Arthur (Usher) Fellig (1899–1968), known under his pseudonym Weegee
and celebrated for his stark black-and-white street photography. Many of his
photos represent realistic scenes of urban life, crime, injury, and death.
By composing City Noir Adams wanted to capture both the intensity and
the drama of the 1940s. He explains:
Those images and their surrounding aura whetted my appetite for an orches-
tral work that, while not necessarily referring to the soundtracks of those films,
might nevertheless evoke a similar mood and feeling tone of the era. I was
also stimulated by the notion that there indeed exists a bona fide genre of
jazz-inflected symphonic music, a fundamentally American orchestral style
and tradition that goes as [sic] back as far as the early 1920’s (although, truth
to tell, it was a Frenchman, Darius Milhaud, who was the first to realize its
32 Kevin Starr, Embattled Dreams (Oxford and New York, 2003), see especially pp.
213–40.
33 Ibid., p. 213.

potential with his 1923 ballet La création du monde, a year before Gershwin’s
Rhapsody in Blue premiered in New York).34
Adams created a sort of ‘soundtrack without the movie’, so that listen-

ers could imagine their own scenarios fed by the different stylistic traces.
The dramatic construction of City Noir consists less of unfolding a number
of situations and ‘events’ than of attempting to capture the very essence of a
cinematographic genre through different states of musical tensions that sug-
gest psychological states or atmospheres. In this orchestral triptych, Adams’s
art lies in his ability to express that faint anxiety, those pallid colors, and that
dangerous menace behind the shadows, away from the artificial lights, all of
which characterize the typically American noir genres (especially film and
image). And yet there is no need to be a cinema enthusiast to embrace and
inhale the unique atmosphere Adams created. Cultural globalization has led
to the dissemination of so many jazz-inflected symphonic soundtracks from
the cinematographic genre that appropriation comes easily. Adams created
a paradox in which the noir genre can be perceived as both ‘authentic’ and
original, renewed, and at the same time refreshingly ‘vintage’. Here Adams’s
post-stylist approach ‘validates’ the intimate representation of this facet of
American music culture which is now widely diffused outside the country’s
frontiers. The concept of post-stylism, which has been enriched in the course
of many compositional experiments by the absorption of the new ‘detritus’
and by the complexification of Adams’s musical language, has enabled him to
create networks of meaning that reach the sensitivity of numerous listeners in
the world, and at many levels.
Post-stylism as Critique of Other ‘Isms’
If postmodernism is understood literally as after modernism, then the era of

post-stylism would logically indicate after style. This could imply a moment in
history that has no particular style attributed to it. Still, it is obvious that every
composer has a style or, at least, searches to have one. For most modern com-
posers, the issue of style is crucial, but for Adams it has no sense if its quest is
an end in itself and if it no longer reflects the influences of the past. Adams’s
point of view is clearly linked to an implicit critique of the late-twentieth-cen-
tury radical musical avant-garde, and, specifically, of serialism which, despite
disdaining or even rejecting the musical past, appealed to many American com-
posers.35 As the composer Jacob Druckman ironically remarked, ‘not being a
34 John Adams, ‘On City Noir’, http://www.earbox.com/city-noir/ (accessed 6

September 2018).
35 See Joseph N. Straus, Twelve-Tone Music in America (New York, 2014).

70 MAX NOUBEL
serialist on the East Coast of the United States in the sixties was like not being
a Catholic in Rome in the thirteenth century’.36 In this respect, it is significant
that Adams has always been critical of the musical vanguards and their utopic
quest for novelty.37 For him, any avant-gardist approach to musical composition
can certainly enable the artist to achieve fame through the original character of
his or her creation, but it leads only to isolation or confinement within groups
of composers. Adams explains this attitude as follows:
By composing the kind of self-referential, complex, difficult music that has

evolved during the latter part of the twentieth century, these composers have
abnegated their place in the culture. The music they compose does not have
the cultural influence that the music of the great composers of the nineteenth
and eighteenth century had.38
Adams does not critique serialism alone as a compositional method, he

critiques all avant-gardist styles. For Adams, composers of the later twentieth
century have broken the link with most classical-music lovers, whom they
have more or less consciously ignored by neglecting the issue of the accessi-
bility of their musical language. In a conversation with Edward Strickland in
1990 Adams pointed out:
What’s happened in twentieth-century art in general, but particularly classi-

cal music, is that it’s gone in a very wrongheaded direction and become very
self-referential. Systems of musical grammar become developed that are virtu-
ally solipsistic and have no relationship to the lingua franca, musical or emo-
tional . . . I see in the serial composers, Babbitt, the European avant-garde, that
their music is inaccessible and tends to be music about itself or similar music.39
Audiences cannot relate to a music that does not speak to them, and whose
language they do not understand. In this way, music has lost the unifying
power it exerted in previous centuries beyond the famous factional squab-
bles through music history. For Adams, Milton Babbitt’s famous words
‘Who Cares if You Listen?’ reveal a lot about this ultra-elitist, anti-audience
approach to music.40 He critically remarks:
36 Interview with Jacob Druckman, Soundpieces: Interviews with American Composers,

ed. Cole Gagne and Tracy Caras (Metuchen, NJ, 1982), p. 156.
37 In an interview conducted by Jacques Doucelin, Adams went so far as to say that
he hated the avant-garde, see ‘John Adams: “Je hais l’avant-garde!”’, Le Figaro, 13
December 1991.
38 Palmer, dir., Hail Bop!
39 Strickland, American Composers, pp. 188–9.
40 See Milton Babbitt, ‘Who Cares if You Listen? [original title: The Composer as
Specialist]’, High Fidelity 8, no. 2 (1958), 38–40, 126–7.

[Babbitt] was far and away better known for his essay . . . ‘Who Cares if You
Listen?’ than he was for his original compositions. He may not have been
responsible for the controversial phrase—an editor had apparently changed
it without Babbitt’s permission from its original title . . . but the fact that
‘Who Cares if You Listen?’ lodged in people’s minds like an advertising jingle
confirmed a general malignant feeling about the arrogance of contemporary
composers.41
For Adams, even minimalist composers such as Steve Reich or Philipp

Glass did not ‘escape’ a modernist approach to composition. As Robert
Schwarz already noted over ten years before Adams’s assessment, minimal-
ists—just like serialists—‘were seeking a systematic method for constructing
music, and their watchword was originality—the rallying cry of the avant-
garde’.42 In contrast, John Adams has fully embraced what is generally con-
sidered the lack of ‘originality’: ‘All my music has this feeling of déjà vu. The
issue of vanguardism, the whole avant-garde, has burned itself out. As we
approach the end of this century, there is an exhaustion of this intense need
to run the barricades, to forge ahead to the future.’43 The hitherto discussed
examples from Adams’s vast musical output confirm that he has stayed true
to this belief.
Indeed, Adams has never shown interest in the quest for novelty at all
costs. For him, a resolutely progressive vision of musical creation seems futile.
The pursuit to be ‘modern’, that is to systematically and critically position
oneself vis-à-vis tradition and to continuously seek new languages and prin-
ciples, can be problematic if the work disconnects audience from composer.
The idea of post-stylism enabled Adams to escape from boundaries raised by
modernist ideologies (including minimalism), which defended both rigid cre-
ative subjectivity and cold objectivity of musical languages. For Adams, find-
ing a personal creative path did not lead to rejecting the styles of the past but,
on the contrary, led him to fully embrace and freely use them. In post-stylism,
a composer’s own style would result from the potential to renew everything
that the past has left behind. In this way, what Adams termed post-stylism
could be renamed dia-stylism as it refers to a constant development of creative
thinking through the abundant diversity of pre-existing styles. It is rooted in
his belief that American music will not find a new Mozart who leaves an
original trail, that a composer can no longer approach creation with ingenuity,
innocence, or virginity:
One could make the point that being naïve in our time is simply not pos-
sible, that to be naïve, one would have to feign innocence at a time when all is
41 Adams, Hallelujah Junction, p. 31.

42 Robert K. Schwarz, Minimalists (London, 1996), pp. 179–80.
43 Ibid., p. 182.

72 MAX NOUBEL
known about everything: ‘been there, done that’. Indeed, a symphony informed
by symphonies of Bruckner, themselves informed by operas of Wagner and the
symphonies of Beethoven, could not hope to claim any truly naïve ground.44
Adams’s post-stylism is more than a mere response to the styles prevalent

in the late twentieth century. It is a personal critique. But in spite of his wish
to be placed beyond musical categories and currents and, in a way, beyond all
‘isms’—as Varèse would have put it—his post-stylism nonetheless expresses a
postmodernist attitude. It abandons the idea of the constant search for prog-
ress in art, or the quest for an utopian ‘never heard’, which the composer no
longer seems to believe in. It also abandons the idea of the metanarrative of
modernism that had formed the basis of the major intellectual and artistic
currents since the Age of the Enlightenment.45 Indeed, Adams’s vehement
non-belief in the avant-garde seems to justify his reliance on multiple and
fragmented pasts, which serve as the ‘raw material’ for works of re-creation
that are inevitably conceived with a (sometimes ironic) distance from history,
transcending geographic boundaries, and transgressing artistic and cultural
hierarchies. John Adams’s post-stylism ultimately suggests agreement with
Frederic Jameson, who thought that the surest way of grasping the concept of
the postmodern is ‘to think the present historically in an age that has forgot-
ten how to think historically’.46
Despite his vehement statements against the vanguards, Adams’s post-
stylism conceptualizes anything but an unadventurous and reactionary artistic
attitude. Indeed, the composer faces the globalized world of our time with
optimism and with a constantly renewed inventiveness that keeps his music
far away from the risks of standardization and cultural impoverishment.
Adams’s imposing output attests to his conviction that the true originality of
a composer lies in his searching for new expressions of accessible art music
rooted in the longue durée of composition.
44 Adams, Hallelujah Junction, p. 257.

45 The concept of meta- or grand narrative (Lyotard called one of its forms the
‘emancipation narrative’) focuses on a tight interconnection between events, sys-
tems, concepts, and conditions closely related to one another and able to make sense
of history. According to Lyotard, postmodernists think of metanarratives as old fash-
ioned and oppressive as one excludes another; see Jean-François Lyotard, La condi-
tion postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (Paris: Minuit, 1979), published in English as
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian
Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
46 Jameson, Postmodernism, p. ix.

Part II
Manifestations of History

4
Germany, Post Modernism,

and the Sphericity of Time
Laurenz Lütteken
One of the celebrated promises of the twentieth century was the arrival of an
art without any constrictions. Its fulfillment would lie in the consolidation—if
not indissociable entanglement—of ethics and aesthetics, which would appear
as a novel, never-previously-experienced affirmation solely of its own action.
Suffering the realities of society afforded the artist the opportunity to partic-
ipate in the dynamism of continuous progress. The work created under such
circumstances would draw its aesthetic claim from an ethical and ultimately
political consciousness. Émile Zola’s J’accuse of 1901, which demonstratively
blends aesthetic and ethical imperatives, constitutes the starting point for this
way of thinking.1 In turn, to consider the countless persecuted and disenfran-
chised individuals—the tormented and murdered artists—one must suspend
aesthetic judgment. For when the price paid for a work is nothing less than the
artist’s life, that work moves into a realm that transcends the aesthetic.
Music was not excluded from these developments. The debate about
modernism in music, which Felix Draeseke initiated by attacking Richard
Strauss’s Salome in 1906, led to fierce affirmations and counter-affirmations of
all kinds.2 The then emerging connection of a liberating dissolution of bound-
aries (achieved through the progress of the so-called material) with aesthetic
authenticity had profound consequences. The supposedly ungraspable art of
ideas surrendered to the reality of the twentieth century, like everything else,
but not without euphoric activity. Absorbed with its own project, this activ-
ity was almost stifled but did not in the least soften under the dictatorships
of Stalin and Hitler.3 Unlike any other aesthetic proposal in music, the art of
1 For further context, see Joseph Jurt, Frankreichs engagierte Intellektuelle: Von Zola bis
Bourdieu (Göttingen, 2012).
2 See Felix Draeseke, ‘Die Konfusion in der Musik’, Neue Musik-Zeitung 28 (1906),
1–7; see also Susanne Shigihara, ed., ‘Die Konfusion in der Musik’: Felix Draesekes
Kampfschrift von 1906 und ihre Folgen (Bonn, 1989).
3 The infamous Düsseldorf exhibition on ‘degenerate music’ of 1938 notoriously met
progressiveness with an horrific mixture of defamation, mockery, and aggression; see

Albrecht Dümling and Peter Girth, Entartete Musik: Zur Düsseldorfer Ausstellung von
1938; Eine kommentierte Rekonstruktion (Düsseldorf, 1988).

76 LAURENZ LÜTTEKEN
ideas had historical impact, even guaranteeing musicians their long-awaited

immediate participation in the realities of society.
In a similar vein, any twenty-first-century reader of Adorno’s Philosophie
der neuen Musik of 1949 might be surprised, even alienated, by the superior
stance of his polemic dogmaticism, and the ostentatious and startling refusal
of balanced reflection.4 Indeed, one is left wondering why this text had such
an enormous effect. The facile decision to divide music history into good and
evil, while leaving no doubt that the aesthetically noble is always ethically
virtuous, and therefore both are valid, may have arrived from an actual renun-
ciation of reflection.
This line of thinking has produced manifold contradictions, evident not
merely in later-twentieth-century totalitarianism, but more concretely in the
allegiances of some musicians. Biographies like Hanns Eisler’s—a persecutee
who without hesitation placed himself in the service of the post-Stalinist
GDR—are perplexing.5 Those who did not succumb to the dogmas of an
aesthetics-turned-ethics, such as Paul Hindemith, had to be steadfast and
incontestable in one way or another. Those who resisted that aesthetics, per-
ceiving it as repressive, detached themselves, as did Bernd Alois Zimmermann
(1918–70). The aesthetics of musical material, which after 1950 became more
and more dominant through a growing dogmaticism (accompanied by the
ever-sharpening hagiographical-messianic features of the Schoenberg recep-
tion) continued even in times when doubts about its foundation became more
pronounced. As musical modernism implied liberation, it became necessary to
perpetually preserve the provocative, the radical, the resisting, and the disturb-
ing aspects of this liberation as a bronze law, even when the bourgeoisie was
no longer part of everyday musical performance. Hardly had a terminological
repertoire been worn out like this in the debates about music. The music was
‘freed’ even when nothing could be liberated anymore. When Adorno, in his
Ästhetische Theorie of 1973, declared the liberation of the hidden as an essen-
tial feature of dialectical-musical progress, nothing remained to be liberated.6
In the early 1970s the belief in the eternally outrageous had turned into the
convention of the unconventional, the conformism of non-conformism—and
thus a comfortable implicitness.
One composer who positioned himself against this complex reality, and
with seismographic precision, was Zimmermann. His importance as the chief
German-speaking composer of the second half of the twentieth century has
reached public consciousness only of late, after his death. His doubts about
4 See Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik, 5th edn (Frankfurt am Main,
1989).
5 See Hanns Eisler, ‘Brief nach Westdeutschland’, Sinn und Form 3 (1951), 14–24.
6 See Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf
Tiedemann, 14th edn (Frankfurt am Main, 1998), pp. 168–70.

GERMANY, POST MODERNISM, AND THE SPHERICITY OF TIME 77
the self-indulgent imaginations of a continuously self-substantiating avant-

garde became evident in their full magnitude only after the end of the ‘dog-
matic age’ (the new music paradigm as put forward by the composers active in
Darmstadt), and this contributed to the slow reception of his works. His last
work, the ecclesiastic action for two narrators, bass, and orchestra titled ‘Ich
wandte mich und sah an alles Unrecht, das geschah unter der Sonne’ (‘I returned
and considered all the oppressions that occurred under the sun’), of 1970,
constitutes much more than an autobiographical tail end. The unconditional,
deeply romantic connection between his life and work under the influence of
the twentieth century receives new, hardly graspable validity, for the comple-
tion of the score is accompanied by the extinction of its creator’s physical exis-
tence. Zimmermann took his own life two days after finishing the score—a
terrible, irrevocable response to the distortions of one’s own time.
Quite contrary to the prevailing zeitgeist, Zimmermann made compos-
ing a process of historical exploration, and in 1967 captured it through the
philosophical concept of Kugelgestalt der Zeit (sphericity of time).7 Expressing
fundamental doubts about the concept of linear progression, and being rooted
in Augustine’s thought on ephemeral moments in time that overlap with the
past and future in a permanent present, sphericity of time argues for a unity of
past, present, and future that knows no ‘old’, no contemporary, and no futur-
istic music.
The critical potential of this metaphor was long underestimated, although
it programmatically entered the titles of Zimmermann’s work of the 1960s,
such as Die Befristeten (The numbered), Présence, and Stille und Umkehr
(Stillness and return). It also manifested itself in quotations from multiple
periods and in the juxtaposition of plots from different periods in his theatri-
cal works. His works were hardly noticed and aesthetic challenges remained
for German composers. Only gradually did the linearity of history as manifest
in aesthetic and compositional progress come to be doubted, a doubt that
7 Hans Werner Zimmermann, ‘Einige Thesen über das Verhältnis von Film und
Musik’, Intervall und Zeit: Aufsätze und Schriften zum Werk, ed. Christof Bitter
(Mainz, 1974), p. 54; he elaborated on it the following year in ‘Vom Handwerk des
Komponisten’: ‘Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft sind, wie wir wissen, lediglich
an ihrer Erscheinung als kosmische Zeit an den Vorgang der Sukzession gebunden. In
unserer geistigen Wirklichkeit existiert diese Sukzession jedoch nicht, was eine realere
Wirklichkeit besitzt als die uns wohlvertraute Uhr, die ja im Grunde nichts anderes
anzeigt, als dass es keine Gegenwart im strengeren Sinne gibt. Die Zeit biegt sich zu
einer Kugelgestalt zusammen. Aus dieser Vorstellung . . . habe ich meine . . . pluralist-
ische Kompositionstechnik entwickelt, die der Vielschichtigkeit unserer Wirklichkeit
Rechnung trägt’. Bitter, ed., Intervall und Zeit, p. 35; see also Jörn Peter Hiekel,
‘Auskomponierte Widersprüchlichkeit: Bernd Alois Zimmermanns Zeitauffassung
und deren historischer Ort’, Musik-Konzepte: Sonderband Bernd Alois Zimmermann
(2005), 5–23.

eventually became a leading trope of the early twenty-first century, perhaps

even its focus.
This essay focuses on three German composers in whose (symphonic)
works these doubts are crystallized and who, as we shall see, stand in constel-
lation to Zimmermann. The work of Killmayer (1927–2017), as the earliest
of the three, belongs to a period in which the paradigm of a boundary-elim-
inating modernism had become brittle, that is around 1970. The symphonic
output of Jürg Baur (1918–2010) falls into a time when these doubts had
grown stronger, as systematically articulated in the composer’s works of the
1970s and 1980s. Largely conceived in the twenty-first century, the oeuvre
of Isabel Mundry (1963–) can be understood as a clear and creative reac-
tion against both genre traditions and modernism. To be sure, the works of
these three composers are utterly heterogeneous in style and expression, albeit
sharing a similar cultural context, namely that of later postwar Germany.
Stemming from different generations, the composers represent ver y differ-
ent compositional approaches indeed. What ultimately binds them together
is their relation to history in the aftermath of Zimmermann. All three turn
against the aesthetics and styles of the recent past, distancing themselves from
the modernism of the earlier and later twentieth century. In order to depart
from and overcome the dogmatic premises of modernism, they relied—
among other things—on very different (music) historical moments, thereby
uniquely connecting a (distant) past with the present. Their works are testi-
mony to an increasing awareness of historicity from the 1970s onward and
paved the way for a future gradually liberated from modernism’s self-accred-
iting dogmaticism.
Historicizing the Symphony: Wilhelm Killmayer
With regard to the symphony, the second half of the twentieth century is a
historically significant time, in spite of the fundamental skepticism toward the
genre in the context of the ‘Darmstadt paradigm’. Christoph von Blumröder’s
assertion of a ‘more or less complete disintegration of the genre’ from the
1940s and 1950s onward did not, however, correlate with the compositional
reality and can therefore be deemed simply an ideologically founded con-
struction.8 Indeed, the assumption of a crisis had been an essential part of
the genre’s evolution from the nineteenth century onward. Since the early
8 ‘ . . . mehr oder minder völligen Zerfall der Gattung’; Christoph von Blumröder,
‘Einleitung’, Die Symphonie im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. II: Stationen der Symphonik seit
1900, ed. Christoph von Blumröder and Wolfram Steinbeck (Laaber, 2002), p. 96.
For a critical assessment, see Ulrich Konrad, ‘Die “Symphonie liturgique” von Arthur
Honegger und die Tradition der Sinfonie um 1945’, Musik-Konzepte 135 (2007), 27–9.

twentieth century, symphonic writing has been heavily preoccupied with this
seeming paradox, acknowledging the impossibility of writing symphonies
even in the very act of doing so. This paradox also extends into the later twen-
tieth century, when such composers as Igor Stravinsky and Arthur Honegger
embraced the symphony as a creative framework through which to react to
World War II—past the evolving postulates of the dialectic materialism that
had begun to predominate in music.
Although composers were skeptical of the genre of the symphony—ques-
tioning even whether it should continue to exist—that critical engagement
ultimately led to a large number of ambitious contributions after 1945, which
regardless of their differences continue to dominate symphonic thinking. The
composers fall roughly into two camps: there are those whose symphonic
oeuvre is limited to a single, but often spectacular, work—among them are
Wolfgang Fortner and his abstract and pathos-laden symphony of 1947;
Olivier Messiaen and his exuberant Turangalîla-symphonie of 1948, which
responds to its time with unbroken optimism; and Zimmermann with his
monumental yet concise Symphony in einem Satz of 1951/3, which challenges
time and form.9 These works invoke a quasi-continuous lineage of the genre
while putting it uniquely into focus at the same time.
Then there are the numerous composers who wrote multiple symphonies,
often returning to the genre again and again throughout their careers. This
group includes Dmitri Shostakovich (fifteen symphonies), Paul Hindemith
(six unnumbered symphonies), Alfred Schnittke (eight symphonies), Galina
Ustvolskaja (five completely heterogeneous symphonies), Witold Lutosławski
(three symphonies), Krzysztof Penderecki (thus far seven symphonies), Roy
Harris (thirteen symphonies), Henry Cowell (twenty-one symphonies),
Alan Scott Hovhaness (sixty symphonies), Jürg Baur (six symphonic works
of which two are quasi-symphonies), Karl Amadeus Hartmann (eight sym-
phonies), and Hans Werner Henze (ten symphonies).10 Apart from canoni-
cal composers, there are also lesser-known contributors to the genre, such as
Havergal Brian (1876–1972), who wrote twenty-three of his thirty-two sym-
phonies between the ages of seventy-five and ninety-two, and Leif Segerstam
(1944–), who has completed over 300 symphonic works since 1977—an
example of the enduring appeal of the genre.11 Indeed, the venerable genre
survives into the twenty-first century, albeit sometimes in absurdist mode, as
9 It is significant that only a few of these works, especially those of Messiaen

and Berio, attracted the attention of music scholars. In spite of the prominence of
Zimmermann’s symphonies, a differentiated examination has not yet occurred.
10 In-depth study on the history of the genre in the twentieth century, especially
in its second half, is still in its infancy; for a noteworthy contribution see Ludwig
Finscher, ‘Symphonie’, MGG Online.
11 See Jürgen Schaarwächter, ed., Aspects of Havergal Brian (Aldershot, 1997).

in Spring Symphony: The Joy of Life (2002) by the German–British composer

Michael Wolter (1971–), which lasts just 16 seconds.
Within the mosaic of different symphonic approaches—ranging from
refusal and evasion, to one-time experimentation, to long-term devotion to
the genre—Wilhelm Killmayer’s work occupies a unique space. By 1968 he
had produced a rich oeuvre of vocal music, stage works, instrumental music
(both orchestral works and chamber music), and works for piano—but not a
single symphony. This suddenly changed with a series of three works titled
Sinfonia I (Fogli) of 1968, Sinfonia 2 (Ricordanze) of 1969, and Symphonie III
(Menschen-Los) of 1973. Thereafter, his symphonic writing ceased.
To contextualize, Killmayer’s interest in the symphony as genre began
when he had just turned forty, and extends through the 1970s, a time when
when many would have questioned the symphony’s relevance, particularly in
the context of an apparently irrefutably self-asserting new music. The effect of
this skepticism that enveloped Killmayer’s symphonic phase can perhaps be
discerned in the long break between Henze’s sixth and seventh symphonies
(1969 and 1983/4, respectively), and the gap between Lutosławski’s second
symphony, completed in 1967, and his third, composed in 1983 (though sig-
nificant counterexamples exist as well, such as Michael Tippett’s continuous
work; and with Penderecki’s first symphony, composed in 1973, an important
new series of the genre begins).
Killmayer’s three symphonies emerged in intense and rapid succession.
Together they form a compelling and unique series, not in the sense of form-
ing an overarching cycle (contrasting thus with the work of Isang Yun, twenty
years later), but as independent works that considerably differ in instrumenta-
tion and duration.12 Killmayer’s series of symphonic works extends further
with four contributions in which he loosely adheres to the genre, as evident in
the quasi-symphonic designation of the Vier Poèmes symphoniques: Jugendzeit
(1977), as well as Verschüttete Zeichen (subtitled ‘Essay symphonique’, 1977/8),
Überstehen und Hoffen (1977/8), and Im Freien (1980). The large-scale orches-
tral work Nachtgedanken (1973), conceived for the Salzburg Festival and
lacking a genre designation, serves as a hinge, as it originated after the third
symphony and before the first symphonic poem.13
Taken together, Killmayer’s (quasi-)symphonic oeuvre thus falls within a
period of just over ten years. There is nothing comparable in his work before
12 See Ae-Kyung Choi, Einheit und Mannigfaltigkeit: Eine Studie zu den fünf
Symphonien von Isang Yun (Sinzig, 2002); and Ilja Stephan, ‘Isang Yun: Die fünf
Symphonien—Eine hermeneutische Rekonstruktion’, Musik-Konzepte 109/10 (2002),
6–170.
13 Also worthy of mention is Paradies, which Siegfried Mauser wrongly classified
as an orchestral work, although it was written for chamber ensemble; see Siegfried
Mauser, ‘Killmayer, Wilhelm’, MGG Online.

1968, and nothing has followed since 1980. In this brief period, however,
Killmayer avows an active, functioning lineage for the genre that reaches
beyond the individual work. Symphonic music as a compositional task and
challenge appears abruptly in his oeuvre, then disappears almost as suddenly,
foreshadowed only by the skeptical withdrawal into poèmes symphoniques and
one ‘essay symphonique’.
Completed during the historically significant year of 1968, Killmayer’s
first symphony emerged during a difficult moment for new music. A funda-
mental skepticism is uttered in works that appeared around the time of its
conception, among them Zimmermann’s Photoptosis, Ligeti’s Lontano, Berio’s
Sinfonia, Britten’s Death in Venice, and Shostakovich’s late string quartets. Yet
the title Sinfonia I does not merely signal that this is the composer’s first foray
into the genre, but also suggests that there will be others—a continued explo-
ration that had already been conceived at the time of the first symphony’s
creation. Indeed, the scores of Killmayer’s first two symphonies were pub-
lished in one volume. The title also places the genre into historical perspective,
invoking the early history of the symphony when such pieces were designated
as sinfonias. This move introduces a state of abstraction or critical distance,
which assumes a decisive generic feature: the will to compose a symphony in
the face of skepticism toward the genre itself, which is thus both near and far
at the same time. Killmayer’s first two symphonies also use the Italian word
as true title. It is only with the third that the composer deliberately recalls the
formal name of the genre, following its traditional scope in line with Mahler
and Sibelius,14 but not merely as the third symphony, but counted with his-
torizing Roman numerals, as Symphonie III.15
Another trait in Killmayer’s symphonism that evokes historicity is the
adherence to a program: the first and second adopt Italian titles, the third
uses the descriptor Menschen-Los. His four symphonic poems as well as
Nachtgedanken even open with programmatic titles, followed by genre des-
ignation. Given the symphony’s being generally considered an abstract genre,
Killmayer’s programmatic approach is particularly noteworthy. The subti-
tle of the first symphony, fogli, denotes leaves in the broadest sense of the
word, including the sheets of a manuscript. Ricordanze, the subtitle of the
second symphony, refers to memories and souvenirs. In both works, there-
fore, the fragmentation of memory is expressly placed in the foreground. The
14 See Wilhelm Killmayer, ‘Einführung zur Uraufführung der Symphonie III’;

quoted after Peter Kiesewetter and Wolfgang Thein, ‘Abbrechen, als ob es weiterginge:
Wilhelm Killmayers Symphonie III (“Menschen-Los”)’, Der Komponist Wilhelm
Killmayer, ed. Siegfried Mauser (Mainz, 1992), p. 31.
15 In his commentary to the CD recording, the composer explicitly notes the
return to the traditional genre; Wilhelm Killmayer, Sinfonien 1–3; La joie de vivre;
Nachtgedanken, Wergo 6282 2 (2000), CD.

ambiguous subtitle Menschen-Los (which can mean both ‘without people’ and
‘the fate of people’) might be understood as an autobiographical reference—
the word is taken from Zornige Sehnsucht by Friedrich Hölderlin, a poet
whom Killmayer intensely engaged with and whose writings he set to music.
In terms of style, Killmayer’s symphonic works defy one major character-
istic of the genre that persisted even in the twentieth century—its length. The
duration of each work is about ten minutes, with the exception of the third
symphony, which differs significantly from the other works, lasting more than
twenty minutes, though it does not follow the conventional symphonic form.
Linked to length is the absence of multiple movements, which appear only
in Sinfonia I and Verschüttete Zeichen, the only work that also carries ‘essay
symphonique’ as a genre description, which loosely connects with historical
designations.
The non-traditional approach to form and structure manifests itself espe-
cially in the material of the symphonies. All three are almost minimalistic. In
the sparse compositional space, tiny movements are condensed into gestures
that forebodingly recall music history.16 These gestures, however, do not consti-
tute a syntax of the material; they remain memories, hints, and allusions, as can
be especially observed in the fragmented compositional space of leaves, the fogli.
Since Mahler, if not before, fragmentation has become a central component
of the genre (albeit within large forms at almost breaking point).17 It conjures
music history without presenting it in an intact or large-scale context. There is
a manifold determinateness of meaning in every compositional detail, which in
its totality constitutes the genre as Killmayer understands it. In a deliberately
fragmented process, historical association and memory penetrate a new form of
presence, which leads to something like a perpetual compositional perspective
without needing to rely on the genre framework of the symphony. Killmayer’s
symphonic works thus display an approximation to and departure from conven-
tional forms and structures, and with this they constitute a unique pull within
their historicity, between the ahistorical and symphony’s legacy, in an attempt to
maintain distance from dogmaticism.
Jürg Baur
Jürg Bauer approached pastness in an entirely different way, but with similar
effect. He was born in the same year as Zimmermann, and this is not where
16 For an in-depth analysis, see Laurenz Lütteken, ‘Verschüttete Zeichen: Killmayer

als Sinfoniker’, Musik-Konzepte: Wilhelm Killmayer 144/45 (2009), 33–49, especially
pp. 40–1, and 44.
17 On the technique of allusive density in Mahler, see Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht,
Die Musik Gustav Mahlers, 2nd edn (Munich, 1986), pp. 100–2.

similarities end. Like Zimmermann, he came from the Rhineland, although

from a completely different environment—he studied with Philipp Jarnach,
took part in the Darmstädter Ferienkurse in the 1950s, and was inspired by
the music of Anton Webern, though distancing himself from these aesthetics
in the course of the 1960s. The imprint of the non-conformist Busoni stu-
dent Jarnach—who, in addition to Zimmermann, had also decisively influ-
enced the conductor Günter Wand—entailed not only a deep engagement
with Bartók and Stravinsky, but also a close adherence to the craftsmanship
of composing.
In 1971 Baur succeeded Zimmermann as Professor of Composition at the
then Staatliche Hochschule für Musik Köln. Ten years earlier Zimmermann
had spoken of the fact that Baur clearly belonged to ‘the species of young
composers’. He further elaborated ‘that such designation was by no means,
as one might conceive, a generational designation, but one of mindset’—a
sentiment which in the postwar avant-garde became clearly defined by the
paradigm Darmstadt had created.18 Zimmermann had always expressed his
unease with such fixation, culminating in his assessment of himself as stand-
ing between the generations—born too late to be ‘avant-garde’, born too early
to really belong to it. In a similar vein did Jürg Baur occupy a fraught posi-
tion of in-betweenness. And in the same way did the overpowering brutal-
ity of the war constitute the onset of his compositional activity. But unlike
Zimmermann, Baur never radicalized his self-defined position to the point of
inner, and finally outer, breaking point.
From the 1970s on Baur’s oeuvre reveals an ever-expanding series of
orchestral works in which—at first decidedly against the trend of the time—
he invoked historicity in a novel way through very direct historical recourse.19
Like Killmayer, he wrote symphonies, but Baur’s are scattered throughout
his oeuvre. Unnumbered, they bear figurative, even evasive, title additions:
Sinfonia montana (1953), Sinfonischer Prolog (1966), Triton-Sinfonietta (1974),
Sinfonia breve (1974), and Sinfonie einer Stadt (Pathetica, 1983). This series
also includes several concertos, among them the Concerto da camera from
1975, which expressly refers to Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu.
The series of orchestral works conceived in the 1970s begins, quite remark-
ably, with a very short piece, Giorno per giorno (1971). Based on Italian poems
by the hermetic Giuseppe Ungaretti that respond to the death of the poet’s
18 ‘Diese Bezeichnung [sei] keineswegs, wie man glauben sollte, eine Bezeichnung
des Lebensalters, sondern der Gesinnung’; Zimmermann’s 1961 radio script ‘Musiker
von heute’, Intervall und Zeit: Aufsätze und Schriften zum Werk, ed. Christof Bitter
(Mainz, 1974), p. 23.
19 No notable comprehensive research on Baur exists to date. For a discussion of
orchestral works, see Lars Wallerang, Die Orchesterwerke Jürg Baurs als Dialog zwischen
Tradition und Moderne (Cologne, 2003).

son in 1942, in a translation by Ingeborg Bachmann, the work was conceived

in memory of Zimmermann. Ungaretti’s lament thus transforms to become
a personal memory of the composer’s colleague and predecessor. This is not
coincidental. Rather, memory and memoria (in the sense of the appropria-
tive) become a decisive act, not in the sense of the historical, but as a personal
realm of experience. To memorialize Zimmermann’s suicide, pensive melan-
choly permeates the overall habitus, which creates the skeptical groundwork
of composing.
This pensive, multi-perspective embrace of the past, however, is not an
endpoint, but rather a productive beginning. Immediately after Giorno per
giorno, Baur composed Musik mit Robert Schumann, a short three-movement
work in which the shadowy, fragmented approach to the Romantic Schumann
proved to be a productive challenge for the compositional activity of the pres-
ent. In the third movement, titled ‘Sinfonische Nachklänge’, the symphony
again becomes a complicated possibility of multilayered self-reflection. The
movement revolves around a splinter from Schumann’s first symphony. Here
of all places, in a kind of variative exploration of the ‘material’, Baur inserted
a short aleatoric passage—the result of which is neither resolution nor lib-
eration, but a melancholic memory of the past, which clearly emerges in the
course of the form.
Conceived almost a decade years later, the Sinfonische Metamorphosen
über Gesualdo of 1981 prismatically unfolds the search for another concept
of composition, mediated by the distant past.20 Already in 1977 Baur had
written the Meditazioni sopra Gesualdo for organ, in which he explored the
most subversive expression of Renaissance music in the mode of a seemingly
aimless self-absorption. The Sinfonische Metamorphosen, lasting almost 20
minutes and thus constituting a short, but due to the employment of a large
orchestra a veritable symphonic work, drives this compositional approach
further. The title points to works with a similarly spheric temporality: the
Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes by Carl Maria von Weber of 1943, which
Paul Hindemith wrote during his exile in America; perhaps even to those
Metamorphoses through which Richard Strauss in 1945 similarly sought
a multilayered musical embracing of history. But Baur’s focus on Gesualdo
opens up another historical space, not least because the composer had been
claimed for a long time as a kind of ancestor of modernism—one might think
of Stravinsky’s Monumentum pro Gesualdo (1960) or Peter Maxwell Davies’s
20 See Dietrich Kämper, ‘Jürg Baurs Gesualdo-Porträt’, Jürg Baur: Aspekte seines
Schaffens, ed. Lutz-Werner Hesse, Armin Klaes, and Arnd Richter (Wiesbaden, 1993),
pp. 51–8; and Robert Abels, Studien zur Gesualdo-Rezeption durch Komponisten des 20.
Jahrhunderts, Studien zur Musik 20 (Paderborn, 2017), pp. 277–9.

Tenebrae super Gesualdo (1972)—particularly since Edward Lowinsky’s for-

mative (but ultimately unhelpful) term ‘triadic atonality’.21
In Baur, the seemingly modern aspect of triadic atonality reverts to its
exact opposite. Sinfonische Metamorphosen über Gesualdo is expressly conceived
as a kind of compositional reflection on historical depth and historical appro-
priation in contemporaneous composition, not on the search for role models
through an assumed ‘rupture’. The work, which overtly employs a deliberately
pathos-laden musical language, consists of seven parts, each of which is based
on a quotation from the late five-part madrigals of Gesualdo. The harmonic
foundation offers a chord, derived from letters of his name (G—E—E♭ [Es
in German]—A—D) that unfolds vertically. Traditional principles serve the
miniature-like parts in elliptical shortness—a passacaglia in the third and a
rondello in the sixth; at the center of the fifth part stands a melancholically
colored dirge. Exploring the past thus proves to be a productive, projective
task of a compositional approach that, in clear parallel to Zimmermann, no
longer understands itself as linear, or as arbitrary either, but merely as playful,
or structurally unplanned. The concept reflected therein reclaims historical
depth not simply as melancholic commentary on history’s conclusiveness, but
as a projective-productive challenge. The concept of metamorphosis, which is
inextricably linked with Goethe’s gestalt concept, programmatically suggests
this projective thought.
After this compositional self-assurance in the face of history, fur-
ther exploration followed: Sentieri musicali (1990) as discourse on Mozart;
Frammenti (1997) as an approach to Schubert; and a Sinfonia sine nomine
(1999) that is fragmented in its formal outer conception, with a Passacaglia as
the opening, a Scherzo at the end, and a designated middle movement titled
‘Malinconia’ (note that the final movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet in
B♭ major, op. 18, bears the same designation). If Bauer, like Killmayer, plays
with forms and structures through historicity in an act of compositional resis-
tance against material and progress, he does so by relying on gesture. Twenty
years later Isabel Mundry takes up the same resistance anew, also using ges-
ture, but in her own unique way.
Isabel Mundry
In the still evolving oeuvre of Mundry, symphonic works are noticeably

absent. Indeed, in conception her music is largely independent of genre tra-
ditions. But it reacts in many ways to the ostensible experience of loss con-
nected with the demystification of the dogma of new music. It does so in
21 Edward Lowinsky, Tonality and Atonality in Sixteenth-Century Music (Berkeley

and Los Angeles, 1962), p. 43.

the sense of rising to a creative challenge. Her music always proves to be a

reaction to the clearly uncertain and ambiguous situation at the beginning of
the twenty-first century. Even if historical models have been shipwrecked by
an emphatically self-authenticating modernism, they are not gone or elimi-
nated. Whereas a generation or two ago it was believed that history could be
overcome, Mundry’s music recognizes that belief as an illusion. However, that
does not leave the composer at a dead end. Her music is permeated by histo-
ricity, interveined by the past, not merely the past of times long gone, but also
the recent past and the twentieth century, which had only just begun to fade
away. Her music is present because it is searching. This search does not hap-
pen in a vacuum and certainly not in a relativistic value-free space.
A student of Hans Zender, Isabel Mundry indirectly yet noticeably glances
at the craft of Zimmermann, whom Zender championed. Zimmermann had
conjured composing as the source of an old-fashioned-sounding and yet radi-
cally present inspiration.22 The same is true of Mundry, whose work is rooted
in craftsmanship and thus ascribes music an innermost point of escape. She
bases her music on the idea that utmost precision is reconcilable with the
unpredictable moments of inspiration and momentum.23
It is therefore significant that the composer turned for inspiration to
Heinrich von Kleist, by far the most important North German dramatist
of the Romantic movement, who, on 21 November 1811, one day before St
Cecilia’s Day, took the life of his terminally ill beloved, and then his own, at
Wannsee near Berlin. His self-destruction in suicide concluded a short but
intense life, during which the suffering and damaged man had become the
protagonist of literary representation in a novel language of original force.
The conception of the literary work had become entwined with its subjects
in a new and unprecedented way. For Kleist the unconditional nature of this
process began to appear increasingly hopeless.
One of Kleist’s most important texts that reflects on art and the artist’s
role in the web of fundamental unconditionality is Über das Marionettetheater
of December 1810.24 This text paradigmatically discusses the role and impor-
tance of art in the case of a puppet, which neither dances in any logical way
22 See Zimmermann’s 1968 radio script ‘Vom Handwerk des Komponisten’, Intervall
und Zeit: Aufsätze und Schriften zum Werk, ed. Christof Bitter (Mainz, 1974), pp. 31–7.
23 For an earlier German version of this section, see Laurenz Lütteken, ‘Komponieren
im 21. Jahrhundert: Eine Annäherung an die Musik von Isabel Mundry’, Musik-
Konzepte: Sonderband Isabel Mundry (2011), 5–18.
24 On the reception history of the text, see Alexander Weigel, Das imaginäre Theater
Heinrich von Kleists: Vorträge, Theatertexte, Aufsätze (Heilbronn, 2015), pp. 13–15; also
Klaus Kanzog, ‘Musikalität—Materialität: Reflexe der Werke Heinrich von Kleists
in Werken von Komponisten’, Musik-Konzepte: Sonderband Isabel Mundry (2011),
127–37.

nor expresses itself verbally, but does so through gesture and in clear delinea-
tion of the mechanical—a form of clarity.
The text on the puppet theater became the basis for Isabel Mundry’s sce-
nic concert nicht ich, which emphatically engages with the fundamental chal-
lenges so inherent in Kleist’s work and puts the negation of the ego in the title.
It premiered in 2011 in Thun, a city where Kleist had spent probably the hap-
piest time of his life. Mundry approaches the idea of a new clarity in a novel
stretto of music and gesture, which also manifests itself in the provocative
subtitle: Szenisches Konzert mit Tanz. Initially creating a model whose prin-
ciples turn against material, but are rooted in the premises of the nineteenth-
century organization of musical syntax as a self-sufficient logic, with nicht ich
Mundry created a counter-model: coherence is created not through structure,
but through gesture and movement; and it is not coherence as autonomous
logic, but rather as spaces of experience and memory. Such thinking can
already be observed in Tchaikovsky, as well as in Stravinsky, Ravel, even in
Strauss, and finally in Zimmermann and Boris Blacher. Gesture can grant
music its own determinacy beyond a supposed formal autonomy. In his book
Musique et l’ineffable of 1961, Vladimir Jankélévitch proposes that gesture
could be a key to understanding ineffability, a proposal based on his intimate
knowledge of Ravel’s work.25 This line of thinking, however, has not yet been
widely embraced.
In nicht ich, a soprano and a wordless dancer ( Jörg Weinöhl) are facing
each other and complementing each other in a compensatory way. A five-part
vocal ensemble and a small instrumental ensemble enter. The three-part work
addresses Kleist’s text at three different levels. It rejects all traditional genres,
but not in the sense of a break with practices, rather through a complicated
withdrawal. Thus, it invokes reduction by way of employing a small group.
At the same time an immense richness emerges that reveals itself not only in
the length of the work, which lasts about an hour, but also in the conscious
crossing of genre boundaries: it leans on musical theater in which dance takes
on a special role. The concept of a staged concert turns out to be deliberately
ambiguous. It relates to the type of event as well as to the genre. Indeed, the
collaboration with the dancer and choreographer Jörg Weinöhl led to a new
form of performance, in which the bulky text is encircled by the wordless
arts of music and dance. Thus, the theatrical event becomes a reflection on
the actual subject of creativity, on the relationship between art and artifice.
Interestingly, this blend traces back to Zimmermann’s ecclesiastical action,
which blends singing and recitation, instrumental music, and scenic action.
25 See Vladimir Jankélévitch, La musique et l’ineffable (Paris: A. Colin, 1961), pub-

lished in English as Music and the Ineffable, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Princeton, NJ,
2003).

The gestural is a central element in the musical language and sound of

Isabel Mundry. It serves as a clasp for the organization of sounds, for coun-
terpoint, form, even for her preferences for pastness as evident in her arrange-
ments of Dufay (2003/4), Couperin and Tchaikovsky (2008), and Scandello
(2010). Gesture lends contour to the music, even when it departs from the
artful with sounds of clanking glasses and crumpled paper. The gestural makes
it possible to impart changing vanishing points to the music: in nicht ich the
dancer, Jörg Weinöhl, argues with gestures on the issues raised by Kleist,
such as the problem of changing priorities and thus of aesthetic veracity. In
Mundry, the dramatic does not derive from the will of narrative, rather it is a
configuration of composition. Only in this way can the approach to an aes-
thetic text such as Kleist’s Marionetten-Theater be explained, especially since
there are few models, apart from Also sprach Zarathustra by Strauss.26 From
this perspective, too, one can appreciate that the work is not about the sensory
illustration of a text, but about finding a new, resonant space that grows out of
interaction with the word. This is not easy for the listener, who needs to have a
deep knowledge of the text in order to appreciate the work. But this subjective
perception, not only of text but also of time spheres and their compositional
treatment, can be found in many of Mundry’s works.
Farewell to the Twentieth Century
The trajectory of composition as exemplified by two generations of compos-

ers during a time generally designated as postmodernity elucidates that the
crisis of dogmatic self-certifying modernism in Germany was perceived early
and continuously, and led to compositional self-assurance of a very different
nature. None of the three composers discussed here is a postmodernist per se,
not even Killmayer—in spite of his leaning toward historical generalization
and simplification. All three perceived the music of the past rather as a chal-
lenge and processed it in entirely different and never casual ways. A deep mel-
ancholy permeates their works, but it is neither deliberately nor intentionally
without perspective. Rather, it serves precisely to explore the possibilities of
composing productively. The music of Isabel Mundry, who has no direct con-
nection with World War II and the avant-garde of the 1950s, shows clearly
that perspectives have emerged which remove themselves from the debates of
modernism, but without negating them.
Modernism’s fervent belief in musical progress has left a peculiar ruin after
the twentieth century. This landscape of ruins is by no means just an aesthetic
26 One might think of Nono’s Prometeo or Goebbels’s szenische Konzerte; see also
Matthias Rebstock and David Roesner, eds, Composed Theatre: Aesthetics, Practices,
Processes (Bristol, 2012).

landscape, but also a physical one, and it has many different faces. Music
history has not taken the course that the protagonists of modernism, under
whatever circumstances, had prophesized. Indeed, Central European music
historiography has shifted, as is evident in the renewed interest in Britten
and Shostakovich, in the new prominence of Hindemith and Copland, in the
insight that not only Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, but also Strauss, Ravel,
and Sibelius belong to the twentieth-century canon, and at last in a grow-
ing understanding of those who, like Karl Amadeus Hartmann or Bohuslav
Martinů, have utterly resisted the dogmas of new music. Although the prod-
uct of aesthetic devastation, this ruined landscape has also, quite positively,
created the understanding that music history has not evolved in linear fashion
along the path of progress, as the protagonists of modernism had wanted to
make us believe. In the sphericity of time there is no real past, or present, or
future; nor can music be defined as old, contemporary, or futuristic.
The crumbling of the idea of a progress-driven temporal linearity parallels
the first symptoms of modernism’s crisis, which, as shown by our case studies,
can be traced back to the 1960s and 1970s.27 In Germany, the advocates of
modernism reacted to the concept of postmodernism with helplessness and
aggression in equal measure, hostile to the notion that anything could come
after their emphatic modernism, and inclined to denounce everything con-
trary to it as betrayal and regression.28 The unique revolutions of 1989 have
further contributed to questioning the dogmas of modernism.
The twentieth century has ended—regardless of whether the historians
suggested a ‘short’ century between the 1914 and the 1989 revolutions, or
whether they have put other bookends in place. The almost endless prophe-
cies that accompanied it and breathlessly kept it in check, the relentless belief
in the dynamics of progress with boundaries and progressive boundlessness,
drowned in measureless bloodshed. These are the terrifying privileges of
a century that culminated in the exultant European moments of 1989 and
1990. These, however, came so unexpectedly that the American political sci-
entist Francis Fukuyama designated them ‘the end of history’, marking the
endpoint of humanity’s sociocultural evolution and ushering in the final form
27 Outside of Germany there were similar developments, such as under the influ-
ence of the repressive late-Soviet cultural policy—most noteworthy examples are
works from the middle period of Penderecki, beginning with Paradise Lost of 1978.
Another example is the middle period of Ligeti, beginning with Monument—
Selbstporträt—Bewegung of 1976; see also Stefan Keym, ‘Krzysztof Pendereckis “Sacra
Rappresentazione” Paradise Lost und das religiöse Musiktheater im 20. Jahrhundert’,
Krzysztof Penderecki: Musik im Kontext: Konferenzbericht Leipzig 2003, ed. Stefan
Keym and Helmut Loos (Leipzig, 2006), pp. 100–35.
28 Gunnar Hindrichs, for instance, defines postmodernism, within the parameters
of eclecticism and craftmanship, as a bad restoration of musical material, see Die

Autonomie des Klanges: Eine Philosophie der Musik (Berlin, 2014), p. 59.

of human government.29 But new aesthetic challenges crystallize ever more

clearly and are becoming a guiding force in the early twenty-first century,
perhaps even its subject. The aesthetic problems that have arisen from dis-
comfort with the failed dogmas of the twentieth century can, however, hardly
be solved by attempts to recapture its premises.
Translated by Tina Frühauf
29 Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (London, 1992). The
book is an expansion of his 1989 essay ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest 16
(1989), 3–18.

5
Visions of the ‘End of History’, ‘1968’,

and the Emergence of ‘Postmoderne
Musik’ in West Germany
Beate Kutschke
In the late 1980s the terms ‘posthistoire’, ‘end of history’, and ‘loss of history’
(henceforth PEL) began to enter the West German discourse on music.
Writers on music applied these terms—which had originally been coined in
theology, the philosophy of history,1 and sociology—to music-historical phe-
nomena, first and foremost the latest compositional developments in contem-
porary music, the so-called ‘postmoderne Musik’.2 Central for the connection
between postmodern music and the PEL terms was the—appropriate or fic-
tional—diagnosis of a crisis of history. German musicologist Ulrich Mosch
pointed this out in 1993: ‘With the crisis of the understanding of his-
tory . . . an issue emerges that appears to be essential to a theory of musical
1 The term ‘philosophy of history’ was coined in the mid-eighteenth century by

François-Marie Arouet (alias Voltaire) in his La philosophie de l’histoire (Amsterdam,
1765), but philosophy of history as a practice intimately belongs to Jewish and
Christian theology.
2 The term ‘postmoderne Musik’ refers to a group of works composed roughly
between the early 1970s and the early 1990s. In this chapter, ‘postmodern music’—i.e.,
the music that was composed during the postmodern era in West Germany—serves
as English equivalent of the German term ‘postmoderne Musik’. (According to the
German theory on ‘postmodernism’, ‘postmodernity’, and ‘postmodern’, these words
refer to both an era and a set of characteristics typical of postmodernism. The era
spans the period from the (late) 1960s to the early 1990s. Postmodern characteristics
are manifold and include pluralism, loss of historical consciousness, and the playful
closing of the gap between high and low art.) To be sure, during the postmodern era
from the late 1960s to the early 1990s in West Germany, composers wrote music in
other styles as well. This music, however, would not be called ‘postmoderne Musik’ in
German musicological discourse. (The English term ‘postmodern music’, in contrast,
commonly refers to all music composed during the postmodern era.) For more about
the concept of ‘postmoderne Musik’, see the section below, ‘The Emergence of the
Pessimistic Version of the End of History’.

92 BEATE KUTSCHKE
postmodernism in both determining the position of musical phenomena with

regards to the past as well as the future.’3
This essay analyzes the musicological discourse on postmodern music
in the long 1990s, when the discourse turned to PEL theories. To provide
a foundation, the essay traces the origins of the PEL terms and their mean-
ing in their original context—religious and philosophical thought of earlier
periods. It then analyzes to what end they were included in the discourse on
(postmodern) music in the long 1990s and how they impacted the discourse
in music-historiographical and -aesthetical respects.
The origin of the diverse theories to which the terms refer can be traced
back to different periods: the decades after 1945 when the world population
looked back at two world wars, the Holocaust, and the dropping of the atomic
bomb; the mid-nineteenth century, after the Enlightenment had begun to
fade; the mid-eighteenth century and the beginning of the Enlightenment
when intellectuals were suffused with optimistic spirit; and as far back as the
first to third century bce with the texts of the Tanakh, to be later also can-
onized as part of the Old Testament. To understand the idea of the ‘end of
history’ as it is relevant to the theory on postmodern music, it is necessary to
understand its origins in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The Optimistic Version of the Idea of the ‘End of History’

in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, and Its Filtering
into the Music Discourse and Aesthetics
What we call ‘history’ today is not a row of objectively existing events, but
a creation by historiographers and other writers on history whose narra-
tives shape events into historical facts and interrelate them based on a spe-
cific rationale. In this way the term ‘historian’ is misleading. ‘Historiographer’
would be more appropriate to designate the profession of those who in fact
do not discover hidden historical events and their causal intertwinement, but
construct and thus create those events by writing about them.
Historiography, the profession of creating history, did not emerge with the
beginning of humankind, but had to be invented and theoretically framed.
Unsurprisingly, throughout the ages historiographers modified and reshaped
their methods of constructing and narrating history. In so doing, they were
3 ‘Mit der Krise des Geschichtsverständnisses . . . ist ein Punkt benannt, der für eine
Theorie der musikalischen Postmoderne ganz wesentlich erscheint, und zwar glei-
chermaßen im Hinblick darauf, die Stellung der in Frage stehenden musikalischen
Phänomene zur Vergangenheit zu bestimmen wie ihre Stellung zur Zukunft.’ Ulrich
Mosch, ‘Musikalische Postmoderne als Krise des Geschichtsverständnisses’, Motiv:
Musik in Gesellschaft anderer Künste 2, no. 3 (1991), 25. Unless otherwise noted, all
translations are by the author.

VISIONS OF THE ‘END OF HISTORY’ 93
heavily influenced by their personal worldviews, which were shaped in turn

by the intellectual environment in which they lived as well as individual
experiences and socio-political events taking place during their lifetime.
Enlightenment thought also significantly influenced the art of historiography
and its theory.4
From the mid-eighteenth century on, historiographers and philoso-
phers of history propagated an optimistic view of history that transferred the
Christian metaphysical imagination of paradise—the eternal state after the
end of history according to Christian theory—to the worldly realm. During
the Baroque, Europeans had viewed the world as a valley of tears and directed
their hopes and expectations to eternal paradise after death (the end of their
individual history) or after the apocalypse (the end of global history). In con-
trast, enlightened thinkers such as the Swiss philosopher of history Isaak
Iselin (1728–82) and the German historian August Ludwig von Schlözer
(1735–1809) thought it possible to implement more or less omnipresent
human happiness on earth. In other words, they constructed a terrestrial end
of history, an eternally happy paradise for humankind on earth. In so doing,
they satisfied the contemporaneous wish of individuals who longed to hear
hopeful forecasts of the end of history.
Other philosophers of history constructed a history that promised the
happy end of history as a result of a continuous process of improvement: first
and foremost, the perfecting of humankind, but also advantageous devel-
opments in political, social, economic, and scientific knowledge and prac-
tices, in sum, progress.5 In his essay ‘The Idea of a Universal History on a
Cosmopolitical Plan’ of 1784, Kant created the image of a ‘consoling’ future,
‘in which there will be exhibited in the distance how the human race finally
achieves the condition in which all the seeds planted in it by Nature can fully
develop and in which the destiny of the race can be fulfilled here on earth.’6
4 Philosophers of history are historiographers who focus less on the ‘discovery’ of

facts than on the development of holistic explanatory models leading to so-called
universal history: a narrative of history that aims at explaining the past, present, and
future of the whole world as the product of a single rationality.
5 On the perfection of humankind as the goal of historical progress, see Isaak Iselin,
Über die Geschichte der Menschheit (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1764); on universal history
as a tool by which to understand the conditions—supportive and preventing factors—
of perfectibility, see August Ludwig Schlözer, Vorstellung seiner Universal-Historie
(Göttingen and Gotha, 1772).
6 ‘ . . . in welcher die Menschengattung in weiter Ferne vorgestellt wird, wie sie sich
endlich doch zu dem Zustande empor arbeitet, in welchem alle Keime, die die Natur
in sie legte, völlig können entwikkelt und ihre Bestimmung hier auf Erden kann erfül-
let werden.’ Immanuel Kant, ‘Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerli-
cher Absicht’, Berlinische Monatsschrift (November 1784), 409–10; English translation

94 BEATE KUTSCHKE
The theory of the perfectibility of humankind was complemented and

supported by recent findings in the natural sciences, particularly Newton’s
‘discovery’ of causality in 1700.7 The Judeo-Christian views before Newton
saw god as the ultimate subject of events. He commanded miracles and del-
uges, and determined both inner-worldly and extra-worldly history. In con-
trast, the newly developed causal theory limited god’s power and provided
certainty that the course of history could be propelled and controlled by
human action. In the framework of causality, men (women were not subjects,
i.e. agents of history) could count on the rule that, if they did A, the antici-
pated B would happen. Thus, according to Enlightenment theory, man deter-
mined his own and the world’s fate.8 Together with the process of perfecting
humankind, progress and its telos ‘paradise on earth’ appeared to be likely or,
at least, not impossible. Correspondingly, the economist and statesman Anne
Robert Jacques Turgot stated in 1750:
The succession of mankind . . . affords from age to age an ever-changing spec-

tacle. Reason, the passions, and liberty ceaselessly give rise to new events: all
the ages are bound up with one another by a succession of causes and effects which
link the present state of the world with all those that have preceded. . . . Finally
commercial and political ties unite all parts of the globe, and the whole human
race, through alternate periods of rest and unrest, of weal and woe, goes on
advancing, although at a slow pace, towards greater perfection [emphasis added].9
These history-philosophical ideas informed the music discourse of the

late eighteenth century; and in the nineteenth century, they became the
foundation of music-aesthetic and -historiographical premises. As such they
by Lewis White Beck, https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/kant/uni-

versal-history.htm (accessed 21 January 2018).
7 Natural sciences developed and came to be distinguished from natural philoso-
phy (as well as speculation and magic) in the course of the eighteenth century; see
Gerhard Wiesenfeldt, Leerer Raum in Minervas Haus: Experimentelle Naturlehre an der
Universität Leiden, 1675–1715 (Amsterdam, 2002), pp. 280–1.
8 See the articles of Wolfgang Krohn, Hans-Peter Schütt, Rainer Specht, and
Friedrich Steinle, in Kausalität und Naturgesetz in der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Andreas
Hüttemann, Studia Leibnitiana Sonderhefte 31 (Stuttgart, 2001).
9 Anne Robert Turgot, ‘A Philosophical Review of the Successive Advances of
the Human Mind’ [1750], Turgot on Progress, Sociology and Economics, ed. and trans.
Ronald L. Meek (Cambridge, 1973), p. 41. In contrast, Condorcet was much less opti-
mistic. He also believed in the perfectibility of mankind, but did not expect that this
would lead to a telos. He rather assumed ‘que la perfectibilité de l’homme est réel-
lement indéfinie: que les progrès de cette perfectibilité, désormais indépendants de
termes que la durée du globe où la nature nous a jetés.’ Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas
Condorcet, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (Paris, 1795),
p. 4.

prevailed throughout the twentieth century. They perpetuated the notion that
music history, and especially compositional history, were moving forward,
thus articulating aesthetic progress.
In his multi-volume history of 1789 Charles Burney, for instance, empha-
sized that since antiquity music history was marked by progress, but with-
out detailing in which aspects progress manifested itself.10 Emulating Iselin’s
and Schlözer’s universal history and drawing on Hegel’s ‘Vorlesungen über
Ästhetik’ of 1835, Franz Brendel’s music history of 1854 conceived composi-
tional advancement as progress of consciousness. Adopting Wagner’s aesthetic
program in order to define his own aesthetic premises, he saw art’s future to
lie in the merging of different art forms in the Gesamtkunstwerk:
In the progression of world history, the different arts are, in changing sequence,
the highest expression of the respectively attained state of consciousness. . . .
The turn that is preparing itself to arrive consists of the abolishment of the
separation of the art forms and their merging in the Gesamtkunstwerk.11
Further, the idea of man’s perfectibility and his power to act as subject of his-
tory began to manifest itself in the concept of the genius artist that emerged
in the eighteenth century and peaked in the nineteenth. Art critics portrayed
the genius artist as an autonomous agent (a ‘subject’ in philosophical termi-
nology) who did not merely ignore existing rules, but even created his own.12
The idea of the genius artist as autonomous subject appears to have been for-
mulated first by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, in his Philosophie
der Kunst of 1802/3, posthumously published in 1859: ‘The genius is autono-
mous. It evades only foreign, yet not its own legislation. For it is genius only
as long as it is supreme legislation.’13 At the same time and in line with the
10 Charles Burney, A General History of Music, 4 vols (London, 1776–89).

11 ‘Im Fortgang der Weltgeschichte sind die verschiedenen Künste in wechselnder
Folge entsprechender, höchster Ausdruck der jedesmaligen Stufe des Bewusstseins. . . .
[Es] bereitet sich unzweifelhaft eine neue Wendung vor, deren Wesen in der
Aufhebung der bisherigen strengen Absonderung der Künste, in dem Aufgehen
derselben in ein grosses Gesammtkunstwerk besteht.’ Franz Brendel, Grundzüge der
Geschichte der Musik (Leipzig, 1854), p. 65.
12 For the concept of the autonomous genius they could draw on the artist’s image
as it had already been shaped during the eighteenth century, when the poetics of rules
(Regelpoetik) prevalent in the Baroque era increasingly lost significance.
13 ‘Das Genie ist autonomisch, nur der fremden Gesetzgebung entzieht es sich, nicht
der eignen, denn es ist nur Genie, sofern es die höchste Gesetzmäßigkeit ist.’ Friedrich
Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, ‘Philosophie der Kunst’, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von
Schellings sämmtliche Werke, Erste Abteilung, Fünfter Band, 1802/1803 (Stuttgart and
Augsburg, 1859), p. 349.

96 BEATE KUTSCHKE
prevalent zeitgeist, the concept of the genius artist became a kind of fashion-
able thought figure.14
The idea of genius’s autonomy and self-legislation strikingly corresponds
to the first sentence of the above-quoted ‘Idea of a Universal History’ of 1784,
in which Kant intertwined the metaphor of a plant that, according to the
theory of entelechy, grows and unfolds by following an internal plan, with the
concept of the human subject as an autonomous and self-guided entity:
Nature has willed that man should, by himself, produce everything that goes
beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence, and that he should
partake of no other happiness or perfection than that which he himself, inde-
pendently of instinct, has created by his own reason [emphasis added].15
After being consolidated in the nineteenth century, the idea that music and
the other arts perform a progressive process, in which the artist as subject
plays a decisive role, shaped (music) aesthetics and philosophical thinking on
music history into the twentieth century. From at least 1930 until his death
in 1969, Theodor W. Adorno forcefully propagated and vehemently defended
concepts of progress and autonomy in numerous writings on new and avant-
garde music.16 His Philosophie der neuen Musik, for instance, played Arnold
14 In his review of the premier of Richard Wagner’s Lohengrin, published in 1858,

Eduard Hanslick wrote: ‘Wer in der Musik kein “Erfinder” ist, wer der geheimnissvol-
len Kraft entbehrt, in Tönen und aus Tönen selbstständig Schönes zu schaffen, der
kann allenfalls der geistreichste Experimentator der Kunstgeschichte werden—ein
Meister seiner Kunst, ein musicalisches Genie nie nimmermehr.’ Eduard Hanslick,
‘Die Oper “Lohengrin”’, Niederrheinische Musik-Zeitung für Kunstfreunde und Künstler
6, no. 47 (20 November 1858), 371. Similarly, Arrey von Dommer stated in his heav-
ily revised second edition of Heinrich Christoph Koch’s Musikalisches Lexicon, pub-
lished in 1865: ‘Das Genie ist, eben als schöpferisch, stets original und selbständig,
es ahmt niemals nach; auch wenn es schon häufig von anderen Künstlern behandelte
Stoffe wieder aufs neue ergreift, oder . . . sogar Gedanken der Vorgänger geradezu auf-
nimmt, prägt es ihnen doch den Stempel seiner eigenen Bildkraft auf, sie zu einer
Vollendung, welche sie bei seinen Vorgängern noch nicht hatten, ausgestaltend.’ Arrey
von Dommer, ed., Koch’s Musikalisches Lexicon, rev. edn (Heidelberg, 1865), p. 375.
Koch’s first edition appeared in 1802.
15 ‘Die Natur hat gewollt, daß der Mensch alles, was über die mechanische
Anordnung seines tierischen Daseins geht, gänzlich aus sich selbst herausbringe und
keiner anderen Glückseligkeit oder Vollkommenheit teilhaftig werde, als die er sich
selbst, frei von Instinkt, durch eigene Vernunft verschafft hat [emphasis added].’ Kant,
‘Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte’.
16 The first known documentation of this propagation is Adorno’s article with the
telling title ‘Reaktion und Fortschritt’ (Reaction and Progress, 1930), published in
Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 20 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1982), XVII, pp. 133–9.

Schoenberg’s and Igor Stravinsky’s compositional innovations off against

each other, arguing that Schoenberg’s style is progressive while Stravinsky’s is
regressive. These music-aesthetical and music-historiographical key concepts
that developed from the mid-eighteenth century persisted, however, only
until the early 1970s.
The Emergence of the Pessimistic Version of the

‘End of History’ in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, and Its Adoption
in the Musicological Discourse of the Long 1990s
In the early 1970s young composers unexpectedly attracted attention with

compositional styles that were later labeled ‘postmoderne Musik’. Although
these composers considered themselves followers of the generations of avant-
garde composers coming to the fore in the postwar era, they ignored the prog-
ress-oriented key concepts that had prevailed since the nineteenth century
and particularly shaped avant-garde music. Wolfgang Rihm’s orchestral piece
Morphonie of 1974 is paradigmatic for this new direction. It is indicative that
its premiere took place in a concert of the Donaueschinger Musiktage. This
festival has been one of the major cultural institutions in West Germany and,
since the early postwar era, has acted as a guardian of the avant-garde music
aesthetics that in essence epitomized the music-aesthetical premises initiated
by the Enlightenment philosophy of history. After the end of World War II,
composers—established and aspiring ones—as well as journalists made the
pilgrimage to the festival in order to learn about the newest, most innova-
tive and progressive, developments in avant-garde composition.17 Premiered
during this festival, Rihm’s Morphonie (and some of his other works) could be
understood by contemporaries as a countermovement against the aesthetic
premises that the international musical avant-garde had consolidated during
the past decades. Although Morphonie did not entirely ignore the aesthetic
premises of the avant-garde, it subversively merged music-idiomatic ele-
ments that in the 1970s (and still today) have been considered late-Romantic
into the avant-garde musical style: highly expressive gestures, thick string
vibrato, sophisticated mélanges of instrumental timbres; Wagnerian turns and
Mahlerian apotheoses with strings, trumpets, and tonal allusions infiltrated
anti-organic, fragmented, torn-apart gestures, and atonality.18 Looking back
17 The term ‘avant-garde’ emphasizes the progressive character.

18 On the aesthetics of the fragment, see Beate Kutschke, Wildes Denken in der Neuen
Musik: Die Idee vom Ende der Geschichte bei Theodor W. Adorno und Wolfgang Rihm
(Würzburg, 2002), pp. 143–5. If an organic gesture is based on a series of crescendos
and decrescendos (i.e., swelling and fading), an anti-organic gesture consists of a cre-
scendo that on its climax suddenly stops with a sforzato or, the other way around, a

98 BEATE KUTSCHKE
at Morphonie’s premiere more than twenty years after the event, the music
journalist and radio editor Josef Häusler classified the work as the beginning
of a new era in composition.19
Like Rihm, various other composers in Germany—such as Hans-Jürgen
von Bose, Hans Christian von Dadelsen, Wolfgang von Schweinitz, Detlev
Müller-Siemens, and Manfred Trojahn,20 and in other parts of the Western
world Henryk Górecki, Luciano Berio, Alfred Schnittke, and George
Rochberg—created new works that deliberately dismissed the idea of prog-
ress.21 They ignored the prescription to write only music that strictly repre-
sented the current state of the composition, as Adorno had authoritatively
mandated in 1948:
[N]ot all things are possible at all times. . . . The demands made upon the sub-
ject by the [musical] material are conditioned . . . by the fact that the “material”
is itself [sedimented spirit] . . . , an element socially predetermined through the
consciousness of man. As a previous subjectivity—now forgetful of itself—
such an [objective spirit] . . . has its own kinetic laws [i.e., laws of change and
development over time].22
Contrary to Adorno’s claims, this new generation of composers seemed to fol-

low an ahistorical eclecticism that drove them to combine diverse musical ele-
ments from the present and past, i.e. foreign and obsolete periods, and to mix
compositional genres usually classified as representing ‘high’ and ‘low art’.23
decrescendo that begins with a sforzato and immediately decreases, or the combination
of both—the decrescendo followed by the crescendo. Those compositional means can
often be found in the works of Luigi Nono (middle period, azione sceniche, before his
turn to the silent works starting with the 1981 string quartet Fragmente—Stille: An
Diotima) and Wolfgang Rihm.
19 See Josef Häusler, Spiegel der Neuen Musik: Donaueschingen—Chronik, Tendenzen,
Werkbesprechungen (Stuttgart, 1996), pp. 314–15.

20 See anonymous, ‘Junge Avantgarde: Sieben junge Komponisten geben Auskunft’,
Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 140, no. 1 (1979), 5–24.

21 Despite their similarities, postmodern music should not be confused with con-
temporary art music of the twentieth century, which has been composed throughout
the entire twentieth century. West German critics, radio editors, concert organizers,
and musicologists, who favored the radical avant-garde of the post-1945 era, often
neglected these ‘moderate’ compositions. The composers of postmodern music, how-
ever, succeeded in gaining a strong position within, not outside, the field of avant-
garde music.
22 Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and
Wesley V. Blomster (New York: Seabury, 1973), p. 33. The German-language original,
Philosophie der Neuen Musik, was first published in 1948.
23 Historical consciousness does not necessarily manifest itself in the use of historical
idioms, but can also manifest itself in the avoidance of them. In the first case, historical

In light of these new compositional and aesthetical developments, writ-

ers on music began to look for explanatory models and labels. (Naming an
unknown phenomenon is an established strategy by which to overcome one’s
own feeling of incomprehension and helplessness.24) To this end, applying
key concepts of the postmodernism found in the postmodern discourse on
architecture, aesthetics, philosophy, and sociology25 allowed them to explain
not only the strikingly backward-looking neo-expressionism of Rihm’s
Morphonie, but also the playful pluralism of styles in Berio’s Sinfonia.26 But
describing the new generation’s music aesthetics with a borrowed vocabulary
did not sufficiently explain the fact that these composers no longer felt bound
to what had become something of an ‘eternal law’ in music aesthetics: inno-
vation and progress. Indeed, there was no doubt that the new generation of
composers aimed to attack those unwritten laws. The composers underscored
this intention by verbal statements. In 1978 Rihm claimed that ‘new music
has come to itself . . . [after] it had been relieved from the dependence to
expose new [i.e. innovative, progressive] modules [emphasis added]’.27 Rihm’s
statement clearly articulates his conviction that innovation and progress were
not the sole, ultimate guideline, or the path to salvation, but rather an aberra-
tion. In the same year, Bose stated even more bluntly that his work is based on
the ‘desire for lost beauty [a taboo in avant-garde music] and content and the
neglect of a feigned belief in progress’.28
consciousness is equivalent to knowledge of and reference to the past; in the second,

it manifests itself in the avoidance of styles that do not belong to one’s own time and
therefore are not appropriate compositional means.
24 On this strategy, see Olaf Briese, Angst in den Zeiten der Cholera (Berlin, 2003).
25 Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture (London, 1977);
Wolfgang Welsch, Unsere postmoderne Moderne, 7th edn (Berlin, 2008); and Frederic
Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London, 1991).
26 In the third movement of his Sinfonia, premiered in 1968, Berio combines quota-
tions from Mahler’s symphonies no. 2 and no. 4, Debussy’s La Mer, Schoenberg’s Five
Orchestral Pieces, Brahms’s and Berg’s violin concertos, Strauss’s Rosenkavalier, Ravel’s
La Valse, Beethoven’s Symphony no. 6, Webern’s Cantata, op. 31, and Stockhausen’s
Gruppen für drei Orchester; he instructs that this mixture of compositional styles is to
be performed by a classical orchestra and the Swingle Singers, a vocal ensemble spe-
cializing in scat, a vocal style commonly associated with gospel music and jazz.
27 ‘ . . . die neue Musik . . ., erleichtert von der Abhängigkeit, neue Bausteine zu expo-
nieren, ist . . . zu sich selbst gekommen, Sie kann bauen’ [emphasis added]; Wolfgang
Rihm, ‘Der geschockte Komponist’, Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik 17 (1978),
40–51.
28 ‘Sehnsucht nach einer verlorengegangenen Schönheit und Inhaltlichkeit und
Ablehnung eines erheuchelten Fortschrittsglaubens’; Hans-Jürgen von Bose, ‘Suche

nach einem neuen Schönheitsideal’, Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik 17 (1978),
34–9.

100 BEATE KUTSCHKE
In light of these provocative confessions, the critique of the imperative

of progress and innovation could not be explained sufficiently by relying on
postmodern theories alone. Writers on music therefore began to apply PEL
concepts and theories to the compositions of the new generation. In 1983
Carl Dahlhaus explained the emergence of ‘New Expressivity’—the style that
Rihm’s compositions exemplified—as a result of composers having lost con-
fidence in the idea of ‘being carried by history as an objective [and progres-
sive] spirit [in the Hegelian sense]’.29 (Postmodern music was initially labeled
Neue Expressivität, in addition to other labels such as Neue Einfachheit and
Neotonalität). Along the same lines, Danuser asserted a year later:
Since the mid-1970s, caused by the shock of the oil crisis of 1973/4 [when]
the economical, political, and cultural idea of progress30 in Europe had been
seriously called into doubt, the decade-long, yet never unchallenged hegemony
of ‘modernity’s’ philosophy of history, as regards the field of art and aesthetics,
had simultaneously turned into a crisis, during which the principle that art has
to be new to claim its authenticity, had disintegrated or turned into its oppo-
site. These ‘tendencies’ are an all-embracing phenomenon: categories such as
‘liberty’, ‘subjectivity’, ‘inwardness’, and ‘privacy’, which had been pointed to as
characteristics of German literature of the 1970s, are also applicable without
any restrictions to music.31
The musicologists Eberhardt Klemm, Albrecht Riethmüller, and Harry

Halbreich brought forward similar arguments.32 Unlike her colleagues, Helga
29 ‘ . . . von der Geschichte als objektivem Geist getragen zu werden’ (Carl Dahlhaus,
‘Vom Altern einer Philosophie’, Adorno-Konferenz 1983, ed. Ludwig von Friedeburg
and Jürgen Habermas (Frankfurt am Main, 1983), p. 136.
30 The adjectives are probably not appropriately positioned. They most likely specify
the areas in which progress was pursued, not the disciplines in which the ideas of
progress were propagated. In brief, Danuser most likely meant: ‘the idea of economic,
political, and cultural progress’.
31 ‘Seit Mitte der 70er Jahre, ausgelöst zumal durch den Schock der ersten Ölkrise
1973/74, [als] das ökonomische, politische und kulturelle Fortschrittsdenken in

Europa in tiefe Zweifel gestürzt wurde, ist gleichzeitig im Bereich von Kunst und
Ästhetik die jahrzehntelange (freilich niemals unangefochtene) Vorherrschaft der
Geschichtsphilosophie der “Moderne” in eine Krise geraten, in deren Verlauf der
Grundsatz, Kunst müsse neu sein, um als authentisch gelten zu können, aufgelöst
oder gar in sein Gegenteil verkehrt wurde. Diese “Tendenzen” stellen dabei ein über-
greifendes Phänomen dar: Kategorien wie “Freiheit”, “Subjektivität”, “Innerlichkeit”,
“Privatheit”, die als Charakteristika der deutschen Literatur der 70er Jahre genannt
worden sind, gelten uneingeschränkt auch für die Musik.’ Hermann Danuser, Musik
des 20. Jahrhunderts (Laaber, 1984), p. 400.
32 Eberhardt Klemm, ‘Nichts Neues unter der Sonne: Postmoderne’, Musik und
Gesellschaft 47, no. 8 (1987), 403; Albrecht Riethmüller, ‘Theodor W. Adorno und
der Fortschritt in der Musik’, Das Projekt Moderne und die Postmoderne, ed. Wilfried

de la Motte-Haber backed her ideas by referencing key PEL authors, particu-

larly Hendrik de Man and Arnold Gehlen, as well as the (cultural) historian and
philosopher of history Arnold J. Toynbee and the art historian Hans Sedlmayr.
She wrote an essay on the relationship between postmodernism, the conscious-
ness of time, concepts of history, theories on historiography, and the manifesta-
tion of these factors in compositional practice since the late nineteenth century.
In her text, PEL theories—or rather selected aspects and fragments of them—
serve to explain the composers’ ‘neglect’ of the aesthetic and historiographic
premises of progress and innovation. She emphasized that contemporaneous
composers and artists did not consider the past in the same way as previous
generations had and, therefore, the past, with its specific compositional styles
and idioms, could be reproduced or emulated in compositions of the present.
In this, she asserted, the loss of the ‘consciousness of a temporal distance from
the past’ manifested itself.33 In her opinion, it was this distance from the past
that until the 1970s had motivated individuals to maintain and conserve past
cultural products and achievements, while asking them to produce new works
that were different from those past products to be conserved.
What role did the PEL theories—especially the ideas of ‘crisis of the
understanding of history’, ‘loss of the past’, ‘loss of history’, and ‘loss of the
consciousness of time’—ultimately play in the understanding of history as
outlined by Helga de la Motte-Haber and the aforequoted Ulrich Mosch?
How was this new view on history drawing on or distinguishing itself from
the optimistic Enlightenment ideas on history?
In the historical-philosophical discourse on which de la Motte-Haber drew,
PEL ‘posthistoire’, the ‘loss of history’, and the ‘end of history’ referred to the
opposite of the Enlightenment understanding of history with its vision of a
possible positive end. While the optimistic end of history promised eternal par-
adise on earth, the emphatically pessimistic one foretells the decline of civiliza-
tion and the universe, in brief, no future. Within this pessimistic outlook two
variants can be found: the first foretells an eternal hell on earth—socio-political,
cultural, and humanitarian-moral decline would be followed by the persistence
of the deficient state at which humankind had arrived; the second prophesizes
the physical disappearance of the world caused by a nuclear war or the destruc-
tion of the biosphere (as this variant is marginal and not sufficiently developed
in PEL theories, it is not pertinent to this essay’s discussion).34
Gruhn (Regensburg, 1989), p. 17; Harry Halbreich, ‘Die Neubewertung des Begriffs
“Konsonanz” jenseits des Begriffs Tonalität’, Wiederaneignung und Neubestimmung: Der
Fall ‘Postmoderne’ in der Musik, ed. Otto Kolleritsch (Vienna and Graz, 1993), p. 119.
33 Helga de la Motte-Haber, ‘Die Gegenaufklärung der Postmoderne’, Musik und
Theorie, ed. Rudolf Stephan (Mainz and New York, 1987), p. 42.
34 Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (Munich, 1956); Dietmar
Kamper, Zur Soziologie der Imagination (Munich and Vienna, 1986), pp. 59 and 60;

102 BEATE KUTSCHKE
The idea of the end of history as eternal hell on earth first appeared in
1861 with Antoine Cournot; Célestin Charles Alfred Bouglé interpreted
and developed the writings of Cournot and introduced the term posthisto-
rique some forty years later.35 Both drew on ‘world-explanatory’ models such
as theories on energy and entropy, Darwin’s theory of evolution, as well as
geometric and physical analogies.36 But Cournot aimed less at presenting a
coherent explanation than at designing a specific dark atmosphere and spirit
(note the added emphases):
We maintain that . . . the political system tends toward stability, at least in

the sense that the political reasons for instability decrease or disappear. It is
important to note that, in politics and elsewhere, the condition of fixation, or
the tendency toward the fixation, is always a kind of solidification of vital energy,
a disposition of passing from the sphere of living nature, ruled by instincts and
passions, to one that is dominated by experience, the laws of logic and calcula-
tion. Progress drives humanity toward a final state in which, strictly speaking,
the elements of civilization have imposed their control on all other elements
of human nature . . . (due to the continuous intervention of experience and
general reason). All original distinctions tend to weaken themselves, and the
society, like a hive of bees, tends to come to terms with the quasi-geometrical
conditions of which the experience operates as . . . the essential condition.37
While Cournot’s and Bouglé’s historical-philosophical ideas were pri-

marily speculative, later promoters of pessimistic PEL ideas—Roderick
Dietmar Kamper, ‘Kupierte Apokalypse: Eschatologie und Posthistoire’, Ästhetik und

Kommunikation 16, no. 60 (1985), 85.
35 Célestin Charles Alfred Bouglé, ‘Les rapports de l’histoire et de la science sociale
d’après Cournot’, Revue de métaphysique et morale (1905), 368.

36 Theories of entropy were extremely popular around 1900 and revived in the 1980s,
see Jeremy Rifkin, Entropy: A New World (Toronto and New York, 1981).
37 ‘Notre thèse consiste à soutenir que . . . le système politique tend vers la stabilité, en
ce sens du moins que les causes politiques d’instabilité s’amoindrissent ou disparais-

sent. Et remarquons bien que la condition de la fixité, ou du progrès vers la fixité, c’est
toujours dans l’ordre politique comme ailleurs, une sorte d’engourdissement de l’énergie
vitale, une disposition à passer, de la sphère où s’accomplissent les phénomènes de
la nature vivante, sous l’empire des instincts et des passions, à celle où tout se gou-
verne d’après l’expérience, par les lois de la logique et du calcul. [ . . . L’histoire] con-
duit progressivement l’humanité vers un état final où les éléments de la civilisation
proprement dite, ayant pris sur tous les autre élément de la nature humaine . . . une
influence prépondérante (grâce à l’intervention continuelle de l’expérience et de la rai-
son générale), toutes les distinctions originelles tendent à s’affaiblir, et la société tend
à s’arranger, comme la ruche des abeilles, d’après des conditions quasi géométriques,
dont l’expérience constate . . . les conditions essentielles.’ Antoine Augustin Cournot,
Traité de lénchaînement des idées fondamentales dans les sciences et dans l’histoire, 2 vols
(Paris, 1861), II, pp. 341–2.

Seidenberg and Hendrik de Man, both publishing in the early 1950s, Arnold
Gehlen publishing in the 1960s and early 1970s, and Lewis Mumford pub-
lishing in the mid-1960s—based their horrific visions on recent develop-
ments in modern Western societies including Nazism and fascist states.38 The
state of the world to which they referred by the terms ‘posthistoire’ and ‘end of
history’ (and to a lesser extent ‘loss of history’) emerged from a self-dynamic
process that led to a ‘crystallized’, stagnant state, a real end of history here
and now. According to the theories of ‘posthistoire’ and ‘end of history’, sev-
eral areas of society and the state would be involved in this self-dynamic. The
authors (and inventors) of these theories believed, for instance, that in the near
future knowledge (especially in the natural sciences), technology, and indus-
trial production would jointly form a system which, aiming at expansion and
efficiency, would eliminate all kinds of disruptive elements, including modes
of behaviors characteristic of human beings, such as spontaneity, passion, and
creativity. With the extinction of such behavior modes, the remaining human
beings would be desubjectivized. Human beings in an emphatic sense would
disappear. Instead, they would be exclusively directed by a rationality that
would maintain the status quo of the system. Accordingly, in his monograph
Posthistoric Man of 1950, Seidenberg envisioned an ‘inherent, obligatory, and
accelerating trend toward increased organization in every aspect of life—a
process tending toward the final crystallization of society—[that would lead
to a] world of the future . . . characterized by a wholly new type of universal
collectivism arising out of an inexorable principle of social integration’.39
Similarly, Gehlen and Mumford considered desubjectivized individuals
as an outgrowth of reproductive work structures (automatization) and of a
merciless system of administration; in Gehlen’s words, the ‘regular function-
ing of the wheels of administration and industry’.40 ‘Under these conditions’,
Mumford prophesized, ‘all human purposes would be swallowed up in a
mechanical process immune to any human desire that diverged from it. With
that a new creature, the post-historic man, would come into existence.’41
Gehlen labeled this new kind of human ‘target type’ or ‘ideal type’.42
38 Roderick Seidenberg, Posthistoric Man (Chapel Hill, NC, 1950); Hendrik de Man,
Vermassung und Kulturverfall (Salzburg, 1951); Lewis Mumford, The Transformations
of Man (New York, 1956); Arnold Gehlen, ‘Ende der Geschichte?’, Einblicke, ed.
Arnold Gehlen (Frankfurt am Main, 1975), pp. 115–34.
39 Seidenberg, Posthistoric Man, p. 234.
40 ‘ . . . regelmäßige Funktionieren der Räder der Verwaltung und der Industrie’;
Gehlen, ‘Ende der Geschichte?’, p. 126.

41 Mumford, The Transformations of Man, p. 155.
42 ‘Solltypus’ or ‘Idealtypus’; Arnold Gehlen, ‘Ende der Persönlichkeit’ [1956],
Studien zur Anthropologie und Soziologie, ed. Arnold Gehlen (Neuwied am Rhein and
Berlin, 1963), p. 333.

104 BEATE KUTSCHKE
The ‘posthistoire’ and ‘end of history’ visions of Seidenberg, de Man, Gehlen,

and Mumford share essential ideas with the famous cultural critique of the
Frankfurt School researching and publishing in the first half and middle of the
twentieth century. In the Dialektik der Aufklärung of 1947, Adorno (together
with Max Horkheimer) warned that in Western, highly industrialized societ-
ies, individuals would ‘shrink to the nodal point of conventional reactions and
the modes of operation objectively expected of [them]. . . . [Their] criterion is
self-preservation, the successful or unsuccessful adaptation to the objectivity
of [their] function and the schemata assigned to it.’43 Adorno also claimed to
have observed an ‘immanent tendency of administration towards expansion
and independence as a . . . form of domination’.44 Furthermore, the ‘system’
had a prominent position in Adorno’s dystopic visions: ‘The absurdity of the
[current] state in which the force of the system over human beings increases
with every step that frees them from the force of nature denounces the reason
of the reasonable society as obsolete.’45
In what way, however, does a system dominated by industry and admin-
istration, and eliminating human subjects in the emphatic sense, terminate
the course of history, as the expression ‘end of history’ suggests? The mean-
ing of the term ‘end of history’ reveals itself in light of the Western concept
of history. If history is a creation by historiographers or other writers who
narrate and shape events into meaningful, reasonably ordered historical facts
that epitomize development and progress, the writing of history, historiog-
raphy, cannot take place without events which the historiographers narrate.
The term ‘event’ does not refer to all actions of living beings—the growth of
plants, the change of seasons—but such occurrences which the historiographer
deems of sufficient significance, because they had an impact on societies, poli-
tics, the state of knowledge and sciences, and many other domains. Moreover,
events are changes that, in the view of historiographers, are related to each
other in a meaningful way. In contrast, the posthistoric socio-economic
43 ‘Das Individuum schrumpft zum Knotenpunkt konventioneller Reaktionen

und Funktionsweisen zusammen, die sachlich von ihm erwartet werden. . . . Sein
Maßstab ist die Selbsterhaltung, die gelungene oder mißlungene Angleichung an die
Objektivität seiner Funktion und die Muster, die ihr gesetzt sind.’ Max Horkheimer
and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung [1947] (Frankfurt am Main, 1969),
p. 34.
44 ‘ . . . immanente Expansions- und Verselbständigungstendenz von Verwaltung
als bloßer Herrschaftsform.’ Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Kultur und Verwaltung’ [1956],

Gesammelte Schriften: Soziologische Schriften 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 20 vols (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), VIII, pp. 125.
45 ‘Die Absurdität des Zustandes, in dem die Gewalt des Systems über die Menschen
mit jedem Schritt wächst, der sie aus der Gewalt der Natur herausführt, denunziert
die Vernunft der vernünftigen Gesellschaft als obsolete.’ Horkheimer and Adorno,
Dialektik der Aufklärung, p. 38.

systems that Gehlen, Seidenberg, Mumford, and Horkheimer and Adorno

described were marked by mere repetition and absurd routine: reproduction,
circular reiterations, and the rotation of the machine—actions that are not
events in the sense defined above.46 Gehlen cynically coined the following
motto for posthistoric society: ‘What repeats itself is healthy.’47 Seen in this
light, the envisioned socio-economic systems could, indeed, be understood as
manifestations of the ‘end of history’. Such horrific visions were of course not
pure fantasy, but reflected concrete experiences: well-planned extermination
mechanisms of the European Jews between 1941 and 1945, Soviet bureau-
cracy, the increasing presence of machines, and the adoption of the assembly
line, starting in 1913 in a Ford plant.48
Although philosophers of history who focused on the idea of a posthistoire
explained the decline they envisaged as the result of modern civilization, thus
pertaining only to Western industrialized societies, this variant of the end of
history was imagined as global. They neglected the possibility that not-yet-
industrialized civilizations could continue to change themselves and their envi-
ronment, including the Western industrialized countries that had crystallized.49
How could such a conception of the end of history serve as an explana-
tory model for the emergence of postmodern music? To be sure, the playful
patchwork character of Berio’s Sinfonia and the hyperexpressivity of Rihm’s
Morphonie do not quite align with the dystopic visions of a crystallized, stan-
dardized, and dehumanized society. The compositions are much too sponta-
neous, creative, vital, and subjective to serve as an analogy of an imagined
posthistoric society.50
46 They described the ‘reproduction of sameness’ [Reproduktion des Immergleichen],

‘travestied routine’ [travestierte Routine] and ‘standardization and serial produc-
tion’ [Standardisierung und Serienproduktion]; ibid., pp. 120 and 115; see also Jean
Baudrillard, ‘Die Abschreckung der Zeit’, Tumult 9 (1987), 109.
47 ‘Gesund ist, was sich wiederholt.’ Arnold Gehlen, ‘Die gesellschaftliche Situation
in unserer Zeit’ [1961], Anthropologische und sozialpsychologische Untersuchungen, ed.

Arnold Gehlen (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1986), p. 133.
48 In the 1980s Christopher R. Browning, for instance, reconstructing the causes
of the Holocaust, suggested: ‘one must shift away from an exclusively Hitlerocentric
focus and look much more carefully at what the middle- and lower-echelon Germans
of the emerging ‘machinery of destruction’ were doing [emphasis added].’ Fateful
Months (New York, 1985), p. 7.
49 In contrast, Fukuyama, saw the end of history achieved through the victory of
liberal capitalism over communism. He turned away from the pessimistic view of his-
tory advocated by Gehlen, Seidenberg, Mumford, and Horkheimer and Adorno; see
Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York, 1992).
50 It should have been clear to the reader of de la Motte-Haber’s article that the
posthistoric society is dystopic, not reality, and thus that postmodern music cannot be
the effect of an already existing posthistoric society.

106 BEATE KUTSCHKE
The reason for this incongruity lies in the fact that Helga de la Motte-
Haber developed her argument and theory on the basis of spurious similari-
ties between musical trends that were called ‘postmodern’, on the one hand,
and ‘posthistoire’ and the ‘end of history’ as theories and visions, on the other.
This procedure was stimulated by the superficial and inaccurate reception of
PEL theories. De la Motte-Haber conflated various ideas that were circulat-
ing in different contexts, among them ‘crisis of history’, ‘posthistoire’, ‘crisis of
historiography’, the ‘end of history’, the ‘abandonment of the idea of progress’,
and the ‘loss of history’—terms that sound similar, but often refer to quite dif-
ferent issues. In PEL theories, the terms ‘posthistoire’ and ‘end of history’ serve
as metaphors for a crystallized social state, which cultural critics envisioned
as a kind of science fiction. In contrast, the ‘loss of history’ refers to a spe-
cific mode of perception or consciousness of history.51 Individuals who perceived
things in this way believed that history (as a meaningful series of events) was
over or stagnant, that is, described a posthistoric socio-economic system. The
crisis of history or historiography, meanwhile, described the insight of his-
toriographers that writing history is concerned less with the reconstruction
than with the actual construction of facts and their relationship to each other.
Proponents of the ‘abandonment of the idea of progress’ held that progress
was no longer a central value. Therefore, while ‘posthistoire’ and ‘end of history’
referred to a global state that lacked history (in the sense of meaningfully
related events in the emphatic sense), the terms ‘loss of history’, ‘crisis of his-
tory and historiography’ and ‘abandonment of the idea of progress’ referred to
ideas of and attitudes toward history.
Unsurprisingly, musicological publications on postmodern music and
PEL theories after de la Motte-Haber, by Gerd Rienäcker, Elmar Budde,
Marc Delaere, and Herman Sabbe, did not continue her argument.52
However, their alternative theories on (or rather, narrations of ) music his-
tory drawing on modes of PEL thinking were hardly more convincing. Their
51 Because of the difference between ‘posthistoire’/‘end of history’ and ‘loss of his-

tory’, both have occured in publications independently from each other. It is logically
possible for individuals to claim that they do not perceive the course of the world as
history (i.e., a series of significant as well as causally and reasonably connected events);
they can do so independent of, for instance, the opinion of the majority of people or
the actual condition of the world.
52 Gerd Rienäcker, ‘Musiktheater—Dialektik der Aufklärung—Postmoderne?’,
Motiv: Musik in Gesellschaft anderer Künste 2/3 (1991), 22–3; Elmar Budde, ‘Der
Pluralismus der Moderne und/oder die Postmoderne’, Wiederaneignung und
Neubestimmung: Der Fall ‘Postmoderne’ in der Musik, ed. Otto Kolleritsch (Vienna and
Graz, 1993), pp. 50–62; Mark Delaere, ‘The End of History: New Music in Post-
Communist Societies’, The European Legacy: Toward New Paradigms 2, no. 1 (1997),
155–9; Herman Sabbe, ‘Pour en finir avec la “fin de l‘histoire”’, Revue belge de musicolo-
gie / Belgisch tijdschrift voor muziekwetenschap 52 (1998), 137–45.

writings seemed to aim less at explaining the specific aesthetics of a post-

modern music, as de la Motte-Haber and Mosch had done, than at pleasur-
ably delving into the specific discourses described in the preceding sections.53
Indeed, by plunging into pessimist history-philosophical theories, the musi-
cologists overlooked what was right before their eyes: concrete historical facts
that, from our perspective today, can be considered as a second—and per-
haps more weighty—group of factors that contributed to the emergence of
a postmodern music. Mosch’s previously mentioned article serves as a useful
approach to the reconstruction of those factors. He presented the compos-
ers’ aesthetic premises, which they articulated as a kind of revolt, as reactions
against a regime that had become unpopular: the established, consolidated,
aesthetic premises of avant-garde music. Trojahn protested against the author-
itarian ‘interdiction of tonality’,54 and Rihm rejected the ‘polite manners of
world music’ and ‘any manners in art’.55 In highlighting the oppositional, dis-
senting attitude of the postmodern composers, Mosch’s article—intentionally
or coincidentally—related the activities of the new generation of compos-
ers to the student and protest movements that took place a few years earlier.
Just as Trojahn and Rihm protested against authorities and ‘manners’, in the
1960s and early 1970s students had protested against the authoritarian and
repressive state institutions and their employees, as well as other individuals
in power: teachers, professors, parents, police, courts. Are those allusions and
analogies mere coincidence?
Postmodern Music and ‘1968’
The German literary theorist Roman Luckscheiter asserts that postmodern aes-
thetics have shared more with the New-Leftist movements than the advocates
53 Rienäcker, for instance, adopted the gloomy, apocalyptic, end-of-millenium rheto-

ric characteristic of the end-of-history discourse. In the 1980s and 1990s, the concept
evoked associations with the apocalypse, last judgment, and global demise. He pro-
phetically exclaimed: ‘Life is all over, the philosophy of life is over; so is the theol-
ogy which has been conjured up; history is all over and each attempt to write it!?’
(Zu Ende das Leben, zu Ende auch das Philosophieren darüber, zu Ende auch die
Theologie, welche heraufbeschworen ist, zu Ende die Historie und jeder Versuch, sie zu
schreiben!?); Rienäcker, ‘Musiktheater’, p. 22.
54 ‘Tonalitätsverbot’; Manfred Trojahn, ‘Manfred Trojahn’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik
140, no. 1 ( January/February 1979), 18.

55 ‘Ich hasse diese höflichen Umgangsformen der Weltmusik. . . . Ich will jede
Wohlerzogenheit aus der Kunst draußen lassen.’ Wolfgang Rihm and Hartmut Lück,
‘Mit vermeintlich kruden, geschmacklosen Werken wider die Wohlerzogenheit der
Kunst und die höflichen Umgangsformen der Weltmusik’, Musik und Medizin (6
April 1982), 88.

108 BEATE KUTSCHKE
of the postmodern turn have usually wished to acknowledge.56 Yet the publica-
tion date of the article ‘Cross the Border—Close the Gap’ by the American
novelist and literary theorist Leslie A. Fiedler, which is celebrated as the
founding manifesto of postmodernism, proves the close relationship between
postmodernism and ‘1968’.57 Published in 1969, a year after the climax of the
student and protest movements around the globe, Fiedler’s article declared the
‘death throes of literary modernism and the birth pangs of postmodernism’.58
He supported his argument by pointing to literary and musical works that, in
his view, had overcome the ‘class-structured world’, crossed the line between
‘elite and mass culture’, and/or were consciously ironic.59
In literature and music (and culture in general), the intertwinement of
‘1968’ and postmodernism manifests itself strongly because ‘1968’ was not
only a socio-political movement, but also a cultural one. The counterculture
performed by the 68ers included aesthetic premises that anticipated several
features later categorized as characteristic of postmodernism.60 This also
applied to music.61 The rediscovery of subjectivity which manifested itself
in the hyperexpressive compositions of Rihm and Trojahn, for instance, can
already be found in compositions of Luigi Nono, who had sympathized with
the resistenza against fascism during World War II and became a member
of the Italian Communist Party (CPI) in 1952 (in spite of belonging to the
Italian upper class). In the radical, avant-gardist ‘azioni sceniche’ Intolleranza
1960 (1961) and Al gran sole carico d’amore (1975), two dramatic works among
his numerous politically engaged compositions, Nono created a pulsating fab-
ric of crescendos and decrescendos.62 In Intolleranza 1960, they enter in a
cascade-like manner (figure 5.1). In Al gran sole, Nono employs compound cre-
scendos, crescendos with canonical entrance, and crescendos and decrescendos
56 Roman Luckscheiter, ‘Der postmoderne Impuls: “1968” als literaturgeschich-

tlicher Katalysator’, 1968: Ein Handbuch zur Kultur- und Mediengeschichte der
Studentenbewegung, ed. Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth (Stuttgart, 2007), pp.
151–60.
57 See Welsch, Unsere postmoderne Moderne, p. 15; Michael Drolet, ed., The
Postmodernism Reader: Foundational Texts (London, 2003), p. 64.

58 Leslie Fiedler, ‘Cross the Border—Close the Gap’, Playboy (December 1969), 151.
59 Ibid., pp. 151, 253, 256, 252, and 230.
60 Luckscheiter, ‘Der postmoderne Impuls’, p. 152.
61 Regarding the contribution of New-Leftist participants to the ‘aesthetic de-dog-
matization’ of new music in the Darmstadt Summer Courses that prepared the later
invitation of composers to be classified as postmodern, see Frank Hentschel, ‘Ein
Popkonzert und die ästhetische Entdogmatisierung der “Neuen Musik” nach 1968’,
Musikkulturen in der Revolte: Studien zu Rock, Avantgarde und Klassik im Umfeld von
‘1968’, ed. Beate Kutschke (Stuttgart, 2008), pp. 39–54.
62 Since Wagner’s music dramas, theater pieces with music are rarely classified as
operas; Nono called his music-theater piece ‘azione scenica’.

Figure 5.1 Luigi Nono, Intolleranza 1960, p. 8.

110 BEATE KUTSCHKE
that overlap and mutually intensify or neutralize each other. In 1968, at the
peak of the student and protest movements in West Germany, Hans Werner
Henze, a public supporter of the movements,63 started his oratorio ‘volgare e
militare’ Das Floß der Medusa with a 20-second crescendo from pp to ff (mm.
1–5) effected by means of successively accumulating brass on top of a coun-
terbass pedal tone.
How, though, are crescendos and decrescendos significant for my premise
that hyperexpressivity in many postmodern compositions can already be found
in avant-gardist compositions? Crescendos and decrescendos are important
means of creating expression on a fundamental, gestural level. The crescendos
and decrescendos in Nono’s ‘azioni sceniche’ convey to the listener an overall
expressive atmosphere of extreme tension, agitation, desperation, and perhaps
also rage. The crescendo at the beginning of Henze’s oratorio emulates a human
scream, a highly expressive musical gesture. Remarkably, the crescendo does not
end on a downbeat or light part of the measure, such as the end of a whole note
terminating the measure, but before the end of the measure, on an eighth note
that naturally accentuates the very final section of the crescendo. Thus, the very
end of the crescendo, as the scream itself, appears to be torn off.
Differentiated forms of (de)crescendos can be best realized by means of
a colorful combination of musical instruments.64 Therefore, Rihm’s hyperex-
pressive works are written for huge, late-Romantic orchestras. Drawing on
Nono’s and Henze’s techniques, Rihm’s large-scale orchestral compositions
further developed and intensified his models. In the Dritte Symphonie of 1977
and the oratorio Andere Schatten of 1985, crescendos and decrescendos serve
to shape the ‘interior’ of the sound (figures 5.2 and 5.3).
Another way for composers to display subjectivity is to employ compo-
sitional methods that demand spontaneous decision-making.65 An example
is Rihm’s String Quartet no. 5, provocatively titled Ohne Titel (1983). In his
63 From the mid-1960s Henze actively supported the student movement. He helped
to organize the Vietnam Congress in Berlin in February 1968 and provided Rudi
Dutschke with asylum in his villa in Marino, Italy, when Dutschke was recovering
from an attack that had almost killed him; see Hans Werner Henze, Reiselieder mit
böhmischen Quinten: Autobiographische Mitteilungen, 1926–1995 (Frankfurt am Main,
1996), pp. 291 and 294. Das Floß der Medusa is Henze’s first explicitly politically
engaged composition.
64 This is not to say that chamber-music works such as string quartets are less expres-
sive; they are differently expressive. The expressivity of chamber music is introverted
while that of the late-Romantic orchestra is extroverted.
65 Like expressivity and emotionality, spontaneity is generally considered to be char-
acteristic of humans. Regarding the significance of spontaneity for Kant’s concept

of the subject, see Rudolf Eisler, ‘Spontaneität’, Kant-Lexikon (Berlin, 1930), http://
www.textlog.de/32648.html (accessed 12 December 2017). Max Horkheimer draws
on Kant’s concept, see Eclipse of Reason (New York, 1947).

Figure 5.2 Wolfgang Rihm, Dritte Symphonie, p. 30.

112 BEATE KUTSCHKE
Figure 5.3 Wolfgang Rihm, Andere Schatten, p. 13.
commentaries on the piece, he explained that he conceived it by carrying

a sketchbook close to his body (‘am Leib’) and, more or less uninterrupt-
edly, noted musical thoughts in the order in which the sound imaginations
emerged.66 Thus, the fair copy truly is a sketchbook.
66 Wolfgang Rihm, in discussion with Wilhelm Matejka, 11 November 1992, private

recording of the Sender Freies Berlin radio broadcast in possession of the author. The
interview took place in the framework of the concert dedicated to the performance of

Like the excessive use of crescendos and decrescendos, the practice of

instantaneous composing was by no means Rihm’s invention. He adopted a
practice that had become characteristic for the New-Leftist new-music scene
since the mid-1960s. Sharing the values of the student and protest movements,
politically engaged contemporary musicians strove for anti-authoritarian,
anti-hierarchical, and grassroots-oriented modes of composing and perform-
ing music. The method that, in their view, was most consistent with the socio-
political impetus of the movements was free improvisation: no composer, no
score, no conductor—in sum, no authoritative instance that ‘commanded’ the
musicians what to do. The tendency toward free improvisation manifested itself
in the so-called Sound Pools that the musicians’ collective Musica Elettronica
Viva (MEV) organized beginning in 1966,67 and in progressive pedagogy in
elementary school since 1970. Free-improvisation groups established them-
selves in numerous West German cities throughout the 1970s.68 Rihm was well
aware of this development, as confirmed in an interview in 1992.69
Two other characteristics of postmodern music that occur, often in combi-
nation with each other, can be traced back to the spirit of ‘1968’: an irreverent
treatment of quotations and the aesthetics of fragmentation. This becomes
visible in the context of the bicentennial of Beethoven’s birthday in 1970.
Striving to bring the New-Leftist anti-authoritarian revolt into the musical
field, New-Leftist composers, who were invited to contribute compositions to
the celebration ceremonies, refused to include the expected references to the
great master, Beethoven. Instead, they alienated the long tradition of hommage
compositions. While, in the past, composers had praised masters in music by
basing variation sets on their famous themes, avant-gardists such as Mauricio
Kagel, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Wilhelm Dieter Siebert removed the
great master Beethoven from his pedestal by processing his music according
Rihm’s string quartets nos. 3, 5, and 8 by the Arditti Quartet at the broadcasting sta-
tion (today: Radio Berlin Brandenburg, or RBB).
67 Frederic Rzewski, Alvin Curran, and Richard Teitelbaum founded the ensem-
ble 1966 in Rome. In the sound pools, the audience was invited to freely improvise
together with the ensemble. When the non-professionals joined the sound pools the
result was regularly charivari and turmoil; see Frederic Rzewski, ‘Sound Pool (1969)’,
Dissonanz 6 (1970), 13–14. The art of improvisation is to avoid playing without a
break and instead to allow enough phases of silence.
68 On the relationship between research on creativity, (music) pedagogy, and free
improvisation, see Beate Kutschke, ‘Improvisation: An Always-Accessible Instrument

of Innovation’, Perspectives of New Music 37, no. 2 (1999), 147–62; Beate Kutschke,
Neue Linke/Neue Musik: Kulturtheorien und künstlerische Avantgarde in den 1960er und
70er Jahren (Cologne and Weimar, 2007).
69 Wolfgang Rihm, in discussion with Wilhelm Matejka.

114 BEATE KUTSCHKE
to radical aesthetics.70 Avant-gardist compositional techniques are marked by

fragmentation; around 1970 a non-fragmented composition would not have
been classified as modern or avant-gardist (unless composed in the minimal-
ist style). Drawing on the aesthetics of fragmentation, Kagel’s Ludwig van
(film, LP, and score), Stockhausen’s Kurzwellen mit Beethoven, and Siebert’s
Unser Ludwig 1970 literally tore Beethoven’s music apart, ripped it off, dis-
torted, alienated, and deconstructed it.71 In so doing, however, they also cre-
ated pluralist compositions that combined contrasting tonalities and styles:
major-minor-tonal classical and atonal modernist.
Again, postmodern composers adopted the achievements of modern-
ist composers for their hommage-and-variation compositions. While the
titles of their pieces seemed innocuous—Wilhelm Killmayer’s Brahms-
Bildnis (1984), Detlev Müller-Siemens’s Variationen über einen Ländler von
Franz Schubert (1977–8), Wolfgang Rihm’s Erscheinung: Skizze über Schubert
(1978), Wolfgang von Schweinitz’s Mozart-Variationen, op. 12 (1976), and
Streichsextett—Hommage à Franz Schubert, op. 16 (1978)—their composi-
tional structures and moods were subversive. This can be observed in Müller-
Siemens’s Variationen (figure 5.4). He created a kitschy atmosphere through
obsessive repetitions of a turning figure, luscious instrumentation, and a
non-Wagnerian ‘redemption’ cadence72 right before the coda, in contrasting
combination with a shredded texture. Müller-Siemens generated the disin-
tegration of the smooth surface of the music by means of numerous short
crescendo–decrescendo sequences that overlap between the different voices,73
70 Important contributors to the hommage genre, which was strongly informed by neoclas-
sical aesthetics and predominated on the West German contemporary music scene, were
composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams (Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis [1910]),
Philipp Jarnach (Musik mit Mozart, op. 25 [1935]), Benjamin Britten (Variations on a
Theme of Frank Bridge, op. 10 [1937]) and Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Henry Purcell,
op. 34 [1945]), Alfredo Casella (Paganiniana [1941]), Boris Blacher (Orchestervariationen
über ein Thema von Niccolò Paganini [1947]) and Variationen über ein Thema von Muzio
Clementi [1961]), Werner Egk (Französische Suite nach Jean-Philippe Rameau [1949]), and
Bohuslav Martinů (Variationen auf ein Thema von Rossini [1949]).
71 Mauricio Kagel, Ludwig van [1969], The Mauricio Kagel Edition (Munich: Winter
& Winter, 2006), DVD; Mauricio Kagel, Ludwig van (Deutsche Grammophon,
1970), LP; Mauricio Kagel, Ludwig van (Vienna, 1970); Karlheinz Stockhausen,
Stockhausen—Beethoven—op. 1970 (Deutsche Grommphon, 1970), CD; Wilhelm
Dieter Siebert, Unser Ludwig 1970 (score) (unpublished).
72 The emphatically solemn character of this passage—each chord of the progres-
sion (iv6, cadential 6/4 [with minor sixth], V, I [Picardy third in the upper voice])
is interrupted by rests; the tonic is played messa di voce—has strong transcendental
connotations.
73 Abrupt changes between piano and forte from one bar to the next in the theme
(mm. 9–16).

Figure 5.4 Detlev Müller-Siemens, Variationen über einen Ländler von Franz
Schubert, first page of variation 3, p. 15

116 BEATE KUTSCHKE
as well as the use of microtones and glissandos that produce an out-of-tune

sound. The Ländler that Müller-Siemens depicts does not simulate the idyll
of Viennese suburban living and wine taverns, but the era of Metternich,
which was marked by censorship and a large spy network suppressing free-
dom of speech in the early-nineteenth-century Austria.
Having proposed an explanation for the emergence of postmodern
music—the zeitgeist of ‘1968’—that replaces the established explanation
brought forward by musicologists such as de la Motte-Haber and Mosch, a
key question remains: if it was the subversive, critical, pluralist, anti-author-
itarian, and expressive impetus of New-Leftist avant-gardist composers, and
not PEL theories, that inspired them in the early 1970s to develop a postmod-
ern style, why did the musicologists avail themselves of the PEL discourse in
order to explain the emergence of postmodern music? What motivated them
to do so? One answer may be that the association with postmodern music was
created less by the content of PEL theories—a posthistoric, dehumanized
society, organized down to the last detail; without progress, but with stagna-
tion; the loss of historical consciousness—than by the general mood those
theories conveyed. For the hyperexpressivity in the pieces by Rihm, Trojahn,
and Müller-Siemens does not cover the entire spectrum of human emotions.
Instead, like atonal, avant-gardist music in general, this music has a pessimis-
tic, negative, self-ironic, depressive mood—a mood that excellently matched
the apocalyptic tone of the PEL theories at the end of the last millennium.

Part III
Receptions of the Past

6
(Neo-)Schenkerism and the Past:

Recovering a Plurality of Critical Contexts
John Koslovsky
And if they could talk to one another, don’t you think they’d suppose that the
names they used applied to the things they see passing before them?
Plato, Republic, Book VII, 514b
The theories of Heinrich Schenker (1868–1935) have had no small impact

on musical thought over the past seventy years, no doubt due in part to the
interest that both the man and his writings have attracted from different
populations: not just music theorists and analysts, but also cultural histori-
ans, cognitive scientists, linguists, performers, and aestheticians.1 As is widely
known, Schenker travelled from the outer reaches of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire at the end of the nineteenth century to live, study, and work in its
capital, Vienna. It was from there that he produced an impressive body of
musical writings, including critical editions, analytical pamphlets, and a tri-
partite tome titled Neue musikalische Theorien und Phantasien that explored
what he saw as the essence of music’s fundamental laws of harmony, strict
counterpoint, and free composition.2 Bringing together worldviews that
encompassed the tradition of nineteenth-century German metaphysics and
Romanticism as well as a burgeoning age of aesthetic and philosophic mod-
ernism, Schenker ultimately proposed a theory of musical genius using his
theory of the Ursatz, a fundamental musical organism embodying a synthe-
sis of tonal music’s core attributes—the linear unfolding of the consonant
triad counterpointed by music’s essential bass progression of the tonic and
1 A comprehensive listing of Schenkerian scholarship up to 2004 can be found in

David Carson Berry, A Topical Guide to Schenkerian Literature (Hillsdale, 2004); and
Benjamin Ayotte, Heinrich Schenker: A Research and Information Guide (London, 2004).
2 This tome includes the Harmonielehre (Stuttgart, 1906); the two separate volumes
of Kontrapunkt I (Stuttgart, 1910) and Kontrapunkt II (Vienna, 1922); and Der freie
Satz, published posthumously (Vienna, 1935); published in English as Harmony, ed.
Oswald Jonas, trans. Elizabeth Mann-Borgese (Chicago, 1954); Counterpoint, ed. and
trans. John Rothgeb and Jürgen Thym, 2 vols (New York, 1987); and Free Composition,
trans. Ernst Oster (New York, 1979).

120 JOHN KOSLOVSKY
the dominant. For Schenker, this synthetic unity governs every stage of the
creative process and also every hierarchic level of a composition, from the
very surface of the music to its deepest recesses. ‘The combination’, Schenker
writes:
of fundamental line and bass arpeggiation constitutes a unity. This unity alone
makes it possible for voice-leading transformations to take place in the middle
ground and enables the forms of the fundamental structure to be transferred
to individual harmonies. Neither the fundamental line nor the bass arpeggia-
tion can stand alone. Only when acting together, when unified in a contrapun-
tal structure, do they produce art.3
At least within North American musicological discourse, few have under-

gone so sustained a critique as Schenker has. Many may even question whether
his ideas can still be taken seriously in an age that is ubiquitously inflected by
what Jean-François Lyotard famously dubbed the ‘postmodern condition’.4 To
be sure, concepts of organicism, formalism, unity, and genius, as well as meta-
phors of surface and depth, have been an object of critique going back at least
to 1980 in musical scholarship, when Joseph Kerman published his article
‘How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out’.5 Given especially more
recent trends in musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory, one might
think it astounding that Schenker’s ideas continue to play a role in scholarly
discourse. For what could be more remote today than grand metanarratives
that assume immutable laws of musical construction—laws, furthermore, that
rely on but a small canon of musical masterpieces and that, taken to their
most radical conclusion, exclude other forms of musical-creative production
that do not adhere to them? Do we not now all follow Lyotard’s cue in main-
taining an ‘incredulity toward meta-narratives’?6
It is little wonder, then, that music scholars of various stripes have refash-
ioned Schenker’s ideas in one way or another, many with the aim of quali-
fying the more controversial aspects of his thought. In fact, we would be
hard-pressed to identify any figure who can genuinely be said to have adopted
Schenker’s ideas wholesale. Not even his most devoted disciples could accept
his radical political or cultural pronouncements—after all, most of them lived
to see the damage that totalitarianism and fascism wrought upon an entire
continent and beyond. But rather than picking apart each of Schenker’s devo-
tees to unveil, rather fruitlessly, how one might be more ‘orthodox’ than the
3 Schenker, Free Composition, p. 11.

4 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans.
Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, 1984).
5 See Joseph Kerman, ‘How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out’, Critical
Inquiry 7, no. 2 (1980), 311–31.

6 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. xxiv.

(NEO-)SCHENKERISM AND THE PAST 121
next, and rather than simply rehearsing the many objections raised against
Schenker over the years, I wish to take a different route by exploring how
Schenkerian practices since World War II have refracted through the gen-
eral intellectual culture of postmodernity, something I think has had no
small impact on Schenker studies but which remains nonetheless under-
acknowledged. To be clear, I am not going to suggest some absurd notion
that all Schenkerian practices are ‘postmodern’, whatever that would mean.
I do believe, however, that there exists an intricate play of contexts wherein
Schenkerian commentators have responded to the postmodern condition,
sometimes overtly and sometimes in a more oblique fashion. These contexts
have as much to do with the various negotiating spaces in which Schenkerian
theory and its postwar commentators operate as they do with Schenkerism’s
relationship to the past.
When it comes to overt links between Schenkerian practices and the
postmodern condition, a number of examples readily come to mind: for
example, Lawrence Kramer’s essay on the relationship between hermeneutics
and Schenkerian analysis in Haydn; David Schwarz’s blending of Lacanian
and Schenkerian techniques in Schubert; and Robert Fink’s ‘post-hierarchi-
cal’, prolongational analyses of Beethoven, Stravinsky, and Reich.7 By the
same token, one could point to the work of Richard Littlefield and David
Neumeyer, who have posited an approach to Schenker that is at once more
pluralist (‘kaleidoscopic’) and more in touch with historical context, ideology,
and narrative.8 And when it comes to historically situated studies, one could
point to the writings of Kevin Korsyn and of Nicholas Cook, both of whom
have taken elements of postmodern and/or deconstructive thinking in order
to look back on aspects of Schenker’s own practice.9
7 See Lawrence Kramer, ‘Haydn’s Chaos, Schenker’s Order; or, Hermeneutics and
Musical Analysis: Can They Mix?’, 19th-Century Music 16, no. 1 (1992), 3–17; David
Schwarz, Listening Subjects: Music, Psychoanalysis, Culture (Durham, NC, 1997);
Robert Fink, ‘Going Flat: Post-Hierarchical Music Theory and the Musical Surface’,
Rethinking Music, ed. Mark Everist and Nicholas Cook (New York, 1999), pp. 102–37.
8 Richard Littlefield and David Neumeyer, ‘Rewriting Schenker: Narrative—
History—Ideology’, Music Theory Spectrum 14, no. 1 (1992), 38–65.

9 See Kevin Korsyn, ‘Schenker’s Organicism Reexamined’, Intégral 7 (1993), 82–118;
Nicholas Cook, The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-siècle
Vienna (New York, 2007). Cook points the reader in the general direction of Schenker
and the postmodern when he refers us to the work of authors who, either directly
or indirectly, locate elements of postmodernity or deconstruction in Schenker’s writ-
ing, not only Korsyn but also Joseph Lubben, Peter H. Smith, Kofi Agawu, and even
William Rothstein, whose 1990 reaction to an article on Schenkerian pedagogy by
Gregory Proctor and Herbert Riggins ‘exemplifies an increasingly widespread image
of Schenkerian analysis that might at least loosely be termed postmodern’. Cook, The
Schenker Project, p. 281. The thrust of Cook’s argument in these pages is directed in

122 JOHN KOSLOVSKY
My own entryway into this vast and treacherous terrain, however, will be
largely oblique, as I will do so through an examination of the strategically
parenthesized word in my title, ‘neo-’.10 I parenthesize this so-called ‘combin-
ing form’ as a means of caution and critique, for the word in itself runs the
risk of distorting an already complicated picture of Schenkerism’s embedding
in postmodernity. In itself, the use of ‘neo-’ is nothing new to music or music
theory—common expressions include ‘neoclassicism’, ‘neoromantic’, and more
recently ‘neo-Riemannian’.11 Despite the many things these similarly flawed
constructs may connote, they have all gained a general acceptance among
scholars and refer to some sort of recovery, revitalization, or renewal of a par-
ticular artistic style or intellectual tradition.
The case of ‘(neo-)Schenkerism’ is different, as it has always sat on the
margins of musicological and theoretical discourse. This is, perhaps, because
Schenker’s ideas have been in a continuous state of development and flux
since his own day, so it seems odd for anyone to identify a revitalization or
renewal of Schenkerian theory, at least on the face of it. The word ‘neo’, as
we shall see, not only conceals a diversity of strategies amongst practitioners
of and commentators on Schenker, but also exposes a blip in the discursive
matrix that both practice and critique foster. What the word outwardly sug-
gests is just as pertinent as what it implicitly conceals. As we will see, it gets
caught up in a seemingly endless deferral of meaning through its very insis-
tence on having an ontological status: not so much through the individuals
who employ it, but rather through the polysemic accrual of usages we observe
across texts. Given the aims of the present volume, an interrogation of this
combining form enables us to cast a different light on Schenkerism’s broader
place within postmodernity, by considering the ways in which issues of tem-
porality and historicity resonate in scholarship dealing with the word. In
order to flesh this out, we need to consider the various contexts in which the
expression has emerged.
part by his attempt to defend his own postmodern image of Schenker in a short paper
he published in 1989; see Nicholas Cook, ‘The Future of Theory’, Indiana Theory
Review 10 (1989), 70–2.
10 Oxford Dictionaries refers to ‘neo-’ as a ‘combining form’ that implies newness or ‘a
new or revived form’, http://www.oxforddictionaries.com (accessed 15 August 2015).

A combining form is ‘used to denote an element that contributes to the particular
sense of words (as with bio- and -graphy in biography), as distinct from a prefix or
suffix that adjusts the sense of or determines the function of words (as with un-, -able,
and -ation)’, ibid.
11 See Richard Cohn, ‘Introduction to Neo-Riemannian Theory: A Survey and a
Historical Perspective’, Journal of Music Theory 42, no. 2 (1998), 167–80.

Babbitt and the Princetonians
Although Schenkerian theory had begun to gain a foothold in the United

States in the 1950s, it was not until 1977 that ‘neo’ first appeared next to
‘Schenkerian’ in print. Remarkably, its appearance was not in a publication
by a Schenkerian practitioner but in one written by a sworn opponent of
Schenkerian theory, Eugene Narmour.12 Devoting an entire study to assess-
ing what he sees as the pitfalls of Schenker’s method, Narmour makes a
sharp distinction between Schenker’s practices and those of the ‘neo’ order:
the latter, he says, are represented by Milton Babbitt and his Princetonian
school of music theorists, among whom Narmour includes Eric Regener,
Philip Batstone, Arthur Komar, Michael Kassler, Robert Morgan, and
Howard Serwer. As Narmour argues, these authors give Schenkerian theory
a new scientific image by positing it as an ‘axiomatic’ system where all ele-
ments of musical structure can be ‘generated from a “base component”, the
Ursatz’.13 In essence, this results in a complete removal of all the metaphysi-
cal and idealist baggage that accompanies Schenker’s theories: his reliance on
the Chord of Nature; his adherence to the doctrine of musical organicism;
and his invocation of mystical numbers. With their renewed and scientifically
cleaned-up image of Schenker, Babbitt and his followers developed a strictly
top-down and hierarchical view of music that included a system of logical
relations formulated in terms of a neutral, context-free set of symbols, much
like Chomskyan transformational grammar. Narmour writes that:
If the analogy between Schenkerian theory and transformational grammar is

correct, as the neo-Schenkerians maintain—and I believe the evidence dem-
onstrates that the two fields are very similar in philosophical outlook—then it
is clear that we cannot seriously contend that Schenkerian analysis deals with
the individuality of a work.14
Without going into the details of Narmour’s work or into the various reac-
tions it has triggered, it appears that he is by-and-large unconvinced with the
(neo-)Schenkerians—he levels a barrage of criticism against them, including
errors in a priori thinking, affirming the consequent, and privileging the syn-
chronic over the diachronic. More relevant for the present discussion is the
effect Narmour’s coining of ‘(neo-)Schenkerian’ has had on later commenta-
tors. The first of these is the aforementioned Joseph Kerman, who makes use
of Narmour’s distinction between the Schenkerian and the (neo-)Schenkerian
12 Eugene Narmour, Beyond Schenkerism: The Need for Alternatives in Music Analysis
(Chicago, 1977).
13 Ibid., p. 12.
14 Ibid., p. 169.

124 JOHN KOSLOVSKY
in his book, Contemplating Music (1985).15 There, Kerman launches his own
challenge to Babbitt’s project of the 1960s, but does so from a cultural-histor-
ical point of view. He does not spare Narmour, either, whom he sees as merely
attempting to replace the Schenkerian form of ‘monism’ with Narmour’s own
brand, the implication-realization model. Furthermore, Kerman is careful to
tell us that ‘(neo-)Schenkerian’ is Narmour’s own designation: while acknowl-
edging the existence of the term, he nonetheless distances himself from any
ownership of or commitment to it (qualifying his remarks with ‘as Narmour
defines it’, ‘in Narmour’s sense’, etc.). In this way Kerman can maintain a cer-
tain distance from the subject matter he critiques.
To be sure, Kerman generally concurs with Narmour’s distinction and he
takes it one step further for his cultural-historical ends. His real aim is to
point to the formalist agenda of modernist music that buttresses itself with
formalist music theory:
Narmour draws a useful distinction between two classes of Schenker’s fol-

lowers, one that points to a further attraction, on a more sophisticated level,
that Schenker’s work has exerted on another type of theorist. The distinction
is based on their view of the Ursatz. ‘Schenkerians’, who include Schenker’s
direct and indirect disciples, view the Ursatz as an empirical ‘deep structure’
perceived in all tonal music, whereas ‘neo-Schenkerians’, who include leading
theorists of avant-garde music, view it as an a priori axiom in a more or less
formal system.16
Kerman argues that, if Babbitt and others could explain the existence of a
formal-axiomatic system for ‘established’ music of the common-practice era,
then they could equally justify the search for new formal-axiomatic systems
in avant-garde composition. For Kerman, this is but one more way in which
analysis and theory have tried to come to the service of new music. He finds
it a deeply problematic model, no doubt due in part to the absence of the
historical-critical attitude. In this way, Kerman concurs with Narmour.
In his two books A Guide to Musical Analysis (1987) and The Schenker
Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-siècle Vienna (2007),
Nicholas Cook endorses Narmour’s definition of (neo-)Schenkerism as a
radical formalist-axiomatic approach to Schenker.17 Although it is only in
the latter volume that Cook focuses exclusively on Schenker, he clearly takes
Schenkerian analysis as the method against which all other methods are to
be measured in his analytical guidebook written twenty years earlier. It is
15 Joseph Kerman, Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (Cambridge, MA,

1985).
16 Ibid., p. 86.
17 Nicholas Cook, A Guide to Musical Analysis (London, 1987); and Cook, The
Schenker Project.

instructive that in both writings, but particularly in the guidebook, Cook

does not simply cite Narmour’s use of the term ‘(neo-)Schenkerian’, but also
subjects it to his own interpretation. Even more than Narmour and Kerman,
Cook treats (neo-)Schenkerism in a largely categorical fashion, seeing it as the
last of three Schenkerian ‘traditions’—the first being Schenker’s own practice
and the second the more standardized practice of ‘conventional’ Schenkerian
theory since World War II.
Tellingly, Cook’s discussion of (neo-)Schenkerian theory is discussed not
in his chapter on Schenkerian analysis but in a later chapter entitled ‘Formal
Approaches to Analysis’. Just like Narmour, Cook attributes the rise of for-
malistic Schenkerian thinking to Babbitt, but he goes further when he intro-
duces two other authors who on the surface have very little (if anything) to
do with Schenker studies: Jeffrey Kresky and Benjamin Boretz. Both Kresky
and Boretz, in Cook’s opinion, aspire to a similar kind of musical formalism,
in which a logical set of relations and an axiomatic approach can be brought
to bear on the structure of a piece of music. Schenker’s role in all this is thus
indirect and might even be considered suspect, were it not for the fact that the
formal attributes Kresky and Boretz read into music can ultimately be shown
to take their cue from Schenker’s theory of the Ursatz and its logical trans-
formations through hierarchical levels. Since both were students of Babbitt,
this comes as no surprise. In its most radical formulation, Cook explains,
(neo-)Schenkerism would distinguish itself from the more conventional guise
of Schenkerism for two reasons: first, it aspires to a more generalized set of
conditions under which an axiomatic approach to music could operate, thus
broadening the formalist scope; and second, it rejects the aural dimension of
Schenkerian theory. In Cook’s words: ‘The Schenkerian question—“how is
the music experienced as directed motion”—is replaced by a new one: “how
can the score be shown to be logically structured?” or perhaps more accu-
rately “how should we recode the score so that its formal unity will become
self-evident?”’18 While Narmour and Kerman show the absence of diachronic
thinking in the (neo-)Schenkerians, Cook maintains that the temporal-expe-
riential element is similarly lacking.
Boretz is of particular interest to Cook. As an example of the (neo-)
Schenkerian approach, Cook invites the reader to compare Boretz’s and
Schenker’s respective analyses of the first theme of Brahms’s Symphony no.
4, the former of which can be found in the fourth part of Boretz’s ‘Meta-
Variations’, entitled ‘Analytical Fallout (II)’.19 In many ways, Boretz’s analysis
acts as a ‘meta-interpretation’ both of the music and of Schenker’s method, as
18 Cook, A Guide to Musical Analysis, p. 122.

19 Benjamin Boretz, ‘Meta-Variations: Studies in the Foundations of Musical
Thought’, a series of articles published in Perspectives of New Music over the period
1969–73. Boretz’s analysis of Brahms’s fourth symphony can be found in Perspectives

126 JOHN KOSLOVSKY
it goes beyond tonal pitch relations to include abstract structural-rhythmic

aspects of the piece as well as an understanding of what Boretz calls ‘time
scales’, thus providing a ‘metric’ of the deep structural patterning at play. One
senses a distinct erasure of historical-diachronic forces in Boretz’s discussion
of Schenker and Brahms, even as the analysis remains conscious of this era-
sure by indexing Schenker to the present and engaging with the temporal-
rhythmic aspects of Brahms’s symphony.
In a more expanded analysis from ‘Meta-Variations’ (mentioned in passing
by Cook), Boretz analyzes the Prelude to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.20 Here
his purported (neo-)Schenkerian tendencies take on new meaning (remem-
bering, of course, that Boretz himself never used the expression). To begin,
Boretz introduces a fictional observer, who knows nothing of the history of
the piece but who does know something about Schenkerian analysis. He
writes:
Let us consider first some of the ‘evidence’ with which Tristan confronts
a ‘naive’ observer, let us say one examining it in our own time who hasn’t a
very good idea of when it was composed. If he knows the ‘Schenker model’
but doesn’t consider its invocation in every case a moral imperative (so that
for him, something can be ‘music’ on other grounds, and even equally ‘highly
developed’ music), how likely is he to find it advantageous in interpreting this
evidence?21
In dialectical fashion Boretz slowly sets out to subject the observer to a new
listening paradigm, one based on a thoroughly non-tonal axiom, namely the
pitch-class set [0369] (a fully-diminished seventh chord). Using Boretz’s
paradigm, all tonal listening experiences fall by the wayside in order to cre-
ate space for his meta-reading, replete as it is with a recursive, top-down
hierarchy.
Without delving further into the details of Boretz’s approach (which
would require a separate study in itself ), it is worth noting that his analyses
are far more than simply exercises in dry formalism, as the passage quoted
above indicates. Just as Martin Scherzinger has problematized a formalist-
deconstructive dichotomy in reading Boretz, Boretz’s plea for über-formalism
is better seen as a subjective and relative type of formalism, one that realizes
its own self-reflexiveness and engages the music with a phenomenological
and pluralist ‘mindset’ (to borrow a term from Joseph Dubiel, another Babbitt
of New Music 11, no. 2 (1973), 160–6. Boretz’s essays were later published in a single
volume (Red Hook, NY, 1995).
20 See Boretz, ‘Meta-Variations, Part IV: Analytical Fallout (I)’, Perspectives of New
Music 11, no. 1 (1972), 159–217. See also Cook, A Guide to Musical Analysis, p. 223.
21 Boretz, ‘Meta-Variations, Part IV’, p. 160.

Princetonian).22 Boretz’s plea for logical structures and formal unity must
therefore be read against this phenomenological and self-reflective listening
approach.
No matter where we wish to draw the line between formalism and decon-
struction, these (neo-)Schenkerians clearly saw the need to remove Schenker’s
cultural baggage, especially when it came to reconstructing the past. The
(neo-)Schenkerians clearly had no use for the kinds of grand metanarratives
that Schenker had on offer, especially not his views on the decline of Western
musical culture after Brahms. For Schenker, historical development was just
as organic as musical development, even if the conclusions he drew from that
history were, to say the least, one-dimensional.23 As evident from Kerman’s
critique, Babbitt’s (neo-)Schenkerians took the most theoretical of theoretical
elements in Schenker while replacing his belief in the absoluteness of German
genius and pessimistic thoughts on musical decline with a belief in scientific
progress and a search for logical-formal systems, ones that could reveal new
modes of composing and listening. In this respect, then, history could be done
away with—in fact it needed to be. Narmour too sensed the historiographical
consequences of the (neo-)Schenkerians, or rather the lack thereof:
Since few are foolish enough to adopt the belief that the Germanic version
of tonality, as exemplified in the Masters (Bach, Beethoven, Brahms), is the
final goal of history—predestined and sufficient for all time—the neo-Schen-
kerians argue that once the evolutionary scheme is admitted, once the idea of
non-recurring change taking place in nonrecurring time is allowed, once the
history of an event becomes necessary to its explanation, once our perception
of something becomes unique with respect to time and place, then an infinite
[Narmour’s italics] number of rules exist. And the possibility of formulating
an explicit theory under such time-contingent circumstances seems to the
neo-Schenkerians (and the transformational grammarians) all but lost.24
22 See Martin Scherzinger, ‘The Return of the Aesthetic: Musical Formalism and Its
Place in Political Critique’, Beyond Structural Listening? Postmodern Modes of Hearing,
ed. Andrew Dell’Antonio (Berkeley, 2004), pp. 252–77; Joseph Dubiel, ‘Theory as
Mindset and as Text: Some Observations’, Perspectives of New Music 43, no. 2 / 44, no.
1 (2005/6), 160–76.
23 The most blatant example of Schenker’s historical prejudices can be found in fig-
ure 13 of Der freie Satz (first edition), which shows two hypothetical histories: one
where the genius and the commoner (Durchschnitt) remain forever on two separate
planes, even when there is an absence of genius; and the other in curves (‘nicht so’)
whereby the commoner can attain the level of genius in times of the latter’s absence.
See Schenker, Der freie Satz, p. 53.
24 Narmour, Beyond Schenkerism, p. 121.

128 JOHN KOSLOVSKY
All in all, then, Narmour, Kerman, and Cook paint a picture of

(neo-)Schenkerism that eschews diachroneity, historicity, and temporality, for
the sake of logical consistency, formal unity, and grammaticality.25
Salzer and the Schenker Extenders
A second context of historicity and temporality vis-à-vis (neo-)Schenkerism

can be excavated from Cook’s use of the expression ‘directed motion’. It inad-
vertently invokes another author, someone also thought to espouse (neo-)
Schenkerian tendencies but for entirely different reasons: Felix Salzer, who
coined the term ‘directed motion’ in the 1940s and then used it as the guiding
principle to his 1952 textbook, Structural Hearing: Tonal Coherence in Music.26
As others have pointed out, Salzer’s attempt to discover a single tonal lan-
guage in Western polyphony from the Middle Ages to his present day went
far beyond Schenker’s own distinct canon of musical genius from Bach to
Brahms. This more inclusive and pluralistic outlook on Schenker’s approach
was most certainly welcome in the post-World War II climate, but it also
came under severe scrutiny, first from other Schenkerian émigrés, who saw
Salzer as giving a skewed picture of Schenker’s ideas, and later from the newly
minted establishment of American music theory, which pointed to a num-
ber of faulty theoretical assumptions underlying Salzer’s project. Nonetheless,
Salzer had made his mark and inspired Schenkerian-based analyses of music
from a wide variety of repertoires—examples include analyses of atonal rep-
ertoire by Roy Travis, of pre-Baroque music by Saul Novack and David Stern,
and of folk and non-Western music by David Loeb. All of these attempts
(and others) have on various occasions been labeled as ‘(neo-)Schenkerian’ by
authors as diverse as Cristle Collins Judd, Alastair Williams, Roger Beeson,
and Tim Carter, to name just a few.27
Salzer’s approach, along with that of his pupils and colleagues, did not
aspire to anything approaching the type of systematic and formal rigor of
25 See Cook, A Guide to Musical Analysis, pp. 122–3.

26 See Felix Salzer, Structural Hearing: Tonal Coherence in Music (New York, 1952).
27 See Roger Beeson, review of Neil Minturn, The Music of Sergei Prokofiev (1997),
Notes 55, no. 3 (1999), 675; Tim Carter, review of Gary Tomlinson, Monteverdi and
the End of the Renaissance (1987), Early Music History 8 (1988), 258; Cristle Collins
Judd, ‘Modal Types and “Ut, Re, Mi” Tonalities: Tonal Coherence in Sacred Vocal
Polyphony from about 1500’, Journal of the American Musicological Association 45,
no. 3 (1992), 437; Alastair Williams, ‘Technology of the Archaic: Wish Images and
Phantasmagoria in Wagner’, Cambridge Opera Journal 9, no. 1 (1997), 82. Cook him-
self at one point even indirectly linked Roy Travis to Babbitt’s (neo-)Schenkerians,
even though Travis is clearly not part of the Princeton school. See Cook, The Schenker
Project, p. 278.

Babbitt and the Princetonians. Although Salzer often made use of a top-
down approach for understanding tonal music, and did so using the metaphor
of language, he did not attempt to create a logically based generative grammar
of tonal music, much less invoke an axiomatic approach. What is it, then, that
makes him a ‘(neo-)Schenkerian’? Unfortunately, none of the authors men-
tioned above gives us a definite indication as to the term’s meaning vis-à-vis
Salzer and the Salzerians. Its use might refer in the most general way to the
more flexible (i.e., less rigorous) use of Schenkerian principles, and above all
the attempt to apply those principles to music beyond Schenker’s canon of
musical masterpieces, most especially to ‘pre-’ and ‘post-tonal’ repertoires. As
a result, its relationship to history and its position within postmodernity is
entirely different.
To begin, where does ‘Salzerism’ sit on the ‘fault lines’ of later moder-
nity and postmodernity? Narmour, strikingly, sees Salzer as the key repre-
sentative of traditional Schenkerian practice (in fact, he uses Salzer almost
as much as he uses Schenker for his examples of conventional Schenkerian
analysis). Cook, meanwhile, considers Salzer a high modernist, his work a
musical-scholarly counterpart to the architecture of Le Corbusier.28 Others,
such as Robert Fink, have fashioned a more postmodern image for Salzer,
one imbued with subjectivity, surface listening, and the eschewing of recursive
hierarchical structures.
In his 1995 article ‘Going Flat: Post-Hierarchical Music Theory and the
Musical Surface’, Fink draws on Salzer’s analysis of Stravinsky’s Symphony in
Three Movements, which was published in Structural Hearing.29 In doing so
Fink picks up on an expanded critique by Joseph Straus from 1987, whose
article ‘The Problem of Prolongation in Post-Tonal Music’ exposed the many
flaws in applying a Schenkerian prolongational model to post-tonal reper-
toire.30 In general, Fink concurs with Straus that Salzer fails to provide an
adequate model for tonal prolongation in Stravinsky; at the same time, he
champions Salzer’s sensitivity to the musical surface over Straus’s own
approach, which uses motivic associations and pitch-class set theory. Fink
even goes a step further by abandoning any sense of hierarchy in Stravinsky
and by positing his own ‘surface-only’ analysis of the first hundred measures of
the Symphony in Three Movements, picking out salient high notes that together
form a dramatic rising line. He concludes that ‘Straus and Schenker are jus-
tified in denying that ersatz post-tonal spans can create a prolongational
hierarchy; and Salzer and I are justified in listening for them anyway—as
28 Ibid., p. 280.
29 See Fink, ‘Going Flat’, pp. 113–20; see also Salzer, Structural Hearing, p. 194 and
pp. 218–19.
30 See Joseph N. Straus, ‘The Problem of Prolongation in Post-Tonal Music’, Journal
of Music Theory 31, no. 1 (1987), 1–21.

130 JOHN KOSLOVSKY
long as we don’t call it structural hearing.’31 If we consider Fink’s attempt at

analyzing Stravinsky a type of postmodern recovery of Schenker via Salzer,
then it might not be too far-fetched to consider it yet another type of
(neo-)Schenkerism, although one at an entirely different end of the spectrum,
with no regard for axioms or depths and with all the focus on surface and
salience. All of this is far from claiming that Salzer himself was a postmodern
thinker (Cook’s comparison with Le Corbusier is apt in many ways), but it is
remarkable to witness how Salzer’s work became the source of inspiration for
scholars coming of age in a postmodern intellectual culture.
Quite apart from his theoretical outlook, Salzer’s relationship to the past
is also very much at odds with that of the Princetonians. Trained as a his-
torical musicologist under Guido Adler at the University of Vienna in the
1920s, Salzer was fully versed in the methods of musicology and in histori-
ography. He first brought his musicological and Schenkerian training to bear
in his 1935 book, Sinn und Wesen der abendländischen Mehrstimmigkeit (The
Meaning and Essence of Western Polyphony).32 Salzer’s aim in this book was
to fulfill a mission that Schenker himself could not complete: to trace the
historical development of Schenker’s notion of Auskomponierung (composing
out) from its beginnings in the twelfth century to its highest manifestation in
the eighteenth.33 This bore all the traces of Schenker’s grand metanarrative
of music history: a long and gradual development leading up to the German
geniuses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a rapid decline
near the end of the nineteenth century. It also borrowed heavily from Oswald
Spengler’s account in The Decline of the West (1918), in which Western culture
is seen to have undergone periods of growth, blossoming, and decay, a pattern
bearing many similarities to Schenker’s own views.34
After 1945, however, Salzer’s views on music history would gradually shift.
Although unable to rid himself fully of his own historiographical precon-
ceptions, Salzer nonetheless remolded Schenker’s core conceits in Structural
Hearing to expand his analytical techniques to deal with twentieth-century
music; he also sought to transform the metanarrative of growth, blossoming,
and decay into one of a continuous tradition of the tonal language, which
continued into his present day and had the potential to stimulate new forms
31 Fink, ‘Going Flat’, p. 117.

32 Felix Salzer, Sinn und Wesen der abendländischen Mehrstimmigkeit (Vienna, 1935).
Salzer’s final chapter to Structural Hearing, ‘The Historical Development of Tonal
Coherence’, is an abridged translation of his 1935 book.
33 See John Koslovsky, ‘From Sinn und Wesen to Structural Hearing: The
Development of Felix Salzer’s Ideas in Interwar Vienna and Their Transmission in

Postwar United States’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Rochester, 2010).
34 For a comparison of Schenker’s and Spengler’s views, see Byron Almén, ‘Prophets
of Decline: The Worldviews of Heinrich Schenker and Oswald Spengler’, Indiana

Theory Review 17, no. 1 (1996), 1–24.

of tonal composition. This certainly had an effect on his most devoted pupils,
which brought into being another kind of relationship to both Schenker and
music history. It even puts Salzer’s project more in line with Narmour’s, when
we read from the latter, for instance, that ‘if we recognize that tonality is not
a synchronic system but a historical style—and in the face of everything we
know about history I do not see how even the Schenkerians can deny this—it
follows that our idea of transformational operations must be reformulated’.35
Far from contradicting it, Salzer seems to have anticipated Narmour’s creed.36
A fundamental tension thus emerges. The one brand of (neo-)Schenkerism,
embodied in the person of Babbitt, is described as axiomatic, formalist, and
ahistorical; the other, traceable to Salzer, has a modified approach to Schenker
as its point of departure—a ‘fast and loose’ (Fink’s term) methodology whose
appeals to hierarchy, depth, and unity quickly fall apart under the microscope
of formalist music theory, but which is more attuned to the historiographi-
cal implications of Schenker’s approach, however asynchronous it might still
be with the burgeoning period of postmodernity. Such (neo-)Schenkerian
tendencies are clearly individual manifestations of what Kofi Agawu calls
Schenker’s dual ‘ad hoc’ and ‘formalizing instinct’.37
Other (Neo-)Schenkerian Practices
If I have dwelt at length on the contrasting (neo-)Schenkerian schools of

Babbitt and Salzer, with respect to both their place within postmodernity and
their relationship to the past, it is largely because they demonstrate the most
obviously contrasting Schenkerian practices that have been dubbed ‘neo’.
However, many other practices have appropriated the combining form. The
term ‘(neo-)Schenkerian’ has, in fact, been used in so many different ways over
the past forty years that we would be hard-pressed to explain what the signi-
fier ‘neo’ actually signifies. For example, many scholars have used it to refer to
approaches that combine Fortean set theory with Schenker, usually in pass-
ing, such as László Somfai’s review of Paul Wilson’s The Music of Béla Bartók,
Anne Marie de Zeeuw’s review of Deborah Mawer’s book on Milhaud,
35 Narmour, Beyond Schenkerism, p. 211.

36 In his review of Structural Hearing Babbitt too acknowledged the importance of
investigating the historical development of tonal principles; he also championed the
dynamic-temporal aspects of Schenker’s approach to tonality; see Milton Babbitt,
review of Felix Salzer, Structural Hearing (1952), Journal of the American Musicological
Society 5, no. 3 (1952), 260–5. Narmour cites Babbitt’s review as an example of the
(neo-)Schenkerian attitude, which throws Narmour’s position on Schenkerism and
diachroneity further into question.
37 See Kofi Agawu, ‘Schenkerian Notation in Theory and Practice’, Music Analysis 8,
no. 3 (1989), 295.

132 JOHN KOSLOVSKY
and Jonathan Bernard’s review of David Harvey’s The Later Music of Elliott
Carter.38
Indeed, it would not be difficult to extend such a term to any analysis that
brings pitch-class set theory in contact with Schenker. But this ‘neo-ness’ is
certainly different from the Babbitt or Salzer varieties, as it does not pre-
suppose an axiom like the Ursatz, nor does it assume prolongational struc-
tures a priori. It also sits awkwardly next to set theory, given that the two are
normally used to different ends. William Benjamin, for instance, has referred
to this as a ‘marriage of convenience’, while Agawu has called Schenker and
sets ‘strange bedfellows’, writing of Allen Forte’s analysis of Liszt’s Nuages
gris that ‘There is not necessarily balance, synthesis or even complementation;
there is only confrontation.’39 Jonathan Dunsby has even detected a ‘pungent
scent of postmodernism in all the current research that combines pitch-class-
set and neo-Schenkerian posttonal voice-leading theories’.40 This relationship
has yet to undergo a sustained critique.
The use of the expression ‘(neo-)Schenkerian’ goes further. In their often-
cited article ‘Rewriting Schenker’ from 1992 (mentioned above), Richard
Littlefield and David Neumeyer have pointed to still other Schenkerian prac-
tices as ‘(neo-)Schenkerian’, not only those of the Babbitt, Salzer, or Forte
variety, but also those by such revisionists as David Epstein, who combines
Schenker’s ideas with Schoenberg’s Grundgestalt theories, and even Fred
Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, whose Chomskyan approach to tonal music
is not Schenkerian per se, but shares many of the same tenets.41 Implicitly
considering themselves part of these many ‘neo’ practices, Littlefield and
Neumeyer are committed to bringing the Schenkerian approach more in
touch with postmodern intellectual strategies, which, they hope, will ‘point
up the historical contingency, ideological constraints, and arbitrariness of
Schenker’s story, and indeed, of all interpretive pronouncements’.42
38 See László Somfai, review of Paul Wilson, The Music of Béla Bartók (1992), Notes
50, no. 1 (1993), 152; Anne Marie de Zeeuw, review of Deborah Mawer, Darius
Milhaud: Modality and Structure in Music of the 1920s (1997), Music Theory Spectrum
22, no. 2 (2000), 271; Jonathan Bernard, review of David I.H. Harvey, The Later Music
of Elliott Carter: A Study in Music Theory and Analysis (1989), Music Analysis 9, no. 3
(1990), 348.
39 William Benjamin, ‘Schenker’s Theory and the Future of Music’, Journal of Music
Theory 25, no. 1 (1981), 171; and Agawu, ‘Schenkerian Notation in Theory and
Practice’, p. 294.
40 Jonathan Dunsby, ‘Schoenberg and Present-Day Theory and Practice’, Constructive
Dissonance: Arnold Schoenberg and the Transformations of Twentieth-Century Culture, ed.

Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey (Berkeley, 1997), p. 191.
41 See Littlefield and Neumeyer, ‘Rewriting Schenker’, pp. 50–2.
42 Ibid., p. 5.

And it does not stop there. Many others have been wont to spice up
their Schenker commentaries with a dash of ‘neo’, including Richard Swift,
who stresses the analytical pluralism of Salzer but who also describes theo-
rists like Carl Schachter and Joel Lester as (neo-)Schenkerian.43 Or Richard
Middleton, who identifies both Forte’s project on the American popular bal-
lad and Walter Everett’s analyses of the Beatles as (neo-)Schenkerian.44 Mark
McFarland points to the (neo-)Schenkerian approach of Henry Martin in
jazz analysis.45 Norman Douglas Anderson places the pre-tonal analyses of
Salzer, Novack, Frederick Bashour, and Susan McClary under the banner of
‘neo-Schenkerian treatment’.46 David Kopp identifies the ‘neo-Schenkerian
and voice-leading’ approaches of Harald Krebs, Deborah Stein, Howard
Cinnamon, Robert Morgan, and Gregory Proctor in the study of chromatic
third cycles.47 Joseph Dubiel, when analyzing the opening passage of Mozart’s
Sonata in A major, K. 331, hears the ‘prolonged initial [A major] sonority in
the neo-Schenkerian, if not Schenkerian, sense’.48 One can even find uses
of ‘(neo-)Schenkerism’ that have less to do with analytic than with compo-
sitional adaptations of Schenkerian thinking, as a 1978 program note to the
British composer Jonathan Harvey’s Inner Light 3 demonstrates: it describes
the piece as ‘the fruit of his neo-Schenkerian quest for structural depth’.49
There are even authors who deploy the term (neo-)Schenkerism in shifting
ways, depending on the context. Agawu perhaps uses the expression more than
anyone. In one place he describes all efforts to formalize Schenkerian nota-
tional practice as ‘(neo-)Schenkerian’, including those of Salzer and William
Mitchell, Forte and Steven Gilbert, and Karl-Otto Plum.50 These authors, in
Agawu’s opinion, do an injustice to the plurality of the Schenker approach, as
they seek to give an expedient method for applying Schenkerian symbols, and
43 See Richard Swift, ‘Omnium Gatherum’, 19th-Century Music 8, no. 2 (1984), 169.
Swift seems to intimate an even broader picture of ‘(neo-)Schenkerian’ approaches
at the opening of his essay, which includes a review of the book collection Aspects of
Schenkerian Theory, ed. David Beach (New Haven, CT, 1983).
44 See Richard Middleton, ‘Pop Goes Old Theory’, Journal of the Royal Musical
Association 122, no. 2 (1997), 305, 308, 316, 318.

45 See Mark McFarland, ‘Schenker and the Tonal Jazz Repertory: A Response to
Martin’, Music Theory Online 18, no. 3 (2012).

46 See Norman Douglas Anderson, ‘Aspects of Early Major-Minor Tonality:
Structural Characteristics of the Music of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’

(unpublished doctoral thesis, Ohio State University, 1992), pp. 28–52.
47 See David Kopp, Chromatic Transformations in Nineteenth-Century Music (New
York, 2002), pp. 128–34.

48 Dubiel, ‘Theory as Mindset and as Text’, p. 171.
49 See Priscilla Proxmire, ‘The 1978 ISCM World Music Days’, Perspectives of New
Music 16, no. 2 (1978), 228.

50 Kofi Agawu, ‘Schenkerian Notation in Theory and Practice’, p. 291.

134 JOHN KOSLOVSKY
do so with an appeal to language: ‘This means that neo-Schenkerian efforts,

by focusing on the linguistic aspects of Schenker’s work, have reduced away
the exciting tension in his analytical method. To put it crudely, we are being
taught how to make grammatically correct statements rather than interesting
or profound ones.’51 Clearly Agawu sees something limiting in systematizing
Schenker, whose interpretive flexibility when seen across his body of work
points to its own divided self. For Agawu, a balance must be sought between
the linguistic and the poetic.
In other places, Agawu refers to a variety of (neo-)Schenkerian analyses
that ‘invoke the neutral notion of design to account for [the] changes of tex-
ture and figuration’, pointing to the work of John Rothgeb and Joel Lester as
representative cases.52 Similarly, Agawu refers to Daniel Leech-Wilkinson’s
(neo-)Schenkerian analyses of Machaut.53 Along the same lines, Agawu
acknowledges Schenkerian and (neo-)Schenkerian approaches to Lied
(‘Schenkerian and neo-Schenkerian studies of song, which provide penetrat-
ing insights into the purely syntactical framework but leave un- or under-
explored the relationships between words and music’), pointing to authors
as diverse as Marianne Kielian, Marion A. Guck, Charles J. Smith, Deborah
Stein, and again Forte and Gilbert, though he is not explicit as to who is ‘neo’
and who is not.54 Agawu even draws attention to the ‘massive Schenkerian
and neo-Schenkerian literature’, but again he leaves us guessing as to who
classifies as Schenkerian and who as (neo-)Schenkerian.55
One could go on like this, exposing other uses of the term (neo-)
Schenkerian or bringing in new examples that seem to fit. But any attempt to
locate a single or unifying conception of ‘(neo-)Schenkerian’ theory would be
to miss out on the contingencies upon which this term is based and the seem-
ingly endless ways in which it can be applied to the work of anyone operating
within the purview of Schenker. As I see it, there is an inherent instability and
even tension in expressions like ‘(neo-)Schenkerian’ and ‘(neo-)Schenkerism’.
So, just as Agawu has pointed to a ‘crisis of representation’ in Schenkerian
51 Ibid., p. 295.
52 See Kofi Agawu, ‘The First Movement of Beethoven’s Op. 132 and the Classical
Style’, College Music Symposium 27 (1987), 34. See also Kofi Agawu, Playing with Signs:
A Semiotic Interpretation of Classic Music (Princeton, NJ, 1991), p. 113. The invocation
of the notion of ‘design’ can also be traced to Salzer’s use of the term in Structural
Hearing. See Salzer, Structural Hearing, pp. 223–4.
53 See Kofi Agawu, ‘Stravinsky’s “Mass” and Stravinsky Analysis’, Music Theory
Spectrum 11, no. 2 (1989), 155.

54 See Kofi Agawu, ‘Theory and Practice in the Analysis of the Nineteenth-Century
“Lied”’, Music Analysis 11, no. 1 (1992), 35.

55 See Kofi Agawu, review of Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Discourse: Toward a
Semiology of Music (1990), Music & Letters 73, no. 2 (1992), 319.

notational practice, I would point to a similar crisis in attempts to draw a clear

line between different types of Schenkerian practices.
Plato’s Prisoners: Out of the Terminological Impasse
If anything, the many efforts to classify different kinds of Schenkerian prac-

tices with the word ‘neo-’ are best seen against the broader backdrop of post-
modernity, in which a deliberately self-conscious effort has been made to
carve out a negotiating space for different kinds of Schenkerism within the
ever-shifting institutional, academic, social, and political landscape, which as
a consequence has influenced how we position and respond to Schenker as
an object of history. Nowhere are such conceptual spaces more aptly sym-
bolized than in the physical space created by the hyphen separating ‘neo’
from ‘Schenkerian’—with my strategic parenthetical interventions further
heightening our awareness of the distances and temporalities we traverse in
Schenker reception. As I see it, these punctuational interjections warn us
against any kind of categorical assessment of Schenker, as they problematize
binary distinctions between ‘new’ and ‘old’, ‘conventional’ and ‘unconven-
tional’, ‘orthodox’ and ‘unorthodox’, etc.
If, as Kevin Korsyn writes, ‘postmodernism involves a complex imbrica-
tion of past and present’, then any clear-cut distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’
Schenkerian practices is obfuscated by the continual processes of recovery
that Schenkerian methodology has undergone and will continue to under-
go.56 Is the word ‘neo-’ really nothing more than an attempt at finding truth
in shadows, much as Plato’s prisoners in the cave once did?57 And, when we
are finally taken out of that cave and shown the fallaciousness of our tax-
onomies, will we at that point not see that our relationship with Schenker
has transformed into something entirely different, where past and present do
not follow from one another but remain inescapably intertwined? Is not our
relationship with Schenker, even when grounded in the past, still formed in
the continuous present? And is not that relationship also colored by the much
larger body of scholarship that has emerged since Schenker’s death, which
itself continues to undergo its own process of recovery?
56 Kevin Korsyn, Decentering Music: A Critique of Contemporary Musical Research

(New York, 2003), p. 70. To put it better into context, Korsyn’s full statement reads as
follows: ‘In contrast to the utopian projects that characterize many forms of modern-
ism, postmodernism involves a complex imbrication of past and present and thus a
complex relationship to modernism.’
57 See Plato, Republic, trans. G.M.A. Grube and C.D.C. Reeve (Indianapolis, 1992),
pp. 186–9.

136 JOHN KOSLOVSKY
In terms of positioning the future of Schenker studies along these lines,

two related strategies suggest themselves. The first, perhaps trivial, one is that
we resist the pigeon-holing of Schenkerian practices with words like ‘neo’ or
‘orthodox’, since such designations serve only to reinforce ideological and
metanarrative structures aimed at marginalizing various kinds of epistemic
positions—in other words, uphold Lytoard’s incredulity, but do so with an
equal distrust for taxonomy. The second, more profound, strategy is that we
think of Schenkerism and its pasts in a more fluid manner: not as a single
inherited tradition, but rather as a seamless overlap between practices, strate-
gies, critique, and viewpoints, both past and present, with the potential to pro-
mote a more intertextual and freer temporal interplay between them and the
musical works and experiences they seek to address. Among other things, this
strategy could potentially enable scholars to traverse analytical history more
freely, and in doing so allow the analyst to incorporate diverse, even contra-
dictory, viewpoints without the immediate need for reconciliation or nega-
tion. Furthermore, it would restyle the way we pursue questions of historicity
in music theory more generally: not just as a series of developing traditions
that unfold on a single temporal plane, but as an intricate web of perspectives
in constant interaction, ‘speaking’ to one another, as it were, through the mind
of the historian in a kind of Bakhtinian ‘dialogism’.
In other words, if Schenkerism (and the historicizing thereof ) is to move
beyond the postmodern impasse, without forgetting the lessons it has learnt
from it, then we should continue to refine those aspects of its approach that
embrace the logical, the empirical, the unified, and the structural, while at the
same time remaining open to the interjection of the interpretive, the discon-
tinuous, the self-reflexive, and the post-structural. In this sense, we can tra-
verse the many fissures between the linguistic and the poetic in Schenkerian
thought, not to mend or reduce them but to expose, emphasize, problematize,
and elucidate them. With any luck, we will have thereby fostered new modes
of analyzing and ‘listening to’ music and its histories.
Engaging the matter in this way, music theorists can begin to give fuller
expression to the multiplicity of contexts surrounding Schenker, in each case
laying bare the varying inclinations of both practitioner and commentator.
After all, we can fashion Schenkerism and its histories to the image of our
liking. It merely amounts to the (mis-)reading we ascribe to any particular
author, and to the agenda that we bring to the table. Is Boretz an über-for-
malist or a deconstructionist? Is Salzer a high modernist or a proto-post-
modernist? At what point does someone like Forte cross from the realm of
the structural into that of the post-structural? Does Babbitt truly ignore dia-
chrony at the expense of synchrony or merely conceive it in ways different
from Narmour and Kerman? Or can we abandon these kinds of questions, or
at least point up the various contexts in which they arise?

In closing, it is worth quoting the late Anthony Pople, who, in introduc-

ing a series of new critical essays on Schenker in 1996, exposed what he saw
as the extremes of formalist (for him, (neo-)Schenkerian) and historicist
approaches to Schenker as a means of walking that fine line between modern
and postmodern perspectives. He goes on to write:
It is one thing to say that a truly postmodern analytical practice would display,
and play with, an awareness of the immanent historiography in the theoretical
categories it chooses to invoke; quite another thing to manage this without
seeming to lose touch with ‘the music itself.’ The greater challenge, clearly, is
to find ‘the music’ anew in the network of culturally loaded terminologies and
conditionals in which we construct our houses of straw.58
Clearly, Schenker will continue to undergo a process of recovery and renewal

for some time to come. The question is, to what extent will these recoveries,
redefinitions, and reconfigurations situate themselves within the postmodern
condition, and to what extent might they attempt to move beyond it?
58 Anthony Pople, ‘Editorial’, Music Analysis 15, nos. 2–3 (1996), 142.

7
From Bach to Neruda: Historicity and

Heterogeneous Temporality in the
Chilean Cantata (1941–1969)
Daniela Fugellie
Señoras y señores, venimos a contar, aquello que la historia no quiere recordar.1
The opening line of one of the most famous works of the Nueva Canción
Chilena movement—Luis Advis’s Santa María de Iquique: Cantata popular
(1969/70)—announces through a male choir in unison that the eighteen-
part cantata is going to share a hitherto secret story, one that history does
not want to remember: the mass murder of mine workers at the Santa María
school in the city of Iquique in northern Chile in 1907. In line with German
Baroque form, which served as a model for the Chilean cantata, the work
alternates movements for soloists, choir (sometimes divided into two groups),
and instruments. Advis himself asserts in the liner notes of the first record-
ing, which made the cantata internationally famous, that he maintained the
‘general features of a classical cantata’, but with Latin-American melodies,
rhythms, and instruments; violoncello and double bass serve as basso continuo
in an ensemble that features two quenas, two guitars, charango, and a bombo.2
Rhythmically spoken narratives replace recitatives.3 Homophonic sections
featuring popular song alternate with imitative processes in the instrumental
1 ‘Ladies and gentleman, we are here to tell, what history does not want to remem-
ber.’ Luis Advis, Santa María de Iquique: Cantata popular (1969/70). ‘I. Pregón’, poem
by the composer, reprinted in the score, Luis Advis, Santa María de Iquique: Cantata
popular (1969/70) (Santiago de Chile, 1999), p. 23. Unless otherwise marked, all trans-
lations are by the author.
2 Advis worked closely with the members of Quilapayún on this recording. For
the reception of the work and its cover versions by other groups, see Eileen Karmy,
‘Ecos de un tiempo distante’: La Cantata popular Santa María de Iquique (Luis Advis—
Quilapayún) y sus resignificaciones sociales a 40 años de su estreno (unpublished master’s
thesis, University of Chile, 2011), http://www.tesis.uchile.cl/tesis/uchile/2011/ar-
karmy_e/html/index-frames.html.
3 ‘Esta obra fue escrita siguiendo las líneas generales de una Cantata Clásica.’ Advis,
Santa María de Iquique, p. 5.

FROM BACH TO NERUDA 139
sections. Typical for Advis’s style, the cantata features a vocal polyphony
consisting of two or three lines, in which soloists and choirs simultaneously
present different texts and contrasting musical expressions. Overall the work
blends art and popular music, though it does not absorb the postmodernist
aesthetics coming of age in other parts of the world.
Santa María de Iquique is generally appreciated as the first Chilean popu-
lar cantata and was crucial for the further development of this genre, which
blossomed during the years of Salvador Allende’s socialist government, the
Unidad Popular (1970–3), as well as after the military coup of 1973 in Chile
and in exile.4 One of the key themes of Chilean popular cantatas is the nar-
ration of Latin American and Chilean history, in which episodes of repres-
sion and social inequality feature prominently. In line with the leftist politics
dominant at the time, popular cantatas relayed the doctrine of socialist real-
ism and its aspiration of educating people through a comprehensible musical
language. But the popular cantatas did not merely share histories, they also
built a bridge to music from the past or, as Advis put it, remarking on its con-
nection with European art music, to the ‘classical cantata’.5
Before the Chilean popular cantata emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s,
at least thirty cantatas are known to have been composed by Chileans between
1941 and 1969 that are strictly rooted in art music (see the Appendix for
a complete list). This hitherto little-known body of work had undergone a
transformation of its own, thereby sparking the development of the cantata
in Chile. The cantatas are linked to two divergent anchors of Chilean cultural
history: the reception of Johann Sebastian Bach, initiated by the influential
composer Domingo Santa Cruz; and that of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda,
who through his literary modernism, especially the Canto general of 1950,
appears as a sort of ‘evangelist’ of a socialist ideology for Latin America. These
two anchors connect different layers of historicity with ethical and spiritual
values that would eventually manifest themselves in Chilean art music and
the cantata in particular.
In their incorporation of musical traditions and narrations rooted in dif-
ferent pasts, combined with contemporaneous compositional techniques, and
ethical messages with a view to the (politically engaged) future, the Chilean
cantatas contain temporal layers of cultural encounters that break with a linear
progression of past, present, and future. By embodying a heterogeneous tem-
porality which is characteristic of Latin American culture, the cantatas also
represent a liminal space between musical modernism and postmodernism or
4 See, for example, the entry ‘Cantata popular Santa María de Iquique’, memori-
achilena.cl (accessed 2 October 2017). Some other well-known Chilean popular can-
tatas are Canto para una semilla (1972) by Luis Advis, La Fragua (1973) by Sergio
Ortega, and Cantata de los Derechos Humanos (1978) by Alejandro Guarello.
5 See Advis, Santa María de Iquique, p. 5.

140 DANIELA FUGELLIE
beyond, attesting to the unique stance of modernism (and postmodernism) in

Latin America.6 With this in mind, this essay focuses on the representation of
historicity in this unique body of works, while considering its shaping during
a time in which both Chilean art music and society were immersed in decisive
transformations.
A Chilean ‘Retour à Bach’
Así entonces, la venerable y venerada figura de Juan Sebastián Bach—el hom-

bre y su obra como un todo indisoluble—viene a ser el tronco paterno de
nuestras propias instituciones musicales.7
Outside Chile, the notion that Bach served as the ideological founding
father of Chilean music institutions might seem strange. Even within Chile,
acknowledgement of the Baroque master’s influence took time. But by 1984,
when young music students of the Universidad de Chile formed the new
music group Anacrusa and proclaimed that the spirit of Bach was directly
related to the establishment of Chilean music institutions, musicians firmly
embraced this notion after almost seven decades of reception history.
The first institution to be instrumental in the dissemination of Bach’s
music in Chile was the Sociedad Bach. Established in 1917 as a private and
informal circle of young students in Santiago devoted to the performance of
Baroque vocal music, it became a society in 1924 after one of its members,
the young lawyer and incipient composer Domingo Santa Cruz (1899–1987),
returned from Europe. For two years he had worked in Madrid as a diplomat
and also took composition lessons with the Wagnerian composer Conrado
del Campo (1878–1953). Like other members of the Sociedad Bach, Santa
6 For discussions on postmodernism in Latin America, see John Beverley, Michael

Aronna, and José Oviedo, eds, The Postmodernism Debate in Latin America (Durham,
NC, and London, 1995); or Carlon Rincón, ‘Sobre el debate acerca del postmod-
ernismo en América Latina: Una revisión de La no simultaneidad de lo simultáneo—
Postmodernidad, globalización y culturas en América Latina’, Cartografías y estrategias
de la postmodernidad y la postcolonialidad en Latinoamérica: Hibridez y globalización, ed.
Alfonso de Toro (Madrid, 2006), pp. 93–127.
7 ‘Consequently, the venerable and revered figure of J.S. Bach—the man and his work
as an indissoluble whole—became the paternal basis of our own musical institutions.’

Agrupación Musical Anacrusa, ‘Bach nuestro contemporáneo’, pamphlet (1984), pri-
vate collection of Juan Pablo González. A new version appeared as an open letter by
the Asociación Musical Anacrusa, ‘Bach nuestro contemporáneo’, Revista musical
chilena 164 (1985), 112–16. I am grateful to Juan Pablo González, a former member of
the group, for providing me with the original pamphlet.

Cruz came from a wealthy family, which provided him with political connec-
tions that were certainly helpful for reaching his cultural-political goals.
Santa Cruz’s visionary project for the society extended to a general reform
of Chilean musical life through the promotion of Baroque music, which, in his
opinion, was overshadowed by Italian bel canto; he also envisioned the estab-
lishment of professional choirs and instrumental ensembles. One outcome
was the reform of the Conservatorio Nacional de Música y Declamación,
which Chilean politicians took on between 1925 and 1928. In 1929, when it
became part of the just-created Facultad de Bellas Artes of the Universidad
de Chile, the government accredited the Conservatorio Nacional academic
status. Ever since, Chilean universities have offered music in their curricula.
In 1932 the Sociedad Bach officially disbanded, but its ideas lived on in the
Facultad de Bellas Artes, where as a dean Santa Cruz continued to work on
restructuring Chilean musical life. He also became Professor of Composition
and Music Analysis at the conservatory, and would remain in these positions
until 1953, when he moved to Europe. There he continued to be involved
in music, serving on the committees of different international organizations,
including the International Society of Music Education, the International
Society for Contemporary Music, and the International Music Council.8
One of Santa Cruz’s major undertakings was the establishment of the
Instituto de Extensión Musical (henceforth IEM) in 1940. It centralized the
work of several institutions that emerged in subsequent years and would have
a stable and lasting presence, among them the Orquesta Sinfónica de Chile
(1940/1), the Coro de la Universidad de Chile (1945), the Ballet Nacional
Chileno (1945), the Revista musical chilena (1945), and the Instituto de
Investigación Musical (1946), all under the roof of the Universidad de Chile.
The directors of the IEM, initially in collaboration with Santa Cruz, exerted
direct influence on the repertoire selection of the performing organizations.9
As Santa Cruz asserts in the editorial of the first Revista musical chilena
in 1945, the spirit of the IEM’s undertakings became immersed in a Pan-
American discourse. In response to World War II and due to the resulting
weakening of relations with Europe, American countries aimed to strengthen
8 The Bach Sociedad is generally understood as an integral part of Chilean music

history; see Vicente Salas Viu, La creación musical en Chile, 1900–1951 (Santiago de
Chile, [1951]); Samuel Claro and Jorge Urrutia Blondel, Historia de la música en Chile
(Santiago de Chile, 1973); and the autobiographical writings by Domingo Santa Cruz,
‘Mis recuerdos sobre la Sociedad Bach (1917–1933)’, Revista musical chilena 40 (1950),
8–62; and Mi vida en la música: Contribución al estudio de la vida musical chilena durante
el siglo XX, ed. Raquel Bustos Valderrama (Santiago de Chile, 2008), pp. 137–290.
9 The directors of the IEM were Santa Cruz (1940–52), Vicente Salas Viu (1952–8),
Juan Orrego-Salas (1958–9), Gustavo Becerra-Schmidt (1959–62), León Schidlowsky

(1962–6), and Carlos Riesco (1966–73). With the exception of Salas Viu, they were all
composers; see Claro and Urrutia, Historia, pp. 129–30.

their local music cultures, and to rediscover their own values and those of
their neighbors.10 The establishment of professional ensembles, institutes of
music education, and research corresponded to the general attitude of this
emancipation.
Although neither the Sociedad Bach nor the IEM focused solely on the
promotion of Bach, his music was continuously present within the institu-
tional development starting in 1924. That year, the society organized four
recitals with Claudio Arrau performing the complete Das wohltemperirte
Clavier, BWV 846–93;11 and on 12 December 1925 a full house witnessed
the Chilean premiere of Bach’s Weihnachts-Oratorium, BWV 248, by the
choirs of the Sociedad Bach and a chamber ensemble in the Teatro Municipal
in Santiago.12 Together with some of the Brandenburgische Konzerte, organ
works, and concertos for keyboards, soloists, and orchestra, Bach’s cantatas
and Passions were performed in the course of several concerts and contin-
ued to be programmed at the Universidad de Chile throughout the 1930s
and 1940s. By 1950, the 200th anniversary of Bach’s death, his Passions, the
Weihnachts-Oratorium, the Magnificat, BWV 243, and the Mass in B minor,
BWV 232, as well as several cantatas, had all been heard in Chile.13 In the
early days of the Chilean Bach reception, all vocal works were performed in
Spanish translation, prepared by Santa Cruz and his collaborators. As Santa
Cruz wrote in his memoirs, it would have been difficult for the choir and
impossible for the soloists to sing the works in German. Performances in
Spanish also ensured that the audience could comprehend the texts.14 With
10 See editorial, ‘Nuestro propósito’, Revista musical chilena 1 (1945), 1–3. The edito-
rial is unsigned, however, Luis Merino maintains that it was written by Santa Cruz;
see Luis Merino, ‘Editorial: Septuagésimo aniversario de la Revista musical chilena’,
Revista musical chilena, 223 (2015), 7.
11 Arrau’s concerts took place on 15, 18, 25, and 29 July 1924, at the Teatro Imperio;
see Samuel Claro, Iconografía musical chilena, 2 vols (Santiago de Chile, 1989), II, p.
823.
12 See ibid., p. 786. Judging by the capacity of this theater, we can assume an audience
of over 1,000.
13 Among other Chilean premieres of Bach since the 1920s were the following
works: Cantata BWV 20 (11 November 1927); Cantatas BWV 105 and BWV 106 (21
December 1928); Cantata BWV 38 (31 May 1929); Matthäus-Passion BWV 244 (30
November 1934); Cantata BWV 35 (11 December 1935); Mass in B minor, BWV 232
(20 December 1935); Magnificat, BWV 243 (3 September 1948); Johannes-Passion,
BWV 245 (28 July 1950). Information based on my research of concert programs
at Archivo de Música, Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, and Centro de Documentación,
Facultad de Artes, Universidad de Chile, Santiago de Chile.
14 See Santa Cruz, Mi vida en la música, pp. 192–5; and his editorial ‘El canto
en español’, Revista musical chilena 33 (1949), 3–7. His papers at the Biblioteca
Nacional de Chile also preserve scores of the Johannes-Passion, BWV 245, and the

the exception of Handel’s Messiah, cantatas and oratorios by other canonic

Baroque composers, such as Telemann or Vivaldi, remained absent from the
concert programs of the Bach Society and the IEM between 1920 and 1950.
The Baroque cantata thus gained a stronghold in Chile through Bach’s works
alone.15
If the Sociedad Bach understood and criticized Italian opera as super-
ficial entertainment, Bach symbolized a musical past that had to be redis-
covered in order to re-establish an intellectual notion of music perceived as
absent in Chile. The discourse that links Italian opera with stagnation and
the German musical heritage with progress is another topos of the Chilean
music narrative—unsurprising, considering that the national musical histo-
riography was born inside the Universidad de Chile, where Santa Cruz had
a cardinal presence.16 However, a simple polarization of Italophilia versus
Germanophilia does not account for the deeper values that Chileans associ-
ated with Bach.
In 1927 Santa Cruz’s friend Carlos Humeres published an article about
the mysticism in Bach’s work in Marsyas, the journal of the Sociedad Bach.17
He criticized the French ‘retour à Bach’ for being interested in merely intel-
lectual and formal aspects of Bach’s work. Bolstering his argument with ref-
erences to Charles Koechlin and Albert Schweitzer, Humeres praised the
expressive quality of Bach’s music, rooted in deep religiosity, and bemoaned
the absence of it in the work of modern composers.18 More so, Humeres
saw Bach’s religiosity as an intimate reunion between the individual and the
divine:
Weihnachts-Oratorium, BWV 248, with his own translations, dated respectively to

1950 and 1951. Santa Cruz later recognized that the first translations were far from
perfect, but he continued translating Bach’s vocal works for performances at least until
1950. Handel’s Messiah and Beethoven’s Symphony no. 9 were also sung in Spanish.
15 Studies on the reception of the European canon in Chile during the twenti-
eth century are scarce. For an in-depth study on the reception of Bach in Chile see
Daniela Fugellie, ‘Bach and the Renewal of Chilean Musical Life since the 1920s’,
Transcultural Music History, ed. Reinhard Strohm (Berlin, forthcoming 2020).
16 Together with the already-mentioned music histories by Claro and Urrutia and by
Salas Viu, see the founding works of a former member of the Bach Society, the his-
torian Eugenio Pereira Salas, Los orígenes del arte musical en Chile (Santiago de Chile,
1941); and Historia de la música en Chile, 1850–1900 (Santiago de Chile, 1957).
17 Carlos Humeres, ‘El misticismo en el arte de Bach’, Marsyas 1, no. 7 (1927),
235–42.
18 His main source must have been Charles Koechlin’s ‘Le retour à Bach’, published
shortly before in La revue musicale (February 1927). Humeres mentions Charles

Koechlin without quoting the source. Albert Schweitzer’s J.S. Bach, le musician-poète
(1905) is quoted in the article.

It is the new man, born out of the Renaissance . . . who searches deep inside
of himself for the divine sense, and discovers through struggles and sufferings
the ‘hidden God’ in the intimate space of his heart. The tragic accent of this
individual aspiration to the heights is precisely what makes Bach’s music so
deeply appealing.19
Along similar lines, Santa Cruz’s future wife, Wanda Morla Lynch, had
characterized Bach in her letters from Paris in the early 1920s as a ‘saint that
makes us sense God’ and ‘our venerated Father and mediator’. Bach’s legacy
was embraced not merely for his music but as ‘a work of faith and love to
God’.20 Although the veneration of the Lutheran composer may seem in con-
flict with the strong Catholicism of Chilean upper-class society, the concept
of a direct connection between the individual and God was probably what
motivated the members of the Sociedad Bach to appropriate the music of the
German composer for their subjective spiritual experience.
The Bach anniversary year of 1950 reveals a continuance of this recep-
tion. In its thirty-eighth issue, dedicated to the composer, the Revista musical
chilena included an article by the Peruvian author César Arróspide, who criti-
cized the objectivism of the ‘retour à Bach’. Arguing from a postwar perspec-
tive, Arróspide supported a turn to spirituality during a time when society
suffered from a lack of unity and religiosity: ‘The validity of his art can be
explained with the absence of its significance in current times: the encounter
of a true human solidarity.’21 The cultural journal Pro arte also dedicated an
issue to Bach in July 1950, which contained a translation of the first part of
Schweitzer’s chapter on symbolism in Bach’s work.22 The issue also included
a slightly modified version of Santa Cruz’s opening speech for the Bach fes-
tivals of 1950, held at the Universidad de Chile.23 With the significant title
‘Bach, the Tradition Capable of Facing the Future’, it presented the composer
19 ‘Ahora es el hombre nuevo, surgido del Renacimiento . . . quien busca en el fondo

de sí mismo el sentido divino, y a través de las luchas y de los sufrimientos, descubre
en lo íntimo de su corazón al “Dios escondido”. Es por esto, por el acento trágico de la
aspiración individual hacia lo alto, que la música de Bach nos conmueve tan profunda-
mente.’ Humeres, ‘El misticismo’, p. 241.
20 Quoted in Patricio Lizama, ‘Wanda Morla en París de los años veinte: Una experi-
encia de la modernidad’, Revista musical chilena 226 (2016), 79.

21 ‘La vigencia de su arte se explica, por tanto, porque hoy se padece la ausencia de lo
que él significa: el hallazgo de una auténtica solidaridad humana.’ César Arróspide de

la Flor, ‘Perspectiva actual de Bach’, Revista musical chilena 38 (1950), 81.
22 Albert Schweitzer, ‘El simbolismo de Bach’, trans. Tomás Eastman, Pro arte 101
(28 July 1950), 5.

23 Domingo Santa Cruz, ‘Discurso de apertura de los Festivales Bach de 1950’ (18
July 1950, Salón de Honor, Universidad de Chile), Fondo Documental Domingo

Santa Cruz, Archivo de Música, Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, Santiago de Chile, 6 p.

as ‘a soul that lived in unity with God, waiting for death with the unbreak-
able faith of the mystics’.24 In true postwar spirit, with its ‘unbridgeable walls
among men’, Santa Cruz bemoaned the impossibility of a ‘universal and coor-
dinated’ worldwide celebration of Bach’s anniversary, alluding specifically to
Germany’s postwar division.25 But Santa Cruz presented Bach’s spirituality
not only as a value per se, but also as a quality that was symbolically influ-
ential for the renewal of Chilean music institutions. The reception of early
music and the interest in composers such as Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky
had proven that Bach’s presence served as ‘the door to the past and the tradi-
tion that could face the future’.26 For this reason, so Santa Cruz claimed, the
performance of Bach’s works initiated by the Sociedad Bach was significant
for the cultivation of Chilean audiences, ‘as exorcism and sign of the cross
against the demons of bad taste and routine’.27 Overall, Santa Cruz pre-
sented Bach as the starting point for a rediscovery of different periods of
music history. Also noteworthy is that Santa Cruz named two French com-
posers, thereby implicitly signaling a tendency to privilege French neoclas-
sicism over Schoenberg and the Second Viennese School. If the members
of the early Sociedad Bach strongly associated spirituality, individual religi-
osity, historical knowledge, and modernity with Bach’s music, Santa Cruz
presented these very same values in 1950 as fundamental pillars of modern
Chilean musical life.28
24 Domingo Santa Cruz, ‘Bach, la tradición capaz de enfrentar el porvenir’, Pro arte
101 (28 July 1950), 2.
25 Ibid.
26 ‘Bach era la puerta del pasado y la tradición que podía enfrentar el porvenir.’ Ibid.,
p. 10.
27 ‘Como el exorcismo y como la señal de la cruz frente a los demonios del mal gusto
y de la rutina.’ Ibid., p. 2.
28 These ideas would resurface in Anacrusa’s pamphlet ‘Bach nuestro contemporáneo’
of 1984, which shows that in the mid-1980s young Chilean musicians and composers
educated at the Universidad de Chile still understood Bach as both the ‘door to the
past’ and a ‘contemporary’: ‘Y así como la presencia de Bach se proyectó en la creación
musical posterior, la Sociedad Bach logró ensanchar los muy estrechos cauces por los
que discurría la actividad musical chilena de comienzos de siglo, renovando radical-
mente nuestra actividad musical; llegando a ser, en consecuencia, un punto de par-
tida determinante para la actual institucionalidad de la música en Chile.’ (And as the
presence of J.S. Bach was projected onto subsequent musical creation, the Sociedad
Bach was able to expand the very narrow channels of early-twentieth-century musical
activity in Chile, resulting in a radical renovation of our musical life. In consequence,
this was the starting point of contemporary musical institutionalization in Chile.)
Anacrusa, ‘Bach nuestro contemporáneo’.

Historicity and Religion in the First Chilean Cantatas
The adoption of the Sociedad Bach’s ideals into the Universidad de Chile,
where in the 1940s to 1960s most Chilean composers received their educa-
tion, suggests a Chilean ‘retour à Bach’ that forgoes the objectivism typically
associated with the French retour and that ultimately manifests itself in the
composers’ contribution to the cantata genre. Among the very first contribu-
tors was Domingo Santa Cruz himself with the Cantata de los ríos de Chile
(1941) for mixed choir and orchestra, and Égloga: Cantata pastoral (1949) for
soprano, choir, and orchestra. Juan Orrego-Salas (1919–2019), one of Santa
Cruz’s former students, premiered his Cantata de Navidad (1946) for soprano
and orchestra in Rochester, New York (at the time he was studying in the
United States).29 One of Santa Cruz’s close collaborators, Alfonso Letelier
(1912–94), also wrote a cantata in 1949: Vitrales de la Anunciación for soprano,
female choir, and chamber ensemble. Indeed, the early Chilean cantatas can
be all traced back to the circle of Santa Cruz.
The conception of the cantatas by Santa Cruz and Letelier just before
the 1950 year of Bach can be seen as a tribute. At the time, both were writ-
ing their articles for the Revista musical chilena. Letelier’s contribution on
Bach’s chorales contains examples from several cantatas, the Passions, and
the Weihnachts-Oratorium.30 Santa Cruz presented an exhaustive analysis of
Bach’s fugue technique using as examples selected instrumental and vocal
works, among them cantatas nos. 6, 22, 65, 75, 102, 105, and 172 to show how
Bach treats fugues in the middle of an overture; cantata no. 40 as an example
for a double fugue; cantatas nos. 6, 21, 40, 43, in which fugues support dra-
matic action; cantatas nos. 51, 54, and 86 for arias written as fugues; cantatas
nos. 25, 31, 39, and 40 as examples of polythematic fugues; and cantatas nos.
21, 22, 68, 80, 144, and 187 to show what Santa Cruz calls ‘harmonic-con-
structive’ fugues.31 The use of Baroque counterpoint and of musical forms first
used in early music genres, such as the madrigal or the Spanish villancico, is
central to the Chilean cantatas discussed here.
Letelier designates Vitrales de la Anunciación as a ‘religious cantata’ of
‘intentionally archaistic’ character, rooted in the incidental music he had com-
posed in 1949 for a Chilean staging of Paul Claudel’s L’Announce faite à Marie
(1940). He creates a religious atmosphere by relying on medieval genres, such
29 The work was also performed in other American cities, in Paris, and in London.
Luis Merino, ‘Visión del compositor Juan Orrego-Salas’, Revista musical chilena 142–4
(1978), 10–11.
30 Alfonso Letelier, ‘El coral en la obra de Bach’, Revista musical chilena 38 (1950),
56–68.
31 Domingo Santa Cruz, ‘La fuga en la obra de Bach’, Revista musical chilena 38
(1950), 16–55.

as plainchant and its inherent modality. In the first part, entitled ‘Organum
cuadruplum’, Letelier combines a medieval tropus with sections written in
strict counterpoint. Strings, woodwinds, and trumpet interact with piano and
bells in polyphonic sections, resulting in a modernist sonority that captures
the archaistic character out of a contemporary perspective.32
Orrego-Salas imbues his Cantata de Navidad with an additional historicity
by using the verses of two important figures from Spain’s Golden Age—San
Juan de la Cruz and Lope de Vega—thereby also evoking a Hispanic atmo-
sphere. Like the Baroque cantata, the four movements (titled as in the Song
of Songs as ‘Cantares’) consist of recitatives, ariosos, and arias; and Orrego-
Salas makes use of counterpoint. The instrumental group—a small string
section, woodwinds, horns, one trumpet, and a triangle—evokes neoclassical
settings. Like Letelier, Orrego-Salas envelopes the archaic in modernist style
by combining modal and diatonic melodies that create static harmonies.33
While the works of Letelier and Orrego-Salas treat religious subjects,
Santa Cruz embraces topoi of pastoral life and nature. The Cantata de los ríos
de Chile praises in an elegiac tone the majesty of Chilean nature as embodied
in two of its main rivers: the Aconcagua and the Maipo. The two movements
are designated as madrigals. In each Santa Cruz sets his own poems line by
line, alternating homophonic sections with counterpoint, thus evoking the
texture of a sixteenth-century madrigal. As Vicente Salas Viu observed after
the premiere of the Égloga in 1950, Santa Cruz’s second work leans more on
the structure of a madrigal than of a cantata; it eschews division into recita-
tives, arias, duets, etc. Conceived as a dramatic unity in through-composed
form, it has sections with different successive motifs in close correspondence
with the content of Lope de Vega’s verses.34
To overarchingly describe the style of these works, neoclassicism might
be an obvious concept, as they historicize, drawing on musical and literary
forms of the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Baroque. New combinations of
instruments and instrument groups, as well as the use of extended harmony
that avoids falling into free atonality, clearly represent the reception of French
modernism in Chile. Recalling Santa Cruz’s assessment of Bach’s presence in
Chile, the influence of the Baroque cantata could be interpreted as a window
to the musical past and as a means to explore a future for musical composi-
tion. But the historicity in these works does not seem to generate a dialectic
32 Alfonso Letelier, Vitrales de la Anunciación (1949) (Santiago de Chile, 1976). For an

analysis of the work, see Gustavo Becerra, ‘El estilo de los “Vitrales de la Anunciación”
de Alfonso Letelier’, Revista musical chilena 57 (1958), 5–22.
33 Merino, ‘Visión del compositor Juan Orrego-Salas’, pp. 25–6.
34 Vicente Salas Viu, ‘La Égloga para soprano, coros y orquesta de Domingo Santa
Cruz’, Revista musical chilena 39 (1950), 19–32.

that could lead to an ironic distance, a decisive feature of neoclassicism.35

On the contrary, the religious content and, in the case of Santa Cruz, the
exaltation of nature are taken seriously. This seriousness may be rooted in the
search for spirituality and depth that was characteristic of the early Chilean
Bach reception.36 Composers such as Santa Cruz, Orrego-Salas, and Letelier
embrace the ‘big masters’ of the past as a basis for the further development of
Chilean composition.
Avant-garde and Socialist Realism in the

Cantatas of the 1950s and 1960s
Santa Cruz’s Égloga premiered in 1950 during the second Festival de Música
Chilena, which he had established in 1948 and which came to play an influ-
ential role in Chile’s musical life, especially with regard to new compositions.
Taking place every other year, the festival premiered chamber and symphonic
works by Chilean composers and immigrants who had resided in Chile for
at least five years. Since there was no age restriction, many young composers
submitted their first works to a committee that selected the repertoire to be
performed by the IEM ensembles; an independent jury consisting of compos-
ers, music professionals, and the audience decided on the awards.37 Given the
make-up of the performing forces available during the 1950s and 1960s—the
Orquesta Sinfónica and the university choir—composers focused on can-
tata and oratorio as the most large-scale genres that could be performed. The
composer Fernando García (1930–) ascribes the lack of operas by Chilean
composers of his generation to the country’s lack of the infrastructure that
35 For a discussion of neoclassicism as a dialectic between two historical moments,

see Katharina Clausius, ‘Historical Mirroring, Mirroring History: An Aesthetics of
Collaboration in Pulcinella’, Journal of Musicology 30, no. 2 (2013), 215–51.
36 Few cantatas written during the 1950s and 1960s by students or former students of
the Conservatorio Nacional followed this archaic orientation. Darwin Vargas (1925–
88) wrote his Cantata de cámara (1954) as a setting of Spanish villancicos; and El poeta
Jacob (1960), by Pedro Nuñez Navarrete (1906–89), focused on the biblical figure of
Jacob. Roberto Escobar (1926–2011) wrote his Cantata del Laja (1963) in the ‘tradi-
tion’ of Santa Cruz, drawing on images of nature and pastoral life. In 1960 Santa Cruz
wrote a third cantata, Endechas, for tenor and chamber orchestra, based on a fifteenth-
century text by Lope de Estúñiga. With atonal sections and using the ensemble in
a more fragmentary way, it is characteristic of Santa Cruz’s later period, shaped by
his musical experiences in postwar Europe after 1953. See Luis Merino, ‘Presencia
del creador Domingo Santa Cruz en la historia de la música chilena’, Revista musical
chilena 146–7 (1979), 41.
37 For an overview see Luis Merino, ‘Los Festivales de Música Chilena: Géneris,
propósitos y trascendencia’, Revista musical chilena 149–50 (1980), 80–105.

opera performance required. The cantata, however, offered flexibility in com-

posing and performing dramatic music.38 In fact, the discursive polariza-
tion described earlier, which associated Italian opera with stagnation and the
developments initiated at the Universidad de Chile with modernization, led
to an institutional polarization, which is another explanation for the absence
of Chilean operas during this period. The IEM did not collaborate with the
Teatro Municipal, which continued to focus solely on European repertoire.39
Only in 1970 would the Ópera Nacional be established as a branch of the
IEM, with a stable corps of singers, stage designers, musicians, and direc-
tors who collaborated on operatic productions under its own roof.40 The mili-
tary coup of 1973 would interrupt the further development of this emerging
project.
During the 1950s and 1960s the Chilean cantata absorbed influences
from the international avant-garde, using methods such as serialism and alea-
toricism, while still relying on historical topics. With this, new temporalities
entered the works.41 Among those who represented the new course is Eduardo
Maturana (1920–2003), who had studied viola at the Conservatorio Nacional
and composition with Pedro Humberto Allende; as a twelve-tone composer,
he was self-taught. León Schidlowsky (1931–) and Leni Alexander (1924–
2005), the only woman composer of this group, were both former students
of the Dutch composer and pianist Fré Focke, who had studied with Anton
Webern in Vienna and emigrated to Chile in 1947. Focke had not entered the
circle of the Universidad de Chile, which is unsurprising, given Santa Cruz’s
distaste for twelve-tone music.42 Schidlowsky and Alexander were children of
Jewish emigrants and had continued their studies in Europe: Schidlowsky in
Detmold (1952–4) and Alexander in Paris and Venice (1954/5).43 Alexander’s
cantatas De la muerte a la mañana (1958) and Tessimenti (1964) reflect her
familiarity with an international avant-gardist language, which also manifests
itself in her choice of texts by Dylan Thomas, Thomas Wolfe, and Leonardo
da Vinci. Alexander’s cantatas resonated positively in Chile and abroad. De
38 Fernando García, in discussion with the author, 24 July 2017.

39 See Gonzalo Cuadra, Ópera Nacional que así la llamaron, 1898–1950: Análisis y
antología de la ópera chilena y de los compositores que la intentaron (Santiago de Chile,
2019).
40 Anonymous, ‘Ópera Nacional’, Revista musical chilena 112 (1970), 109–10.
41 For detailed biographies, see Claro and Urrutia, Historia.
42 For a detailed study of the Chilean early avant-garde, including Maturana, Focke,
and Focke’s students, see Daniela Fugellie, ‘Musiker unserer Zeit’: Internationale
Avantgarde, Migration und Wiener Schule in Südamerika (Munich, 2018), pp. 194–204
and 403–50.
43 Schidlowsky was born in Chile; his father had emigrated from Poland. In inver-
sion, Alexander was born in Breslau and lived in Hamburg, from where she emigrated
with her family to Chile in 1939.

la muerte a la mañana was selected for and premiered at the World Music
Days of the International Society for Contemporary Music, which was held
in Cologne in 1960; and her second cantata, Tessimenti, received the honor
prize at the ninth Festivales de Música Chilena of 1964.
Most of the cantatas composed during the 1950s and 1960s present
Americanist topics with a clear historicizing function. Several rely on verses
from Pablo Neruda’s Canto general, among them Falabella’s La lámpara en la
tierra (1958), Schidlowsky’s Caupolicán (1958), García’s América insurrecta
(1962), Canto a Margarita Naranjo (1964), and La tierra combatiente (1965),
Orrego-Salas’s América, no en vano invocamos tu nombre (1965), and Becerra’s
Macchu Picchu (1966). Generally understood as one of the major works of the
Chilean poet, Neruda’s Canto general embraces more than five centuries of
Latin American history, from pre-Columbian times to the decade of 1940.
It relates human suffering and exploitation in different historical moments,
though representing them as problems that can be overcome through social
action—a utopian political message.44 When in 1948 the Chilean president,
Gabriel González Videla, outlawed the Communist Party through the Ley
Maldita (Damned Law), Neruda went into exile. After spending time in
France and the USSR, he arrived in Mexico, where Talleres Gráficos de la
Nación published the Canto general in 1950. In Chile, the Communist Party
distributed 5,000 copies, which were illegally printed.45 The Canto general
attained great popularity, corresponding to the political development of Chile
during the 1950s and 1960s, which led to Salvador Allende’s democratic
socialist government in 1970.
Other literary sources used in Chilean cantatas of the period include
Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana (set by Becerra in 1965), a sixteenth-century
epic poem about the war between the Spanish conquerors and the Mapuche
in south-central Chile.46 Because of the long duration of this conflict, known
as the Guerra de Arauco, the Mapuche have become associated with resis-
tance against colonization and have thereby been influential in the construc-
tion of Chilean cultural identity. Andrés Sabella (1912–89), a member of the
Communist Party, put into focus the organizer of the first strike in Chile
44 See Mark Mascia, ‘Pablo Neruda and the Construction of Past and Future Utopias
in the Canto general ’, Utopian Studies 12, no. 2 (2001), 65–81.
45 For an historical contextualization see David Schidlowsky, Pablo Neruda y su
tiempo: Las furias y las penas, 2 vols (Santiago de Chile, 2008), II, p. 812.
46 The poem was an antecedent of Neruda’s Canto general; see Schidlowsky, Pablo
Neruda, pp. 810–11. The painter and composer Carlos Isamitt (1887–1974) was
a pioneer of ethnomusicological research on the Mapuche in southern Chile. His
catalogue lists a Cantata huilliche (1965) with text in Mapudungun (the language of
the Mapuche), now deemed lost. See Samuel Claro, ‘Catálogo de la obra de Carlos
Isamitt’, Revista musical chilena 97 (1966), 54–67. The catalogue indicates that Claro
consulted the manuscripts.

in a poem that formed the basis of García’s cantata Sebastián Vásquez (Siglo
XVI). Similarly drawing on prominent political figures, in the first two parts
of his Amereida (1969), Schidlowsky recalls the verses of the Peruvian poet
and guerrillero Javier Heraud (1942–63), who died fighting against the mili-
tary government of his country; and both Schidlowsky in the third part of
Amereida, ‘Ecce Homo’, and Maturana in Responso para el guerrillero (1968)
used fragments of Ernesto (Che) Guevara’s writings, devoting works to him
after his death in Bolivia in 1967.47 Alluding to a Soviet topic, García’s Los
heroes caídos hablan is based on letters written by Russian soldiers during the
German invasion (1941–5). García’s América insurrecta was dedicated to the
fortieth anniversary of the Communist Party in Chile in 1962 and received
first prize in the Festivales de Música Chilena in the same year. This use of
composition to make overt political statements corresponds with García,
Roberto Falabella (1926–58), Gustavo Becerra-Schmidt (1925–2010), and
other composers being members or supporters of the Chilean communist and
socialist parties.48
In spite of these strong connections to contemporaneous Chilean politics,
most of the cantatas historicize a distant past. From the fifteen sections of
the Canto general, Falabella, Becerra, and Orrego-Salas specifically selected
verses dedicated to the pre-Columbian period, and Schidlowsky and García
chose those devoted to the Spanish colonization and the early twentieth cen-
tury. None of the compositions draws from the poems that relate the Latin
American political situation around 1948. By digesting topics from a distant
past, the composers avoided the representation of social and political conflicts
latent in contemporary history. The cantata’s status as a historically established
musical genre, strongly linked in Chile with the reception of Bach, enabled
the representation of historical topics to make a political statement from a
musical and aesthetic distance. The cantata thus enabled political topics to
enter the concerts halls of Chile, while avoiding direct confrontation with the
intense political discussions of the 1960s.
To be sure, the politically engaged cantatas do not approach the past from
an ironic or intellectual distance. On the contrary, many of them were con-
ceived as dramatic scenes, supported by the appearance of a new protagonist:
47 Sergio Ortega also composed Responso por el guerrillero muerto (1968) for soprano
and two percussionists. For a discussion of Maturana’s work see Graciela Paraskevaídis,
‘Eduardo Maturana, un músico olvidado’, Revista musical chilena 222 (2014), 58–69.
48 García, a student of Becerra and Orrego-Salas and later a teacher at the Universidad
de Chile, is still a member of the Communist Party in Chile. Although chronic paraly-
sis prevented him from studying at the Conservatorio Nacional, Falabella was close to
the composers of the Universidad de Chile and was a private student of Becerra, who
had studied composition with Santa Cruz and had been a composition teacher of the
conservatory since the 1940s.

Example 7.1 Acario Cotapos, Balmaceda (1956), microfilm of the manuscript score,
p. 35, transcription.
§ §
Ç Ç
Flt
G G 3
Ç TT Ç Ç
Obs 1 © Ç Ç Ç
2
$ 3
dim
Cl
3 Ç Ç
Cl B
3
6
Fags
K ÇÇ TT
$ dim M
3
Cor
3
ÇÇ T
T
1
2
M dim
3
G
Tromp
Ç ±
3
M
4
1
2
Trbs
3

¡No! Lucharía en este último día...Su

Narrad. tierra, el país entero, por el que
veló con gran amor; tanto quiso...
sus campos, sus ríos...todo iría
a desaparecer de su mente y hun_
dirse en la sombra... !Oh, dolor de
un hombre entonces incomprendido!
G G 3
ÇÇ K K TT

1
M dim
3

Vlns
K ÇÇ » x@ K K
2 TT KÇ
G
M G 3
! » K KT @
6
Viola
K
TT 3
K @ K K K K 6
Cello ÇÇ
M dim
CB


the narrator. Spoken narrative appears for the first time in Balmaceda (1956)
by Acario Cotapos (1889–1969), based on the political testament of the
Chilean president José Manuel Balmaceda, a liberal politician who took
his own life in 1891, the year of the Chilean Civil War.49 Although it is not
designated a cantata, but rather a ‘musical tale’, Balmaceda exhibits cantata-
like features through a highly dramatic musical language; it also anticipates
the orchestral explorations later found in Schidlowsky, García, Becerra, and
Maturana. The work narrates Balmaceda’s last hours, and the orchestra takes
on a major role in representing the dramatic developments that lead to his
suicide. The narrator ends the work in an epic tone (example 7.1), emphasiz-
ing that Balmaceda’s sacrifice was not in vain: ‘With their light his ideas ger-
minate and spread a seed of sympathy and prosperity among men.’50
Other works, too, are centered on one heroic figure, such as Caupolicán,
Sebastián Vásquez, or the Russian soldiers of World War II. They similarly
rely on a narrator who presents scenes of the hero’s life in a dramatic and
almost prophetic tone. The declamation is straightforward and responds to
the dramatic development of the narration, resembling a melodrama. It sup-
ports the clear transmission of a story from the past possibly intended as a
moral lesson for the future.51 Some works feature several narrators in sup-
port of a more dramatic conception that revives historical events through per-
formance on stage. The role of the narrator in Chilean cantatas parallels the
Baroque evangelist found in some of Bach’s vocal works. Both share a similar
function: they tell a truth that must be told.
Regardless of whether this truth is of religious nature or proclaims a
social ideology, the gesture of narration is taken seriously enough to con-
nect it to the discourse of non-ironic ‘retour à Bach’ characteristic of Chile.
The direct and sparse narration invests the Chilean cantatas with an aura
of solemnity. In their rendering of powerful words by Neruda or socially
engaged martyrs such as Balmaceda, Heraud, and Che Guevara, the nar-
rations become epic. This narrative aspect differentiates these works from
49 Cotapos, a cosmopolitan autodidact composer who lived in Chile, but also in

Argentina, New York, and Paris, has often been described as an ‘outsider’ in Chilean
music history. Balmaceda is the first work to address Chilean republican history.
For a short biography and the political testament of José Manuel Balmaceda, see
http://www.memoriachilena.cl/602/w3-article-662.html#presentacion (accessed 2
October 2017). Neruda’s Canto general also dedicates a poem to the president (IV/35,
‘Balmaceda de Chile’).
50 ‘ . . . sus ideas germinan y esparcen con su luz una simiente de comprensión y pros-
peridad entre los hombres!’ Acario Cotapos, Balmaceda (1956), microfilm, Archivo de
Música, Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, Santiago de Chile.
51 In a few instances, such as in Schidlowsky’s Oda a la Tierra and Caupolicán, the
part of the narrator is written out rhythmically, indicating Sprechgesang.

their 1940s predecessors, leading to a performative representation of the

encounter between past and present.
The politically engaged cantatas also break with the style of their pre-
decessors, exploring different compositional techniques and sonorities.
Commenting on a corpus of forty-six works based on Neruda’s poems, mostly
written by composers of a younger generation, Luis Merino asserts that
Neruda’s ‘imposing grandiosity was translated into music by using massive
combinations of voices and instruments, many times with a rough and abrupt
language, which in some compositions breaks completely with the tradition,
and enters into the aleatoricism of the avant-garde’.52 Falabella’s La lámpara
en la tierra, written shortly before the composer’s premature death in 1958
and the very first setting of the Canto general, represents Neruda’s majestic
description of Latin American nature through colorful instrumentation with
a large percussion section; it also displays inventive polyrhythmic treatment
and use of pentatonic scales that often appear simultaneously with, and are
complemented by, whole-tone scales. Similarly, complex rhythmic structures
can be found in the cantatas by Schidlowsky.53 The leaning toward aleatorics
is evident in Maturana’s Responso para el guerrillero. Further, electric guitar and
‘jazz drums’ play glissandi of various kinds and rely on extended playing tech-
niques. Performances may also include a pre-recorded tape which, although
described as optional in the score, adds an interesting collage of advertise-
ments as well as quotations from Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and others.54
Maturana defined himself as a chronicler of his time and was particularly
concerned with the representation of Che Guevara as a symbol of purity and
the social transformation of a corrupted society.55
Most socially engaged Chilean composers of the 1960s saw no contra-
diction in combining musical elements associated with the avant-garde with
local musical traditions, topics from the past, and political content oriented
toward the future. Gustavo Becerra’s La Araucana (1965), which departs from
the style of earlier cantatas, is a case in point. It exhibits an experimental
52 ‘Su grandiosidad imponente se traduce en música para masivas combinaciones de

voces e instrumentos, muchas veces de lenguaje áspero y abrupto que en algunas de
las composiciones rompe completamente con la tradición, para entrar en los recursos
aleatorios de la “avant garde”.’ Luis Merino, ‘Fluir y refluir de la poesía de Neruda en la
música chilena’, Revista musical chilena 123–4 (1973), 56. The publishing of article in
the last months of 1973 (after the military coup of 11 September and Neruda’s death)
about Neruda’s poetry in the music of politically engaged composers can be under-
stood as a political act in itself.
53 Merino compared the rhythmical structures with the isorhythmic motets and the
music of Anton Webern. Luis Merino, ‘Roberto Falabella Correa (1926–58): El hom-
bre, el artista y su compromiso’, Revista musical chilena 121–2 (1973), 58–9.
54 For transcriptions of the texts, see Paraskevaídis, ‘Eduardo Maturana’.
55 See ibid.

Example 7.2 Gustavo Becerra-Schmidt, La Araucana (1965), manuscript score,
mm. 78–87, transcription.
Ç Ç
Marac.
Ç Ç
Rugidoras
C M C M C M C M

(f)
Ç

S. (
Chi - le fér - til Pro - vin - cia
G
A.

(mp)
Ç
Chi - le fér - til Pro - vin - cia
4 G
T.
Ç
Ç
B.
(
»
O R O R O R O R O R O
Trompel
$

Trutruc.
$
= = =
18 19
y señalada en la región
Rec.
w
Äntártica famosa, de remotas naciones respe-
C

I

Vl.
@ @
II
@ @ @ @
Vla. !
Ç
Vc.
! Ç Ç Ç
Cb.
Ç Ç Ç Ç Ç
78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

language, with aleatory sections of undetermined tones and rhythms (example

7.2).56 As a work that depicts the war between Spanish conquerors and the
Mapuche, it employs three actual Mapuche instruments: trompe, trutruka,
and kultrun. Moreover, these instruments are played on stage to accompany
the voices of the indigenous characters, thus creating a stark contrast to the
neoclassicist sonority of the Spanish conquerors. Moreover, this fight between
the Spanish conquerors and the Mapuche was not merely an instance of his-
toric social oppression that could perhaps offer a lesson for the future. During
the 1960s some Mapuche groups were still fighting for the expropriation of
their lands—a conflict that remains unresolved even now. Becerra uses the
indigenous instruments in a playful way, with no discernable irony. These
instruments are rather used to represent the oppressed population in Chile,
thus indirectly alluding to the necessity of social change.
Becerra’s Macchu Picchu (1966) for male and female narrators, choir, orches-
tra, tape, and oscillator takes avant-gardist explorations further. Aside from
using a rich percussion section, different vocal effects for the choir (bocca chi-
usa, murmur, undetermined tones, etc.), extended playing techniques for the
piano, and the echo sonority produced by tape and oscillator, the 38-minute-
long work is almost continuously aleatory. Still, as Merino observed, the com-
position is entirely determined by the declamation of Neruda’s poems.57 The
work’s political message is not specifically related to Chilean history; it rather
conveys a Latin American identity through the setting of Neruda’s ‘Alturas de
Macchu Picchu’ (Canto general, II). In one of the most famous poems of this
section, ‘XII. Sube a nacer conmigo hermano’, Neruda invokes archaic plow-
men, weavers, shepherds, goldsmiths, and farmers to tell their histories of pun-
ishment and oppression. Although they will not come back from death, the
poet claims that he speaks through their dead mouths: ‘Yo vengo a hablar por
vuesta boca muerta.’58 The poet portrays himself a ‘medium’, a voice that enables
the social activists of the past to speak to the audiences of a given present (see
systems 1–4 in example 7.3). The message, strongly conveyed through an exper-
imental music texture, can be interpreted as an appeal to the future that leaves
the possibility of a playful deconstruction of Neruda’s heroic tale aside.
56 Becerra’s Entrada a la madera (1956) is a peculiar cantata for singer and piano,
which is structured in brief sections designated as recitativos, arias, and ariosos, com-
bining the conception of a large Lied, rich in chromaticism and dissonant intervals,
with the structure of a solo-cantata. Cantata del amor americano (1965) is described as
a ‘didactic work for the youth’ and the musical features are not very complex, though it
does include some fugatos and bi-choral sections.
57 Merino, ‘Fluir y refluir de la poesía de Neruda’, p. 58. Unlike in the published
scores, in Becerra’s catalogue from 1972 both La Araucana and Macchu Picchu are des-
ignated as oratorios.
58 ‘I am here to speak through your dead mouth’. Pablo Neruda, Canto general.
‘Alturas de Macchu Picchu’, XII. See also footnote 1.

Example 7.3 Gustavo Becerra-Schmidt, Macchu Picchu (1966), manuscript score,
part VI, systems 1–5, transcription.
1
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coro

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w
1 2 3

Fernando García’s cantatas also combine Mapuche and avant-gardist

musical elements. In his first work, América insurrecta (1962), the sound of the
trutruka—a Mapuche wind instrument—is evoked through brass instruments
that play melodic motifs ending in an upward glissando, a feature commonly
heard in the Mapuche tradition at the end of a melody. A binary rhythmic
pattern also strengthens the evocation of Mapuche music. However, atonality
and expressionistic contrasts in dynamics and timbre follow in the footsteps
of the Second Viennese School. The use of avant-gardist elements increases
in García’s subsequent cantatas. He experiments with tapes, graphic notation
to indicate undetermined tone-sections and other effects, as well as differ-
ent types of vibrato, all the while continuing to draw on elements from the
Mapuche tradition. Following a documentary style, Sebastián Vásquez (1966)
features a tape recording with the (imaginary) voice of the sixteenth-century
conqueror Vázquez, adding a new dimension to the performance of history
on stage. As in Becerra’s work, the use of Mapuche elements in combina-
tion with histories of social activism and repression can be interpreted as a
message to promote a socially engaged future. In this context, the musical
evocation of the Mapuche seems to constitute a recurring motif for different
moments of social oppression in Chilean history.
García himself highlighted the possibility of a politically engaged avant-
garde after the premiere of his América insurrecta, describing the work as an
example of socialist realism:
From the viewpoint of the musician in society, the work corresponds to the
so-called ‘socialist realism’, understood as an ethical attitude towards art that
implies that we have to be completely honest with the period in which we live.
The musical language must be direct, to reach those to whom the work is dedi-
cated. We need to shorten the distance between the creators and the audience,
which transforms the music into a luxury for few people. The chosen composi-
tional technique must reflect the current musical developments. In this sense,
the use of tonality is out of place and must be replaced by serialism, in this case
(freely used) dodecaphony.59
59 ‘Desde el punto de vista de la posición del músico ante la sociedad, la obra responde
a lo llamado “realismo socialista”, esto es, a una actitud ética frente al arte, de lo que
se deduce que hay que ser absolutamente consecuente con la época en que se vive. El
lenguaje musical usado debe ser directo, que llegue a quienes la obra está dedicada.
Hay que terminar con el distanciamiento entre creadores y público, que ayuda a trans-
formar la música en lujo para unos pocos. La técnica de composición empleada debe
estar de acuerdo con los avances experimentados por la música. En ese sentido, el uso
del tonalismo está fuera de lugar y debe ser reemplazado por el serialismo, en este caso
dodecafónico (un tanto libre)’; quoted in Carlos Riesco, ‘Octavo Festival de Música
Chilena’, Revista musical chilena 83 (1963), 26.

The composer Carlos Riesco commented on this statement with surprise,

noting that socialist countries did not permit the composition of twelve-
tone music. However, Riesco did not further question García’s claim, since
he agreed with the possibility of a socially engaged music that could be open
to different aesthetical currents.60 In América insurrecta the aesthetics of
socialist realism is associated with the understandability of Neruda’s poems,
both through the part of the narrator and in the treatment of the choir, and
through the inspiration taken from national music traditions, in this case the
Mapuche. However, García combined these elements—in his own words—
with ‘current musical developments’, understanding the use of contemporary
procedures such as the twelve-tone method as a representation of an ethical
compromise with the present. García clearly understood dodecaphony as a
manifestation of ‘the period in which we live’, and hence perceived in it no
contradiction to Neruda’s historical evocation and political message.
In this way, politically engaged composers such as García, Maturana, and
Becerra found a unique path to representing social content through the musi-
cal procedures of their time, thus creating an ‘experimental’ Chilean variant of
socialist realism that on first sight might be surprising given the social revolu-
tion of the 1960s.61 However, as García remembers, the Chilean Communist
Party did not prescribe aesthetic dogmas for its artists and composers.62 In
an article for the Boletín música of the Casa de las Américas in La Habana,
García shares the words of Luis Corvalán, Secretary General of the Chilean
Communist Party, who in 1962 made the following declaration:
Each creator who follows the path of the revolution, lives and manifests it
through his work and his contact with the people. The Party must support him
in this endeavor, stimulating at the same time (the search for) new forms that
can enrich the content. But since this process is unfolding within the condi-
tions of a capitalist country such as ours, the incorporation and militancy of
artists and writers in our rows has only one requirement: the revolutionary
attitude in politics, not the adherence to certain aesthetic schools.63
60 Ibid., p. 27.
61 Paradoxically, Orrego-Salas’s Americanist cantata, América, no en vano invocamos
tu nombre (1965), written after the composer had permanently settled in the United
States, exhibits a more conventional treatment of the choir, a more conventional style,
and modal gestures that are more in line with the aesthetic ideals of socialist realism.
The chosen verses praise the majesty of the American continent (Canto general, II/8
and VI/18) and do not suggest any political allusions.
62 Fernando García, in discussion with the author, 24 July 2017.
63 ‘Cada creador que toma el camino de la revolución lo vive y lo soluciona a través
de su trabajo y de su contacto con el pueblo. El partido debe ayudarlo en este sen-

tido, estimulando al mismo tiempo las formas nuevas que a la vez enriquezcan el con-
tenido. Pero tratándose de un proceso, en las condiciones de un país capitalista como el
nuestro, la incorporación y la militancia de los artistas y escritores en nuestras filas sólo

The idea of a politically engaged avant-garde was also present in other

circles of left-wing composers in Latin America at the time, such as the circle
of the Cursos Latinoamericanos de Música Contemporánea, showing that its
relevance went beyond Chilean borders.64
In the Chilean works of the 1960s little of the form, style, or subject
matter of the Baroque cantata is left. Most of the works were conceived as
monumental dramatic scenes, in which the archaistic tone of the first works
was replaced by larger orchestral groups and experimentation with mod-
ernist techniques, such as aleatory music, the incorporation of tapes, and
extended performance techniques for singers and instruments. The Chilean
cantata of the 1960s was committed to the search for a Latin American or
Chilean musical identity while embracing a contemporary sonority. In this,
the representation of the past continued to be a central aspect of a genre, now
connected to the social ideology promoted by the Chilean Left. From these
cantatas to Luis Advis’s Santa María de Iquique the leap is not as wide as it
seems. The idea of representing the past, carried by the genre of the cantata,
had taken firm hold in Chile. The serious voice of the narrator and the imita-
tion or actual use of Latin American instruments had thoroughly infiltrated
the Chilean cantata. What was new in Advis’s work, however, was the con-
scious turn toward a popular language that retreated from modernism and
the avant-garde, as well as eschewing postmodernist approaches, to create an
immediacy between composers, performers, and audiences.
A Voice from the Past to Face the Future
In his Canto general, Neruda takes on the double role of poet and historian,
embracing many centuries of Latin American history.65 Through epic poetry,
he brings agents from the past into the present, to share their histories of
social fights. The opening line of Luis Advis’s Santa María de Iquique, ‘Señoras
y señores, venimos a contar, aquello que la historia no quiere recordar’, sug-
gests a similar approach as Advis ‘revives’ the mine workers from 1907 to tell
their forgotten history.
tiene una exigencia: su actitud revolucionaria en política y no la adhesión a las escuelas

estéticas’. Fernando García, ‘Chile: música y compromiso’, Boletín música 29 (1972),
2–9; quoted in La música de Fernando García: Arte, ciencia, compromiso, ed. Alejandro
Jiménez Escobar (Santiago de Chile, 2010), pp. 118–27, 119–20.
64 For a general discussion on the leftist musical avant-garde in Latin America, see
Daniela Fugellie, ‘Luigi Nono: Al gran sol de la revolución; algunos de sus encuen-
tros con América Latina entre evolución y revolución de la nueva música (1948–72)’,
Boletín música 35 (2013), 3–29.
65 See Rafael Bosch, ‘El Canto general y el poeta como historiador’, Revista de crítica
literaria latinoamericana 1, no. 1 (1975), pp. 61–75.

With its dramatic character, increasingly so during the 1960s, the Chilean
cantata performs historical events on stage. Social activists from the past
communicate through the music and, more specifically, through the voice of
the narrator—a clearly performative treatment of the past. The cantata genre,
deeply rooted in the Chilean reception of Bach, invites such performativity
with the goal of bringing forgotten histories to an audience who has to face
the future, a future that ought to be transformed in line with social goals.
In this way did the cantata performances merge layers of past, present, and
future into a whole.
Such layered temporality, however, should not suggest that Chilean com-
posers were consciously deconstructing the presumed linearity of past, pres-
ent, and future. In line with the belief in the social transformation of the
future, the voices from the past are not evoking nostalgia, nor suggesting an
idealized return to a better time. On the contrary, Chilean composers narrate
histories of struggle and repression from the past in order to help construct
a better future, and, by this, they function as agents of future transformation.
The cantata provides a suitable musical genre for the encounter of non-lin-
ear temporalities on stage, since it has long been connected with notions of
spirituality, seriousness, and solemnity. With its flexible musical form, it also
invites an encounter of elements from different musical traditions, through
which composers can explore the possibilities of a Chilean art music reflective
of the country’s cultural and historical reality, without denying the European
tradition, but also without strictly following modernist and postmodernist
aesthetics. Indeed, the Chilean cantata leans on modernist techniques while
combining musical sounds from different cultural traditions, a procedure
associated with postmodernism.
This liminality can be also seen in the layering of histories without com-
pletely deconstructing the notion of linear progression, which reflects Chilean
cantatas’ representation of metanarratives, such as the belief in social change
through revolution, and ultimately in the progress of music and humanity at
large. This, in turn, must be seen in the context of twentieth-century develop-
ments in the art music of Chile. With the first long-standing professional
orchestra formed in 1940/1 and the first stable choir and ballet in 1945, post-
war Chilean composers were inventing a tradition without deconstructing
centuries of existing ones; they were searching for their foundational myths,
not breaking with their music history or national history, both of which were
perceived as histories in an early stage of development. Since the musical
reforms promoted by the Sociedad Bach and Santa Cruz, the composers of
the Conservatorio Nacional were conscious of living in a period of impor-
tant institutional changes, and their new musical compositions were expected
to contribute to these developments. Indeed, those active at the Universidad
de Chile expected Chilean art music to be aligned with the international
developments of its time, while also contributing to the creation of a unique

Chilean music tradition rooted in the histories of the country from the pre-
Columbian period onward. Such thinking evokes the concept of ‘multiple
modernities’, which is rooted in the idea that processes of modernization
should not be understood as homogeneous forms of Westernization, but can
take on different shapes in different parts of the world. Since the 1920s South
American modernism had integrated elements of traditional and popular cul-
ture, which led to hybrid developments supporting the belief in ‘progress’.66
In a similar way does the development of the cantata in Chile suggest a
revision of ‘neoclassicism’ and ‘socialist realism’ in their application to Latin
America culture. Chilean historicist or archaistic music was not characterized
by an ironic distance from or a paradoxical encounter with different histori-
cal periods. With regard to the reception history of early music in Chile, a
‘retour à Bach’ in the sense of a literal return to a musical past was not pos-
sible from the perspective of national music history, since the Chilean recep-
tion of Bach was a twentieth-century phenomenon. In this way, the idea of
connecting to earlier periods of music history, and idea so characteristic of
neoclassicism,67 is permeated by the cultural specificities of reception. The
same is true for ‘Chilean socialist realism’, which composers understood as a
politically engaged attitude that was open to avant-gardist experimentation.68
In the relatively conservative context of the Conservatorio Nacional, compo-
sitional techniques or methods such as twelve-tone music and the aleatory
were revolutionary, indeed, even during the 1960s.
Approaches to historicity as they apply to periods, composers, and genres
must be conceived differently in countries where art music developed not in
parallel to the European canon, but in a temporality of its own, leading to
transformations of musical discourses and ideas. This ultimately evokes dif-
ferent perceptions of temporalities as well. Considering the case of Bach
in Chile, who was understood simultaneously as a point of departure for
the reception of early music and as an agent of musical transformation, he
embodied past, present, and future.
66 Arguing in this direction, Leonardo Senkman affirms: ‘Latin American moder-

nity has some specific core ideas and modes of expression. Intellectuals of Brazil and
Argentina grasped this in hybrid and syncretic terms in as early as the 1920s–40s, long
before the rise of the idioms of multiculturalism in other Western societies’. Leonardo
Senkman, ‘The Counter-Hegemonic Discourse of Brazilian and Argentinean
Intellectuals, 1920–1940’, Globality and Multiple Modernities: Comparative North
American and Latin American Perspectives, ed. Luis Roninger and Carlos Waisman
(Brighton, 2002), p. 239.
67 See for example Arnold Whittall, ‘Neo-classicism’, The New Grove Dictionary of
Music and Musicians (New York, 2001), vol. 17.

68 See for example Christopher Norris, ‘Socialist Realism’, The New Grove Dictionary
of Music and Musicians (New York, 2001), vol. 23; and Klaus Mehner, ‘Sozialistischer
Realismus’, MGG Online.

Appendix: Chilean Cantatas (1941–69)
Genre
Composer Title Year Text Scoring Designation Source*
Domingo Cantata de los 1941 Poems by the composer mixed choir, cantata / madrigal BNC†
Santa Cruz ríos de Chile rev. orchestra
1961/74
Juan Orrego- Cantata de 1946 Lope de Vega, San soprano, cantata BNC
Salas Navidad Juan de la Cruz orchestra
Alfonso Vitrales de la 1949 Bible, medieval hymns, soprano, female religious cantata Universidad de Chile,
Letelier Anunciación Lope de Vega, Álvarez choir, chamber Facultad de Ciencias y
del Gato orchestra Artes Musicales y de la
Representación
Domingo Égloga: 1949 Lope de Vega soprano, choir, pastoral cantata BNC
Santa Cruz Cantata orchestra
pastoral
Darwin Cantata de 1954 Juan Ramón Jimenez, soprano, alto, cantata BNC
Vargas cámara Eugenio D’Ors, choir, orchestra
Gabriel García Tassara,
anonymous Spanish
source
Gustavo Entrada a la 1956 Pablo Neruda soprano, piano cantata BNC
Becerra- madera
Schmidt
(continued)
Genre
Acario Balmaceda 1956 President Balmaceda’s narrator, relato musical BNC
Cotapos political testament orchestra (musical tale)
León Cantata negra 1957 Blaise Cendars tenor, piano, cantata Archiv Akademie der
Schidlowsky percussion Künste Berlin
Roberto La lámpara en 1958 Pablo Neruda, Canto baritone cantata BNC
Falabella la tierra general (narrator
/ singer),
orchestra
Leni De la muerte a 1958 Psalm 58, Dylan baritone, female cantata BNC
Alexander la mañana Thomas, Thomas choir, chamber
Wolfe ensemble
León Caupolicán 1958 Pablo Neruda, Canto narrator, relato épico (epic BNC
Schidlowsky general choir, two tale)
pianos, celesta,
percussion
León Oda a la 1958 Bible (Genesis) narrators (tenor n/a BNC
Schidlowsky Tierra and baritone),
orchestra
Cirilo Vila Cantata 1958 Bible choir, chamber cantata BNC
ensemble
Fernando Voz preferida 1959 Vicente Huidobro singer, cantata BNC
García percussion
Genre
Domingo Endechas 1960 Lope de Estúñiga tenor, chamber cantata BNC
Santa Cruz orchestra
Pedro Nuñez El poeta Jacob 1960 Jorge de Lima (transl. tenor, orchestra cantata BNC
Navarrete Gustavo de la Torre)
Fernando América 1962 Pablo Neruda, Canto narrator, choir, cantata BNC
García insurrecta general orchestra
Roberto Cantata del 1963 Rosa Cruchaga, soprano, choir, cantata BNC
Escobar Laja Gabriela Mistral, organ, strings,
Juan Ramón Jiménez, percussion
Garcilaso de la Vega
Fernando Canto a 1964 Pablo Neruda, Canto narrator, choir, cantata BNC
García Margarita general orchestra, tape
Naranjo
Leni Tessimenti 1964 Leonardo da Vinci soprano, alto, cantata BNC
Alexander chamber
orchestra
Juan Orrego- América, 1965 Pablo Neruda, Canto soprano, cantata BNC
Salas no en vano general baritone, male
invocamos tu choir, orchestra
nombre
Fernando La tierra 1965 Pablo Neruda, Canto three narrators, cantata BNC
García combatiente general orchestra
Carlos Cantata 1965 Text in Mapudungun singer, orchestra cantata lost
Isamitt huilliche
(continued)
Genre
Gustavo Cantata 1965 Andrés Sabella narrator, cantata BNC
Becerra- del amor soloists
Schmidt americano (SATB), choir,
orchestra
Gustavo La Araucana 1965 Alonso de Ercilla narrator, choir, n/a BNC
Becerra- orchestra, [designed as
Schmidt Mapuche oratorio in
instruments catalogue of 1972]
(trompe,
trutruka,
kultrun)
Gustavo Llanto por el 1965 Fernando González choir cantata BNC
Becerra- hermano solo Urízar
Schmidt
León Amereida I. 1965 Javier Heraud narrator, elegy Israel Music Institute
Schidlowsky Llaqui orchestra
León Amereida II. 1967 Javier Heraud soprano, n/a Israel Music Institute
Schidlowsky Memento orchestra
León Amereida III. 1969 composer, Ernesto soprano, n/a Israel Music Institute
Schidlowsky Ecce Homo (Che) Guevara orchestra
Fernando Sebastián 1966 Andrés Sabella narrator, cantata BNC
García Vásquez (Siglo soprano,
XVI) orchestra, tape
Genre
Gustavo Macchu Picchu 1966 Pablo Neruda, Canto narrators (male n/a Archive Becerra-Schmidt,
Becerra- general and female), [designed as UniversitätOldenburg
Schmidt choir, orchestra, oratorio in
tape, oscillator catalogue of 1972]
Fernando Los heroes 1968 letters from Russian three narrators, cantata BNC
García caídos soldiers during the choir, orchestra
hablan (7 de German invasion
noviembre (1941–5)
1917–1967)
Eduardo Responso para 1968 composer, with orchestra, tape n/a BNC
Maturana el guerrillero quotations from Che (optional)
(Comandante Guevara
Ché Guevara)
Luis Advis Santa María 1969 composer narrator, Cantata popular MINEDUC / SCD
de Iquique male soloists
and choir,
two quenas,
charango, guitar,
bombo, cello,
double bass
* If no publisher is provided, the composition exists solely in manuscript.

† BNC = Archivo de Música, Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, Santiago de Chile.
8
Time Re-Covered: Double Temporality in

Olga Neuwirth’s Hommage à Klaus Nomi
Georg Burgstaller
Research into cover versions has yielded a multitude of motivations (economic

and artistic), methodologies, and processes associated with the musical prac-
tice, yet structural delineations of covering on musical grounds alone remain
limited to broad characterizations in relation to levels of faithfulness to the
original. As a corollary, distinctions between covering in popular music—be
it a matter of interpretation, imitation, adaptation, quotation, sampling, or
remixing—and in other genres throughout the ages (perhaps referred to as
pastiche, arrangement, variation, fantasia, etc.) are vague.1 Although the term
‘cover version’ becomes awkward when applied to classical ‘works’ due to its
association with popular ‘products’,2 some mutually underlying aspects can
be derived from the experience of such hypertexts (if seen as distinct deriva-
tions of earlier music, i.e., hypotexts) in either realm; Sheldon Schiffer sug-
gests a topology from the inside out: the issue of intrapersonal signification
(i.e., changes in signification)—and, as a result, new meaning—perceptible to
a listener familiar with the ‘elapsed’ original version poses new paradigms in
relation to originality, authenticity, and historiography.3 As cover artists and
composers, often crossing genres and generations, both interpret and rewrite
a ‘decaying’ history in their present, they enter into a complex relationship
with the listener’s—but also their own—memory and perception of the past,
transmuting their (re-)creations into metahistory.4 As such, music can at once
figure as both the subject and the object of the artist’s telling of meta-history
1 The complexities surrounding the interplay between interpretation and autono-

mous artistic statement in rock music alone are addressed in Theodore Gracyk,
Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock (London, 1996), pp. 1–36.
2 See David Horn, ‘Some Thoughts on the Work in Popular Music’, The Musical
Work: Reality or Invention?, ed. Michael Talbot (Liverpool, 2000), pp. 14–34.
3 As Schiffer suggests, the historicity of the cover song relies not merely on memory
but also on material traces that are, like memory, subject to decay; see Sheldon Schiffer
‘The Cover Song as Historiography, Marker of Ideological Transformation’, Play It
Again: Cover Songs in Popular Music, ed. George Plaketes (Farnham, 2010), pp. 88–9.
4 See ibid., pp. 89 and 93.

TIME RE-COVERED 169
on either side of what Andreas Huyssen has termed the ‘great divide’ between
‘high’ and popular culture.5
The objective of this essay is to show how covering music embodies unique
processes of temporality and historicity while crossing that divide. As a means
to that end, I rely on a case study of a work by the Austrian composer Olga
Neuwirth (1968–), namely her Hommage à Klaus Nomi, initially arrangements
of four songs from the second album by the synth-pop cover-artist Klaus
Nomi, Simple Man (1982). Scored for countertenor and small ensemble (bass
clarinet, trumpet, two synthesizers [also coupled to a sampler], percussion,
amplified violoncello, and amplified double bass doubling electric bass), these
were commissioned by the Salzburg Festival and premiered as part of its Next
Generation series in 1998. Nearly a decade later, Neuwirth turned the cycle
into a work of music theater titled Hommage à Klaus Nomi: A Songplay in Nine
Fits, adding arrangements of four songs from Nomi’s first album (Klaus Nomi,
1981) as well as a Friedrich Holländer/Marlene Dietrich hit not recorded
by the artist, ‘Wenn ich mir was wünschen dürfte’ (1931).6 Her song cycle
underwent further arrangements for the concert stage, with orchestrations for
increasingly large and conventional forces—versions for chamber orchestra
(2010) and full orchestra (2015)—although retaining the main precepts of its
original chamber form such as the use of synthesizers and the sampler.
Leaving aside Neuwirth’s covering of herself, her tribute to Nomi,
like the recordings it is based on, comprises a wide array of musical styles,
including the singer’s most extreme cases of genre and temporal displace-
ment, namely, his turns to the Baroque era to provide a distinct counterpoint
to his overt enthrallment with futurism. Each of Nomi’s albums contains a
retitled aria by Henry Purcell: on the first is ‘Cold Song’ (a version of the
bass aria ‘What Power Art Thou’, the Cold Genie’s song from the third act
of King Arthur, 1691); and on the second, ‘Death’ (a rendition of Dido’s
lament, ‘Thy Hand, Belinda . . . When I Am Laid in Earth’, originally for
5 See Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture,
Postmodernism, Theories of Representation and Difference (Bloomington, 1986), p.
viii. Diversification and shifts of performative contexts across the bifurcation of ‘high’
and ‘popular’ culture have, as a corollary to twentieth-century commodification of high
culture and the valorization of popular culture, come to be seen as at least significant
facets of postmodern modes of production, even if not all concepts of postmodern sen-
sibility in Western ‘art’ music easily map onto popular music (for instance, the former’s
central premise of postmodern eclecticism as a negation of modernist hegemony); see
Giles Hooper, ‘A Popular Postmodern or a Postmodern Popular?’ International Review
of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 43, no. 1 (2012), 187–207.
6 Neuwirth’s choice is likely to have been inspired by another Friedrich Holländer
song that Nomi did cover (also included in her Hommage), namely ‘Ich bin von Kopf
bis Fuß auf Liebe eingestellt / Falling in Love Again (Can’t Help It)’, made famous by
Marlene Dietrich in the film Blue Angel (1930).

170 GEORG BURGSTALLER
soprano, from the third act of Dido and Aeneas, 1680). Both are sung in
their original keys in Nomi’s trained countertenor voice.7 The availability of
a textual point of reference in the Purcell score helps crystallize Neuwirth’s
process of covering Nomi’s recordings (as such, only a single song included
in the later extended version of the Hommage, ‘Wasting My Time’, is cred-
ited to Nomi) and transposing them onto the concert stage.8 Circumventing
issues of authoriality typically vexing the comparative study of popular and
classical music, I will offer a close reading of her arrangement (her preferred
term) of Nomi’s ‘Death’ (Dido’s lament retitled yet again as ‘Remember’).
Cover versions commonly express identification, and Neuwirth’s musical
arrangements allow some insight into a parallelism between Nomi’s eclecti-
cism and her avant-garde aesthetics. However, her reclaiming, in 2007/8, of
the Nomi recordings for the theater in Hommage à Klaus Nomi: A Songplay
in Nine Fits allows clearer insights in this regard, as her published diaries
from the period of composing her initial Hommage in 1998 became aug-
mented with a sketch for the singspiel version. Rather than focusing on
the potentially subversive aspects of covering, which arise from a knowing
manipulation of the given material, my emphasis lies on the ways in which
Neuwirth’s covers signify, both through musical processes and in relation to
performance, a temporal spatialization akin to Nomi’s own collapsing of the
past and the future into his present.9
The underlying theoretical thread relies on the concept of double tempo-
rality brought forward by Julia Kristeva, who argues that European sensibility
constitutes a tension between identity formed by historical sedimentation and
loss of identity produced by ahistorical memory, in Kristeva’s words the time
of linear history associated with nation states and another time that ‘situates
certain supranational, sociocultural ensembles within even larger entities’.10
Kristeva offers as an example of the latter the subjective female perception of
repetition and eternity involving (but not bound to) biological rhythm and
maternity, and—in the context of feminism—observes the convergence of
two attitudes: ‘insertion into history and the radical refusal of the subjective
7 Framed by wordless renditions of the Renaissance composer John Dowland’s lute

song ‘If My Complaints Could Passions Move’, Simple Man features a further num-
ber from Dido and Aeneas, the Sorceress’s accompanied recitative ‘Wayward Sisters’,
whimsically placed anterior to his cover of Harold Arlen’s ‘Ding Dong (The Witch is
Dead)’ from The Wizard of Oz (1939).
8 The sources for Dido and Aeneas are notoriously problematic; for the present pur-
poses reference is made to the revised Novello score edited by Margaret Laurie and
Thurston Dart (Borough Green, 1974).
9 See Ken McLeod, ‘Bohemian Rhapsodies: Operatic Influences on Rock Music’,
Popular Music 20, no. 2 (2001), 199.

10 Julia Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, Signs 7, no.
1 (1981), 14.

TIME RE-COVERED 171
limitations imposed by this history’s time’.11 In a similar vein, Homi K.

Bhabha, building on Kristeva’s work, posits that, within the postcolonial
context of nationness, texts can signify cultural difference and identification
beyond historicist hierarchical or binary structuring of social antagonism, as
nation people must ‘be thought of in double-time’, as both historical objects
of an authoritative nationalist discourse and subjects of signification in the
present.12 Those who are not contained within the former but are markers of
the latter (i.e., itinerants and the displaced, the postcolonial subject) develop
a kind of double vision: ‘The lost object—the national Heim [home]—is
repeated in the void that at once prefigures and pre-empts the “unisonant”
which makes it unheimlich [unhomely, uncanny]; analogous to the incorpora-
tion that becomes the daemonic double of introjection and identification.’13
As such, the postcolonial subjects’ doubling is also the marker of ‘other disso-
nant, even dissident histories and voices’, such as those of women and people
of non-mainstream sexual orientation or gender identity, or people with HIV/
AIDS who through their interventions break the ‘time-barrier of a culturally
collusive “present”’.14 As the signifying of double temporality evident in both
Nomi’s and Neuwirth’s cover versions is to some degree accumulative, my
analysis will, for the sake of structural clarity, follow a chronological course.
11 Ibid., pp. 16–20.

12 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London, 1994), pp. 145–6.
13 Ibid., p. 165. Locality and cultural difference have traction here. Both Nomi and
Neuwirth traverse European and North American cultural sensibilities, and these are
anchored in Neuwirth’s biography as well as in Nomi’s. Born in Graz, she trained at the
Conservatory of Music and Arts College in San Francisco, the Vienna Hochschule für
Musik (now the Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien and its Institut
für Komposition, Elektroakustik und TonmeisterInnen-Ausbildung), and at the Paris
IRCAM; she has remained a notably nomadic composer (‘a Wanderer Fantasy’, as she
puts it) throughout her career. ‘Interview: Olga Neuwirth’.
14 Bhabha, The Location of Culture, pp. 4–5, 9. Marginality is easily identified in
Nomi and Neuwirth: Ken McLeod suggests that opera served as an ‘a-historical
camp reference for Nomi’s asexual alien counter-tenor’, as a corollary to sexual dif-
ference, and Neuwirth’s views on her status as a woman composer within the dual
patriarchal structures of the international contemporary music scene and artistic life in
Austria, respectively, are robustly expressed in her published diaries and elsewhere; see
McLeod, ‘Bohemian Rhapsodies’, p. 200; and Olga Neuwirth, ‘I Feel Like the Lettuce
in a Burger: It’s There But You Can’t Taste It’, http://www.olganeuwirth.com/text42.
php (accessed 12 April 2017).

Klaus Nomi’s Purcell
Born 1944 in Bavaria as Klaus Sperber, Nomi’s artistic sensibilities were

shaped by his upbringing in the German industrial city of Essen (his own
accounts of his early record purchases single out Maria Callas and Elvis
Presley’s King Creole), which eventually led him to study singing in Berlin
while immersing himself in opera during his night-jobbing as usher at the
Deutsche Oper and performing in nightclubs. After relocating to New York
City in 1972 in the search of stardom, he became absorbed in the creative
scene of the late-1970s and early-1980s East Village and its hybrid perfor-
mance-art-cum-nightlife aesthetics.15 His first documented public perfor-
mance as the art figure Klaus Nomi—at the New Wave Vaudeville at the
Irving Plaza club, a show fashioned after traditional vaudeville with an avant-
garde slant, conceived and directed by the performance artist Ann Magnuson
and organized by the artist David McDermot in 1978—was emblematic: a
rendition of the popular mezzo-soprano aria ‘Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix’ from
Camille Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila, sung in his countertenor voice to a
backing track. Nomi’s debut featured the heavy makeup that would become
customary for him, and an oversized futuristic costume prefiguring the one he
later became most associated with, a rehash of a self-designed tuxedo worn
by David Bowie during a collaborative performance on Saturday Night Live
in 1979.16 From the outset, Nomi was strongly associated with new wave, an
umbrella term for a variety of amorphous and heterogeneous styles that came
about at the dawn of the MTV era as an alternative to punk more palatable
for mass consumption. His blend of artistic influences, ranging from synth-
pop to Dadaist theatricality and operatic sensibility, chimed—along with his
leanings toward the desexualized and machine-like—with the futurism and
surrealism inherent in the other arts and some areas of wider popular culture
at the time, prompting neologisms such as ‘future wave’ to describe his style.17
The prestige afforded by Nomi’s association with Bowie led to a cult-
like following for his set shows, the aesthetics of which have been described
15 See Dan Cameron, ‘It Takes a Village’, East Village USA, ed. Michelle Piranio
(New York, 2004), pp. 42–4; and Uzi Parnes, ‘Pop Performance in East Village Clubs’,
The Drama Review 29, no. 1 (1985), 10.
16 Bowie’s outfit, in turn, was based on Weimar panache; see Kathryn Johnson, ‘David
Bowie Is In’, David Bowie: Critical Perspectives, ed. Eoin Devereux, Aileen Dillane,
and Martin J. Power (New York, 2015), p. 13. Similarly, Nomi’s trademark minimalist
stage movements can be related to Oskar Schlemmer’s Das Triadische Ballet (1927)
via Bowie’s performance aesthetics, though acts such as the German electronic-music
outfit Kraftwerk seem plausible influences as well.
17 Nomi himself favored the term ‘now wave’ (‘the future is now’); ‘Klaus Nomi on
NYC 10 O’Clock News, ca. 1981’, YouTube video, posted by ‘trylonperisphere’, 16

February 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-hn9jraQKM, at 2:00–2:10.

TIME RE-COVERED 173
by his first manager, Ron Howard, as a ‘tinker-toy version of the real opera
show’.18 Even so, the Saint-Saëns aria, which he usually closed his sets with,
remained the only operatic piece in his repertoire until the release of his
aforementioned two albums on the Spindizzy label (RCA Records), intended
for the European market and gaining, in addition, a following in Japan as
well. Nomi’s decision to feature Purcell on these albums was most likely trig-
gered by his interest in classical music: having been exposed to opera record-
ings since childhood, he regularly frequented classical concerts—occasionally
even in his signature outfit—and he stated his ambition to perform at the
Metropolitan Opera shortly after his rise to local fame.19
Purcell was not unheard of in the East Village queer theater scene of the
period: the performance artist John Kelly styles that scene as guided by ‘a
kind of punkish aesthetic, but also incredibly baroque . . . [a] glamorous illu-
sionistic kind of drag’; his own ‘glamorous gender-fuck punk drag’ show S.
Sebastiano, presented at the Pyramid Club in 1981, for instance, included
music by Purcell, along with that by Verdi.20 Nomi’s brief career, nowadays
referred to only occasionally, as a footnote to that of David Bowie, came to an
abrupt end with his death from an AIDS-related disease in 1983, leaving his
ambitions for wider fame unfulfilled.21
18 The Nomi Song: The Klaus Nomi Odyssey [2004], directed by Andrew Horn (New
York: Palm Pictures, 2005), DVD, 00:48:17–00:48:33. These shows featured a medley
of original songs by Kristian Hoffman (‘Nomi Song’, ‘Total Eclipse’, etc.) and covers
of 1960s hit songs such as Lou Christie’s ‘Lightnin’ Strikes’ (1965), and ‘You Don’t
Own Me’, recorded by Lesley Gore in 1963, along with the aforementioned Holländer
song and others, sung variably with both his countertenor voice and baritone register.
19 ‘Klaus Nomi on NYC 10 O’Clock News, ca. 1981’, 2:16–2:20.
20 See Joe E. Jeffreys, ‘An Outré Entrée into the Para-Ridiculous Histrionics of
Drag Diva Ethyl Eichelberger: A True Story’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, New York
University, 1996), p. 94; and Tricia Romano, ‘Nightclubbing: New York City’s Pyramid
Club’, Red Bull Music Academy Daily, 4 March 2014, http://daily.redbullmusicacad-
emy.com/2014/03/nightclubbing-pyramid. This was a scene Sperber was familiar
with; apart from frequenting the Pyramid Club he, while planning for his break-
through during the 1970s, took lessons with Ira Siff, later founder and prima donna
of La Gran Scena (1981–2001), an all-male opera company that performed classics in
drag; he also participated in a performance of the American maverick playwright and
director Charles Ludlam’s Der Ring Gott Farblonjet in the spring of 1977; see David
Kaufman, The Theatrical Life and Times of Charles Ludlam (New York, 2002), p. 263.
21 In his 2015 monograph on Bowie, Shelton Waldrep refers to Nomi as ‘a foot-
note to queer performance’, his stage persona ‘mainly fashioned from the discards of
Bowie’s earlier mythologies’. Shelton Waldrep, Future Nostalgia: Performing David
Bowie (New York, 2015), p. 62. A book on the artist mooted at the time of Sperber’s
death by his friend and collaborator Joey Arias (see Stan Leventhal, ‘Klaus Nomi Dies’,
New York Native, 29 August 1983) did not materialize, so the most comprehensive, if
by no means exhaustive, account of Nomi’s career is a documentary by the American

Although Nomi’s appearance and repertoire played a central role in his

early reception—by all accounts exposing the era’s somewhat more conserva-
tive perceptions of gender and androgyny even among the East Village intel-
ligentsia—the most commented-upon element of his performances was his
countertenor voice, which he defined as a mezzo-soprano.22 Although his
technique was limited compared to that of fully trained singers, his singing
with a high soft palate (i.e., his controlled breathing and use of muscles that
created a resonance in his head and face) distinguished his vocal production
from the falsetto singing of David Bowie, the members of the Beach Boys and
the Bee Gees, Lou Christie (a comparison between his and Nomi’s respective
versions of ‘Lightnin’ Strikes’ serves as a case in point), and countless crooners
and background singers. Asked in a decidedly pre-MTV-style interview for
French television in 1982 about his vocal training, he spoke about working
on his own technique in order to be ‘as natural about it as possible’.23 This
likely sounded counterintuitive to his audiences, who perceived his voice as
otherworldly, disembodied, and even nauseating, possibly because they found
it to resemble some of the synthesizer string timbres prevalent at the time.24
filmmaker Andrew Horn titled The Nomi Song: The Klaus Nomi Odyssey (2004), on
which most biographical accounts in circulation on fan sites and the steadily growing
amount of scholarly literature are based. Arias, who did not take part in the documen-
tary, remains the holder of Nomi’s estate, which includes the latter’s costumes and
video footage; whether and to what extent the estate contains other personal items
that might allow insights into Nomi’s life and work could not be ascertained at the
time of writing.
22 ‘Klaus Nomi interview + Total Eclipse on German TV’, YouTube video,
posted by ‘jessicagraham898’, 4 October 2013, https://www.youtube.com/

watch?v=wZceLGCWwWg, at 1:55–2:20. While Nomi’s career was just at the cusp
of the international countertenor renaissance, he was likely to have been familiar with
recordings emanating from the United Kingdom, where there was a historical tra-
dition of male alto singing and whence came the pioneering Alfred Deller (1912–
79). Deller’s wide-ranging discography includes Dowland lute songs (including ‘If
My Complaints Could Passions Move’, sung by Nomi on Simple Man), and he also
directed and participated in recordings of Dido and Aeneas (1964) and King Arthur
(1979). In the United States, too, high male singing was not quite as unheard of as
Nomi’s uninitiated audiences evidently felt: the Brooklyn Academy of Music, for
instance, put on a production of Pier Francesco Cavalli’s opera Erismena that involved
no fewer than four countertenors in 1979, a fact that was noted rather prosaically in
reviews; see Alan Rich, ‘Lots of Laffs in Old Venice’, New York Magazine, 5 February
1979; and John Rockwell, ‘Cavalli’s “Erismena” Staged by the New Opera Theater in
Brooklyn’, New York Times, 20 January 1979.
23 ‘Klaus Nomi 1982 interview’, YouTube video, posted by ‘trylonperisphere’, 3 May
2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQ4__PGjFQI, at 4:17–4:45.

24 See Žarko Cvejić, ‘“Do You Nomi?” Klaus Nomi and the Politics of (Non)
Identification’, Women & Music 13 (2009), 69–71. The perceived uncanniness of

TIME RE-COVERED 175
Although makers such as Moog and ARP designed synthesizers to imitate

‘real’ instruments (and the sound of string sections in particular), a variety
of players embraced the synthetic quality of sounds imitating strings.25 One
among many contemporary examples that prominently feature this particular
sound is Gary Numan’s new-wave classic, ‘Cars’ (1979): apart from the simi-
larity in timbre (the vox humana preset on a Polymoog26), the ‘string’ writing
here, with its angular riffs in the low register contrasting with soaring des-
cants, is reminiscent of Nomi’s own showy vocal acrobatics, such as changes
from low to high registers and wide leaps in high register, particularly in the
songs written by his songwriter, Kristian Hoffman.
It is the performance of operatic music that most impressively shows off
Nomi’s technique: aspirated onsets, maneuvering around exposed changes
in register (such as during the course of the Cold Genie’s stuttering chro-
maticism), and his ability to sing long phrases. The careful phrasing and
wide vibrato in ‘Death’, sung in the original key of G minor and demand-
ing a g2 audibly—perhaps tragicomically—at the edge of his range, demon-
strates a seriousness of intent akin to operatic depth. Contrastingly, the string
accompaniment—presumably played from a piano score—is predominantly
synthesized, involving a sawtooth bass and an opaque, monochrome string
sound occasioning a loss of contrapuntal nuance and, as a result, a perhaps
heightened sense of inevitability.27 This is combined with a serviceable obbli-
gato electric harpsichord continuo realization (presumably played by Jack
Waldman, who is credited as the arranger), which adds to a general sense of
unintegrated tuning. The choice of instrumentation might not have been an
artistic one ( J. P. Bommel, at the time head of promotion and publicity for
RCA Records in Paris, notes that the company restricted the budget for the
Nomi’s voice was likely heightened by the lack of any visual gender reinforcement
(particularly Nomi’s choice of oversized costumes that obscured his body). This dis-
tinguishes his image from that of, for instance, the Bee Gees, who balanced their
high singing with clothing that accentuated their bodies and thus asserted their
masculinity; see Ulrich Linke, ‘Vokaler Gender Trouble: Wie queer sind sehr hohe
Männerstimmen?’, Der Countertenor: Die männliche Falsettstimme vom Mittelalter zur
Gegenwart, ed. Corinna Herr, Arnold Jacobshagen, and Kai Wessel (Mainz, 2012), pp.
240–1.
25 Theo Cateforis, Are We Not New Wave? Modern Pop at the Turn of the 1980s (Ann
Arbor, MI, 2011), p. 162.

26 Ibid., p. 173.
27 The conspicuous sawtooth sound exposed during the tasto solo lamento bass at the
beginning of the lament, following a descending tetrachord pattern thereafter repeated

eleven times, is particularly reminiscent of the sonic doom of dystopic futurism at the
time, such as Vangelis’s soundtrack for Blade Runner (1981).

Nomi recordings),28 yet its artistic effect is there all the same: an anachro-
nism played out in purely sonic terms, complementing the ambiguity of gen-
der inherent in Nomi’s performance. Together these elements render Purcell’s
lament uncanny, both poignant and kitsch. ‘Death’, perhaps most closely
among Nomi’s recordings, aligns with Judith Periano’s assessment of a ‘queer
synthesis of a cold “inhuman” synthesizer and the too-human sentimentality’
prevalent in synth pop.29
There is no record of Nomi performing ‘Death’ live, yet the particular
dynamic between authenticity and theatricalization and its attendant distur-
bance of temporalities evident in his studio recording was integral to Sperber’s
art figure altogether: asked in the aforementioned interview for French televi-
sion about his purportedly clownish and cold stage appearances, he replied:
‘I don’t think it’s clowns, I don’t think it’s cold, it’s very theatrical, it’s very
intense . . . it’s a stage make up, it’s like a doll, it’s like animation . . . I’m not
really hiding, I’m coming out’, the latter comment referring to a sense of
alienation due to his looks while growing up.30 Ever since the New Vaudeville
days, Nomi’s carefully crafted shows dramatized him as an alien temporarily
visiting the locale, using a darkened stage, sound effects, and dry ice or other
means of obscuring the performer to achieve their aesthetic. From the out-
set this was a matter not only of (outer) space but of a mythological past as
well.31 The clearest reference to his investment in this fabrication of temporal
displacement—the past and the future as pure spaces from which to judge the
28 ‘JP Bommel—RCA, France’, http://thenomisong.com/bommel.htm (accessed 1

February 2017).
29 Judith Peraino, ‘Synthesizing Difference: The Queer Circuits of Early Synthpop’,
Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship, ed. Olivia Bloechl, Melanie Lowe, and
Jeffery Kallberg (Cambridge, 2015), p. 288.
30 ‘Klaus Nomi 1982 interview’, YouTube video, 2:50–4:00. Although predominantly
maintaining artificial, androgynous stage personae and sometimes maintaining these

off-stage—a kind of blurring of art and reality not uncommon in the East Village
scene of the era—Nomi did on occasion perform out of costume (though in make-up),
with a more rock ’n’ roll feel to his renditions.
31 Influences in this regard can be located in his operatic ambitions, but also in the
theatricalization of rock associated with the 1970s. Given the linkage of Nomi to
Bowie, it is likely that the latter’s disruption of late-1960s rock as a participatory art
form, an ‘imagined social collective’ in relation to which audiences prized the perform-
ers’ perceived authenticity above all, served as an inspiration; see Philip Auslander,
Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music (Ann Arbor, MI,
2006), p. 17. Nomi’s collaboration with session musicians in the rock documen-
tary Urgh! A Music War (1981), one of the few records of his performing on a rock
stage, might be viewed as representing a clash between the different kinds of stage
aesthetics, noted as such by his disgruntled former musicians; see The Nomi Song,
1:03:30–1:04:14.

TIME RE-COVERED 177
present—can be found in the lyrics of ‘Keys of Life’, the opening song of his
debut album, Klaus Nomi: ‘From ancient worlds I come / To see what man has
done / What’s fact and what is fiction / To judge the contradiction.’32
Nomi’s renditions of opera arias are easily recognizable as part of his Old
World lore, though they can also be seen as having topical connotations.33 His
choice of ‘What Power Art Thou’ from King Arthur for his ‘Cold Song’, hardly a
vocal showpiece in the common sense or endowed with a particularly memora-
ble melody,34 may well have been, by all accounts, a reflection on his unfulfilled
personal life. This well-known scene from Purcell’s semi-opera is merely a play-
within-a-play, incidental to the patriotic retelling of the Arthurian legend that
is the main thread of John Dryden’s libretto. In it, Cupid enters a loveless realm
and seeks to rouse its spirit, who is initially loath to oblige: ‘What power art
thou who from below / Hast made me rise unwillingly and slow / From beds
of everlasting snow / . . . Let me, let me freeze again to death.’ Yet the spirit’s
reluctant stirring from the underworld and anticipated imminent return, exem-
plified by the shallow chromatic rise and fall of the vocal line, also telescoped
Nomi’s stage fictions and brought about a new one: a live performance of ‘Cold
Song’ in Munich at the ARD-Klassik-Rock-Nacht of 1982, the third such large-
scale Eurovision-televised event organized by the German producer and per-
former Eberhard Schöner.35 (Nomi was in Europe in 1981/2 for a promotional
tour.) Stripped of its synthesizer accompaniment and performed by the local
broadcasting orchestra, this is sometimes mistakenly credited as being Nomi’s
final performance, though he performed on at least one more occasion after his
32 In a statement shortly after Nomi’s death Joey Arias put it this way: ‘He wanted to
bring music, beauty, and art from the old world into the modern era and create some-
thing new to give back to the people.’ Leventhal, ‘Klaus Nomi Dies’.
33 The choice for his debut, Delilah’s seduction aria ‘Mon cœur s’ouvre à ta voix’ (My
heart opens to your voice)—which had been recorded by Callas—is likely to have been
conceived in reference his own voice. In the case of Dido’s lament there is certainly
anecdotal and textual evidence that he was preoccupied with his increased exhaustion,
exacerbated by his touring schedule (the second album was recorded while on tour in
Europe)—a preoccupation may have transmuted into death fantasy. The first cases in
New York of Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID), as it was termed, were diag-
nosed in early 1981; Nomi was diagnosed only after his return from his final European
tour in 1983.
34 As Cornelius Bauer suggests, the vocal line might be reduced to a harmonic
middle voice, a reading in this case aided by Nomi’s rendition in the alto register;
see Cornelius Bauer, ‘“What Power Art Thou?”: Zur Harmonik Henry Purcells am
Beispiel der Arie des Cold Genius aus King Arthur’, Zeitschrift der Gesellschaft für
Musiktheorie 3, no. 3 (2006), 332–3.
35 ‘Klaus Nomi: The Cold Song (live)’, YouTube video, posted by ‘mickmarks’, 20
December 2006, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hGpjsgquqw.

return to New York.36 In clear contrast to his pointed, restrictive tuxedo or cape
outfits obscuring his body, here he wore a crimson Elizabethan-style costume
including a sash and ruff, definitely looking the part. Along with the costume
exposing his diminutive figure, the arena setting marks this as his most con-
ventional stage appearance by far. Seemingly unique among his performances,
there is, despite his embodiment of the most theatrical of all theatrical tropes—
that of the Shakespearian tragic figure—no conceptual disjoint or commentary
forced by a non-human or camp aesthetic.37 Featuring a more conventional exit
to a ‘curtain tune’, the dance of the Cold People from the same scene in King
Arthur, the rock-arena setup adds to a sense of historicity, precisely because
the receptive codes associated with such mass events chimed with the popular
view—perhaps one held by Klaus Sperber as well—of opera as an opulent spec-
tacle primarily in the service of celebrating the human voice.
Nomi’s enactment of what would soon be his own oblivion into the past
played a major part in his posthumous reception, his survival as ghost vis-
à-vis the collective tragedy of ‘sex and death bound together as Isolde never
could have dreamed’, and its harbinger.38 Derrida writes of ghosts as neither
dead nor alive, being and not-being, a singularity and a repetition, and queer
theorists have come to argue that ghosts, both mourned and forgotten, haunt
queer consciousness during the time of the HIV/AIDS epidemic by contrib-
uting to its ‘disruption of intelligible distinctions between temporalities of life
and death’.39 This inexorable death topos associated with Nomi comes out
particularly strongly in the later singspiel version of Neuwirth’s tribute.
36 The album version of ‘Cold Song’, an arrangement by Man Parrish (then at the
outset of his career in electronic music), featured a bass-light and wooly synthesizer
string sound, diminishing the in tremolo of the ‘shivering’ accompaniment, and added
composed-out treble parts.
37 See Ken McLeod, ‘Space Oddities: Aliens, Futurism and Meaning in Popular
Music’, Popular Music 22, no. 3 (2003), 339.

38 As an uneasy counterpoint to ‘Cold Song’ evolving into a minor AIDS anthem in
Europe, Nomi’s fiction of ephemerality led, as Žarko Cvejić points out, to an aestheti-
cization of his death that blithely conflates his stage theatrics with his tragic demise;
see Philip Brett and Elizabeth Wood, ‘Gay and Lesbian Music’, Queering the Pitch:
The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology, ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C.
Thomas, 2nd edn (New York, 2006), p. 365; and Cvejić, ‘“Do You Nomi?”’, pp. 74–5.
For the quotation see Paul Attinello, ‘Closeness and Distance: Songs about AIDS’,
Queering the Popular Pitch, ed. Sheila Whiteley and Jennifer Rycenga (New York,
2006), p. 221.
39 See Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning
and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York, 1994), p. 10; see also Julian
Gill-Peterson ‘Haunting the Queer Spaces of Aids: Remembering ACT UP/New
York and an Ethics for an Endemic’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 19, no.
3 (2013), 279–80.

TIME RE-COVERED 179
(Dis)covering Nomi: Neuwirth’s Hommage
Neuwirth has by her own accounts been haunted by Nomi’s songs since her
childhood (or, more precisely, since the age of twelve—around the time his
first albums were released), and Hommage à Klaus Nomi (hereafter Hommage)
plays a central role in her output.40 In its various incarnations it is emblem-
atic of themes that the composer, an articulate writer and polemicist, occa-
sional political activist and self-confessed ‘Austrian depressionist’, considers
as fundamental to her work, describing these in 1993 as a questioning of the
conceived dichotomies of ‘resistance and reaction, continuity and discontinu-
ity, consciousness and forgetting, the old and the new’.41 The work is one of
three song cycles Neuwirth wrote in the 1990s that calls for a countertenor,
the other two being Five Daily Miniatures (1994) and La vie . . . ulcérant(e)
(1995, for two countertenors), both of which reference English Baroque
music as well. Like her choice of a countertenor as the protagonist ( Jeremy)
of Bählamms Fest (1999), her first large-scale piece of music theater (written
at the same time as the Hommage), and the countertenor roles in her David
Lynch adaptation Lost Highway (2003), these cycles are likely to be connected
to notions of androgyny and transformation derived from her enthrallment
with Nomi’s voice.42 Her thoughts on androgyny and sonority can be found
40 As a matter of reference, Neuwirth wrote two further hommages during the 1990s:
!?dialogues suffisants!? Hommage à Hitchcock—Porträt einer Komposition als junger Affe
(1991/2), and Fondamenta: Hommage à Joseph Brodsky (1998). Citing the German com-
poser Adriana Hölsky and the French spectralist Tristan Murail as influential teachers,
and Varèse, Nono, and Ligeti as key inspirations, her body of work resonates with a
precocious multitude of acknowledged influences from the other arts, literature, and
sciences, of which the ambiguity between playfulness and solemnity in the machine
sculptures of Jean Tinguely, mentioned in an interview in 2016, might serve as but one
example; see ‘Die Poesie von Schrott’, Tonart, Deutschlandradio, Deutschlandradio
Kultur, 6 September 2016, http://www.deutschlandradiokultur.de/neues-konzert-
von-olga-neuwirth-die-poesie-von-schrott.2177.de.html?dram:article_id=365084.
41 ‘Die Unerbittlichkeit des Kampfes zwischen dem Verbinden und Zerstückeln,
zwischen Fortsetzung und Stillstand, zwischen Leben und Tod—eines also konstanten
Infragestellens von Widerstand und Reaktion, Kontinuität und Bruch, Bewusstsein
und Vergessen, Altem und Neuem—sind Hauptbegriffsfelder, um meine Arbeit im
Allgemeinen zu beschreiben; “österreichischer Depressionist”.’ Unless otherwise indi-
cated, all translations are by the author. Olga Neuwirth, ‘Gedankensplitter zu Lonicera
Caprifolium (1993)’, Olga Neuwirth: ‘Zwischen den Stühlen’—A Twilight-Song auf der
Suche nach dem fernen Klang, ed. Stefan Drees (Salzburg, 2008), pp. 28 and 31.
42 By the 1990s casting countertenors in modern opera, usually to signify some kind
of transcendence or otherness, was hardly unheard of—the first major role written
for this voice was that of Oberon in Benjamin Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream
(1960). However, using the countertenor voice for large roles was still unusual. For a
representative list of operatic roles composed for the countertenor voice during the

in a 1994 text, conceived after her 1993–4 studies at IRCAM, in which she
writes about the interplay of electronic music with acoustic instruments in
terms of its potential to yield new, hybrid sonorities that she refers to as
androgynous.43 In an interview for the Austrian radio station Ö1 in the con-
text of the premiere of the orchestral concert version (2015) of the Hommage
in Vienna, she affirms this linkage between the countertenor timbre and her
own thinking on ‘hyper-sound’ and genre intertextuality:
This play already between classical and pop, and these strange timbres [emerg-
ing from the interplay] of electronics and acoustic instruments; yes, this I
wanted to develop further, because this is something I feel close to, and I have
found it all there—and the countertenor voice, of course. Naturally, it is a dif-
ferent timbre altogether, being also a trained one . . . resulting in a hyper-voice
that cannot be categorized, so to say, and this has always interested me, because
my instrumentations are the same, intended to obscure precisely which instru-
ment is playing; [there is] a new timbre arising from the combination, and that
is something I see in the countertenor voice itself.44
‘Remember’—the arrangement of ‘Death’—was the first song Neuwirth

worked on when writing the 1998 Hommage, as it was the first song for which
second half of the twentieth century see Linke, ‘Vokaler Gender Trouble’, p. 234; see
also Stefan Drees, ‘Musikalische Repräsentation des “Anderen”: Der Countertenor als
Klangchiffre für Androgynie und Artifizialität bei Olga Neuwirth’, Der Countertenor:
Die männliche Falsettstimme vom Mittelalter zur Gegenwart, ed. Corinna Herr, Arnold
Jacobshagen, and Kai Wessel (Mainz, 2012), pp. 251–68.
43 ‘Ein . . . Aspekt meiner kompositorischen Arbeit ist die in all meinen letzten
Stücken verwendete Elektronik als Mittel der Erweiterung und zur Erzeugung von
“androgynen” Klängen. [Es geht mir] um eine Fusion, einen Hyperklang oder auch
ein Hyperinstrument zu erzeugen. Das Verschmelzen der beiden widersprüchlichen
Klangquellen ist doch das Spannende!’ (One aspect of my compositional work is, as in
all my recent pieces, the use of electronics as a means of augmentation and production
of ‘androgynous’ sounds. I am seeking a fusion to generate a hyper-sound or perhaps
a hyper-instrument. The blending of the two divergent sound sources, that is what
excites me!); Neuwirth, ‘Gedankensplitter zu Lonicera Caprifolium’, pp. 30–1.
44 ‘Dieses Spiel schon zwischen Klassik und Pop, und diese seltsamen Farben
zwischen Elektronik und Live-Instrumenten; ja, da wollte ich ansetzen, denn das ist
mir nahe, und das habe ich dort alles gefunden—und den Countertenor natürlich.
Gut, das ist ja eine ganz eigene Farbe, ist ja eine trainierte auch . . . und dadurch ent-
steht eine Hyper-Stimme, die man sozusagen nicht einordnen kann, und das hat mich
immer interessiert weil meine Instrumentation ist auch so, dass man oft nicht wis-
sen soll, welches Instrument spielt jetzt eigentlich; [es gibt] eine neue Farbe in der
Kombination und das ist der Countertenor schon selbst.’ ‘Olga Neuwirth meets Klaus
Nomi’, Morgenjournal, Austrian Broadcasting Corporation (ORF), Ö1, 10 November
2015, http://oe1.orf.at/artikel/423139. Transcribed by the author.

TIME RE-COVERED 181
she received copyright permission.45 The arrangement reveals the composer’s

simple yet effective strategies for harnessing the synthesis of ‘blending diver-
gent sound sources’ employed throughout the cycle,46 while also offering a
glimpse of the temporal synthesis between Nomi’s recordings fixed in time
and her own memories of the early 1980s when she first encountered them.
She faithfully reproduces Purcell’s original vocal line in the countertenor part,
transposed down a third into a less strenuous E minor, with no attempt to
imitate the small idiosyncrasies in Nomi’s singing, and, as on Nomi’s record-
ing, with all of Purcell’s original accompaniment retained. Both Nomi’s and
Neuwirth’s covers are, as such, primarily a matter of instrumentation, yet
whereas Purcell receives a modern gloss through the use of electric and elec-
tronic instruments on Nomi’s recording (which Neuwirth distinctly considers
a version [Fassung] rather than an interpretation47), Neuwirth’s setting not
only harbors the synthetic camouflage of that recording but, in addition, con-
flates it with another of her own childhood memories. This signified by the
combination of electric guitar, trumpet, and saxophone (with the bass clari-
net here favored, as in her other song cycles for countertenor[s]), which, in
her words, reminds her of the jazz clubs where her father used to play.48 Her
efforts to create ‘hyper-sounds’ within the ensemble can be observed in the
occasional doubling of the vocal line with the synthesizer (harpsichord) as
well as, more pointedly, the pairing of acoustic with electric and electronic
45 The remaining three songs are no. 1 ‘So Simple’ (‘Simple Man’ by Kristian
Hoffman), no. 3 ‘Can’t Help It’ (‘Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß . . . / Falling in Love Again’
by Friedrich Holländer), and no. 4 ‘The Witch’ (‘Ding Dong’ by Harold Arlen).
46 The transparency of the original 1998 version for small ensemble discussed here
best demonstrates this, although it is also true of her later orchestrations.

47 Olga Neuwirth, Bählamms Fest: Ein venezianisches Arbeitsjournal, 1997–1999
(Graz, 2003), p. 67.

48 Stefan Niederwieser, interview with Olga Neuwirth, ‘Heimat bist du großer’,
Wiener Zeitung, 29 November 2016. Neuwirth’s allusion to a band, however, goes

further than this: apart from the use of amplification and electronic sound produc-
tion, responsibility for triggering samples (produced by the composer herself with the
Austrian baritone Bartolo Musil) lies with several of the ‘live’ musicians. In her notes
on the rehearsal process committed to her diary, the composer—who was a member
of a punk band in her youth—divulges that this performance dramaturgy was delib-
erately put in place in order for the musicians to sound like a band, homogenous with
the singer, the sampler, and the synthesizer; ‘otherwise’, by her estimation, ‘these Nomi
songs simply do not sound tangy, light-hearted, and vigorous’. ‘Sonst klingen diese
Nomi-Songs einfach nicht spritzig, leicht und vital.’ Neuwirth, Bählamms Fest, p. 171.
Given her reference to ‘hearing all these different kinds of American music, from blues
to Steve Reich and Klaus Nomi’ while accompanying her father to gigs in New York
City jazz clubs as a child, the aesthetics of Reich’s band as well as his replacement of
tapes with sampling keyboards in City Life (1995)—to this date his only such use—
may have been influences in this regard. ‘Interview: Olga Neuwirth’.

Example 8.1. Olga Neuwirth, Hommage à Klaus Nomi (1998), ‘Remember’, mm.
23-31, transcription.

$ % & &

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(#)* !

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TIME RE-COVERED 183
instruments throughout the AAB1B2 aria. In the A part the pairing lies in the
scoring of the original first violin part for the detuned electric guitar shad-
owed by the bass clarinet an octave below. This transposition alone creates
congestion in the bass register, added to which the second violin part—due
to the transposition into E minor putting the line outside the range of an
ordinary violin—is given to synthesizer strings.49 The resulting thickness of
texture, in combination with tuning vagaries and synthetic sonority, heightens
the sense of deterioration and kitsch in Nomi’s recording of the song: patently
pastiche, the earlier recording’s sense of artificiality is transferred here onto
predominantly ‘live’ instruments through a fairly standard practice of queer-
ing register and tuning (example 8.1).50
One of two additions to the Nomi rendition is the tolling of bells
throughout, markers of passing time if not an outright death knell, and
reminiscent of the gongs that can be heard as part of the sound-design tap-
estry underlying Nomi’s Dowland rehash, ‘From Beyond’ (1981). The sec-
ond addition is an independent trumpet part that constitutes one of the
slight texture changes in the second half;51 the second violin part (previ-
ously played by the trumpet player on synthesizer 2) is now transferred to
the bowed guitar and played as double-stops in quarter-tone intervals, with
some added microtonality and chromaticism imitating the ground bass
in the bass clarinet. The trumpet, with its echoes, held notes, and bright
whole-tone riffs (see example 8.2, m. 49, a little figure introduced as a kind
of slow mordent earlier in the bass clarinet), is the odd instrument out, cov-
ering the countertenor part in loose imitation by, for instance, anticipating
its soaring leap upward (see example 8.2, trumpet and countertenor, mm.
48–50).52 Neuwirth’s writing for trumpet is privileged by the fact that the
49 Making up the remaining accompaniment, a violoncello renders Purcell’s original

viola line and the continuo part is discreetly (if somewhat sparsely) realized through-
out, though neither literally sticking to Purcell’s figured bass nor replicating the real-
ization on the Nomi recording.
50 As Neuwirth’s full score does not facilitate easy reading because of the guitar scordatura
(detuned strings) and B♭ wind instruments, the score is here transcribed with all instru-
ments notated as they sound. For the sake of space-efficiency, this includes the double bass,
also a transposing instrument and usually notated an octave higher than it sounds.
51 Although the music of the B part is essentially repeated, the vocal line falls out
of phase with the ground bass for several bars upon repetition, a move that might be
interpreted as signifying Dido’s loss of consciousness and submission to her fate; see
Judith A. Peraino, ‘I Am an Opera: Identifying with Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas’,
En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera, ed. Corrine E. Blackmer and Patricia
Juliana Smith (New York, 1995), p. 120.
52 As a matter of practicality, the performance indication for how to play the semi-
breves on the (plucked) guitar (‘fast movement, quasi tremolo between two strings’) is
here rendered in standard notation (tremolo).

Example 8.2. Olga Neuwirth, Hommage à Klaus Nomi (1998), ‘Remember’, mm. 42-54, transcribed reduction without synthesizer 1 and
percussion.

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"

"


" # " ! " # "

TIME RE-COVERED 185
instrument was her own, which she had been forced to give up, along with
her ambitions to become a ‘female Miles Davis’, after injuring her jaw in an
accident in 1983.53 That early loss assumes a central role in her reflections
on her career: ‘By losing my instrument, the trumpet, I have lost the [tem-
poral] present, and composing became an augmented yearning for precisely
that vanished present.’54 As such, the mournful echoes of the vocal line in
particular might be seen as collapsing the already charged semiotic context
of Dido’s plea, reconstituted through Nomi, with childhood memories of
her own music-making, something perhaps alluded to in the renaming of
the song.55
The plausibly autobiographical touch might be seen as lending a personal
dimension to the composer’s initial motivation for her arrangements, namely
her openly expressed admiration for Nomi and, by her aforementioned claim,
her aim to recover a lost past. Yet as a whole the four songs that make up the
1998 version also factor into the present, providing an expression of alien-
ation from the new-music scene in which the composer sought to establish
herself, an antagonism well documented in her accounts of the circumstances
surrounding the premiere. For Neuwirth’s work seemed to strike at the very
heart of the festival’s values, challenging the dominant modernist status quo,
and critical responses were decidedly ambivalent.
Perhaps in a case of introjection, the program of the Salzburg perfor-
mance—curated by the composer and reminiscent of Nomi’s eclecticism
both in concert and on record—broke up the cycle and interjected, among
other pieces, works by Helmut Lachenmann and Tristan Murail as well as
John Blow’s Ode to the Death of Henry Purcell and her other featured items
such as La vie . . . ulcérant(e), which paraphrases Blow’s ode.56 Added to this
mixed programming, the hybridity of Neuwirth’s Nomi songs (particularly
53 ‘Weiblicher Miles Davis’; Olga Neuwirth, ‘Ich möchte zwischen Musik und
Literatur eine Brücke schlagen: Daniela Gross im Gespräch mit Olga Neuwirth’,
Olga Neuwirth: ‘Zwischen den Stühlen’—A Twilight-Song auf der Suche nach dem fernen
Klang, ed. Stefan Drees (Salzburg, 2008), p. 269.
54 ‘Dadurch, dass ich mein Instrument, die Trompete, verloren habe, habe ich die
Gegenwart verloren und das Komponieren wurde zu einer gesteigerten Sehnsucht

nach eben dieser verlorenen Gegenwart.’ Olga Neuwirth, ‘Vorgedanken’, Olga
Neuwirth: ‘Zwischen den Stühlen’—A Twilight-Song auf der Suche nach dem fernen
Klang, ed. Stefan Drees (Salzburg, 2008), p. 12.
55 Neuwirth had exhibited a preoccupation with her own childhood already in her
sound installation soundcases of memory (1995), and according to her diaries it played
on her mind while writing the central nursery scene of Bählamms Fest, less than a
month before the first rehearsal for the Hommage.
56 For the full program see ‘Olga Neuwirth 2’, http://www.salzburgerfestspiele.
at/archive_detail/programid/1198 (accessed 30 March 2017). Incidentally, this was

hot on the heels of Peter Breuer’s dance revue Nomi with musical arrangements by

the acutely felt infiltration of popular music, despite the omission of a rhythm
section in her arrangements of ‘Simple Man’, ‘Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuß . . .
/ Falling in Love Again’, and ‘Ding Dong’) served to collapse the high–low
dichotomy and its attendant concepts of authoriality and musical autonomy
that are arguably central to the Salzburg Festival.57 In reflecting on the criti-
cal responce to this audacity, the composer spoke of ‘falling flat between two
chairs’, her music being conceived as both conservative and trivial by oppos-
ing camps.58 This complaint counts among the most consistently expressed
facets of her situational consciousness, frequently articulated, particularly dur-
ing the 1990s, along with her status as a female composer.
Having by her own account already developed a sense of alienation from
gender norms during her childhood, it is perhaps unsurprising that Neuwirth’s
conceptualization for Hommage à Klaus Nomi: A Songplay in Nine Fits almost
ten years later seeks to portray Nomi as a ‘child-like dreamer of a better world,
in which sexuality or rather gender have become suspended’.59 The Salzburg
the German cabaret-composer Franz-Josef Grümmer, premiered at the Salzburg

Metropolis theater in the previous fall.
57 See Bernhard Günther, ‘Olga Neuwirth: Hommage à Klaus Nomi’, Olga Neuwirth:
‘Zwischen den Stühlen’—A Twilight-Song auf der Suche nach dem fernen Klang, ed. Stefan
Drees (Salzburg, 2008), p. 171.
58 Following the two Salzburg feature concerts of which the Hommage was part she
polemically paraphrased typical criticisms of her work by the press commentariat as

‘nullity of content, no “noble”, “well-maintained”, “clear”, “sublime” form, rather a
depravity of form, neglect of craftsmanship and structures, simply an unintentional
work of art, no: not even a work or an art, just a something . . . I am falling flat between
two chairs, it would seem.’ (‘Nichtigkeit des Inhalts, keine “edle”, “gepflegte”, “klare”,
“hehre” Form, ja sogar eher Formverwilderung, Verwahrlosung des Handwerks und
der Strukturen, einfach ein absichtsloses Kunstwerk, nein: nicht einmal Kunst und
Werk, sondern das reine Irgendwas . . . Ich falle wohl zwischen zwei Stühlen durch’,
Neuwirth, Bählamms Fest, p. 192). Later performances of the Hommage have received a
warmer, though on occasion somewhat blasé, reception; see, for instance, Mark Swed,
‘Green Umbrella Titles the Concert “Outrageous”, but Is It?’, Los Angeles Times, 14
January 2015.
59 Speaking of growing up in rural Styria in a household frequented by intellectuals
and artists, the composer has commented on her own ‘boyish’ interests of learning the
trumpet and playing football: ‘People did not know what to make of it, they prob-
ably thought: With these parents it had to come to this.’ (‘Die Leute haben schon
komisch geschaut, aber die haben wahrscheinlich gedacht: Mit den Eltern musste
das ja so kommen.’) ‘Olga Neuwirth: Leben als Alien’, Emma, 1 September 2002. For
the quotation (original: ‘Kindlicher Träumer von einer besseren Welt, in dem sich
die Sexualität oder bzw. die Geschlechtlichkeit aufgelöst hat’), see Olga Neuwirth,
‘Gedanken-Skizzen zum Projekt Hommage à Klaus Nomi’, Olga Neuwirth: ‘Zwischen
den Stühlen’—A Twilight-Song auf der Suche nach dem fernen Klang, ed. Stefan Drees
(Salzburg, 2008), p. 349. The songplay was premiered at the Berliner Festspiele

TIME RE-COVERED 187
premiere of the 1998 Hommage had already featured video projections (by the
German media artist and scenographer Corinne Schweitzer), and the new
numbers—including an excerpt from the recitative ‘What Ho! Thou Genius
of This Isle’, which precedes the Cold Genie’s air in King Arthur (Nomi never
recorded this recitative)—have a dramatic lilt even without staging.60
In line with the performative and structural experimentalism and inter-
textuality that constitute her music-dramatic aesthetics (summarized in 1994
as ‘a constantly changing compendium of different conditions and temporal
units that come together in a new, other “totality”’), her dramaturgical con-
cept for her songplay, which she dubbed an ‘ironic Requiem for a visionary’,
is evocative of her musical bricolage: the scenario is made up by a contrast-
ing mix of deathly rumination by an actor, Nomi’s ‘double’, reciting texts by
the German dramatist Thomas Jonigk, and the singer’s renditions of the nine
songs (hence the singspiel designation).61 The set represents a ‘nowhere-
land’ of projected cityscapes offset by the imagined solitary rural landscapes
of Sperber’s childhood, with superimpositions of Nomi footage in and out
of character. The continual doubling of temporality alluded to in Neuwirth’s
depictions (childhood/adulthood, life/death) is accentuated by the inser-
tion of eight purely instrumental Baroque lamenti between the nine songs,
each heralded by further tolling of tubular bells, and electronic sound design
accompanying the actor’s recitations. Neuwirth imposes these temporal dis-
ruptions onto Sperber’s aesthetics, placing the death topos anterior to the
creation of his art figure. As if haunted by his own ghost, ‘Nomi invents his
highly artificial identity as a ritual for overcoming fear, because perhaps he
Maerz Musik (2008), and thereafter realized in revised versions at Grand Théâtre de
Luxembourg (2009), and Opera Garnier, Paris (2011).
60 The latter is a tongue-in-cheek character piece in which both the decidedly dis-
embodied countertenor and a grizzly Hammond organ continuo are prerecorded,

accompanied by sampled space-age whirring and live harmonic glissandos on the bass
clarinet reminiscent of the electronic incidental music accompanying Nomi’s stage
theatrics.
61 ‘Ein ständig changierendes Kompendium verschiedener Zustände und
Zeiteinheiten, das sich zu einer neuen, anderen “Ganzheit” zusammenfügt.’ Olga

Neuwirth, ‘Überlegungsfragmente zu einem Musiktheater’, Olga Neuwirth: ‘Zwischen
den Stühlen’—A Twilight-Song auf der Suche nach dem fernen Klang, ed. Stefan Drees
(Salzburg, 2008), p. 33; ‘Ein mit Zweifeln gespicktes, leichtes, ironisches Requiem
auf einen Visionär!’ Neuwirth, ‘Gedanken-Skizzen zum Projekt Hommage à Klaus
Nomi’, p. 349. In the premiere production in Berlin the actor and the singer wore
stylized versions of Nomi’s ‘Weimar’ tuxedo (actor) and Elizabethan costume worn
during the ARD-Klassik-Rock-Nacht (singer); these costumes, however, are not speci-
fied in Neuwirth’s sketch. Production stills have been published by the director, Ulrike
Ottinger, on her homepage. ‘Hommage à Klaus Nomi’, http://www.ulrikeottinger.com/
index.php/813.html (accessed 24 July 2017).

had always felt Damocles’s sword of (early) extinction hanging above him’.62
Neuwirth may likely be sensitive to the singer’s spectrality in Derrida’s sense
as the result of a second formative event during her childhood (besides ‘losing’
the trumpet)—a near-death experience, a reflection upon which in her diary
in 1998 prompted her to suspend distinctions between the above-mentioned
dichotomies altogether: ‘I sought out a child-like world of wonders, “abstract”
music, attempts at composition, that was supposed to supplant my shattered
childhood . . . Now I am dead inside. I slowly disintegrate, I turn rotten . . . I
am neither child nor adult.’63 The most remarkable projection, however, is that
of a social consciousness growing out of alienation that is more representative
of Neuwirth herself than, based on what slim textual documentation of his
life is available, of Nomi. She writes:
He has left behind the drummed-in behavioral and role patterns that are
being replayed over and over in different social strata, in that he has landed
as an alien in a world unfamiliar and seemingly without a sense of meaning
to him, and has invented his logic within its apparent illogicality. In this way
he was alone in proving and demonstrating the fallacies of his time, which are
prevalent everywhere. His outsider sentiment and his outsider position have
played an important role in the independence of his thinking. Nomi is no lon-
ger a foreign body, but an individual world in himself. From my perspective,
this is his relevance to us today.64
62 ‘Nomi erfindet sich seine hochartifizielle Identität als ein Ritual der
Angstbezähmung, den vielleicht fühlte er immer schon das über ihm schwebende
Damoklesschwert der (frühen) Auflösung.’ Neuwirth, ‘Gedanken-Skizzen zum
Projekt Hommage à Klaus Nomi ’, p. 352.
63 ‘Ich suchte mir eine Art kindlicher Scheinwelt, diese “abstrakte” Musik, die
Kompositionsversuche, die mir die zerbrochene Kindheit ersetzen sollte . . . Jetzt bin
ich innerlich tot. Ich löse mich langsam auf, ich werde faulig . . . Ich bin weder Kind
noch Erwachsener.’ Neuwirth, Bählamms Fest, p. 208. Her emphasis on the childlike
in Nomi—already evident in the infantile pre-recorded backing vocals to ‘Ding Dong’
ten years earlier—is more or less unique among responses to the artist, which tend to
emphasize camp aspects (i.e., experience over innocence).
64 ‘Er hat die eingetrichterten Verhaltensmuster und Rollenmuster, die in den ver-
schiedenen Schichten der Gesellschaft immer und immer abgespult werden, hinter
sich gelassen, indem er als Alien in einer ihm fremden Welt ohne scheinbaren
Sinnzusammenhang gelandet ist und seine Logik in der scheinbaren Unlogik für sich
(er)findet. Dadurch war er allein durch sein (Anders-)Sein in Stande Trugschlüsse
seiner Zeit, die all überall vorherrschen, nachzuweisen und aufzuzeigen. Sein
Außenseitergefühl uns seine Außenseiterposition haben für die Unabhängigkeit
seines Denkens eine große Rolle gespielt. Nomi ist kein Fremdkörper mehr, sondern
eine individuelle Welt für sich. Das ist aus meiner Sicht seine Relevanz für uns heute.’
Neuwirth, ‘Gedanken-Skizzen zum Projekt Hommage à Klaus Nomi ’, pp. 352–3.

TIME RE-COVERED 189
Remnants of Songs
Bringing to mind Judith Halberstam’s concept of queerness, decoupled from

sexuality and gender, as ‘an outcome of strange temporalities, imaginative life
schedules, and eccentric economic practices [resulting in] forms of represen-
tation dedicated to capturing these willfully eccentric modes of being’, both
Nomi’s and Neuwirth’s covering practices are overtly marked by non-linearity,
something the composer describes as ‘rousing the personal with that which
has passed and thereby creating a whole—whatever that may be’.65 Though
she made this statement in relation to her own work, the description chimes
with the singer’s aesthetics as well. Neuwirth’s reasoning for remaining with
this particular ghost from the past—extending to the idiosyncratic request of
his recording of ‘Ding Dong’ for her own funeral—can be seen as extending
to artistic kinship, or rather a matter of identification.66
Nomi’s eclectic borrowings from beyond the ‘great divide’ within a new-
wave aesthetic involving multitrack, mixing, and a predilection for hybrid
instruments such as the synthesizer (half traditional keyboard, half electronic
sound production) might be viewed as analogous to historical reference, bri-
colage, and extended instrumentation (including the sampler) in much of
Neuwirth’s music. Even if he is unlikely to have been her sole inspiration in
this regard, the ‘seeming illogicality’ of his recorded concoctions and what she
refers to as the ‘(children’s) entertainment-apparatus made of puzzles, refer-
ences, irony, and nonsense’ of his shows is likely to have had some impact on
her tendency to cover music from the past and put it together in new com-
binations—the most extreme case of which might be her Zornian collage No
More (2009).67
In the 1998 Hommage (and also its later versions) the sense of uncanniness
that Nomi brought to his cover versions—which, without intent to subvert
or politicize, speak in two historical languages—itself figures as an aesthetic
tenet. Though it is but a part of the time- and genre-bending apparatus, in
her travel into the new world by way of an even older one Neuwirth reifies
the antagonism played out between musical content and surface on Nomi’s
recordings, and does so without taking sides: although Purcell had come to
65 Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural

Lives (New York, 2005), p. 1. ‘Das Persönliche mit dem Vergangenen in einer Fülle
des Ganzen—was auch immer das sein mag—wachzurufen, war mein Wunsch.’ Olga
Neuwirth, ‘Vorgedanken’, Olga Neuwirth: ‘Zwischen den Stühlen’—A Twilight-Song auf
der Suche nach dem fernen Klang, ed. Stefan Drees (Salzburg, 2008), p. 12.
66 Olga Neuwirth, ‘Elf Fragen an Olga Neuwirth’, Olga Neuwirth: ‘Zwischen den
Stühlen’—A Twilight-Song auf der Suche nach dem fernen Klang, ed. Stefan Drees
(Salzburg, 2008), p. 22.
67 ‘(Kinder)Unterhaltungsapparat aus Rätseln, Verweisen, Ironien und Nonsense’,
Neuwirth, ‘Gedanken-Skizzen zum Projekt Hommage à Klaus Nomi ’, pp. 352-3.

penetrate wider Central European musical sensibilities during the rise of the
early-music movement, it stands to reason that Neuwirth ‘discovered’ the
English composer through Nomi’s recordings, resulting in a kind of synchro-
nous musical double-sedimentation (she on occasion singles out Dowland
and Purcell as among her favorite composers).68 Rather than drawing a cari-
cature or stressing disintegration, her arrangements’ undeniable irony rather
lies in their challenge to the modernist work concept—while at the same
time in no way surrendering the same. The work in all senses belongs to the
composer.
As such, her takeover signifies double time, understood as a dialogic pro-
cess. It addresses and to a degree reconciles two temporalities, an adulthood
marked by dissatisfaction with institutionalized superstructures concerning
not least Neuwirth’s role as a woman composer, and a ludic, gender-neutral
childhood marked by a correspondingly heterogeneous exposure to music.
Given the composer’s perception of cultural collusion within her professional
sphere, this would seem to chime with the marginalization of women in soci-
ety recognized in Kristeva and Bhabha’s theories, a difference arising from
the ‘migration’ from childhood to adulthood and the formation of identity,
including gender identity, within that process.69 In this respect, the Hommage
is emblematic for several of Neuwirth’s later works that cover an eclectic and
seemingly irrational mix of ‘high’ and ‘low’ music appearing to have some
personal resonance for her, including (but by no means limited to) . . . mira-
mondo multiplo . . . (2006/7) for trumpet and orchestra or ensemble, Remnants
of Songs . . . An Amphigory (2009) for viola and orchestra, and her orchestral
work Masaot/Clocks without Hands (2015), which she describes as a ‘shaped
68 Olga Neuwirth, ‘“Komponieren ist altmodisch”: Carsten Fastner im Gespräch mit

Olga Neuwirth’, Olga Neuwirth: ‘Zwischen den Stühlen’—A Twilight-Song auf der Suche
nach dem fernen Klang, ed. Stefan Drees (Salzburg, 2008), p. 233.
69 The complexities around music and identity as a liberatory narrative encountered
in the Hommage are not contained therein: these, for instance, flash up in the nursery
scene of Bählamms Fest, a scene written soon after finishing the song arrangements
in 1998. Here themes such as temporality, gender, and dis/embodiment momentarily
seem to fold into each other. Set in a household ruled by brutal patriarchy, the scene
features the brief apparition of the patriarch’s wife as a little girl, sung by a boy soprano
quite literally coming out of the closet (scene 5, ‘Ich bin so lang im Schrank gewesen’)
to music that is reminiscent not only of the sound world of the Purcell numbers in
the Hommage (including a synthesizer/harpsichord) but, like the Purcell parody in the
fifth song of Five Daily Miniatures, also features the English composer’s characteristic
sprightly dotted rhythms. The choice of Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando—her 1928 novel
revolving around an immortal poet who changes sex from male to female—as the
basis of Neuwirth’s latest opera, premiered at the Vienna State Opera in 2019, likely
reflects a continued interest in the role of gender vis-à-vis society and artistic creation.

TIME RE-COVERED 191
stream of memories, . . . music that is both native and foreign’.70 Her con-
ception for her hauntological songplay-Requiem, then, more fully covers the
past by projecting this doubling of temporality back in time onto its subject,
a move to a degree facilitated by Nomi’s stage personae and real-life sense of
alienation as eternalized in Horn’s 2004 film by those who survived him.
The reception of her work, too, factors into this temporality.
Notwithstanding the fact that Neuwirth’s audiences represent a sphere even
more rarified than do Nomi’s loyal fans, the Hommage has by its very nature
become one of the composer’s most popular pieces, and Sheldon Schiffer’s
reference to the cover song as a ‘history that erases the past’ (i.e., an over-
writing of cultural memory) might well be seen at work vis-à-vis Neuwirth’s
elevation of Nomi to a ‘high’-art figure.71 Yet it is the opposite notion that
is perhaps the more thought-provoking, namely the convergence of tempo-
rality and historicity: how music of the past can figure as a container that
may be backfilled with biographical experiences, a synchronicity unsettling
more linear conceptions of covering as a matter of rendition, appropriation,
or subversion.
70 Olga Neuwirth, ‘Vom Schaukeln der Dinge im Strom der Zeit’, http://www.
ricordi.com/en-US/News/2015/06/Neuwirth-Masaot.aspx (accessed 10 August
2017).
71 See Schiffer, ‘The Cover Song as Historiography’, p. 93.

Part IV
Nostalgias and the

Temporalities of Belonging

9
The Past Is Home: Eduardo Martínez

Torner in Postwar London; An Exile’s
Nostalgia for Spanish Musicology
Susana Asensio Llamas
When the musicologist Eduardo Martínez Torner (1888–1955) fled his

native Spain about two months before the end of the Civil War (1936–9),
he could not foresee that he would spend the rest of his life in exile. After
he crossed the northern border into France, he faced the repressive mea-
sures applied to Spanish refugees, who were interned in so-called ‘campos
de internamiento’. Torner spent time in the Saint-Cyprien camp, which was
established on 8 February 1939 in southern France for the 453,000 Spanish
Republicans who escaped during the so-called Retirada. He was also
interned in the nearby Argelès-sur-Mer camp, which had an infrastructure
that allowed some refugees to exit officially as workers. A British volun-
teer association, the National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief (Comité
Británico de Ayuda a España), eventually rescued Torner from the camp in
Argelès-sur-Mer.1 The severe conditions in the camps, however, took a toll
on Torner’s health and he would suffer the consequences of his internment
until his very last days.2
Exile generates a repository of a dissatisfied past and a truncated promise
of life, and this is especially true of Torner’s experience. He had been one of
the most promising figures in Spanish culture and music before the war, a
status that was compromised in exile. If many exiled artists and intellectu-
als create a ‘memory of exile’, Torner belonged to those who developed an
‘exile of memory’, detaching himself from distinct parts of his pre-exile years
and selectively de-ideologizing some of his later writings in order to protect
his family and friends, in spite of his well-known support of the Spanish
1 See Pablo de Azcárate, ‘Salazar Chapela, Cernuda Martínez Torner y el Instituto

Español de Londres’, Ínsula 298 (1971), 10.
2 Jovita Martínez in discussion with the author, 14 April 2014. On the conditions in
these camps, see Geneviève Dreyfus-Armand, L’exil des républicains espagnols en France:
De la Guerre civile à la mort de Franco (Paris, 1999), pp. 62–6.

196 SUSANA ASENSIO LLAMAS
Republic.3 The first sign of this can be found in his short contribution to the
small handmade newspaper Profesionales de la enseñanza: Hoja de información
diaria, which circulated in Saint-Cyprien in 1939. While other Spanish art-
ists in exile created art works that recycled materials and reflected their hor-
rific experience in the refugee camps,4 Torner chose to contribute a ‘neutral’
lecture transcript on rhythm in different literary genres, titled ‘El ritmo en los
estilos literarios’ (figure 9.1).
The first page of the same issue gives the following hopeful note: ‘The first
speaker, a pioneer of this kind of work, our esteemed Eduardo M. TORNER,
who will soon leave us to occupy a chair of Spanish music at the University of
Cambridge, his efforts of so many years get deservedly rewarded.’5 The note
indicates a new beginning.
According to his son, in 1939 Torner managed to get a ticket to leave
France for the United Kingdom at the outbreak of World War II.6 On 3
September he embarked on a boat to England, but life was by no means easy
there. Torner almost died in the Blitz, but was rescued by his friend Pablo de
Azcárate, a diplomat who during the Civil War had served as ambassador of
the Republican government to London and thereafter headed the Spanish
Refugee Evacuation Service in France, also known as Servicio de Evacuación
de Refugiados Españoles.7 His duties included visiting refugee camps and
3 See Antolín Sánchez Cuervo, ‘Memoria del exilio y exilio de la memoria’, Arbor
185, no. 735 (2009), 5. For further details on Spanish refugees in France, see Elena
Díaz Silva, Aribert Reimann, and Randal Sheppard, eds, Horizontes del exilio: Nuevas
aproximaciones a la experiencia de los exilios entre Europa y América Latina durante el siglo
XX (Madrid, 2018).
4 See Miguel Cabañas Bravo, ‘Los artistas españoles del exilio en Francia’, Debats
126, no. 1 (2015), 26–41. See also Miguel Cabañas Bravo et al., Analogías en el arte, la
literatura y el pensamiento del exilio español de 1939 (Madrid, 2010).
5 ‘El primer conferenciante, el mejor iniciador de esta labor, nuestro estimado
Eduardo M. TORNER, que nos dejará próximamente para ocupar una cátedra
de Música española en la Universidad de Cambridge, sus esfuerzos de tantos años
encuentran ahora el premio merecido.’ All translations, unless otherwise indicated, are
by the author.
6 See the interviews with Torner’s son, Eduardo Martínez, by Javier Neira, ‘Eduardo,
desde Madrid, y Jovita, que vive en Londres, evocan su gran amor a Asturias y la
dureza del exilio: Torner en el recuerdo de sus dos hijos’, La nueva España, 7 April
1988; and Modesto González Cobas, ‘El discreto exilio del musicólogo Eduardo
Martínez Torner’, Sesenta años después: El exilio literario asturiano de 1939; actas del
Congreso Internacional celebrado en la Universidad Oviedo 20, 21 y 22 de octubre de 1999,
ed. Antonio Fernández Insuela (Oviedo, 2000), pp. 159–71.
7 When Azcárate went looking for Torner after the bombings, he found him sitting
against the only wall of the house still standing, waiting to die as he ‘did not even care
to move’. Azcárate, ‘Salazar Chapela’, 10–11. Azcárate’s memoirs do not contain any
reference to Torner. Torner himself never wrote about any of his traumatic experiences,

THE PAST IS HOME 197
Figure 9.1 Opening of ‘El ritmo en los estilos literarios’, Profesionales de la

enseñanza: Hoja de información diaria, 4 April 1939.
helping the exiles with their lives outside the camps. Most likely, this is how
he met Torner. In 1939 Azcárate had returned to London and established an
important infrastructure in the British capital that allowed Spanish exiles to
develop outstanding cultural activities. Torner would live with the Azcárate
including the Spanish Civil War and the rupture of World War I, which forced him to
terminate his studies at the Schola Cantorum de Paris.

family in Taplow until 1943, when he decided to move back to London so as

to have access to materials from universities and libraries for his work.8
By the end of World War II, Torner realized that a return to Spain was
impossible. If he were to go back, he would be prosecuted as he had been
politically active in support of the Republican government that preceded the
Franco dictatorship. He had publicly defended the democratization of cul-
ture and the lay state. He had been a Republican and a Mason. Torner thus
remained in London, though still hoping to return someday to the country
that had provided impetus and resources for his life as intellectual.
This essay is devoted to Torner’s London exile, a time when he faced the
impossibility of advancing his profession as a musicologist. It is particularly
concerned with Torner as scholar, leaving aside his contributions as com-
poser of zarzuela and piano works. It analyzes and contextualizes his schol-
arly works to uncover how he created a space suspended in time, where time
itself had no meaning beyond its own past. The discussion investigates the
reasons why Torner returned to subjects that he had abandoned for almost
two decades before leaving Spain. In so doing, it draws on archival materials
scattered through Spain from Oviedo to Madrid, and through the United
Kingdom and the Americas, as well as personal collections that have uncov-
ered information buried for over half a century; it also relies on oral history
among the surviving Torner family.
As such, this essay opens a hitherto little-known chapter in the history of
Spanish musicology and puts into perspective the historiography of the dis-
cipline’s evolution from the early to the later twentieth century. It also reveals
how time and displacement affect musicological work and the reception of
musical ideas. In this way this study contributes to the discourse on the mean-
ing of space, time, and identity in light of the experience of exile.
In The Dialectics of Exile, Sophia McClennen proposes a theory of exile’s
time, suggesting that the ‘temporality for exiles from the latter part of the
twentieth century often involves a dialectic between pre-modern myth and
circularity, modern linear history, and postmodern ahistorical timelessness’.9
Torner’s scholarly work in London sheds light on such temporality of exile,
and on the role historicity and nostalgia play therein. But to understand his
exilic existence as musicologist, one must understand the man who was born
in Asturias, lived for much of his early life in Madrid, and had embraced all of
Spain in his fieldwork.
8 See Eduardo Torner to Pablo de Azcárate, 25 November 1943, Pablo de Azcárate

Papers, Archivo del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores y Cooperación, Madrid.
9 Sophia A. McClennen, The Dialectics of Exile: Nation, Time, Language, and Space in
Hispanic Literatures (West Lafayette, IN, 2004), p. 58.

The Last Years in Spain
When Torner left Spain at the height of the Civil War, he was a recognized
researcher and intellectual, a point of reference for anybody who focused on
Spanish folklore, oral tradition, and literature, or on the social role of music in
education. Adolfo Salazar, a contemporary of Torner and himself an acclaimed
writer on music, considered his colleague to be the most important researcher
on music in Spain.10 Torner had taught numerous courses, attended countless
conferences, and had given many public lectures with live performances by
local musicians and singers. He used the same format for his academic talks.11
The positions he held attest to his rank in the Spanish intelligentsia: in
1926 he became the head of the music section at the Centro de Estudios
Históricos. Founded in 1910 as part of the Junta para Ampliación de
Estudios e Investigaciones Científicas as the first research center in Spain, the
Centro de Estudios Históricos brought together a new generation of intel-
lectuals, musicians, writers, scientists, and artists who aimed to fulfill their
enlightened ideas.12 In the spring of 1930 Torner also became the head of
the ‘Sección de Folklore’ at the Archivo de la Palabra, which was housed at
the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid. From 1931 to 1936 he headed the
music division of the Misiones Pedagógicas, a project of cultural solidarity
sponsored by the government of the Second Spanish Republic that sought
to bring literature, music, and theater to isolated and underdeveloped villages
10 For examples of written tributes attesting to Torner and his achievements, see
Adolfo Salazar, ‘La República y el Cancionero de Barbieri ’, El sol (Madrid), 14 April
1933; Anonymous, ‘Barbieri, la zarzuela, la opereta y la euforia’, El sol (Madrid),
22 September 1934; Georges Créach, ‘Notas musicales españolas: El laúd y la gui-
tarra’, trans. José Subirá, Biblioteca Fortea, revista musical 3 (1935), 3; and José Subirá,
‘Manuscritos de Barbieri existentes en la Biblioteca Nacional’, Revista las ciencias 3, no.
2 (1936), 386–7.
11 In 1915 Torner gave his first lectures on Asturian music in Oviedo and other
cities and villages. All major Asturian newspapers published reviews; among them,
anonymous, ‘La Semana Asturiana: Conferencias del eminente artista ovetense señor
Torner’, El pueblo astur, 31 January 1915; Fernando Señas Encinas, ‘Arte asturiano:
Conferencia en la Universidad’, El correo de Asturias, 10 February 1915. For further
information see Diego Catalán, El Archivo del Romancero, patrimonio de la humanidad:
Historia documentada de un siglo de historia, 2 vols. (Madrid, 2001), I, pp. 83, iii–xxiii.
12 For further details of Torner’s role at the Centro de Estudios Históricos, and
the Residencia, see Susana Asensio Llamas, Fuentes para el estudio de la música popu-
lar asturiana: A la memoria de E.M. Torner (Madrid, 2010); Susana Asensio Llamas,
‘Eduardo Martínez Torner y la Junta para Ampliación de Estudios en España’, Arbor
187, no. 751 (2011), 857–74; and Adela Presas, ‘La Residencia de Estudiantes (1910–
1936): Actividades musicales’, Música: Revista del Real Conservatorio Superior de Música
de Madrid 10–11 (2003–4), 55–104.

and towns.13 In 1932 he was appointed Professor of ‘Prácticas de Folklore’ at

the Real Conservatorio de Música y Declamación in Madrid.14 Aside from
this, Torner served from 1932 to 1934 on the board of the Junta Nacional
de Música y Teatros Líricos, the official organ in charge of legislating music
and theater, and from 1934 to 1937 on the board of the Museo del Pueblo
Español, which was among the first institutions to support ethnographic
work on the different cultures inhabiting Spain.15 He also held positions at
the Consejo Nacional de Cultura (1932–6) and the Consejo Central de la
Música (1937–9), and taught at the Institución Libre de Enseñanza.
At the Centro de Estudios Históricos, which strongly promoted the devel-
opment of culture in Spain, Torner closely collaborated with the acclaimed
philologist and historian Ramón Menéndez Pidal. He provided the musical
notation for the second edition of the first-ever compilation of Spanish ballads
collected by Menéndez Pidal.16 In the preface Menéndez Pidal acknowledged
Torner’s contribution, which was quite modest, especially in comparison with
the vast collection of ballad texts and music he had amassed over the years.17
Torner collaborated with Menéndez Pidal on the history of pan-Hispanic
ballads, a body of material that represents some of the oldest and most impor-
tant traditions of oral literature in Europe. He also contributed an appendix
of melodies to a reprint edition of Spanish ballads collected by María Goyri,
13 For information about Torner in the Misiones Pedagógicas, see Víctor Pliego de
Andrés, ‘El Servicio de Música: Eduardo Martínez Torner y Pablo de Andrés Cobos’,
Las Misiones Pedagógicas, ed. Eugenio Otero and María García (Madrid, 2006), pp.
414–43; and Narciso J. López García, María del Valle de Moya Martínez, and Raquel
Bravo Marín, ‘El papel del Patronato de Misiones Pedagógicas como divulgador de la
cultura musical en la España de la II República’, Co-herencia: Revista de humanidades
15, no. 29 ( July–December 2018), 335–55.
14 For further details of Torner’s activities at the Conservatorio, see Federico Sopeña
Ibáñez, Historia crítica del Conservatorio de Madrid (Madrid, 1967).

15 On Torner’s position at the Museo del Pueblo Español, see Anales del Museo del
Pueblo Español 1, nos. 1–2 (Madrid, 1935). For Torner’s role at different institutions
during the Second Republic and the Civil War, see Andrés Ruiz Tarazona, ‘La música
y la generación del 27’, Cuadernos hispanoamericanos 514–15 (April–May 1993),
117–24; Javier Suárez Pajares, Música española entre dos guerras, 1914–1945 (Granada,
2002); Leticia Sánchez de Andrés, Música para un ideal: Pensamiento y actividad musi-
cal del krausismo e institucionismo españoles (1854–1936) (Madrid, 2009); and María
Nagore et al., Música y cultura en la Edad de Plata, 1915–1939 (Madrid, 2009).
16 See Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Flor nueva de romances viejos (Madrid, 1933). The
first edition appeared in 1928 without music examples.

17 The vast majority of Torner’s ballad collection is held at the Archivo Menéndez
Pidal, Fundación Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Madrid. Some drafts and copies can also
be found at the archive of the Biblioteca Tomás Navarro Tomás, Consejo Superior de
Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid. Torner was never able to publish this material and
his role in ballad research is still unrecognized.

the first woman in Spain to hold a PhD in Philology (she was also the wife
of Menéndez Pidal).18 Indeed, Torner, championed teamwork, which at the
time was rare. He collaborated with several musicologists as co-author, such
as with Jesús Bal y Gay on the first edition of Galician folklore (1933) and on
the Cancionero gallego, a collection of folk songs, folk dance music, and sacred
songs.19 Torner also worked together with the folklore scholar José Castro
Escudero while living in Valencia in 1938.20
Torner published numerous articles, books, and editions. During his early
years in Madrid, that is, between 1916 and 1923, he had focused on historical
topics. He had studied the Cancionero de la Colombina and the materials found
by Francisco Asenjo Barbieri on the Cancionero de Palacio.21 This interest
must be understood in the context of the time. Beginning in the 1880s, and
increasingly so in the first decades of the twentieth century, Spanish schol-
ars gradually devoted themselves to Spanish early music, mainly in response
to French and German scholars who had questioned its relevance and even
its existence.22 Those claims provoked a strong reaction, and many Spanish
18 See María Goyri de Menéndez-Pidal and Eduardo Martínez Torner, Romances que
deben buscarse en la tradición oral, e indicaciones prácticas para la notación musical de los
romances, rev. edn (Madrid, 1929).
19 See Eduardo Martínez Torner and Jesús Bal y Gay, ‘Folklore Musical (O folklore
musical de Mélide)’, Terra de Mélide (Santiago de Compostela, 1933), pp. 537–66. The
anthology Cancionero gallego was published posthumously in 1973 and again in 2007.
20 For further details of the collaboration of Torner and José Castro Escudero, see
José Subirá, ‘En el centenario de Lope de Vega’, Ritmo: Revista musical ilustrada 100
(15 December 1934), 5. Subirá mentions that Torner and Escudero were planning a
publication titled La música y las danzas en el Teatro de Lope de Vega.
21 See Salazar, ‘La República’; and Subirá, ‘Manuscritos de Barbieri’. On Torner’s
early works on the Cancionero de la Colombina, see Eduardo M. Torner to Ramón

Menéndez Pidal, 18 July 1920, Archivo Menéndez Pidal, Fundación Ramón
Menéndez Pidal, Madrid.
22 During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries several French and German
scholars devoted themselves to the study of Spanish early music. The most notable
work was by Françoise-Auguste Gevaert, a composer and music researcher who in
1851 visited Spain to report on the state of early music manuscripts, a time when
neither research nor attempts at cataloguing had been undertaken. The following year
he published a devastating report, ‘Rapport sur la situation de la musique en Espagne’,
Bulletin de l’Académie Royale de Belgique 19, no. 1 (1852), 184–205; for more than a
century Spanish early music was seen as almost nonexistent and irrelevant. Others
who added to the damage were Edmond Vander Straeten, who wrote on the pres-
ence of Dutch musicians in Spain (Edmond Vander Straeten, Les musiciens néerlan-
dais en Espagne, 2 vols [Brussels, 1885 and 1888]), and Amédée-Henri-Gustave-Noël
Gastoué, who wrote on old Spanish manuscripts in Paris (‘Manuscrits et fragments de
musique liturgique, à la Bibliothèque du Conservatoire, à Paris’, Revue de musicologie de
la Société Française de Musicologie 13, no. 41 [1932], 1–9).

intellectuals, historians, and musicians who were offended by the sugges-

tion that Spanish music lacked value began to preserve and catalogue music
of the early modern period. Francisco Asenjo Barbieri, Felipe Pedrell, and
Julián Ribera, among others, rediscovered the Cantigas de Alfonso X written in
the thirteenth century, identified Spain’s finest polyphony in the Cancionero
de Palacio, and championed many other works composed between the four-
teenth and seventeenth centuries. They also rediscovered music for organ and
vihuela. However, the academic study of Spanish music of the early modern
period did not take hold immediately.
Torner was among those who engaged in it, though his deep knowledge of
Spanish early music is not widely recognized. He had transcribed many early
music sources—among them the villancicos by Juan Vásquez, vihuela music
by Luys de Narváez, and the Cancionero de Palacio, Cancionero de Medinaceli,
Cancionero de Turin, and Cancionero de la Colombina—but most of the tran-
scriptions were never published.23 Only the first edition of sixteenth-century
music for vihuela, the antecedent of the Spanish guitar which flourished in
Spain during that century, appeared in print.24
At the center of Torner’s published work was Spanish folklore, and his
writings on various topics in this subject area were well known throughout
the country.25 By the 1930s, however, folklore studies began to founder as
new trends took hold in Spain, largely influenced by the European avant-
garde. Indeed, folklore began to be rejected as old and outmoded. Torner’s
research no longer enjoyed the popularity it had attained earlier, especially
among composers such as the Grupo de Madrid, also known as Grupo de
los Ocho, whose main concern was to eliminate musical conservatism, which
for them expressed itself in the use of folklore as a source of inspiration.26
23 Torner’s remaining transcriptions of these cancioneros can be found in the Torner

Papers, held at the Modesto González Cobas Collection, Real Instituto de Estudios
Asturianos, Oviedo.
24 See Eduardo Martínez Torner, ed., Colección de vihuelistas españoles del siglo XVI:
Composiciones escogidas de El Delphin de música (1538), 2 vols (Madrid, 1923).

25 For an in-depth discussion of his most famous edition, the Cancionero musical de la
lírica popular asturiana of 1920, see José Antonio Gómez Rodríguez, ‘Un cancionero
excepcional ninguneado por la (etno)musicología española’, Revista de musicología
32, no. 2 (2009), 69–89; and Ana María Botella Nicolás, ‘Las canciones de boda del
Cancionero musical de la lírica popular asturiana de Eduardo Martínez Torner’, Revista
de folklore 378 (2013), 4–15.
26 The Grupo de los Ocho, loosely modeled on two other European formations (Les
Six and The Five), consisted of Spanish composers and musicologists, among them
Jesús Bal y Gay, Ernesto Halffter and his brother Rodolfo, Juan José Mantecón, Julián
Bautista, Fernando Remacha, Rosa García Ascot, Salvador Bacarisse, and Gustavo
Pittaluga. The group disbanded at the onset of the Spanish Civil War, when most of
its members left Madrid or went into exile.

(There were, however, notable exceptions to this thinking, as evident in the

cultural production of Manuel de Falla and Joaquín Turina.) All this came to
an end in the summer of 1936, when the Spanish coup of 17 and 18 July was
launched in Madrid and succeeded, sparking the Civil War. Later on, after the
war, the Franco regime began to purge society of its ‘undesirable’ members.
The Long Departure
The coup-d’état came as a surprise to Torner. At the time he was work-

ing in Madrid at the Misiones Pedagógicas, while his wife Jovita Cue and
daughter Jovita were vacationing in north Asturias. Torner and his son left
the capital and headed to Valencia, to which city the Republican govern-
ment had moved their headquarters.27 In November 1936 Valencia became
the capital of the Republic, a status it maintained until October 1937, when
Barcelona assumed the position. In late January 1939 Barcelona was taken,
indicating the onset of the Retirada, which led to the end of the war and the
beginning of the Franco dictatorship. Once the war was over, teachers at the
Conservatorio in Madrid were sanctioned or permanently removed; Torner
was among the latter.28 Similar removals took place at the other institutions
where Torner worked.
Indeed, the political developments affected Torner in more than one way
as, like many other writers and artists, he followed the official government
from Madrid to Valencia and to Barcelona. In Barcelona, Torner and oth-
ers, such as the acclaimed poet Antonio Machado, met at so-called tertulias,
social gatherings for giving talks and sharing information on literature, art,
and politics in public places, often bars.29 One of Torner’s last known com-
munications from Barcelona, a letter to the first Professor of Spanish at the
University of Cambridge, the British Hispanist John Brande Trend, describes
how he left the city in a hurry:
I have received the proofs from the press to correct them two days before the
fascists entered Barcelona [figure 9.2], which is why I now have them in my
27 Torner’s daughter recalls: ‘I was recovering from an illness in a little Asturian vil-
lage, in Riosa, with my mother, and my father and brother were in Madrid. . . . We
spent several years in Riocastiello, with some cousins, and then went to Oviedo.’ Jovita
Martínez, in discussion with the author, 16 June 2012.
28 For further details, see Igor Contreras Zubillaga, ‘Un ejemplo del reajuste del
ámbito musical bajo el franquismo: La depuración de los profesores del Conservatorio

Superior de Música de Madrid’, Revista de musicología 32, no. 1 ( January 2009),
569–93.
29 See anonymous, ‘Noticias literarias’, Revista hispánica moderna 5 (1939), 244–5.
On pre-Civil War tertulias in Madrid, see also Neira, ‘Eduardo, desde Madrid.’

Figure 9.2 Proof from a manuscript being printed in Barcelona and recovered by
Torner in 1939, Seis canciones corales españolas de la época de Cristóbal
Colón.

possession, as there was no time to return them. Indeed, we worked there until
the very last moment.30
Torner had to leave behind in Barcelona a substantial amount of source

material related to Spanish early music. He recalls in the same letter to Trend:
I have left in Barcelona more than three thousand photographs of musical

codices from the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, and several
works that were already in print. The flight happened in such haste that, liter-
ally, the fascists came in through one door and I went out the other.31
Thereafter Torner hardly mentioned the proofs. But he took with him transcrip-
tions he had been working on during the war years with the goal of publishing
them in several editions: Seis canciones corales españolas de la época de Cristóbal
Colón: Transcritas de los códices originales por E.M. Torner; Tesoro de la música espa-
ñola: Selección y transcripción de manuscritos y ediciones antiguas por Eduardo M.
Torner, No. 1. (figure 9.3); Repertorio coral español: Canciones inéditas de los siglos
XV y XVI—Transcritas de los códices originales por Eduardo M. Torner (figure 9.4);
and Villancicos de Juan Vásquez.32 Torner would take these manuscripts with
him upon leaving Spain.33 He also packed other materials from his early period
as a scholar when he studied Spanish early music. He would later digest parts of
these manuscripts in his Cancionero musical español of 1948.
30 ‘He retirado las pruebas de imprenta para corregirlas dos días antes de la entrada
de los fascistas en Barcelona, razón por la cual las tengo ahora en mi poder, pues ya
no hubo tiempo para devolverlas. Quiere decir esto que hemos trabajado allí hasta el
último momento.’ Eduardo Torner to John Brande Trend, [c. January 1939], Torner
Papers, Modesto González Cobas Collection, Real Instituto de Estudios Asturianos,
Oviedo. The letter was written after Torner left Barcelona, perhaps while in Figueres,
and probably before his flight to France. The printing proofs refer to his unpublished
manuscript, Seis canciones españolas de la época de Cristóbal Colón.
31 ‘Por esto he dejado en Barcelona más de tres mil fotografías de códices musicales de
los siglos XV, XVI y XVII, y varios trabajos que estaban ya en las imprentas. La huida
fue tan rápida que puedo decir que entraban los fascistas por una puerta y salía yo por
la otra.’ Eduardo M. Torner to John Brande Trend, [c. January 1939], Torner Papers,
Modesto González Cobas Collection, Real Instituto de Estudios Asturianos, Oviedo.
32 These undated manuscripts came into the possession of Modesto González Cobas
through Torner’s son. They are now held at the Real Instituto de Estudios Asturianos,
Oviedo. Some of them have been digitized and can be accessed at the Biblioteca
Virtual del Principado de Asturias, https://bibliotecavirtual.asturias.es/, but not all of
them have been catalogued as of yet.
33 Jovita Martínez asserts that some of the papers were lost during her father’s pas-
sage to France, among them thousands of bibliographic references on folklore from all
over the world; Jovita Martínez, in discussion with the author, 16 June 2012. However,
these references Torner had left behind at his office in Madrid.

Figure 9.3 Cover of one of the manuscripts that Torner carried with him in 1939
to France and to the United Kingdom, Tesoro de la música española.

Figure 9.4 Cover of one of the manuscripts that Torner carried with him in
1939 to France and to the United Kingdom, Repertorio coral español:
Canciones inéditas de los siglos XV y XVI.

Torner’s subsequent stay in France extended his long departure. He

spent time with Antonio Machado in Colliure until the poet’s death on 22
February 1939.34 After his time at Saint-Cyprien and Argelès-sur-Mer, he
moved on to Narbonne to see his son. There he inquired of the National Joint
Committee for Spanish Relief as to whether the two of them could travel
together to the United Kingdom, but received an answer that this was not
possible and that he should go alone and initiate a reunion from exile.35 They
would never see each other again.
The London Exile
During his exile in London, from September 1939 until his premature death
in February 1955, Torner continually tried to rebuild his career. But pursuing
his core research, which relied on fieldwork and the consultation of historical
sources and his own personal archives, was impossible outside Spain. Living in
a liminal space—unable either to continue his previous research or to embark
on new lines—the last decades of Torner’s life were marked by an ‘eternal’
return to the subjects of Spanish early music and the relationships between
music and text (both poetry and prose), especially in terms of rhythm.
From the outset, Torner faced setbacks. The position he was supposed to
assume at the University of Cambridge never materialized. During his first
months in London, he received support from the National Joint Committee
for Spanish Relief, which covered his rent and living expenses.36 Later, Torner
became part of the Hogar Español, the Spanish House in Bayswater, which
opened its doors on 17 October 1941. He received funding from the Juan
Luis Vives Scholarship Trust, which several Spanish and English intellectu-
als, among them Pablo de Azcárate, created on 26 May 1942 to support the
education and research interests of Spanish exiles. An evaluation by William
Entwistle provides further details on Torner’s work:
34 See José María Moreiro, ‘El último viaje de Antonio Machado’, ABC: Suplemento
dominical (Madrid), 26 February 1978. The article is based on an interview with
Matea Monedero, sister-in-law of the poet and only survivor of the family members
who accompanied Machado into exile.
35 M.B. Denner [Comité National Britannique d’Aide a l’Espagne] to Eduardo M.
Torner (in Narbonne), 4 August 1939. Private collection of Jovita Martínez, London.
In 2013 Martínez donated it to the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid. In 1940
Torner would enlist the help of his friend Pablo de Azcárate to locate his son in France
and bring him to the United Kingdom. See Eduardo M. Torner to Pablo de Azcárate,
undated [c. early 1940], Pablo de Azcárate Collection, Archivo del Ministerio de
Asuntos Exteriores y Cooperación, Madrid.
36 See Azcárate, ‘Salazar Chapela’, 11.

Sr. Torner has proposed to make a statistical investigation of Spanish styles,

to discover what differences can be objectively stated as between classical and
modern Spanish, and between different modern writers. He relies particu-
larly on the sonority due to choice and distribution of vowels, and the effect
produced by the vocalism of rhymes. . . . I am of the opinion that Sr. Torner’s
scholarship should be continued to complete the year.37
Another report by Entwistle nine months later attests to Torner’s advance-

ment: ‘Don Eduardo Torner has sent to me, and I have read attentively, two
works . . . Índice de analogías entre la lírica Antigua y la moderna. Sobre
estilística literaria española.’38 These were first drafts of what would eventually
become his books Ensayos sobre estilística literaria española and Lírica hispánica.
To carry out research for his work, Torner frequently used the libraries of
the British Museum and different London universities, as well as the newly
founded Instituto Español de Londres, where he was eventually appointed
head of the library (figure 9.5). Spanish scholars and political figures exiled in
London established the institute on 20 January 1944, after the Hogar Español
closed its doors. They supported the institute with the objective of disseminat-
ing Spanish cultures and languages among not only the displaced community
but also the local population.39 Thus, the institute offered courses, talks, con-
certs, and other cultural events, and published the Boletín del Instituto Español
de Londres. The year of the institute’s foundation marked the end of Torner’s
first exilic phase (1939–44), a period of turmoil, during which he had little or
no control over his life and work. Tellingly, no publications came out of this
period, though Torner continued his work on rhythm in literature, which he
had started in 1938 in Valencia, not foreseeing that the turn away from core
musicological questions would prove crucial for his scholarly identity in exile.
By 1946 Torner was no longer receiving financial support from the Juan
Luis Vives Scholarship Trust. He turned to Azcárate for advice, making him-
self available for collaboration. He had just finished the manuscript of his
book Metodología para la transcripción de la música popular, which Homero
Serís, head of the Centro de Estudios Hispánicos at Syracuse University, New
York, had commissioned and had turned over to William Entwistle for peer
review.40 In subsequent years, Torner published two editions. The first, Cuatro
37 William Entwistle to Pablo de Azcárate, 11 December 1943, Pablo de Azcárate

Collection, Archivo del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores y Cooperación, Madrid.
38 William Entwistle to Pablo de Azcárate, 4 September 1944, ibid.
39 For the cultural activities of exiles in London after World War II, see Luis
Monferrer, Odisea en Albión: Los republicanos españoles exiliados en Gran Bretaña (1936–
1977) (Madrid, 2007).
40 Eduardo M. Torner to Pablo de Azcárate, 28 January 1946, Pablo de Azcárate
Collection, Archivo del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores y Cooperación, Madrid.

The book manuscript has not been found to date.

Figure 9.5 Torner on the terrace of the Instituto Español de Londres, 1949.

danzas españolas de la época de Cervantes, is a transcription and piano arrange-

ment he made on the occasion of the fourth centenary of Cervantes’s birth;
the music is based on Gaspar Sanz’s Instrucción de música sobre la guitarra
española of 1674. Each of the four dances—Zarabanda, Marizápalos, Villain,
Canary—is preceded by a literary text. Torner himself provides insights into
his work in the introduction to the edition:
I have shaped these dances through direct transcription of tablatures that

appear in various guitar books of the seventeenth century. Some of their har-
monies and modulations may seem too modern for that time, but all of them
are expressly found in the original texts, which are rigorously respected here in
this regard. This is not the first time that Spanish music displays such anticipa-
tory character in harmonic procedures, as widely recognized in the criticism of
works by seventeenth-century vihuelists.41
The second edition is the Cancionero musical español of 1948, an edition of

twenty-four Spanish folk songs conceived as an introduction to various styles
and forms.42
Torner also contributed articles, lectures, and book reviews to Symposium,
a quarterly journal of criticism in modern literatures originating in languages
other than English, and to the Boletín del Instituto Español. Indeed, the insti-
tute provided a strong anchor for Torner until it closed on 31 December 1950.
During his second exilic phase (1944–50) many of his publications—arti-
cles in Symposium, the collection of essays Estilística literaria española, peda-
gogical materials such as the Cancionero musical español, and didactic piano
music such as the Cuatro danzas españolas de la época de Cervantes—eschew
any ideologization. Thus far Torner had not shared his views about the current
work of Spanish musicologists, but this changed in October 1948, when he
reviewed editions of early music that had been published in Spain after the
end of the Civil War. His awareness of publications issued by the Instituto
Español de Musicología in Barcelona clearly triggered his re-engagement
with the musical and cultural life in Francoist Spain, and prompted him to
re-examine his self-understanding as musicologist, Spaniard, and exile. The
timing is significant as well. The reviews appeared in the Boletín del Instituto
41 ‘He formado estas danzas mediante transcripción directa de textos en cifra que
constan en diversos libros de guitarra del Siglo XVII. Acaso parezcan demasiado mod-
ernas para aquel tiempo algunas de sus armonías y modulaciones, pero todas ellas se
hallan de manera expresa en los textos originales, respetados aquí en este aspecto con
todo rigor. No es ésta la primera vez que la música española ofrece ese carácter de
anticipación en los procedimientos armónicos, pues fue reconocido esto mismo por la
crítica respecto de las obras de los vihuelistas del siglo XVI.’ Cuatro danzas españolas de
la época de Cervantes (London, 1947).
42 Torner had produced similar works before exile, see Cuarenta canciones españolas
(Madrid, 1924) and Cancionero musical (Madrid, 1928).

Español just as his wife and daughter were finally able to make plans to move
to London (his son was never allowed to visit him). Torner’s reviews show a
profound disagreement with the ‘new’ Spanish musicology. He particularly
criticizes approaches to transcription:
Mr. Pujol interprets Narváez’s tablature following the rules used by Mr.
Anglés; but it is obvious to anyone who knows the systems of tablature nota-
tion that these deficient scripts cannot accurately express either polyphonies
or rhythms. The latter have to be deduced with the help of the tradition [the
knowledge of music history]. The particularities that Spanish music has always
had within the European context and continues to exhibit today are due to the
fact that our composers exclusively use national modes, turns, and rhythms.43
Torner would elaborate on his own approach to interpreting Spanish early

music tablatures in his unpublished manuscript Rítmica musical hispánica.
There he argues that the transcription of rhythm has to be informed by oral
and written sources, as early music tablatures do not render it accurately.
To understand the significance of Torner’s return to Spanish early music
after having reoriented himself to focus on literature, one needs to go back
in time to April 1936. In that month the third conference of the recently
established International Musicological Society was held in Barcelona. It is
noteworthy that the conference took place a few years after the foundation
of the Second Spanish Republic in 1931, when the state became aware of the
importance of its musical heritage. This awareness reveals itself in the creation
of the Junta Nacional de Música y Teatros Líricos in 1931 and the Consejo
Central de la Música in 1937, institutions that included important Spanish
musicians and scholars on their boards, Torner among them.44
After decades of changing orientation, the conference exposed the polar-
ization of opinions and research interests, and foreshadowed the beginning
of a new era in Spanish musicology.45 It also created a new leadership who
43 ‘El Sr. Pujol interpreta la cifra de Narváez siguiendo las normas empleadas por el
Sr. Anglés; pero es evidente para quien conozca los sistemas de notación cifrada que
estas deficientes escrituras no pueden expresar con exactitud ni las polifonías ni los
ritmos. Estos últimos tienen que ser deducidos con ayuda de la tradición. Las particu-
laridades que en el conjunto europeo ofreció siempre y sigue ofreciendo hoy la música
española obedece a que nuestros compositores emplean modos, giros y ritmos de tipo
exclusivamente nacional.’ Eduardo M. Torner, ‘Anglés, Higinio, La música en la corte de
Carlos V . . . Pujol, Emilio, Luys de Narváez . . . Pahissa, Jaime, Vida y obra de Manuel de
Falla . . . (book reviews)’, Boletín del Instituto Español de Londres no. 6 (October 1948),
19–20.
44 For further information, see Emilio Casares Rodicio, ‘Introducción’, Música (1998),
13–20. [Facsimile edition of the monthly magazine published in Barcelona in 1938.]

45 See Igor Contreras Zubillaga, ‘Ciencia e ideología en el III Congreso de la
Sociedad Internacional de Musicología (Barcelona, 18–25 abril de 1936)’, Música y

would later shape musicology in Francoist Spain, when the discipline came
to be closely aligned with the politics and conservative Catholicism that
the dictatorship supported. One of them was Higinio Anglés (1888–1969),
a Catholic Catalan priest who emerged as the leading figure of Spanish
musicology. Since 1917 Anglés had been in charge of the music section at
the Biblioteca Central in Barcelona (now Biblioteca Nacional de Cataluña).
As one of the vice presidents of the International Musicological Society,
he offered the library as a conference venue. During the conference, Torner
was among those musicologists who, because they did not adhere to the
nascent National Catholicism, was disdained and boycotted by the orga-
nizers.46 Indeed, the main point of contention was that the group of schol-
ars around Anglés perpetuated the notion that Spanish early music derived
from church music, while Torner established theories on the interrelation of
early music and poetry with popular music. Their ideologies reflect conser-
vative Catholicism and liberalism respectively, on the grounds of Spanish
early music.
When Anglés returned from exile in Germany in March 1939 (just weeks
after Torner had left the country), he became involved in the newly founded
Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (Spanish National Research
Council, CSIC), which succeeded the Junta de Ampliación de Estudios e
Investigaciones Científicas. In 1943 he would assume the directorship of the
newly inaugurated Instituto Español de Musicología in Barcelona, which
operated under the auspices of the CSIC. That year he emphasized his par-
ticular interest in establishing an ‘archive of musical copies to continue the
edition of historical works’.47 Around the same time he shared his plan to edit
a ‘catalogue of the music at the Biblioteca Nacional’.48 (In 1923 Torner had
completed such a catalogue, but he never published it.49)
cultura en la Edad de Plata, 1915–1939, ed. María Nagore, Leticia Sánchez de Andrés,
and Elena Torres (Madrid 2009), p. 143.
46 A clear expression of the rejection of Torner was that neither the text nor a
summary of his paper on the rhythms of Spanish traditional music was printed in
the conference proceedings, only the title; see Eduardo Fernando Martínez Torner
‘Los ritmos en la música popular castellana’, Congrés de la Societat Internacional de
Musicologia (Barcelona, 1936).
47 Higinio Anglés to Nemesio Otaño, 2 November 1943, José María Albareda
Collection, Archivo General, Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona.

48 Higinio Anglés to José María Albareda, 27 October 1943, ibid.
49 In 1923 Torner received a fellowship from the Academia de Bellas Artes de San
Fernando in Madrid to finish cataloguing the music papers in the national library,
largely donated by Francisco Asenjo Barbieri in 1880 and known as the ‘Barbieri
Papers’. Torner’s work was praised by Adolfo Salazar in 1933 (see ‘La República’), but
was never found after the war.

The newly created Instituto Español de Musicología needed a folklore

section, and Anglés considered himself uniquely qualified given that he knew
‘all international literature on the subject’.50 (In reality Torner had been at
the forefront of folklore research and had collected an extensive bibliogra-
phy on the subject, which he had to abandon upon leaving Spain.51) To be
sure, Anglés had access to the materials Torner had left behind in Barcelona
and Madrid, including one of the most specialized libraries of folklore at that
time. Given the political circumstances and Torner’s exile, Anglés had free
rein to decide what to do with the materials, as they ‘belonged’ to the new
institute. Torner’s collection thus exerted an important influence on musicol-
ogy in postwar Spain, but this influence was attributed largely, if not exclu-
sively, to Anglés.52
All this might have been a motivating factor for Torner to turn again
to Spanish early music, in order to defend his own legacy and to bolster his
ideological position (the seed of which he had laid at the 1936 conference).
Nonetheless, the course of Spanish musicology proofed devastating for Torner,
both professionally and personally: his unpublished works, transcriptions,
files, notes, bibliographic cards, and photographs, as well as his archive and
library, were tacitly subsumed by the CSIC. In 1945 the Romances que deben
buscarse en la tradición oral of 1929 was reissued in Barcelona without Torner’s
permission. His new edition of the Asturian Cancionero with another 1,000
new melodies would never appear in print and might have been destroyed.
His name was purged from bibliographies, his published works removed from
libraries.53 His correspondence (including with Anglés) might have been
purged from the archives.54 The ferocity with which his memory was erased
suggests that he was far more important than most Francoist musicologists
50 Higinio Anglés to José María Albareda, 13 November 1943, José María Albareda
Collection, Archivo General, Universidad de Navarra, Pamplona.
51 In 1945 Torner still hoped to recover his bibliography: ‘La “Bibliografía musical
española” se quedó en Madrid, junto con otros varios trabajos que tenía en marcha. De
todo ello ya veremos lo que encuentro a mi regreso’, Eduardo M. Torner to Homero
Serís, 12 March 1945, private collection of Jovita Martínez, London. On Torner’s bib-
liography see also Israel J. Katz, ‘A Closer Look at Eduardo M. Torner’s Bibliographic
Survey of Spain’s Traditional Music and Dance’, Anuario musical: Revista de musicología
del CSIC 59 (2004), 243–88.
52 On Anglés’s relationship to other exiles, see Eva Moreda Rodríguez, ‘Early
Music in Francoist Spain: Higini Anglès and the Exiles’, Music & Letters 96, no. 2
(May 2015), 209–27; and Eva Moreda Rodríguez, Music and Exile in Francoist Spain
(Farnham and Burlington, 2016).
53 The first volume of Torner’s vihuela transcriptions, Narváez: El Delphin de la
música, Colección de vihuelistas españoles (Madrid, 1923), is almost impossible to find.

54 No correspondence could be found in the Higinio Anglés Collection, Archivo de
la Sección de Música, Biblioteca de Cataluña, Barcelona.

were prepared to admit. Consequently, Torner’s work was obliterated from

musicology, put beyond the reach of scholars and intellectuals who might
otherwise have engaged with it. The only exceptions were his contribution to
the Asturian songbook and his popular-music choral repertoire. Torner must
have been aware of these developments and his last years, the third phase of
his exile (1950 to 1955), are marked by both continuity and attempts at a new
beginning.
During these last years Torner continued to contribute lectures and
articles, as well as book and concert reviews, to almost every issue of the
Boletín del Instituto Español de Londres until the publication ceased in 1950.
Thereafter, he became a regular contributor to BBC’s Third Programme; one
of the leading cultural and intellectual forces in Britain, this also played a cru-
cial role in disseminating the arts further afield, as it was broadcast through-
out much of Europe. Torner was involved in and ultimately responsible for
a weekly program devoted to Spanish culture, which he used to raise aware-
ness of Spanish folklore. During this time he also resumed teamwork, which
he had promoted back in Spain. In 1952 he met Alan Lomax at the BBC,
just after that acclaimed American ethnomusicologist had returned from sev-
eral months travelling through Spanish villages, under daunting physical and
political conditions. They immediately began to collaborate on a book devoted
to Spanish popular music, tentatively titled The Folk Songs of Spain: Collected by
Alan Lomax, Edited with Additions by Eduardo Torner, of which the theoretical
portions are still extant.55 However, it remains unclear which songs they had
selected from the Lomax recordings to be included, for Torner never finished
the musical transcriptions. The geographical organization of the book—with
chapter titles such as ‘The North: Galicia, Asturias and the Basque Country:
Sixty Songs’ and ‘The Center: León, Castile, Extremadura: Sixty Songs’—fol-
lows a structure that resembles Torner’s talks on Spanish traditional music.
Torner became one of the contributors to Lomax’s Columbia World Library
of Folk and Primitive Music.56 He also contributed transcriptions to the 1952
edition Apologie de la danse, by F. de Lauze 1623: A Treatise of Instruction in
Dancing and Deportment.
Torner also published the aforementioned Ensayos sobre estilística literaria
española, with the Dolphin Book Company in Oxford. The book consists of
four interrelated essays that focus on the stylistic effects produced through
the largely unconscious use of rhythmic patterns and vowel combinations as
exemplified by three modern writers: Ramón del Valle-Inclán (1866–1936),
José Martínez Ruiz (also known under his pen name, Azorín, 1873–1967),
55 See Spanish Popular Music, Eduardo Martínez Torner Collection, Centro de

Documentación, Residencia de Estudiantes, Madrid.
56 See Alan Lomax, ed., Columbia World Library of Folk and Primitive Music (New
York, 1955).

and José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955). A thirty-nine-page appendix consid-

ers additional works ranging in time and scope from El Cantar de mio Cid to
poems by Rubén Darío. The inclusion of El Cantar de mio Cid is noteworthy.
Franco had named the Cid the forefather of his version of a Spanish society,
but he is also Spanish literature’s paradigmatic exile, a man who has been
cast out of his home but manages to return—a hope that Torner might have
harbored as well.57 Torner’s knowledge as musicologist filtered into the pub-
lication, as in his suggestion that the rhythms of Valle-Inclán’s writing were
informed by the folk songs of his native region. The reception of Ensayos sobre
estilística literaria española, however, was poor, both in Spain and in the United
Kingdom. Torner himself would later admit that he was not especially proud
of the book.58
By this time, that is in 1953, Torner had turned to finishing his work
on oral poetry and rhythm. Lírica hispánica and Rítmica musical hispánica:
Contribución al estudio de la música popular española e hispanoamericana, now
considered the most important works that Torner advanced during this
period, would not be published during his lifetime. Both belonged to a three-
part project that aimed at creating a comprehensive reference corpus.59 With
Lírica hispánica, he specifically aimed to show the relationship between poetry
from the Golden Ages and orally transmitted poetry.60 The anthology dif-
fers from most of Torner’s other publications in treating the words of popular
poetry apart from their musical setting, though his sensitivity to the relations
between words and music is obvious, notably in his discussion of the shifts in
verbal accent which are a common feature of Spanish folk song. The material
Torner assembled emphasizes a number of historical points, particularly the
rapprochement which took place between popular and stylized poetry of the
late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.
57 See McClennen, Exile’s Time, p. 87.

58 ‘El pequeño libro sobre estilística literaria que acompaña a las separatas me parece
ahora, visto en letras de molde, un atrevimiento tal vez imperdonable. De él sólo creo
eficaces las páginas dedicadas al ritmo en el verso de romance’, Eduardo M. Torner to
Ramón Menéndez Pidal, 16 November 1953, Archivo Menéndez Pidal, Fundación
Ramón Menéndez Pidal, Madrid.
59 The first part, on the romancero, Torner left behind at his office at the Centro de
Estudios Históricos in Madrid, in 1936. His first publications on the subject appeared
in the 1920s: ‘Indicaciones prácticas sobre la notación musical de los romances’, Revista
de filología española 10, no. 4 (1923), 389–94; ‘Del folklore español: Persistencia de
algunos temas poéticos y musicales’, Bulletin of Spanish Studies 1, no. 2 (1924), 62–70,
and Bulletin of Spanish Studies 1, no. 3 (1924), 97–102; ‘Ensayo de clasificación sobre
las melodías de romance’, Homenaje a don Ramón Menéndez Pidal (Madrid, 1925), II,
pp. 391–402.
60 See E.M. Torner, ‘Elementos populares en la poesía de Góngora’, Revista de espa-
ñola 14 (1927), 417–24.

Rítmica musical hispánica (figure 9.6) focuses on the same relationship

that Lírica hispánica analyzes, but with a focus on rhythm. It might have been
motivated by the wish to explain or defend Torner’s pre-exile position on
rhythm in Spanish early music, specifically the cancioneros and their connec-
tion with contemporary oral traditions.61 Torner began Rítmica musical his-
pánica around 1945 and, according to his daughter, he was working on the
manuscript up to the day of his passing, leaving it unfinished. He intended to
add music examples and bibliographic references.
Although also unfinished, Lírica hispánica was published posthumously in
early 1966 in Madrid, with a prologue by Homero Serís and corrections based
on Torner’s publications in Symposium. This publication, a somewhat symbolic
return though not as a musicologist, went hand in hand with early signs of
Torner’s reception in his homeland. Among the first to rediscover Torner after
his death and to recognize his influence on the development of Spanish eth-
nomusicology were González Cobas, Ruiz de la Peña, and García de Castro.62
In spite of the early attempts to honor Torner’s legacy during his last
years and after his death, several factors delayed the reception of his work.63
The Spanish dictatorship, which lasted nearly forty years, had erased his
61 See Eduardo Martínez Torner, ‘La rítmica en la música tradicional española’,

Música (Barcelona) 1, no. 1 (1938), 25–39; ‘Música y literatura: Tres esquemas filológi-
cos’, Música (Barcelona) 1, no. 3 (1938), 7–20. The first publication was reprinted in
Nuestra música (Mexico City) 3, no. 9 ( January 1948), 55–68.
62 See Modesto González Cobas, ‘Eduardo Torner, visto por su esposa’, La nueva
España (Oviedo), 17 March 1966; Modesto González Cobas, ‘Eduardo Martínez

Torner, maestro de los estudios folklóricos españoles (I)’, La nueva España (Oviedo),
14 September 1967; Modesto González Cobas, ‘Prólogo’, Cancionero musical de la lírica
popular asturiana, ed. Eduardo Martínez Torner, repr. edn (Oviedo, 1971), pp. 11–25; and
Modesto González Cobas, ‘El discreto exilio del musicólogo Eduardo Martínez Torner’,
Sesenta años después: El exilio literario asturiano de 1939; actas del Congreso Internacional
celebrado en la Universidad Oviedo 20, 21 y 22 de octubre de 1999, ed. Antonio Fernández
Insuela (Oviedo, 2000), pp. 159–71; Ignacio Ruiz de la Peña, ‘Eduardo Martínez Torner,
musicólogo español I: La figura de Eduardo Martínez Torner en el panorama de la
Musicología española y contemporánea’, La nueva España (Oviedo), 13 August 1967;
and Ramón García de Castro, ‘Otro asturiano universal: Eduardo Martínez Torner—
Semblanza biográfica’, La voz de Asturias (Oviedo), 6 August 1967.
63 Homero Serís references Torner’s work more than fifty times, see Manual de bib-
liografía de la literatura española, 2 vols (Syracuse, NY, 1948). For obituaries that pay
tribute to Torner’s work, see José Fernández Buelta, ‘Ha fallecido en Londres el folklor-
ista-musicólogo ovetense, don Eduardo Martínez Torner’, La nueva España (Oviedo),
19 February 1955; Luis Amado-Blanco, ‘Eduardo M. Torner: Obituario’, Información
(Havana), 19 March 1955; Constantino Suárez, ‘Martínez Torner, Eduardo’, Escritores
y artistas asturianos: Índice bio-bibliográfico, 7 vols (Madrid, 1956), V, pp. 206–14; and
John Brande Trend, ‘Eduardo Martínez Torner’, Journal of the International Folk Music
Council 8 (1 January 1956), 63.

Figure 9.6 A page from the original manuscript of Torner’s Rítmica musical
hispánica.

personal and professional legacy in his homeland. Much of his published

work had been destroyed. His personal and professional documents were
largely unavailable to scholars or impossible to locate. Except for Mallo del
Campo’s work in 1980,64 only at the turn of the century did Spanish musicol-
ogy begin to engage with its own history, and in doing so to include Torner,
though even then attention was limited to his work on folklore and pedago-
gy.65 The dispersion of his materials and their inaccessibility (a result of the
complex political elimination of his memory in Spain), lengthened Torner’s
exile for almost a century.
The Temporality of Exile
Undeterred by the political situation in his homeland and his hardship in

exile, Torner remained steadfastly devoted to research on Spanish literature
and music (he also continued composing, but there is no evidence that he
tried to publish his works). Tragically, his most significant output in exile were
the works he could not finish. Indeed, he never had control over his time,
with historical events affecting the trajectory of his whole life: first he was
caught in World War I, which interrupted his education in Paris and forced
his return to Spain, then came the Spanish Civil War, followed by World War
II during his time in London. Through these historical events, time and place
became inextricably linked in his life. To maintain his identity and to intel-
lectually survive he continued with his research and publications as much as
circumstances permitted. And he did so not in the language of his exile, but
in his native Spanish, attesting to his vision of exile as a temporary condi-
tion. The construction of home (and the adherence to homeland) also extends
to his research subjects, through which he revisited his past. Indeed, despite
the loss of his collections, his past remained inscribed in his memory, in the
words of the anthropologist George Balandier, ‘preserved and available’.66
For Torner, (Spanish) history and its connection to the present were the
only home he recognized, one in which the old and the new were part of the
same whole, with no ruptures or changes of pace. Similarly, he saw history,
64 María Luisa Mallo del Campo, Torner: Más allá del folklore (Oviedo, 1980).
65 See, for example, Eva Gallardo Camacho and José Antonio Gallardo Cruz,
‘Artículos musicales publicados en la Revista de pedagogía (1922–1936)’, Música y edu-
cación: Revista internacional de pedagogía musical 22 (2009), 50–60; and Juan Carlos
Montoya Rubio, ‘Didáctica del folclore musical en la era tecnológica: Una propuesta
tras los pasos de Eduardo Martínez Torner’, Etno–folk: Revista galega de etnomusico-
loxía 16–17 (2010), 373–97.
66 See Georges Balandier, Une anthropologie des moments critiques (Paris, 1996), p. 42.

ethnography, musicology, literature, and the plastic arts as part of the same
universe, in this case his Spain, the one that existed before the Civil War.
As such, Torner’s exilic existence as a scholar embodies exactly the dia-
lectic between ‘circularity, modern linear history, and postmodern ahistorical
timelessness’ proposed by Sophia McClennen.67 In his work, Torner circles
back to subjects that had concerned him over two decades before, namely
Spanish early music, but he also moves forward, departing from subjects
that had previously occupied him as a musicologist and exploring poetry as a
way to advance his trajectory as a scholar. Due to circumstances, namely the
inaccessibility of research materials, Torner ultimately embodies postmodern
ahistorical timelessness—as if he lived in a time capsule—in which his own
personal and professional history, the history of Spanish musicology, and his
trajectory in exile form not a coherent whole, but a sphericity that allowed
him to continue to cultivate his identity as a scholar. This timelessness also
entails the absence of a professional future, a future Torner did not have, lead-
ing to an unfinished body of work that was largely conceived without an aca-
demic infrastructure and scholarly network.
Aside from the hopelessness of a future within an ahistorical time cap-
sule, Torner’s writings reveal a complex relationship to historicity that recalls
Frederic Jameson’s notion of the ‘nostalgia for the present’, which constitutes
a crisis in representing the present. He asserts: ‘Historicity is, in fact, neither
a representation of the past nor a representation of the future . . . it can first
and foremost be defined as a perception of the present as history.’68 Indeed,
Torner was excluded from the making of music history in Spain, marginal-
ized from the linear or historical time of his nation, and thus went into cycli-
cal repetition. He created his own version of music history outside the borders
of Spain, and he did so without any intention to challenge, even indirectly, the
dictatorship that was the cause of his exile. Instead, as a public and famous
figure in Spain, whose family had remained behind, he created a sort of chro-
notope in Bakhtin’s sense, one with no obvious political implications, con-
stituting an aseptic body of facts that presented a Spanish culture detached
from its actual reality—censorship, prosecutions, assassinations.69 In this way
Torner was able to protect his family and, ultimately, himself.
If all this suggests that exile set Torner apart, it is important to note that
he was something of an outsider even before seeking refuge in London. In
Spain he had been a musician amongst philologists, writers, and historians at
the Centro de Estudios Históricos. He had held several important positions
67 McClennen, The Dialectics of Exile, p. 58.

68 Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(Durham, NC, 1991), p. 284.
69 On the chronotope, see Mikhail M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four
Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX, and London, 1981).

in official institutions, but always returned to the most isolated and depressed
rural areas to teach the illiterate; he was also said to be the most knowledge-
able scholar in literature and art of his whole generation. But what particularly
set Torner apart was that he put musicology into scholarly perspective during
a time when interdisciplinary research was not yet developed. His work relied
on theories and methods from various disciplines in the social sciences and
humanities—history and literature, anthropology, pedagogy, and folklore.
The interrelation of place, time, and identity that had defined Torner’s
stance in musicology disappeared with exile, leaving him in a suspended state
of survival, connected only loosely with his surroundings. If Torner did not
make London his home, he did not seek home elsewhere either. He rejected
offers to travel to the United States (from Homero Serís, in Syracuse, New
York) and Mexico (from his brother, Florentino Torner, in Mexico City),
where other Spanish scholars created new lives supported by local and
national institutions. Indeed, though physical exile had its problems, it was
the intellectual and social exile that troubled Torner most. His immobility
was rooted in the hope that the dictatorship would be overthrown and that
he would be able to return to his life and family, and his intellectual interests,
which remained tied to Spain. When he realized that his exile might last, he
brought his wife and daughter to London. For Torner, the past had become
his home, and his existence a time outside his own history.
In 1957 the acclaimed Polish novelist, poet, and translator Józef Wittlin
(1896–1976) coined a term for those who were not only out of place, but who
by virtue of being elsewhere were also missing a certain period in time:
In Spanish, there exists for describing an exile the word destierro, a man
deprived of his land. I take the liberty to forge another term, destiempo, a man
deprived of his time, meaning, and deprived of the time that now passes in his
country. The time of exile is different.70
As such Wittlin puts forward the idea that the exile lives in the present of the
exile and in the past of his homeland and thus is ultimately exiled from the
present time of his nation. This state of being is what creates nostalgia.71
To be sure, studies on the temporality of exile have spawned differing
views on the time of exile, ranging from the inability to engage with the
present to being in a timeless state, removed, that is, from historical time of
a nation and from its future.72 This is especially true for exile triggered by
70 Józef Wittlin, ‘Sorrow and Grandeur of Exile’ [Blaski i nędze wygnania, 1957],
Four Decades of Polish Essays, ed. Jan Kott (Evanston, IL, 1990), p. 88.
71 On the various forms and expressions of nostalgia, see the essays by Caitlin
Vaughn Carlos and Michael Arnold in this volume.

72 See Claudio Guillén, Múltiples moradas: Ensayo de literatura comparada (Barcelona,
1998).

the Spanish Civil War, which was of particularly long duration. Indeed, if
the condition of exile averages a decade, in Spain the war transitioned into a
dictatorship that lasted nearly forty years, preventing the exiles from return-
ing home and thereby putting their professional and personal lives on indefi-
nite hold. As such Torner’s case elucidates the differences between modernist
and postmodernist conceptions of exile. Although not radically different
from each other, in the later twentieth century some basic changes have taken
place: the understanding of exile as a permanent state, and an emphasis on
exile’s problematic construction and fragmentation as evident in the restraint
of feeling alienation, separation, and strangeness—a suspension as it were, not
only in place, but also in time and in history.
Appendix: Torner’s Writings in Exile and Posthumous Publications
This bibliography documents all known scholarly works that Torner pub-
lished while in exile, as well as his unpublished works conceived during
that time (i.e. his last original manuscripts and his posthumously published
works). All manuscripts are held at the Real Instituto de Estudios Asturianos
in Oviedo and the Residencia de Estudiantes in Madrid. Their holdings also
include incomplete essays, lectures and talks, radio programs, and sheet music
for voice, piano, guitar, and other instruments.
Books and Editions
El folklore en la escuela (Buenos Aires: Losada, 1946).

Cuatro danzas españolas de la época de Cervantes (London: Schirmer, 1947).
Cancionero musical español (London: George G. Harrap, 1948).
Ensayos sobre estilística literaria española (Oxford: Dolphin Book Company, 1953).
Spanish Popular Music. Manuscript, c. 1953.
Rítmica musical hispánica: Contribución al estudio de la música popular española e hispano-
americana. Manuscript, 1955.
Lírica hispánica: Relaciones entre lo popular y lo culto (Madrid: Editorial Castalia, 1966).
Musical Transcriptions
Tesoro de la música española. Manuscript, 1939.

Repertorio coral Español: Canciones inéditas de los siglos XV y XVI. Manuscript, c. 1939.
Seis canciones corales españolas de la época de Cristóbal Colón. Manuscript, c. 1939.
Villancicos y sonetos de Juan Vásquez. Manuscript, c. 1939.
Apologie de la danse, by F. de Lauze 1623: A Treatise of Instruction in Dancing and Deport-
ment, ed. and trans. Joan Wildeblood (London, 1952).

Articles
‘El ritmo en los estilos literarios’, Profesionales de la enseñanza: Hoja de información dia-
ria 22 (1939), 1–3.
‘Índice de analogías entre la lírica española antigua y la moderna’, Symposium 1, no. 1
(1946), 12–33.
‘Manuel de Falla’, Boletín del Instituto Español de Londres 1 (February 1947), 3.
‘Conferencia: La música española en la época de Cervantes (resumen)’, Boletín del
Instituto Español de Londres 2 ( June 1947), 8–9. A summary of a lecture on music
during the time of Cervantes.
(1947), 4–35.
(1947), 84–107.
‘La rítmica en la música tradicional española’, Nuestra música (Mexico City) 3, no. 9
( January 1948), 55–68.
‘Conferencia: Formas históricas de la canción popular española (resumen)’, Boletín del
Instituto Español de Londres 6 (October 1948), 9–12.
(1948), 84–105.
(1948), 221–41.
‘Joaquín Turina’, Boletín del Instituto Español de Londres 7 (February 1949), 20.
‘Conferencias: Ritmo y color en la literatura española’, Boletín del Instituto Español de
Londres 9 (October 1949), 12–19.
(1949), 282–320.
‘Conferencia: Cante jondo y cante flamenco (resumen)’, Boletín del Instituto Español de
Londres 12 (October 1950), 15–17.
(1950), 141–80.
‘Un aspecto de la prosa de Valle-Inclán’, Grial (Vigo) 1, nos. 1–2 (May 1963), 141–80.
‘Curiosidad literaria’, Grial (Vigo) 6, no. 21 ( July–September 1968), 322–5.
Reviews
‘Slonimsky, Nicolas: Music of Latin America. George G. Harrap & Co., Ltd. London.
374 p. Doce chelines y seis peniques’, Boletín del Instituto Español de Londres 2
( June 1947), 27.

‘Anglés, Higinio: La Música en la Corte de Carlos V, con la transcripción del Libro de

Cifra Nueva para Tecla, Harpa y Vihuela de Luys Venegas de Henestrosa (Alcalá de
Henares, 1557). Publicación del Instituto Español de Musicología. Barcelona 1944.
205 p. de texto literario y 217 de música. 1 libra, 17 chelines y 6 peniques. // Pujol,
Emilio: Luys de Narváez: Los seys libros del Delphin de Música de Cifra para Taner
Vihuela (Valladolid, 1538). Publicación del Instituto Español de Musicología. Bar-
celona 1945. 59 p. de texto literario y 91 de música. 2 libras y 10 chelines. // Pahissa,
Jaime: Vida y obra de Manuel de Falla. Editorial Ricordi Americana. Buenos Aires
1947. Con grabados e ilustraciones musicales. 208 p. 1 libras y 2 chelines’, Boletín
del Instituto Español de Londres 6 (October 1948), 19–20.
‘Música. Cancionero de Upsala (siglo XVI). Villancicos de diversos autores a dos y a tres y a
cuatro y a cinco bozes, agora nuevamente corregidos . . . Venetiis. Apud Hieronymum
Scotum MDLVI. Edición de El Colegio de México. México, 1944. 71 p. de texto
literario y 152 de música’ (book review), Boletín del Instituto Español de Londres 7
(February 1949), 27.
‘Música: Como comentario de la reciente ópera de Roberto Gerhard, titulada The
Duenna, reproducimos a continuación la charla crítica leída en la BBC para España
por el profesor Eduardo M. Torner la noche del 13 de marzo’ (concert review),
Boletín del Instituto Español de Londres 8 ( June 1949), 27–8.
‘Salazar Chapela, Esteban: Lecturas Clásicas Españolas. Harrap’s Modern Language
Series. Publicaciones dirigidas por el Instituto Español de Londres. George G.
Harrap & Co. Ltd., 279 p., 8 chelines y 6 peniques’ (book review), Boletín del Insti-
tuto Español de Londres 9 (October 1949), 27.
‘Salas Viu, Vicente: La última luz de Mozart. Ediciones Nuevo Extremo. Santiago de
Chile’, Boletín del Instituto Español de Londres 10 (February 1950), 31.
‘Salazar, Adolfo: The Music in Our Time: Trends in Music since the Romantic Era. The
Bodley Head, London. 367 p. 15s’, Boletín del Instituto Español de Londres 10 (Feb-
ruary 1950), 31.
‘Música española: Dos ballets en Londres’, Boletín del Instituto Español de Londres 11
( June 1950), 26.
‘Valle, Héctor del: Mozart. Ediciones Atlas. Madrid. 158 p.’, Boletín del Instituto Espa-
ñol de Londres 11 ( June 1950), 27.

10
Historical Nostalgia, Nature, and the

Future in Three Iconic Albums from 1971:
Aqualung, Who’s Next, and Led Zeppelin IV
Caitlin Vaughn Carlos
After a series of exhausting European and American tours in 1969, Jimmy

Page and Robert Plant of the British hard-rock group Led Zeppelin escaped
to the remote cottage Bron-Yr-Aur in Wales for a few weeks of relaxation and
song-writing. Upon their return to London, they recorded Led Zeppelin III.
The album, released by Atlantic Records on 5 October 1970, is dramatically
different from the band’s previous hard-rock style, especially in its reliance on
acoustic instrumentation. In an interview with Chris Welch of Melody Maker,
Page confirms the new course: ‘We’ll never stop doing the heavy things,
because that comes out of us naturally when we play. But—there is another
side to us. The new album is totally different from the others and I see that
it’s obviously a new direction.’1 In that interview Page also looks ahead to
the next album, promising an even greater evolution of the band’s musical
style. The fourth album, commonly known as Led Zeppelin IV, hit the market
a year later, on 8 November 1971.2 It is generally viewed as their most iconic
work. Looking back at these creative years, Page exclaims during an interview
with Brad Tolinski of Guitar World: ‘Our attitude was, “Fuck the sixties. We’re
going to chart the new decade!”’3
1 Chris Welch, ‘Led Zeppelin: Page on Zeppelin III’, Melody Maker (24 October
1970), 11.
2 The album’s wordless cover does not indicate a specific title for the album. Four
symbols are listed on the top of the inside sleeve (the first text found in the album
artwork), offering one possible title. However, the album is also variously referred to as
Led Zeppelin IV, Untitled, IV, Four Symbols, Zoso, and Runes. This essay will refer to
the album as Led Zeppelin IV.
3 Brad Tolinski’s ‘oral autobiography’, Light & Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page,
pulls from several decades of interviews with Jimmy Page, beginning in 1993 when
Tolinski was editor and chief for Guitar World. Much of this material is previously
unpublished. Although Tolinski does not cite exact dates for each interview segment
in the book, this particular quote appears to come from an interview conducted after
2007. In the same interview, Page speaks of ‘a little while ago, before the Led Zeppelin

226 CAITLIN VAUGHN CARLOS
And a new decade it was. In 1971 Great Britain stood at a crossroad

of economic crisis and social anxiety. The rebuilding of London and other
British cities after World War II had produced a functional, modernist land-
scape of housing projects and urbanization, a process that carried into the
following decades. Between 1945 and 1970 over 6.2 million homes were built,
with peak periods just after the war and again, under the Conservative gov-
ernment, in 1951. By 1971 these once-futuristic concrete visions had greyed
and were showing signs of decay. In this postindustrial age, a new generation
of young people began to question the earlier attitude toward urban and tech-
nological development.4 Combined with the disappointing attempt at tech-
nological revolution under Prime Minister Harold Wilson (1964–70), the
grey landscape of urban development mirrored the dim reality of their future
prospects.5 Akin to the Victorian Romantics’ protests against industrializa-
tion, many neo-romantics of the late 1960s and early 1970s saw the encroach-
ment of the urban environment as a threat to the essential needs of body,
mind, and soul—needs that could be satisfied by experiencing an unspoiled
nature. However, the reincarnation of romanticism expanded beyond its nine-
teenth- and early twentieth-century forebear. Not only did these postmodern
romantics explore the spatial playground of the outdoors, they also sought
refuge in an idealized temporal space. The historian Meredith Veldman
asserts that many neo-romantics of this generation were ‘appalled by the pres-
ent and fearful of the future’, and challenged postwar Britain with a ‘protest
rooted in romanticism: they looked to nature and the past for guidance in
their effort to build in Britain a society that would suit not only the demands
of the ecology but also the spiritual and communal needs of humanity’.6 The
escape to nature and the outdoors is integrally intertwined with nostalgic and
neo-romantic visions of the past, as well as with a resurgence of interest in
medieval and mythological topics during this time.
The nostalgia of this generation for more ‘genuine’ times and spaces also
affected British popular culture. The sense of decline triggered by the eco-
nomic crisis and unstable job market coincided with the fall of the utopian
dream of the hippies—especially for popular and rock musicians of the time.
reunion show’, most likely referring to the band’s first full-length reunion concert in
2007. Brad Tolinski, Light & Shade: Conversations with Jimmy Page (New York, 2012),
p. 117.
4 See Meredith Veldman, Fantasy, the Bomb, and the Greening of Britain: Romantic
Protest, 1945–1980 (Cambridge and New York, 1994).

5 Francis Sandbach argues that concern for environmental pollution and disillu-
sionment with high financial costs of technology ‘toys’ like the Concorde airliner were
essential elements in the decline in support for Wilson’s ‘white heat’ policies of eco-
nomic and technological growth; see Francis Sandbach, Environment, Ideology, and
Policy (Montclair, NJ, 1980), pp. 36 and 138.
6 Veldman, Fantasy, p. 246.

THREE ICONIC ALBUMS FROM 1971 227
By early 1971 the Beatles had disbanded, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix had
both died of drug overdoses, and Jim Morrison’s death would follow in the
summer of that year. The genre of psychedelic blues popularized by Joplin and
Hendrix could not continue without their reigning figures. In his 1979 reflec-
tion on the nostalgic attitude of the era, the sociologist Fred Davis relates
‘[t]he nostalgia wave of the seventies . . . to the massive identity dislocations
of the sixties’.7 Even the folk revival, rooted in British heritage and reviving
songs from several centuries that were deemed ‘traditional’, had ‘gone electric’,
led by pioneering folk-rock bands such as Fairport Convention, and Steeleye
Span.8 As social critics (and parents) expressed a rising concern about the
drug use and sexual freedom of hippie culture, musicians and their fans
attempted to respond to the larger cultural and musical upheavals. Indeed,
1971 appears as a critical moment in British history, marking the end of the
cultural idealism of the late 1960s, and culminating politically in the fall of
the Labour government with its promises of social and economic restoration
through technological and industrial advancement.9
Employing iconographic research, hermeneutics, and musical analysis,
and anchoring them in theories of nostalgia, medievalism, and urban criti-
cism, this essay puts into context three iconic albums successively released
in 1971: Jethro Tull’s Aqualung, The Who’s Who’s Next, and Led Zeppelin’s
Led Zeppelin IV. These albums stand as pointed examples of social criticism
and awareness in mainstream popular culture. At a critical juncture, often
seen as the onset of the postmodern, rock musicians searched for authentic-
ity and truth, while attributing a multiplicity of meanings to their art. Play
becomes space for navigating this seeming incompatibility. In theory, this play
is captured in Barbara Stern’s concept of historical nostalgia, that is, a ‘desire
to retreat from contemporary life by returning to a time in the distant past
viewed as superior to the present’.10 This ‘distant past’ could take the form
of a specific historical moment (or at least an imagined conception of that
moment), such as the Middle Ages, but it more often appears as an unde-
fined blur of previous eras, and as such is extremely vague and non-specific.11
7 Fred Davis, Yearning for Yesterday: A Sociology of Nostalgia (New York, 1979), p. 105.
8 See Britta Sweers, Electric Folk: The Changing Face of English Traditional Music
(Oxford, 2005).
9 The General Election of 1971 resulted in an unexpected victory for the Conservative
Party under Edward Heath, pushing out the Labour Party led by Harold Wilson.
10 See Barbara B. Stern, ‘Historical and Personal Nostalgia in Advertising Text: The
Fin de Siècle Effect’, Journal of Advertising 21, no. 4 (1992), 13. As such, historical
nostalgia stands in diametrical opposition to personal nostalgia for an individual’s own
lifetime and experiences.
11 Scholars often use the term ‘medievalism’ to describe an artifact associated with
the Middle Ages that is viewed as historically inaccurate or a creative work or refer-
ence associated vaguely with the distant past (not limited specifically to the Middle

Additionally, this imagined past is envisioned alongside a romanticized view

of an undeveloped British countryside. The albums rely on these concepts to
varying degrees in their album artwork, instrumentation, and lyrics, and they
will be discussed here in order according to the weight or clarity of each con-
cept as it appears in the album. All three albums reflect and respond to the
tension of this historical moment through a turn toward nostalgia.12 Being
rooted in a mythological sense of past while rejecting the naive utopianism
embraced by the generation of the previous decade, they ultimately express
and convey divergent fantasies of time and space.
Nostalgia, Nature, and the Urban Landscape
For a generation of young adults at the start of the 1970s, their nostalgia for
a historical past melded with an imagined vision of the unspoiled English
countryside. This generation’s rediscovery of a pastoral sensibility can be seen
as historically linked to a recurring neo-romantic view of nature as an essential
human need, especially in opposition to industrialization, urban development,
and modernization. The historian Frank Trentmann regards the early-twen-
tieth-century English culture’s affinity for outdoor ‘rambles’ that look to the
countryside as the ‘“psychic balance wheel” to the merciless advance of smok-
ing chimneys and urban life’.13 The open-air music festival (first embraced
by the folk revivalists, and later by psychedelic and rock musicians) aimed to
fill this therapeutic role in the late 1960s, allowing musicians and audiences
Ages, but usually from a post-Antiquity / pre-Enlightenment historical moment); see

Karl Fugelso, ed., Defining Medievalism(s) I and II, Studies in Medievalism 17 and
18 (Cambridge, 2009). In his 1973 essay Umberto Eco defines ten different types
of medievalism, which he calls the ‘Ten Little Middle Ages’; see ‘Dreaming of the
Middle Ages’ [1973], Travels in Hyper Reality: Essays, repr. edn (New York, 1990), pp.
61–72.
12 The concept of historical nostalgia, while helpful for understanding the differences
in temporal spaces for nostalgia, is inadequate as a sole conceptualization for 1970s

attitudes. It does not account for the spatial dimension on its own. Svetlana Boym’s
conception of ‘collective memory’ proves exceptionally useful for expanding the defi-
nition of nostalgia. In her seminal study on nostalgia, Boym asserts that collective
memory offers ‘signposts’ of everyday life which allow for a multiplicity of narratives.
These signposts provide a playground for musicians’ nostalgic imaginings, resulting
in creative works that can and did differ drastically in their manifestations, while still
looking to a shared rural vision of England; see Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia
(New York, 2001), p. 53.
13 See Frank Trentmann, ‘Civilization and Its Discontents: English Neo-
Romanticism and the Transformation of Anti-Modernism in Twentieth Century

Western Culture’, Journal of Contemporary History 29, no. 4 (October 1994), 583–625.

to escape from the soulless modernism of urban life.14 As the decade went
on, however, a darker undertone came to infuse the festivals, tainting the
utopian view of the natural world commonly expressed by musicians of the
time. Even the Woodstock Festival of 1969, depicted in Michael Wadleigh’s
film Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music (1970) as a ‘contemporary version of
The Canterbury Tales: a pilgrimage for hippies seeking the communal expres-
sion of music and love’, witnessed 5,000 medical cases and three deaths.15
This darker side of music festivals clouded the utopian vision from which
they originated; however, many musicians, such as Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin,
and The Who were not ready to completely abandon the pastoral, acoustic
mode or nostalgic imaginings of a distant past. In creating these albums, these
musicians negotiated historical nostalgia and images of Britain’s rich heritage
in counterpoint with a future filled with new technological and aesthetic pos-
sibilities. All three albums, to different degrees, use their artwork to introduce
the tension between urban life with its rising control of society and pasto-
ral traditions, a critique further developed in the songs’ music and lyrics. A
clear example can be seen in Led Zeppelin IV. Led Zeppelin balances nostal-
gic imaginings and progressive developments by creating an album rich in
overt dichotomies such as past/present, pastoral/urban, brightness/darkness,
and weightlessness/weight (epitomized in the band’s own name). The textless
cover introduces the listener to exactly these themes.16
14 Throughout his analysis of the events leading up to and surrounding Bob Dylan’s
historic performance at the Newport Folk Festival, Elijah Wald provides a strong his-
tory of the outdoor music festival’s ideological legacy; see Dylan Goes Electric: Newport,
Seeger, Dylan, and the Night that Split the Sixties (New York, 2015).
15 Paul Hegarty and Martin Halliwell begin their chapter on the role of nature in
progressive rock by examining this darker side (violence, poor sanitation, etc.) of
the outdoor music festival emerging at the end of the 1960s; see Beyond and Before:
Progressive Rock since the 1960s (London, 2011), pp. 49–50.
The Isle of Wright festivals (1968–9) were also set against a pastoral backdrop of
‘rolling green hills and bright, bright sunshine’, but were criticized for ‘prison camp’
security and inadequate resources. The chain-link fences and other security features
were not intended to protect the attendees, but rather to ensure that all were paying
customers. Further, Rolling Stone magazine hailed 6 December 1969, when violence
during The Rolling Stones’ set at the free Altamont Festival resulted in the fatal stab-
bing of a black teenager by the Hell’s Angels (hired by the Stones as security for the
event), as ‘rock and roll’s all-time worst day’; see Hegarty and Halliwell, Beyond and
Before, pp. 50–1.
16 Although the album does not credit a photographer or designer for the outside
cover artwork, George Case attributes the front-cover photograph to the rock pho-
tographer Keith Morris. Case quotes Page as crediting Plant with discovering and
suggesting they use the painting of the old man; see Led Zeppelin FAQ: All that’s Left
to Know about the Greatest Hard Rock Band of All Time (Milwaukee, WI, 2011), p. 213.

On the front cover, a framed picture hangs on a dilapidated wall with

peeling wallpaper. The painting functions as a window to a distant past. It
shows an old man carrying a bundle of sticks on his back. His haggard, elderly
appearance and hunched posture under a heavy burden indicate a sense of
pastness, of the challenges of advanced age in a pre-industrial world. Further,
his solitude in a green countryside where he gathers woodland materials refer-
ences nature and the outdoors. The faded, peeling wallpaper implies a sense of
decline associated with the waning of rural lifestyles. Further, the front cover
seems to offer an inside view into one of the crumbling postwar buildings of
the back cover: Unfolded, the back cover seamlessly incorporates the edges of
the wallpaper, and additionally depicts the ruins of multi-family homes, with
a cityscape towering in the background. These contrasting images take view-
ers on a journey through temporal spaces.17 As the viewers’ perspective opens
to the full cover, they travel away from the old framed painting, through
two more layers of time—through the falling postwar landscape, culminat-
ing in the contemporary Salisbury Tower apartment complex in the distance.
These layers are depicted within one relative location—a location which has
changed dramatically from a green countryside (similar to the one found in
the painting) to a cold, desolate cityscape. This contrast between the extremes
of the two environments—the modern as dominating and cold, and the past
as pastoral and natural—appears as a major theme on the tracks of this album.
In a BBC interview conducted in October 2014 Jimmy Page elaborates
on the artwork, explaining that the design was based on a sense of ‘resonance
to the idea of the “old style” . . . the old ways of life, and the encroaching
modernity’.18 Before the first note is even heard, the album cover has already
introduced the listener to the tension between a previous, countryside exis-
tence and a destructive, urban development. However polarized time and
space appear there is a space in between. The social critique of the album
exists in this in-betweenness, in the tension between the dichotomies found
on the cover (and also heard in the music). Homi K. Bhabha refers to this
place of critique as the ‘Third Space’, claiming that it is ‘unconscious’ and yet
‘introduces . . . an ambivalence in the act of interpretation’.19 The juxtaposi-
tion of past and present on the album cover, depicted through a spatial time-
line of pastoral to urban, projects a nostalgia for the past, but tempered by the
reality of forward development.
17 See Elizabeth Upton, ‘Concepts of Authenticity in Early Music and Popular

Music Communities’, Ethnomusicology Review 17 (2012), http://ethnomusicologyre-
view.ucla.edu/journal/volume/17/piece/591.
18 ‘Jimmy Page Talks to Shaun Keaveny’, 29 October 2014, BBC Radio6 Music,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p029myrc.
19 Homi K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (New York, 1994), p. 53.

Nature and the longing for nature also manifest themselves in the cover
art for The Who’s album Who’s Next, but with inversion. Designed by the pho-
tographer Ethan Russell in July 1971, the front cover shows grey, real-life
industrial remnants, and references the album’s origins in the science-fiction
concert-film project Lifehouse. The project was never completed. The album’s
artwork introduces the dystopian future of the abandoned film, depicting the
script’s vision of a post-apocalyptic world—one in which nature has been
contaminated and destroyed by human development. The polluted surface of
the earth is portrayed through the cover photo, in which the band members
stand upon a vast slag heap.
Looking more closely at the scene, one can see that the musicians have
just finished urinating on an isolated, large concrete piling. The band’s actions
can be read metaphorically, representing their opinion of the industrial, over-
crowded, and polluted present. In essence, the band is urinating on a once-
idealized future—a future that is further symbolized by the piling’s striking
similarity to the monolith of 2001: A Space Odyssey.20 The landscape of piling
and vast slag heap appears as a desolate wasteland, the piling standing as the
leftover remnant of coal-mining in the area and the optimism the industry
conveyed in the past. The album’s back cover, according to The Who’s guitar-
ist and principal songwriter, Pete Townshend, contains a photo of the band
‘all pissed in a dressing room after a show’.21 Although Townshend refers to
the cover as a ‘joke in bad taste’, the urine-themed imagery hints at social
anxieties of the time about progress and its toll on humanity, reflected in the
destruction of the English countryside.
In a more nuanced way, Jethro Tull’s Aqualung uses album art to critique
the postwar decades, while simultaneously offering Luddite lenses through
which to view and build a future. The front, back, and inside covers draw on a
series of three watercolor paintings by the New York artist Burton Silverman.
The front cover depicts a scruffy and suspect man. His sinister expression and
apprehensive concealment of his hand suggest an immediate, albeit under-
lying, danger of urban life—a fear of dark alleys and shady figures. In an
interview in 2014, Silverman reveals that after attending some of the band’s
rehearsals and hearing some of the songs, he had attempted to create an
image of what a ‘homeless man with a malevolent stare might look like’.22
20 In his meticulously detailed monograph on The Who’s activity during this period,
Richie Unterberger claims that the photographer and cover designer Ethan Russell
had originally thought they ‘should tentatively absorb its aura, much as the apes had
with the famous monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film’, before finally deciding
on the more rebellious stance of urination; see Won’t Get Fooled Again: The Who from
Lifehouse to Quadrophenia (London, 2011), p. 149.
21 Pete Townshend, Who I Am: A Memoir (New York, 2012), p. 222.
22 Juan Marcos Velardo, ‘Burton Silverman—An Exclusive Interview, Aqualung/My
God’, Jethro Tull Tribute Blog, 14 February 2014, http://aqualung-mygod.blogspot.

More specifically, he had envisioned the figure ‘pictured against a doorway

almost cornered but still menacing . . . a fringe person who would usually be
ignored in the street (this seemed to be much of the content in a couple of the
songs in the album . . .’.23 He was likely referring to the title track ‘Aqualung’,
in which a homeless man is described as both dangerous—a dark, menacing
pedophile—and pathetic, a marginalized and defeated old man.
The back cover reflects the latter description. In Silverman’s own words,
it depicts the ‘other side of this creature’s rant at the world, the hopeless
side as he sat alone in the dark and with only a stray dog, as a companion’.24
The threatening man who dominates the front cover is a victim of the social
inequality so clearly visible in an urban environment such as London. In pre-
senting these contrasting images of the same man, the artwork contributes to
the album’s critique of urban life.
Building upon the critique found in the cover artwork, the albums often
sonically portray the tension between natural and urban landscapes by con-
trasting acoustic and electric instrumentation. This contrast carries both tem-
poral and spatial connotations, with the acoustic sounds presented as older,
natural, and free from corruption, and the electric sounds perceivable as con-
temporary, powerful, and dominating.25 The lyrics further deepen these con-
trasting modes, expressing nostalgia for an imagined, deeper life experience
associated with the older, pastoral setting. Led Zeppelin IV explores these sonic
and lyrical playgrounds overtly through softer, folk-influenced songs such as
‘Goin’ to California’ and ‘The Battle of Evermore’, which exist alongside the
heavier rock of ‘Black Dog’, ‘Rock and Roll’, and ‘When the Levee Breaks’.
The divergence between these contrasting styles mirrors that found on the
album cover; the heavier songs and their lyrics emphasize dominance and
power (like that of the encroaching urban modernization), while the acoustic
songs tend to focus on introspection and humanity. ‘Going to California’, for
instance, looks to a brighter future in the West, one of freedom and open air:
‘The mountains and the canyons started to tremble and shake, as the children
of the sun began to awake.’ California, with its natural wonders of ‘mountains
and canyons’ and its powerful earthquakes appears here as a majestic space,
one in which the speaker can ‘make a new start’. The tension built through the
juxtaposition of contrasting song styles is manifest in ‘Stairway to Heaven’,
dk/2014/02/burton-silverman-exclusive-interview.html.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 In his work on heavy-metal music, Robert Walser argues that distortion (the fur-
thest end of the electrification spectrum) ‘functions as a sign of extreme power and
intense expression by overflowing its channels and materializing the exceptional effort
that produces it’. Robert Walser, Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness
in Heavy Metal Music (Middletown, CT, 1993), p. 42.

the album’s central track and the only song to have the lyrics printed with the
cover materials. The song sonically weaves together two modes, alternating
between acoustic and electric instrumentation, once again blurring the line
between the extremes of past/present and nature/urban. In doing so, the song
portrays the growing dominance of urban influence and the desire to return
to a past envisioned as closer to nature and thus more ‘authentic’. The play-
ful act of musically recreating the past reveals the influence of postmodernist
ideas on rock. While there is no single claim to ‘truth’, the fantasy of a medi-
eval past is offered as a critique of the present more than a prescription for the
future. Nostalgic imaginings allow these musicians to express a sincere long-
ing for genuine life experiences by looking back to a time or times in which
they perceive life to have had more meaning.
In the course of ‘Stairway to Heaven’, acoustic instrumentation gives way
to the electrified timbre; however, the song ultimately resolves by reverting to
the natural connotations of the acoustic sound. In the repeat of the opening
phrase, the song’s famous acoustic guitar introduction is expanded through
the addition of haunting recorders, setting the scene of a misty English coun-
tryside. In the highly publicized 2016 trial over the song’s authorship (spe-
cifically regarding this short 13-second introduction), Robert Plant testified
that he ‘was really trying to bring the beauty and remoteness of the pastoral
Britain’, looking to a nostalgic view of a pre-urban, untainted country.26
To a slightly lesser degree, Aqualung also embraces the tension between
acoustic and electric modes of sound in its critique of urbanization and cor-
ruption.27 Once again, the acoustic mode is used as representative of ‘natural’
elements and places, while the electrified, distorted rock sections can be seen
as representative of an overly industrialized, modernized urban space. Unlike
Led Zeppelin IV, which explores a romanticized past primarily through nos-
talgic wanderings in an imagined, pastoral environment, Aqualung turns more
strongly to urban criticism through the use of recurring characters in many of
the album’s songs. The dark characterization of Aqualung himself—a creepy,
homeless pedophile—highlights the dangers and sexual profligacy of the city.
Aqualung, the character, never speaks a word, but his pedophilic intentions
26 Plant’s testimony also ties this remote vision of Britain to mythology and
medieval imaginings, which will be further discussed in the following section;
see ‘Read Robert Plant’s Testimony at Led Zeppelin “Stairway to Heaven” Trial’,
The Rolling Stone, 16 August 2016, http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/
read-robert-plants-testimony-at-led-zeppelin-stairway-to-heaven-trial-w434372.
27 Jethro Tull, Jethro Tull: 25th Anniversary Box Set, Chrysalis CDCHR 6004 (1993),
CD. In the album’s liner notes the novelist Craig Thomas describes the contrasting
sounds heard in the title song as ‘blues-hard rock declamation’ and ‘lyrical-folk intro-
spection’. He interprets this opposition as ‘the clash between the individual and soci-
ety, between the rural and urban worlds, between happiness (however qualified) and
disillusion’, and views it as ‘the archetypal tension of so many songs by the band’.

(‘eyeing little girls with bad intent’) and poor hygiene (‘snot dripping down
his nose, greasy fingers smearing shabby clothes’) are explicit. Further, his
name alludes to an underwater breathing device, and is derived from the
sound of his labored breaths (‘and you snatch your rattling last breaths with
deep sea diver sounds’). His asthmatic symptoms can be reasonably inferred
to stem from urban pollutants such as smog or cigarettes. Both Aqualung and
Cross-Eyed Mary (the eponymous character of the album’s second track) are
found in this same, polluted space—far away from nature. As the English
writer Alan Moore puts it:
Anderson places us firmly in North London, a London beneath a cold sun, by

an urban playground . . . this situates us firmly in contemporary England—
no exoticism, no fantasy, but a rather dirty reality . . . Dirty, because there is a
strong under-current of child molestation here—not only in the description of
Aqualung, but Mary seems to have spent her lunch-hour undergoing a back-
street abortion, hence her lift back with the ‘jack-knife barber’.28
By setting both songs in the same location, Jethro Tull presents the con-
temporary urban environment as a place of danger and disgust. Mary’s cross-
eyedness (whether literal or not) implies an inability to see things as they
really are, because the realities are too horrifying. Aqualung’s lyrics critique the
present day. This critique is supported through the pastoral allusions intro-
duced by the acoustic guitars, recorders, and other instruments more com-
monly associated with the folk-rock movement than hard rock. Further,
the nostalgic desire for a simpler time is implied through the tone of songs
like ‘Mother Goose’ or ‘Wond’ring Aloud’. Even ‘Aqualung’ uses imagery of
nature (‘sun streaking cold’; ‘do you remember December’s icy freeze?’) to
reveal a softer side of Aqualung’s world. The flowers contrast with the bitter
cold of winter, felt especially by the homeless people wandering the empty
city streets, while the bog becomes a place of refuge for the man’s aching feet.
Although these references to nature may seem subtle in comparison to those
found on Led Zeppelin IV, they are indicative of a growing trend in the band’s
repertoire to turn toward an idealized image of pastoral England and the past,
to be epitomized later in their 1976 album Songs from the Wood. In 1971, how-
ever, the band was only beginning their pastoral turn, implying nostalgia pri-
marily through a powerful critique of the contemporary urban world.
If Led Zeppelin roots its nostalgia in the past and Jethro Tull in depic-
tions of the present, The Who paradoxically finds its nostalgic imaginings
in the future. Although the songs do not play with contrasting sonic spaces
to the same extent as the other albums, the lyrics idealize the outdoors. The
music of this album was originally conceived as part of the concert-film
28 Allan F. Moore, Jethro Tull’s Aqualung (New York, 2004), p. 26.

project Lifehouse. In an interview for Crawdaddy in 1971, Pete Townshend

explains the film’s premise:
Basically what happens in the film script . . . It’s an age when overpopulation
and pollution and all that kind of stuff has forced man into a totally artificial
existence. He lives out his experience in his life in a cocoon—it’s a very stock
science fiction idea called an experience suit. You put on a suit and you live
programs, if you like, for your experience.29
Of the nine songs on the album, eight relate directly to the abandoned film
project, with several of them using language that idealizes nature and the out-
doors amid the devastation of a post-apocalyptic world.30 The open-air space
of the future, like that of the idealized past, provides a view of the outdoors as
a place of freedom and escape—a major theme in the songs, connecting back
to the Lifehouse premise of humans living in constricting experience suits
controlled by a dictatorial figure. The idea of freedom of life on the earth’s sur-
face is present from the opening lines of the album’s first song, ‘Baba O’Riley’:
‘Out here in the fields, I fight for my meals!’ While the speaker has to fight for
his livelihood, this fight seems preferable to the alternative—an inauthentic,
artificial existence, living out one’s life in the bubble of a futuristic experience
suit (which has essentially become the new city). The protagonist of the film
script is a farmer living in Scotland named Ray. In the story, he and his wife,
Sally, travel to London to participate in an open-air music festival, Lifehouse.
The lyrics ‘Sally, take my hand, travel south cross land’ and ‘the exodus is here’,
from ‘Baba O’Riley’, and the entire premise of ‘Goin’ Mobile’ express the free-
dom sought in this exodus. ‘Goin’ Mobile’ ends with the lines:
I don’t care about pollution

I’m an air-conditioned gypsy
That’s my solution
Watch the police and the tax man miss me
I’m mobile31
The need for mobility expressed in these lyrics contrasts an imagined free-
dom of movement with the limited personal space of an experience suit. This
mobility is both spatial (the protagonist physically travels across Britain) and
29 John Swenson, ‘The Who Puts the Bomp or They Won’t Get Fooled Again’,
Crawdaddy 5 (December 1971), 30.
30 Written by the bassist John Entwistle, the song ‘My Wife’ was not intended for
the Lifehouse project. Of the others, ‘Baba O’Riley’, ‘Love Ain’t For Keeping’, and
‘The Song Is Over’ idealize nature and the outdoors, while ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’
and ‘Goin’ Mobile’ offer a sense of rebellion against modernization’s claustrophobic
dominance.
31 The Who, Who’s Next, Decca (1971), LP.

temporal (the journey represents a turn toward past values of human inter-
action and simplicity). Still, The Who finds ‘authenticity’ in this (relatively)
natural environment. It is a world in ruins, but still preferable to the sani-
tized, simulated existence to be had in the technologically advanced experi-
ence suits. Furthermore, the journey across this wasteland is a pilgrimage to
find an ‘authentic’ life in another setting—the live-music experience of the
outdoor festival.
To be sure, violence and commercial corruption had tainted the utopian
ideals of the outdoor festival by 1970. In 1971 society may have been only a
year into the 1970s, but it was conceptually a different era from the utopian
open-air festivals of the 1960s. By using a representation of the future as a
means of exploiting historical nostalgia, The Who expresses optimism amid
fears about Britain’s future; while technological progress hinders the human
expression in the post-apocalyptic Lifehouse, those characters who challenge
the status quo find ecstatic freedom and creativity in reconnecting with nature.
Overall, the three albums portray the contrast between urban and natural
landscapes, through a nostalgic reflection on the past rooted in an affinity
for the British countryside. In doing so, they look to a future that draws on
these idealized visions without abandoning all contemporary developments.
However, the imaginings of the natural world are only one expression of nos-
talgia and neo-romantic visions of the past, which also take hold in a height-
ened interest in medieval and mythological topics at the onset of the new
decade.
Mythology, Medievalism, and British Heritage
If the nostalgia of the early 1970s was grounded in an image of the unspoiled
British countryside, it was a setting derived from several generations of fan-
tasy and pseudo-historical imaginings.32 Nostalgic visions of rural Britain
had long looked to a past seen as mythological, magical, and medieval. The
Celtic world, especially, is often depicted as a ‘world before time, inhabited
by supernatural creatures, power and heroes, fabulous myths and legends’.33
Further, imaginings of medieval material encompass a wide spectrum of
32 Each chapter in Norman Cantor’s monograph, Inventing the Middle Ages, provides
a history of a different vision of the Middle Ages that was developed in the twentieth
century, and explores the reverberating effects of each of those visions on later fan-
tasies of the medieval period. See Norman F. Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages: The
Lives, Works, and Ideas of the Great Medievalists of the Twentieth Century (New York,
1991).
33 Veronica Ortenberg West-Harling, ‘Medievalism as Fun and Games’, Defining
Medievalism(s) II, ed. Karl Fugelso, Studies in Medievalism 18 (Cambridge, 2009), p.

1.

referential materials and creative works, such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the
Rings or Disney’s Fantasyland.34 Just as the term ‘medievalism’ encompasses a
broad range of creative practices, so its use in 1970s British rock music draws
upon an eclectic array of source material. Embracing the Middle Ages as a
pretext, according to Umberto Eco, allows musicians to use them ‘as a sort of
mythological stage on which to place contemporary characters’.35
To varying degrees, the three albums, in both their visual and sonic art,
imagine the medieval world and create a metaphorical stage through which
each band can play out their fantasies.36 By submitting to spatial and tempo-
ral mobility provided by practices of nostalgia, specifically to medievalism and
fantasy, these musicians were able to find a creative playspace in which they
could contemplate real-life cultural and societal issues. In Led Zeppelin IV,
symbolic figures from several sources intertwine to create an aura of fantasy
and mysticism. The whole inside cover shows a pencil illustration, titled The
Hermit, by Page’s friend Barrington Colby. It is printed vertically across the
fold.37 Page explains it as follows: ‘It actually comes from the idea from the
tarot card of the Hermit, and so the ascension to the beacon and the light of
truth.’38 Page’s interpretation of the hermit as a transcendental figure likely
came from his familiarity with Aleister Crowley’s writings on tarot. In his
Book of Thoth, Crowley describes the hermit card as follows:
34 See Upton, ‘Concepts of Authenticity in Early Music and Popular Music

Communities’.
35 Eco, ‘Dreaming of the Middle Ages’, p. 68. This is also clearly visible in Led
Zeppelin’s stage shows, where one could find Jimmy Page waving a violin bow in the
air as a metaphorical wand, casting a spell on his audience through both the physical
gesture of the raised bow and the unearthly sound it creates when shredding across the
strings of an electric guitar.
36 The video-game designer Brian Upton defines play as ‘free movement within a
system of constraints’. For rock musicians, the technological limitations of the physical
album, as well as stylistic and genre expectations for the music, provide some of these
constraints. Brian Upton, The Aesthetics of Play (Cambridge, 2015), p. 15.
37 Both Barney Hoskyns and Erik Davis recognize ‘View in Half or Varying Light’
as an alternative title. The hermit figure also connects back to the old man on the front
cover. Both images depict an elderly man holding a walking stick and, through the
context of their placement, revere these men as sources of wisdom that has been lost
to modernization; see Hoskyns, Led Zeppelin IV (New York, 2006), p. 129; and Erik
Davis, [Led Zeppelin IV] (New York, 2005), p. 36.
38 Hoskyns, Led Zeppelin IV, p. 129. Helen Farley traces the Hermit’s symbolic ori-
gins to Renaissance tarot packs under the alternative titles of il Vecchio (Old Man),
il Gobbo (The Hunchback), or il Tempo (Time), and argues that the personification
of time as an old man is likely one of the card’s earliest origins; see Helen Farley, A
Cultural History of the Tarot: From Entertainment to Esotericism (London, 2009), p. 68.

Wander alone; bearing the light and thy staff. And be the light so bright that
no man seeth thee. Be not moved by aught without or within: Keep silence in
all ways. Illumination from within, secret impulse from within; practical plans
derived accordingly. Retirement from participation in current events.39
Crowley’s writings on tarot and the occult grew out of a surge of medi-
evalism in England in the Victorian era. The neo-romantic revival of medi-
evalism by musicians of the late 1960s and the 1970s draws on the writings
of their Victorian predecessors. Further, the image is clearly modeled on the
Hermit card from a popular 1910 tarot deck designed by Pamela Colman
Smith.40 By using an image from a tarot card, Zeppelin looks back through
several layers of pastness (early twentieth century, Victorian, and medieval)
to an understanding of the world that goes beyond the rationality of postwar
twentieth-century thought. In doing so, the band embraces the cards’ divina-
tion connotations in its quest for a pure and enlightened existence.
The inside sleeve maintains the mysticism projected by the Hermit image
through the juxtaposition of symbols from several different origins. The front
of the sleeve displays the lyrics of the song ‘Stairway to Heaven’. At the
request of Page, Colby designed the font for the inside sleeve in a style similar
to one Page had found in ‘an old back issue of the Victorian arts and crafts
magazine Studio’.41 Four symbols on the top of the page each represent a dif-
ferent band member. A fifth symbol can be found further down on the sleeve
next to the name and appearance information of Sandy Denny, lead singer for
the folk-rock band Fairport Convention.
It was Page who had the idea of a symbolic representation of each band
member. He designed the first symbol himself and suggested Rudolf Koch’s
The Book of Signs to John Paul Jones and John Bonham for finding their signs,
which are placed consecutively after Page’s.42 Jones’ sign is described as one of
‘two signs used to exorcise evil spirits’.43 This reference to the occult relies on
nontraditional modes of understanding reality and harks back in imagination
39 Aleister Crowley, The Book of Toth: A Short Essay on the Tarot of the Egyptians
(London, 1944), p. 257.
40 George Case writes that in 2007 Page also connected the image to an 1845 paint-
ing of Christ holding a lamp-light, The Light of the World, by William Holman Hunt;
see Case, Led Zeppelin FAQ, p. 215.
41 Martin Power, No Quarter: The Three Lives of Jimmy Page (London, 2016).
42 Rudolf Koch, The Book of Signs: 493 Symbols Used from Earliest Times to the Middle
Ages by Primitive Peoples and Early Christians [1930], repr. edn (New York, 1955).
Although it is tempting to assign significance to these choices, it is likely that they
were somewhat superficial decisions. For instance, Bonham’s symbol appears on the
page opposite Jones’s symbol in Koch’s book, indicating that they may have merely
glanced at a few pages rather than searching the book thoroughly.
43 Ibid., p. 33.

to a time in which the occult could explain the world as easily (or subjectively
better) than science. Bonham’s symbol also looks toward prescientific thought
and, according to Koch’s book, is an ‘early sign’ for the Trinity:
Each circle has its own center and is therefore complete in itself; at the same
time it has a large section in common with each of the other circles, though
only the small central shield is covered by all three circles. In this shield they
possess a new central point, the real heart of the whole figure.44
A Christian understanding of the Trinity requires believers to accept that

God is simultaneously both tripartite and one. Such a concept defies ratio-
nality, exemplifying a belief system that scientific and technological progress
cannot explain. While this symbol has religious origins, in Page’s view it rep-
resents a man, woman, and child and relates to ‘the mainstay of all people’s
belief ’.45 Similarly, Robert Plant saw a range of meaning in his, the fourth,
symbol, stating: ‘My choice involved the feather—a symbol on which all phi-
losophies have been based. For instance, it represents courage to many Indian
tribes.’46 In addition to referring to the natural world, the feather and its sym-
bolic connotations rely on ideas outside Western culture, fixing on a perceived
‘purity’ of Native Americans. In doing so, Plant searches for wisdom in the
ideas of people whom he thought potentially had a closer connection with the
natural and spiritual realms of being.
As a group, the symbols project both mystery and mysticism, directing
their audience toward more ancient ways of understanding the world. Even
without the (personal) associations, the four symbols correspond with the rest
of the cover art to contribute to the mysterious tone of the album and to
generate a creative space for nostalgic imaginings. This diversity of symbolic
meaning ultimately creates a sense of timelessness, which Boym describes as
an escape from the feeling of being ‘stifled within the conventional confines of
time and space’.47 This kind of nostalgia suggests dissatisfaction with present
modes of creating meaning while offering the individual a variety of means by
which to reconceptualize one’s identity and its relationship to the past.
44 Ibid., p. 32.
45 Hoskyns seems to draw from his personal archive of interview materials (likely
from his previous work as a writer for NME and Melody Maker) for this particular
quote; see Hoskyns, Led Zeppelin IV, p. 127.
46 David Lewis, Led Zeppelin: The Tight But Loose Files—Celebration II (London,
2003), p. 25. This anthology of resources on the band and its history provides the
earliest documentation of this quote. Having been editor and chief of Tight But Loose
Magazine, Lewis draws on resources from previous editions of the magazine as well
as his own files of exclusive interviews. Unfortunately, his 2003 book does not provide
any additional information on the origins of this specific quote.
47 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, p. xiv.

In contrast to Led Zeppelin IV’s eclectic array of mythological symbols and

gestures, Aqualung’s critique of contemporary society uses specific appropria-
tions of Christian references. The album extends its critique to the perceived
hypocrisy of organized religion, thus adding to a complex vision of pastness
in the present. The font used on the cover of Aqualung, like that found on the
inside sleeve of Led Zeppelin IV, suggests several layers of pastness by resem-
bling the Gothic lettering of a medieval Bible; the font looks to a specific
historical moment, while the written form of the Bible itself dates as far back
as the fifth century ce and chronicles stories from throughout human history.
The evocation of the Bible is deepened through a parody of Genesis 1 printed
on the back cover. This parody is the listener’s first introduction to a rather
piquant critique of organized religion on the tracks of the album’s second half.
The irony of the role reversal in Genesis—of man creating God and using
his God to suppress other, ‘lesser men’—is further developed in the two-part
structure of the album’s musical material. The first half of the album intro-
duces a litany of strange characters, like Aqualung and Cross-Eyed Mary,
who are reviled and pitied by society. Only after considering these charac-
ters’ humanity does the album dive into its powerful religious critique, driv-
ing home the message proclaimed on the album’s back cover. The medieval
church serves as the playground for the creative manifestation of this critique.
The cover ultimately invites us to recognize the album’s deep connections to
a medieval past and its desire to irreverently appropriate this past for a new
conception of the present and future, a present and future that together indict
humanity for its injustices while empowering humankind to use their ‘rule
over all the earth’ to do something better.
The artwork on the inside fold depicts the band in a scene of wild revelry
inside a gothic church. The band’s front man, Ian Anderson, appears dressed
in a white peasant top and boots, a popular medievalism of the late 1960s
and 1970s; he irreverently swings a thurible above his head. The keyboardist,
John Evan, is depicted playing the organ in his signature white suit. The band
members are being contextualized in an imagined gothic framework—in a
church whose architecture points to the Middle Ages while also serving as
the contemporary recording space for the album. Poignantly, the album was
recorded in Island Studios’ new recording spaces in a converted gothic church
on Basing Street in London.
While the cover art for Who’s Next does not use overt medievalisms, the
simultaneous temporalities expressed on the cover indirectly relate to myth-
ological roots of the apocalypse. The dystopian future of the abandoned
Lifehouse script exists simultaneously with the present space depicted in the
album’s cover art; the desolate rubble surrounding the band members points
to an apocalyptic vision of the future. There is something ‘medieval’ about the
end of the world, its superstition, its signs; or as Eco names the tenth of his

‘Little Middle Ages’, the expectation of the millennium.48 In this light, the
historian Kirsten Barndt’s theoretical examination of temporality in regard to
post-World War II industrial history is strikingly applicable to the cover art
for Who’s Next, in which ‘formerly industrial landscapes now seem suspended
in time or even thrown into reverse: framed by nature and drawing on the
aesthetics of ruin, the remnants of recent economic progress and decline fall
back in time and are rendered instantly ancient in their resemblance to past
ruins’.49 The futuristic post-apocalyptic ruins of Lifehouse implied by the cover
photo are viewed as a recent past, while, at the same time, existing in the real-
ity of the present space.
Medievalism, mythology, and references to English heritage are also pres-
ent in the lyrics and music of these albums. For example, deliberate refer-
ences to fantasy and pastoral imagery from J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings
abound in the lyrics for Led Zeppelin’s ‘Battle of Evermore’. The song fea-
tures the mandolin in a starring role, supported by an acoustic guitar; while it
was a common instrument in folk-rock recordings of this period, the mando-
lin was a highly unusual choice for a hard-rock band. Additionally, the track
employs the only female voice heard on the album, that of the aforemen-
tioned Sandy Denny. In a 1977 interview with Dave Schulps of Trouser Press,
Page explains that the song ‘sounded like an old English instrumental first
off. Then it became a vocal and Robert did his bit. Finally we figured we’d
bring Sandy by and do a question-and-answer-type thing.’50 The timbres of
the acoustic guitar, female voice, and mandolin mark a dramatic shift from
the band’s usual sound. The instrumentation creates a sonic space of mythical
and fantastical aesthetics, providing the framework for the imaginative play-
ground of the lyrics, an excursion into the fantasy world of Tolkien’s trilogy.51
Many fan sites and books about Led Zeppelin passionately contend that the
song’s lyrics refer to the Battle of the Pelennor Fields from The Return of the
King, the third and final volume of Tolkien’s trilogy.52 A common interpreta-
tion reads Tolkien’s Aragorn as Led Zepplin’s ‘prince of peace’, Eowyn as ‘the
queen of light’, and Sauron as ‘the dark lord’. Tolkien’s Ringwraiths (servants
of Sauron who ‘ride in black’) are mentioned by name in Led Zepplin’s lyrics.
48 Eco, ‘Dreaming of the Middle Ages’, p. 72.

49 Kerstin Barndt, ‘Layers of Time: Industrial Ruins and Exhibitionary Temporalities’,
PMLA 125, no. 1 ( January 2010), 138.
50 David Schulps, ‘Jimmy Page: The Yard Birds Era’, Trouser Press 22 (October 1977).
51 Although The Lord of the Rings was originally published in the 1950s, it was reis-
sued in paperback in the 1960s, making it readily available to a new generation of fans.
52 I have yet to find a direct statement from the band members about what the lyr-
ics mean, but Hoskyns supports this popular fan interpretation; see Hoskyns, Led
Zeppelin IV, p. 84.

Additionally, the lyrics carry Christian connotations (i.e., ‘prince of peace’)

and references to Arthurian mythology (i.e., ‘angels of Avalon’, traditionally
the burial place of King Arthur).53 In adding these concepts, the band does
not simply make reference to extra-musical sources, but actually participates
in a dramatization of Tolkien’s fantasy world.
The album’s most iconic song, ‘Stairway to Heaven’, uses instrumentation
to create an ethereal, fantasy-world sound. As Page puts it: ‘It’s . . . incredibly
English. It sounds almost medieval. At times it sounds like, you know, you
want to have swirling mists.’54 Page’s description of the music as ‘medieval’
is likely an ahistorical description, tied to the use of recorders in the opening
measures.55 However, rather than indicating some specific historical period,
listeners receive a ‘general sense of a premodern “before now”’, leaving them
with a nostalgic feeling that offers space for personal reflection and inter-
pretation.56 The acoustic guitar introduction layers an ascending melodic line
arching over the midpoint of the phrase, creating a musical ‘stairway’ against
the descending chromatic (lament) bass line. The Dorian melody, implied
through emphasis on the lowered seventh at the end of key phrases (such
as ‘and she’s buying a stairway to heaven’) hints at older, pre-tonal conven-
tions. Simultaneously, the harmonic structure of the song employs more func-
tional tonal harmony in the key of A minor, striking a balance between older
and contemporary musical practices.57 Additionally, the reverb effect in the
53 Avalon as the burial place of Arthur is first mentioned in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s

twelfth-century History of the Kings of Britain. Geoffrey of Monmouth, The History of
the Kings of Britain, trans. Lewis Thorp, repr. edn (Harmondsworth, 1984).
54 Hoskyns seems to draw from his personal archive of interview materials (likely
from his previous work as a writer for NME and Melody Maker) for this particular
quote; see Hoskyns, Led Zeppelin IV, p. 97.
55 Page likely uses ‘medieval’ as a vague description of music from a more distant
past. Susan Fast, in contrast, attempts to tie the band’s efforts to a specific historical
moment, noting that as ‘a trained musicologist with a fairly good grasp of historical
styles of Western music, I hear traces of sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century Tudor
music in the opening of “Stairway to Heaven”, and this situates it not it mythological
time but in a particular historical moment.’ She cites the timbre of the recorder as one
of these specific elements; see Susan Fast, In the Houses of the Holy: Led Zeppelin and
the Power of Rock Music (New York, 2001), p. 67. However, neither the members of
Led Zeppelin nor their audiences would have been concerned with historical speci-
ficity. Instead, the recorders offer a sense of timelessness. The non-specificity of the
past implied by these musicians is a common and important characteristic of popular
medievalism.
56 Upton, ‘Concepts of Authenticity in Early Music and Popular Music
Communities’.
57 I am grateful to Elizabeth Upton for her insight on the effect of the modal melody
in this song.

recording gives an atmospheric suggestion of space, which brings to mind the

large resonant space of a church. The lyrics for ‘Stairway to Heaven’ further
contribute to the medievalism and mythology of the piece. The musicologist
Robert Walser divides the lyrics and its imagery into the following categories:
We encounter a number of mysterious figures: a lady, the piper, the May

Queen. Images of nature abound: a brook, a songbird, rings of smoke, trees,
forests, a hedgerow, wind. We find a set of concepts (pretty much summing up
the central concerns of philosophy): signs, words, meanings, thoughts, feelings,
spirit, reason, wonder, soul, the idea that ‘all are one and one is all’. We find a
set of vaguely but powerfully evocative symbols: gold, the west, the tune, white
light, shadows, paths, a road, and the stairway to heaven itself. At the very end,
we find some paradoxical self-referentiality: ‘to be a rock and not to roll’.58
Walser’s categories help us understand the wide range of symbols found in the
song, which ultimately work together to create a mythical, gothic, ‘English’
space. As Plant reflects over forty years later, in the 2016 copyright trial
regarding the song ‘Stairway to Heaven’, the British, pastoral setting of the
song arises from ‘the old, almost unspoken Celtic references into the piece’.59
Similar to many other creative works drawing on medievalism, the song does
not rely on historical accuracy of the references or even their individual sym-
bolism. Instead, it derives its overall meaning from their interaction with one
another. Together they create a mystical, imaginative space that is both pasto-
ral and temporally distant.
The piecing together of various mystical imaginings is also manifest on the
acoustic tracks of Aqualung, though it is used more sparingly. ‘Mother Goose’
is the most overt example. Anderson intended it to be a ‘surrealist pastiche
with summery motives’ of fairy tale (and faux-fairy tale) characters.60 The
song title brings to mind the Robert Samber’s popular eighteenth-century
translations of the Mother Goose fairy tales, and, by association, the tradition
of fables and nursery rhymes of Britain’s literary history. The nostalgic back-
drop of fairytale characters and childhood innocence are juxtaposed against
the darker reality of concealed identities and sexual innuendo, dark because of
the undertones of child molestation implied in the lyrics earlier in the album.
Anderson describes these characters as caricatures of people he saw and met
around Hampstead Heath (Mother Goose, Bearded Lady, Long John Silver,
Johnny Scarecrow, etc.).61 The imagery satirizes the diverse individuals who
make up contemporary society, while at the same time highlighting their
inability to see one another’s true identity.
58 Walser, Running with the Devil, p. 159.

59 ‘Read Robert Plant’s Testimony’.
60 Moore, Jethro Tull’s Aqualung, p. 42.
61 See ibid., pp. 40–1.

Like Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’, ‘Mother Goose’ also makes use
of recorders. In an interview included as the final track on the twenty-fifth-
anniversary release of Aqualung, Anderson describes the recorders for Tull’s
tracks as ‘weird, genuine, Yamaha, plastic, school recorders’. Although he does
not remember exactly what kind of instrument they used for the recording,
he acknowledges that they were ‘things we bought in the local school supply
shop . . . little plastic-y things’.62 As with Led Zeppelin, Anderson was less
concerned with the historical accuracy of any temporal associations with the
instrument or its sound than with the interesting acoustic ‘bit of color’ the
recorders added.63 Anderson also ponders the personal nostalgic associations
of the school recorder for musicians (and listeners) at the time, reflecting that
the recorder was ‘for many people, their first shot at playing a musical instru-
ment . . . picking up the “school recorder” and having a go’.64 In this way, per-
sonal nostalgia acts as a catalyst for the social critique of the piece. The music
and lyrics allow the listener to reminisce on the perceived simplicity of child-
hood that parallels the more historical nostalgia found in the broader cultural
trend of the time.
Just as memories of childhood favor an idealized recollection of the inno-
cence and peace of one’s own past, the historical nostalgia of British society
in the 1970s romanticized the pastoral ‘simplicity’ of a pre-Enlightenment
past. The cultural historian Robert Hewison expresses a similar observation in
his study of the commodification of nostalgia and British heritage, explaining
that ‘Nostalgia is felt most strongly at a time of discontent, anxiety, or disap-
pointment, yet the times for which we feel nostalgia most keenly were often
themselves periods of disturbance.’65 In 1971 British society was searching
for answers to the economic, political, and cultural questions of the times.
Through a historical nostalgia rooted in familiar images of British mythology
and symbolism, these two albums brought forward a hope for the future made
believable through idealized memories of different pasts.
Who’s Next takes a more indirect approach to mysticism and medievalism,
especially in comparison with the more overt examples found in Led Zeppelin
IV and Aqualung. Sonically, the band closely adheres to their standard elec-
trified instrumentation and sophisticated recording methods. And yet,
Townshend verbally rejects overly complicated musical technologies, speak-
ing in a contemporaneous interview with Steve Turner of Beat Instrumental
62 John Bungey and Ian Anderson, ‘Ian Anderson Interview’, Aqualung (Bonus Track
Version), Parlophone Records Ltd (1996), http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/aqua-
lung-bonus-track-version/id726371044 (accessed 14 June 2016).
63 Ibid.
64 Ibid.
65 Robert Hewison, The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline (London,
1987), p. 45.

in December 1971: ‘The technology is beginning to overtake the musician . . .

The infinite possibilities presented by technologies makes me want to capture
the present in a far more simple way.’66 Closer examination of Townshend’s
songs written during this period, as well as his spiritual and musical influ-
ences, reveals the type of simplicity to which he is referring.
The opening track for Who’s Next, ‘Baba O’Riley’, relies heavily upon the
synthesizer; in fact, Townshend indicates in a 1971 Melody Maker interview
that the instrument would have provided the backbone for the Lifehouse proj-
ect, had it been completed. Referring to ‘Baba O’Riley’, Townshend shares
that ‘This is the way we expected most of the music in the film to sound . . .
because we have a pre-recorded tape of the synthesizer in the background.’67
However complicated and futuristic the technology needed for the film proj-
ect would have been, the musical composition relies upon the avant-garde
movement of minimalism. The song title combines the names of two of
Townshend’s influences of the time: The Californian minimalist composer
Terry Riley, and the Indian spiritual leader Meher Baba. Both Riley’s music
and Baba’s teachings focus on concepts of simplicity and reduction. Riley’s
1969 minimalist album, A Rainbow in Curved Air, as well as his 1964 compo-
sition In C were favorites of Townshend’s and bare a remarkable resemblance
to the underlying keyboard motif in ‘Baba O’Riley’. Meher Baba’s philoso-
phies were a major part of Townshend’s work in the interim period between
Tommy and Who’s Next.68
Baba’s concepts of simplicity and the illusion of reality are similar to the
rejection of artificial living expressed in the Lifehouse plot. Moreover, just as
Townshend drew on an eclectic range of science-fiction source material for
Lifehouse, so the mysticism in the plot (and, consequently, in the songs on
Who’s Next that were written for the film project) draws from a wide range
of Eastern philosophical and spiritual ideas. For example, at a press confer-
ence at the Young Vic Theatre in Waterloo, on 13 January 1971, Townshend
announced:
We shall not be giving the usual kind of Who rock show. The audience will be
completely involved in the music, which is designed to reflect people’s person-
alities. Each participant is both blueprint and inspiration for a unique piece of
66 Steve Turner, ‘Pete Townshend: Genius of the Simple’, Beat Instrumental 104
(December 1971).
67 Quoted after Unterberger, Won’t Get Fooled Again, pp. 64–5. Unterberg indicates
that the quote comes from ‘Pete’s track-by-track description of Who’s Next’ in the 17
July 1971 issue of Melody Maker.
68 Interestingly, Townshend’s major project between Tommy and Lifehouse / Who’s
Next was an LP entitled Happy Birthday in honor of what would have been Meher
Baba’s seventy-sixth birthday (however, it ended up marking the first anniversary of
his death); see ibid., pp. 56–7.

music or song. We shall try to induce mental and spiritual harmony through
the medium of rock music.69
The concept of a unifying spiritual, musical pitch forms the basis for the cli-
max of the film—a moment of transcendence experienced during the live
open-air concert. In a 1970 essay for Melody Maker, Townshend explains his
burgeoning personal philosophy of musical spirituality, which seems to stem
from the teachings of Inayat Khan: ‘There’s a note, a musical note, that builds
the basis of existence somehow. Mystics would agree, saying that of course it
is OM, but I am talking about a MUSICAL note.’70 Songs such as ‘Getting
in Tune’ reference Townshend’s ideas regarding spiritual harmony as the lyr-
ics describe ‘getting in tune’ with emotional and physical states, as well as an
eternal note—‘the simple secret of the note in us all’.
Although Who’s Next takes a futuristic approach to its critique of
unchecked progress, environmental degradation, and the decline of human
interaction, the science-fiction fantasy relies on philosophical values from
a more distant past—the same past ideals promoted in the imaginings of
Aqualung and Led Zeppelin IV. Using a range of multimedia approaches, Led
Zeppelin, The Who, and Jethro Tull all explore contrasting playgrounds of
temporal and spatial possibilities in their albums. They express a romanticized
vision of the past; however, each album centers on a different temporal space
to create a nostalgic and mystical tone that looks toward a vision of a less
rational, less industrialized past.
Where Past, Present, and Future Collide:

Grappling with Changing Times
The three pivotal albums of British rock music in 1971 all embody layers of
time, but each emphasizes a different temporal space within its larger time-
frame: Led Zeppelin focuses on the past, Jethro Tull on the present, and The
Who on the future. But in doing so, they employ similar means. Within their
differing temporal foci they draw on urban or social criticism, pastoral imag-
ery, and medievalism to explore other issues as well. The various manifesta-
tions of time in these three albums express the vision of a new generation
of young adults—both performers and audiences—who turn to nostalgia for
what Boym has described as ‘a zone of stability and normativity in the current
69 Andrew Neill and Matthew Kent, Anyway, Anyhow, Anywhere: The Complete
Chronicle of The Who, 1958–1978 (New York: Sterling, 2009), p. 196.
70 Pete Townshend, ‘Another Fight in the Playground’, Melody Maker (19 September
1970), 19; see also Unterberger, Won’t Get Fooled Again, pp. 44–5.

of change that characterizes modern life’.71 Facing an uncertain and unstable

future, the albums represent this generation at the start of the 1970s, look-
ing back to the past as a source of truth and ‘authenticity’ and as a time that
valued the simplicity of the natural world. But the pasts prevalent in these
albums are also diverse and layered. They are often ambiguous and ahistorical.
They are clearly imagined and idealized. The ambiguity of temporality’s past
allows for diverse interpretations by the listener—in turn these are likely to
be powerfully authentic and meaningful to the interpreter.72 Indeed, nostalgic
imaginings like those in these three albums, as carriers of cultural memory, are
reliant on individual interpretation of shared frameworks and meanings. The
paths of both creation and interpretation are varied, and yet they all lead to a
similar critique of society and a concern over the price of unchecked progress
and advancement.
As Boym argues, ‘nostalgia is a rebellion against the modern idea of time,
the time of history and progress’.73 Indeed, the nostalgia expressed in these
albums looks to a ‘time out of a time’, in which pseudo-historical fantasies
mingle with mystical symbolisms and even futuristic, science-fiction visions.
This nostalgia is not only temporal, it is also spatial. The heavy electric blues
of the American South intertwine with pastoral fantasies of remote Britain in
Led Zeppelin IV, while the dark underground of contemporary London is jux-
taposed with gothic medievalisms of the Christian church in Aqualung. Even
Who’s Next, built upon futuristic visions of a post-apocalyptic world, looks to
an idealized perception of the outdoor music festival. And yet, The Who’s
natural world is still polluted and corrupt. In many ways, this futuristic depic-
tion of the outdoors is similar to Anderson’s dirty and dangerous London.
The contradiction and instability of these visions ultimately poses ‘some of
the necessary questions . . . even if it didn’t provide any real answers’.74 The
albums’ critiques develop in the tension between these opposing times and
spaces, and reflect the complex, if not uncertain, relationship between this
new generation and their vision of a better future.
Faced with disappointment as the utopian visions imagined in the 1960s
failed, young adults in 1971 stood at the beginning of a new decade, with new
politics, economic instabilities, and societal concerns creating uncertainty for
71 Boym traces this idea back to Maurice Halbwachs; see Boym, The Future of
Nostalgia, p. 54.
72 See also Louise M. Rosenblatt, The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional
Theory of the Literary World, rev. edn (Carbondale, IL, 1994). Louise Rosenblatt
outlines the stages of reader responses to a literary text. Much of this interpretative
response can be applied to how listeners and fans would response to musical works.
73 Ibid., p. xv.
74 Moore, Jethro Tull’s Aqualung, p. 1. Although Moore wrote specifically about
Aqualung, his statement holds true for the other albums as well.

their future. These three albums participate in this moment, and show a gen-
eration of British youth attempting to navigate their uncertain present and
future by looking to romanticized visions of the past for inspiration. Made
cautious by the overly zealous idealism of the previous decade, this new gen-
eration embraced a more tempered vision of the future—one that could move
beyond the limitations of archaic ideas of religion and traditional lifestyles,
and yet still retain the values of spiritual and communal unity which they
found in romanticized past imaginings.

11
Indie Neofado’s Temporality:

A Tale of Two Nostalgias
Michael Arnold
During the summer of 2008, while strolling the streets of Lisbon, I searched
every single indie record shop in the city to purchase as many Portuguese
albums as I could find.1 But with the exception of one store, all had only
shelves of the hottest international (that is Anglophone) indie bands fashion-
able at the time. There was hardly any album by a local band. Indie record
shops in the trendy Bairro Alto neighborhood had approximately the same
selection as any hip record shop in my hometown of Minneapolis. The
only difference between record stores such as Discolecção and Treehouse
Records was that the latter offered a large section of locally produced albums.
Perplexed by this lack of local representation in Lisbon’s record shops, I used
the Myspace.com events calendar to find some live local indie rock shows.
The relative paucity of indie music events during July and August 2008 was
not as surprising as what I encountered at the events themselves: a continuous
stream of the ubiquitous international indie sounds in vogue at that moment:
soft-core singer-songwriter tunes in the vein of Bon Iver, the hard-rock and
1 The term ‘indie rock’ is very vague and encompasses a vast field of affinity groups
and even splinter groups within those groups. Indie was at one point nearly synon-
ymous with ‘underground’. Both can be traced back to the same musical ancestors,
most notably the group The Velvet Underground. ‘Indie’ developed as a generic indi-
cator out of the independent underground (mostly Anglophone) music scene during
the 1970s and 1980s. After the rampant success of the Aberdeen-based grunge band
Nirvana’s first major label release Nevermind (1991) with DGC Records, other major
labels scrambled to cash in on what was also known as ‘alternative’, ‘progressive’, or
‘modern’ rock. The co-option and commercialization of indie bands by major labels
involved a major label buying the contract of a band from an indie label or buying
the entire label outright. Indie rock became a catch-all term for more visible, yet still
non-mainstream, rock, and nearly all rock that could be found on ever-larger indepen-
dent record labels and indie subsidiaries of the majors. For more information on indie
definitions and this era of indie-rock rupture, see Wendy Fonarow, Empire of Dirt:
The Aesthetics and Rituals of British Indie Music (Middletown, CT, 2006); and Michael
Azerrad, Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground,
1981–1991 (Boston, 2001).

250 MICHAEL ARNOLD
heavy-metal sounds of groups like Boris, experimental music à la Animal

Collective, Hold Steady-influenced pub-rock music, generic art-rock akin to
Les Savy Fav. The local musicians skillfully approximated international styles,
yet the absence of lyrics and sounds with local color was striking. The only
way to experience local urban sounds was through traditional fado perfor-
mances in Lisbon’s twenty-first-century casas de fado (fado music clubs) and
Portuguese rural folk music at various festas populares, the outdoor festivals in
towns and villages that take place during the summer throughout the coun-
try. But Lisbon did not seem to have an indie rock scene that drew from
local roots, only performances of Portuguese international indie music or
Portuguese folk music, never both in one place or both in one sound. The fado
and rural folk music I heard expressed a certain place (urban or rural Portugal)
and a wealthy cultural past that yet resonates in the present. However, while
the international indie sounds drifting across Lisbon’s radio airwaves and
music clubs evoked the now with great precision, they conveyed the here only
in the broadest sense—to the point that place seemed an empty signifier.
Two years later, shortly after my return to Lisbon, I encountered the scene
I had been looking for, on 4 September 2010, at the Portuguese Communist
Party’s annual music festival, Festa do Avante, in the Lisbon-based four-piece
band A Naifa. I then embarked on nine months of archival work and field-
work (including some participant observation) to uncover the indie scene
with local roots.2 The present study is based on a series of interviews I con-
ducted throughout my stay in Lisbon with musicians, radio DJs, music jour-
nalists, and record-label representatives. Two months after hearing A Naifa at
the Festa do Avante 2010, I interviewed A Naifa’s co-founder, the Portuguese
guitarist Luís Varatojo, to learn about the origins and aims of a group which,
at the time, seemed to me to be a statistical outlier.
Around the turn of the millennium, the idea to form A Naifa emerged
from a previous collaboration between the bassist and electronic musician
João Aguardela, and the former punk guitarist Luís Varatojo. They shared a
taste for an eclectic mix of musical styles: punk, pop, rock, electronic, and
fado. Aguardela and Varatojo had first worked together from 1999 to 2003
with the band Linha da Frente, which they formed with the neofado vocal-
ist Viviane Parra in honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Portuguese
Carnation Revolution of April 1974.3 Varatojo had already become an icon
2 The primary archival source I consulted on traditional fado was at Lisbon’s Museo
do Fado. The museum’s Centro de Documentação has an expansive collection of fado
sheet music that preceded the introduction of the phonograph in Portugal. It also
holds recordings, many of which have been digitized and are now available online at
www.museudofado.pt (accessed 9 September 2018).
3 On 25 April 1974 the Carnation Revolution (known in Portuguese as the
Revolução dos Cravos), a nearly bloodless coup, put an end to António de Oliveira
Salazar’s right-wing authoritarian regime, which had come to power following a coup

INDIE NEOFADO’S TEMPORALITY 251
for young Portuguese punks due to his success with the bands Peste & Sida
(Plague & AIDS) and Despe & Siga (Undress & Follow). Aguardela enjoyed
similar fame after forming the indie pop rock band Sitiados (Sieged) in 1987.
Aguardela and Varatojo auditioned several vocalists before deciding on María
Antónia Mendes (known under her stage name, Mitó), who showed a keen
ability to innovate fado vocal technique, creating a style in-between those of
Amália Rodrigues and Portishead’s Beth Gibbons. Since A Naifa’s inception
in 2003, the group has released four albums and has garnered a large national
following.4
A Naifa is one of many bands that emerged at the turn of the century
and that I henceforth refer to as indie neofado.5 This term should not imply
that the scene conceptualizes itself as a self-conscious united movement.
Indie neofado serves here as an umbrella term for individual groups who in
their stylistic development have incorporated elements of traditional fado in
an attempt to voice both their nationality and their generation. The early-
twenty-first-century phenomenon of indie neofado melds the lyrics, music,
themes, and general aesthetics of fado with a variety of indie subgenres as
performed by musicians who consider themselves part of an international
independent music scene. Like Varatojo and Aguardela, many of these musi-
cians grew up surrounded by fado music, but—either disdainful of or indiffer-
ent to this Portuguese urban genre—began their musical careers composing
and performing some form of indie or electronic music. The combining form
‘neo’ in neofado relates to both the relative newness of the phenomenon (its
pioneer, Ovelha Negra, released its first album in 1998) and the difference of
this hybrid genre from its predecessor, novo fado (new fado). Novo fado began
earlier, during the 1980s, and designates traditional fadista’s incorporation of
other music styles and aesthetics into fado. In contrast, neofado developed
among indie musicians experimenting with fado. Indie neofado musicians do
not come from fado. Their origins lie in punk, post-punk, experimental, elec-
tronic, industrial, and psychedelic rock.6 Differentiating between novo fado
in May 1926 that overthrew the last of a series of failed democratic leaders who pre-
sided over Portugal’s First Republic. For further information on the regime and the
revolution that ended it, see António Costa Pinto, Modern Portugal (Palo Alto, 1998);
and Tom Gallagher, Portugal: A Twentieth-Century Interpretation (Manchester, 1983).
4 Luís Varatojo, in discussion with the author, 3 November 2010.
5 Varatojo was well aware that A Naifa was one of many bands that combined fado
with indie; Luís Varatojo, in discussion with the author, 3 November 2010.
6 Post-punk began in the mid-1970s and can be best described as the splintering of
the punk movement into a diverse array of Anglophone rock genres that drew from
punk’s ideology and energy, while branching out to encompass other non-rock styles
including (amongst others) experimental art music, electronica, reggae, funk, dub,
and disco. For further information, see Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again:
Postpunk, 1978–1984 (London, 2006); Clinton Heylin, From the Velvets to the Voidoids:

252 MICHAEL ARNOLD
and neofado is important, as they have entirely different creative origins that
underlie their hybrid fado cultural production.
This chapter analyzes indie neofado, taking into consideration the two
genres that it draws from—indie and fado. Given fado’s strong link to nos-
talgia, it is particularly pertinent how indie neofado links past and present
through unique expressions of what Svetlana Boym has termed reflective and
restorative nostalgia. Whereas restorative nostalgia is an active nostalgia that
attempts to draw from a lost past to recreate and superimpose it on the pres-
ent, reflective nostalgia passively thrives in the longing itself for a selective
past.7 According to Svetlana Boym, ‘Restorative nostalgia manifests itself in
total reconstructions of monuments of the past, while reflective nostalgia lin-
gers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place
and another time.’8 My study builds on Boym’s theory of nostalgia to com-
ment on the temporal trajectory of indie neofado. The primacy of and need
for one nostalgia over another when indie and fado encounter each other in
twenty-first-century indie neofado provides insight into how these two nos-
talgias are different with respect to both temporality and purpose. As the two
ensuing case studies will elucidate, indie neofado relies on restorative nos-
talgia’s hyperbolic claims to authenticity and absolute truth, and uses highly
charged national symbols to manipulate spectator emotion to achieve reflec-
tive nostalgia’s ends. The trajectories of both kinds of nostalgia tie past and
present together, thus cultivating and preserving fado. The two case studies
presented here also provide insight into the values of this new generation of
indie neofado musicians who, stylistically, are born outside the traditional
fado scenes. They reference an intricate tapestry of pastness to preserve fado
for the future.
(Neo)Fado’s Origins and Nostalgia
Fado is rife with saudade, a complex Portuguese concept that a number of

scholars have equated with nostalgia.9 The first mention of saudade in an
English text dates back to 1861, pointing to its Portuguese orthographical
A Pre-Punk History for a Post-Punk World (New York, 1993); Clinton Heylin, Babylon’s
Burning: From Punk to Grunge (New York, 2007); and Will Hermes, Love Goes to
Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York that Changed Music Forever (New York, 2011).
7 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York, 2001), p. xviii. Boym divides the
word nostalgia itself in half: restorative nostalgia revolves around the nostos (Greek for
homecoming), and reflective nostalgia wallows in the algia (Greek for longing).
8 Ibid., p. 41.
9 For further analysis of the origins and underpinnings of fado’s historical reliance
on the reflective nostalgic concept of saudade, see Rui Vieira Nery, Para uma história
do fado (Lisbon, 2004); Paul Vernon, A History of the Portuguese Fado (Brookfield,

origins in the beginning of the sixteenth century and connecting it to Latin

or Gothic roots that imply regret, absence, and longing.10 A little over fifty
years later, the proto-Iberianist Aubrey F. G. Bell translates saudade as ‘a
vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably can-
not exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or
towards the future; not an active discontent but an indolent dreaming wistful-
ness’.11 In his subsequent anthropological study of Portugal, Bell attempts to
give an approximate translation of the word saudade as, simply, ‘wistfulness;
bitter-sweet regret’.12 The overall continuum remains a sense of regret and
the passive qualities of a wistful longing—essential characteristics of reflective
nostalgia. Just over two decades later, Rodney Gallop emphasizes how saudade
and fado are natural partners:
Saudade is yearning: yearning for something so indefinite as to be indefinable:

an unrestrained indulgence in yearning. It is a blend of German Sehnsucht,
French nostalgie, and something else besides. It couples the vague longing of
the Celt for the unattainable with a Latin sense of reality which induces real-
ization that it is indeed unattainable, and with the resultant discouragement
and resignation. All this is implied in the lilting measures of the fado, in its
languid triplets and, as it were, drooping cadences.13
Gallop’s description portrays an evolution of fadista saudade from reflective

to restorative in that it attempts, albeit vaguely, to recapture selective cultural
traditions (the Celtic and the Latin) of Lusophone patrimony. Svetlana Boym
describes saudade as definitively reflective in nature: ‘tender sorrow, breezy and
erotic, not as melodramatic as its Slavic counterpart, yet no less profound and
haunting’.14
Saudade’s reflective nostalgia, if difficult to translate into English, is not
so difficult to translate into sound. Richard Elliott considers that even some-
one who lacks fluency in Portuguese cannot help but notice that Lisbon fado
‘reiterates certain sounds (words) almost obsessively’.15 Elliott highlights the
lyrical repetitiveness of traditional Lisbon fado, particularly the fadista’s per-
sistent reiteration of words related to witnessing and memory, to fate (that
is, fado, in Portuguese), to saudade and other synonyms of nostalgia, longing,
1998); and Richard Elliott, Fado and the Place of Longing: Loss, Memory and the City
(Burlington, VT, 2010).
10 See George P. Marsh, Lectures on the English Language (New York, 1861), p. 687.
11 Aubrey F.G. Bell, In Portugal (London and New York, 1912), pp. 5–6.
12 Aubrey F.G. Bell, Portugal of the Portuguese (London, 1915), p. 262.
13 Rodney Gallop, ‘The Fado (The Portuguese Song of Fate)’, The Musical Quarterly
19, no. 2 (1933), 211–12.

14 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, p. 13.
15 Elliott, Fado and the Place of Longing, p. 10.

254 MICHAEL ARNOLD
loss, and to Lisbon toponyms. This consistent insistence on certain words that
are emphasized in dramatic melisma has allowed fado to increasingly travel
beyond its geographical and linguistic borders ever since the nation began to
reincorporate itself into the global community and international marketplace
following Portugal’s mid-1970s transition to democracy. One regularly hears
the word saudade, and, more importantly, one feels it in many contemporary
fado performances. Such felt saudade may resonate with non-native listen-
ers, with their own reflective nostalgia. However, the saudade the non-native
listener feels is not necessarily always intended as reflective. The nostalgia of
Lisbon’s fado saudade can be reflective or restorative in nature, depending on
the origins of the composition and/or the particular attitude of the singer.
Fado was born in the margins. From its roots in the lundum and modinha
song and dance of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Afro-Brazilian slave
culture, to its transatlantic voyage to Lisbon’s casas de fado (literally ‘houses
of fate’), it was a creation that would be associated with the lowest rung on
the ladder of Lisbon’s society throughout the majority of the nineteenth cen-
tury.16 Fado’s evolution in Lisbon began in the brothels, or casas de fado, so
termed by ‘proper’ Catholic Portuguese citizens of the era as a pious judgment
of and deterministic reference to the ill-fated fadistas (prostitutes, pimps,
and clientele) who worked in such establishments.17 Out of these brothels
that dotted Lisbon’s then peripheral neighborhoods (primarily Alfama and
Mouraria) would pour nightly the highly inebriated, melancholic song of sau-
dade that is fado. The fadista prostitutes, pimps, and johns performed these
tunes—when not otherwise engaged in their commerce or the frequent knife-
play violence that plagued the dark alleyways of these neighborhoods—to
while away the wee hours of the night. Their songs voiced the reflective nos-
talgia in, for example, the inherent perdition involved in the fadista vocation
itself (‘Canção da Desgraçada’ or the Song of the Disgraced), the pining sau-
doso love of the sailor lost at sea (the essence of myriad lyrics in this vein was
best crystallized decades later in José Régio’s ‘Fado Português’), the plaintive
lament on the death of fado’s first star and prostitute martyr, Maria Severa
(‘Fado da Severa’), as well as another song written from the perspective of
the broken-hearted, slumming aristocrat whom Severa had enchanted before
her untimely demise (‘Fado do Vimioso’). These early fado songs, so deeply
imbued with the reflective nostalgic sentiment of saudade, celebrated and
mourned the many tragic and romantic lives and deaths of mid-nineteenth-
century Lisbon’s seedy underbelly.
16 For a comprehensive history of fado and its roots, see Nery, Para uma história do
fado.
17 For an ethnographic study of the fadista see Pinto de Carvalho, História do fado
(Lisbon, 1903), pp. 31–43; see also Nery, Para uma história do fado, pp. 40–50, 64–74.

Fado entered Lisbon’s mainstream at the turn of the century and, though
not losing its reflective nostalgia, began to celebrate topics relevant to middle-
class Portuguese society.18 Nevertheless, shortly after the end of World War II
newly conceived fado lyrics turned decisively toward restorative expressions.
The pervasive censorship of the Estado Novo regime led by the right-wing
dictator António Oliveira de Salazar deployed fado as a vehicle for the dic-
tatorship’s own restorative nostalgic ends. Salazar wished to elevate fado by
erasing its original connection to the dregs of Lisbon society and repurposing
it in line with his own agenda of anti-modern cultural autarky, which sought
in part the restoration of the golden age of global Lusophone expansion and
empire. The dictator chose to ‘fix’ fado, creating an icon of an essentialized
national culture.19 Fado lyricists who attempted to compose any message
contrary to the national imaginary envisioned by Salazar’s Estado Novo dis-
course were rapidly disabused of such artistic liberties by the regime’s lápis
azul (literally ‘blue pencil’), a euphemism for Estado Novo’s literary censor-
ship. Fado musicians began a long process of self-censorship. Poverty was an
acceptable theme as long as it did not imply some form of social injustice.
Lyrics that told of natural disasters, work accidents, acts of heroism, amorous
betrayals, etc. were deemed acceptable. Lyrics dealing with the rigidity of class
hierarchy, or protest, unionization, social immobility, revolution, and wealth
inequality were not.20 The restorative nostalgia of Salazar-era fado reinte-
grated a sense of tragic fatalism for the unfortunate citizen whose only lot
in life was to remain calmly obedient to authority.21 The regime called for a
18 For an expanded view of the evolution of saudade lyricism in fado to its reflective
nature under Salazar, see Nery, Para uma história do fado, pp. 30–5, 64–74, 82–97, 218–
48. For a detailed description of the fado tropes through the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries as they evolved under Salazar and the new Portuguese democracy, see Elliott,
Fado and the Place of Longing, pp. 13–29. For an analysis of the impact of Salazar’s
purification of the genre through the regime’s physical demolition of fado’s neighbor-
hoods, see Michael Colvin, The Reconstruction of Lisbon: Severa’s Legacy and the Fado’s
Rewriting of Urban History (Lewisburg, 2008).
19 For a more detailed description of the sociopolitical background and cultural
agenda of Salazar’s internationally isolated Estado Novo regime, see Felipe Ribeiro de
Meneses, Salazar: A Political Biography (New York, 2009). For a concise review of the
Lusophone golden age that Salazar’s restorative nostalgic discourse references, see José
Hermano Saraiva, História concisa de Portugal (Lisbon, 1989).
20 See Nery, Para uma história do fado, pp. 191–2.
21 See ibid., p. 192. Nery explains how fado lyrics were censored toward a sensibility
both deterministic and tragic, in line with the ultramontane Catholic dogma of the
regime: ‘They would now sing . . . exclusion, poverty, and hunger, not as symptomatic
of a specific socio-economic order susceptible to change, but as individual, unavoid-
able tragedies which one could only describe and lament; the unprotected elderly, the
widow, the orphan.’ All translations by the author, unless otherwise indicated.

256 MICHAEL ARNOLD
nostalgic celebration of proper Portuguese conduct within the realm of one’s

God-given gender and class roles, regardless of any adversity that may come
one’s way. The burden of Salazar’s cultural agenda would pressure fado lyri-
cists to focus as much as possible on a glorified national past—rather than on
a depressing Portuguese present. Nostalgia poetics in fado (e.g., marialvismo)
still function today to produce images for conservative Portuguese citizens of
what they perceive to be the good old days of the Salazar regime, marked by
so many symbols of national strength and stability.22 And yet the very same
fado lyrics might also serve the contemporary Portuguese socialist by prompt-
ing questioning of ‘the unrealized dreams of the past and visions of the future
that became obsolete’.23 The fado lyrics produced during the Salazar regime
still make up the majority of the greatest hits today.24
How then do reflective and restorative nostalgias distinctly manifest them-
selves in indie neofado? The restorative nostalgia produced under Salazar’s
extremely conservative authoritarianism makes for a strange bedfellow with
the liberal-progressive, reflective-nostalgic tendencies of international indie
from which indie neofado nostalgia poetics simultaneously draws. The fol-
lowing two case studies show how indie neofado uniquely fuses these two
opposite nostalgias, employing the symbols and means of restorative nostalgia
in order to achieve its own reflective nostalgic ends.
22 The term marialvismo dates back to an eighteenth-century treatise on horseman-

ship penned by the Marquês de Marialva. It is related to rigid, chauvinistic gender
roles and the subordination of the Portuguese woman. Marialvismo was reaffirmed
and restored in fado lyricism under Salazar’s Estado Novo regime. Many of the best
hits of the traditional fado canon, sung by stars such as Lucilia do Carmo (‘Foi Na
Travessa Da Palha’; ‘O Meu-Um Homem A Meu Jeito’) or Amália Rodrigues (‘Rua
Do Capelão’ and ‘Tudo Isto É Fado’), are still popular today despite their marialvist
bent, celebrating the woman as object owned by her man to be treated (and beaten)
as he pleases. For more information on marialvismo, see Miguel Vale de Almeida,
‘Marialvismo: A Portuguese Moral Discourse on Masculinity, Social Hierarchy and
Nationhood in the Transition to Modernity’, Serie Antropologia 184, Departamento
de Antropologia, Universidade de Brasilia, 2 December 2004, pp. 2–3; http://www.
dan.unb.br/images/doc/Serie184empdf.pdf.
23 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, p. xvi.
24 For more information on Salazar’s restorative nostalgic influence on fado lyricism
and its relevance for fado today, see Rui Vieira Nery, Pensar Amália (Lisbon, 2010).
Pensar Amália contains analysis of the restorative nostalgic lyrics penned for and
adapted by Amália Rodrigues, and details her life under the regime as well as her
impact on Portuguese culture to the present.

Reflecting Recent Fado History: Ovelha Negra
In 1998 the electric guitarist Paulo Pedro Gonçalves (1955–; figure 11.1)
founded the very first indie neofado group, Ovelha Negra. Previously he had
co-founded the first Portuguese punk, post-punk, and indie new-romantic
bands: Os Faíscas (1978–9), Corpo Diplomático (1979–81), and Heróis do
Mar (1981–90). Gonçalves’s position as the first indie-electronica adopter
of traditional fado music can best be understood if one considers his unique
expat background. He spent the majority of his adolescence outside Lisbon.
When he was only two years old, his parents emigrated to Toronto. Having
never experienced fado’s close association with the right-wing authoritarian
Salazar regime, Gonçalves grew up unaware of the national cultural anxiet-
ies related to the genre that would seem to have prevented other Portuguese
artists from fully embracing it. He was not only physically distanced from the
burgeoning subversive, leftist, urban population that increasingly equated fado
music with regressive, right-wing authoritarian politics, but he was also spiri-
tually disconnected from most of the signifiers of his childhood homeland.
However, Gonçalves became connected to fado from a very tender age
after his father brought Portugal to Canada by co-founding, in September
1956, the so-called First Portuguese Canadian Club in Toronto to ease the
transition for the family and other émigrés. The club attracted several expat
fado and Portuguese rural folk music performers, providing Gonçalves with
an early glimpse of the national culture but in a diaspora setting. By the age of
five, he had met and watched the performances of some of the most famous
fado singers of the 1950s and 1960s. He would even envision himself as a
fado singer after the fadista had left the stage: ‘I used to get on stage after
they performed and sing myself, even though the mic wasn’t up there. I wasn’t
singing to anybody, just to pretend that I was singing.’25 This began to evoke
in the young Gonçalves a nostalgic feeling of loss and saudade for the very
primary symbols of a motherland he had never experienced completely in the
first place.
As Gonçalves spent the majority of his adolescence outside his home-
land, he was gradually introduced to the culture of Portugal while absorbing
other cultural expressions of his environment. Experiencing Portugal through
its diasporic representation in Toronto profoundly influenced Gonçalves,
providing him with a worldview different from that of his contemporaries
in Portugal—a distinct trajectory. The affective bonds to national patri-
mony fostered by the expat family and diaspora are at times stronger than
those formed by residents of the homeland who can take such traditions for
granted. Gonçalves’s unique habitus would allow him to pioneer a movement
that, at the time, was not envisioned by the majority of his indie peers.
25 Paulo Pedro Gonçalves, in discussion with the author, 10 April 2011.

258 MICHAEL ARNOLD
Figure 11.1 Paulo Pedro Gonçalves, 11 June 2017.
In 1976, two years after the Portuguese Carnation Revolution that

brought a definitive end to the Estado Novo regime, Gonçalves returned
to a newly democratic Lisbon. (At that time many Portuguese citizens had
already sought distance from a past linked to Salazar, including fado.) Shortly
thereafter he moved to London—a cycle began during which Gonçalves
would shift back and forth between the Lusophone and British metropoles
for decades. Gonçalves appreciated the opportunity music provided him to
express himself while adjusting to two very different places in changing times.
His true musical awakening came in 1976 via punk rock. Inspired by bands
like The Clash and The Sex Pistols, Gonçalves would go on to found the first
Portuguese punk band, Os Faíscas.26
Half a decade later, the eponymous debut album of Gonçalves’s indie
band, Heróis do Mar (1981), would rely on restorative nostalgic means (the
26 Os Faíscas did not last long and never recorded an album. Evidence of the exis-
tence of Portugal’s first punk group remains through a handful of poor-quality pho-
tographs and even poorer-quality live recordings held by Gonçalves. Gonçalves and
his Faíscas bassist cohort, Pedro Ayres Magalhães (who would later go on to form
the all-time most successful Portuguese indie export, Madredeus), called it quits to
work on the post-punk project Corpo Diplomático. After short-lived success with this
influential collaboration, Gonçalves and Magalhães decided to move on to form this
founding duo’s most successful project, the indie band Heróis do Mar.

use of highly charged national symbols to manipulate the emotions of a target

audience) to challenge ideas of the mythic Portuguese empire by accusing it
of harboring intrinsically fascist qualities. The concept of Heróis do Mar, aside
from producing very danceable indie rock, was to represent Portugal’s history
and culture through a postmodernist ironic lyrical bent. The name of the band,
referring to heroes of the sea, is taken from the first verse of the Portuguese
national anthem, ‘A Portuguesa’.27 Heróis do Mar’s initial approach was
somewhat militaristic, as can be seen in many of the (restorative nostalgic)
lyrics and much of imagery that accompanied their live performances, which
glorified national history. The Portuguese rock and pop journalist and musi-
cologist Jorge Pires asserts that ‘It was a military approach, but at the same
time it was a kind of new barbarian, mythological, theatrical thing.’28 This
militarism is toned down somewhat on the recorded album, but still rubbed
many Portuguese citizens the wrong way. The memory of Salazar’s Estado
Novo was still very fresh in the minds of the generation that lived their entire
lives under its oppressive heel.
After Heróis do Mar broke up, Gonçalves became frustrated with the
Portuguese musical scene: ‘I thought “fuck this”—you know? You can’t get
out of Portugal if you do Portuguese music. Let’s do something in English
and get somewhere. So we did LX-90 and, yeah, we got a record deal.’29 This
cynical expression regarding the state of the 1990s Portuguese music scene
can be easily understood in light of the tidal wave of Anglophone rock that
had engulfed the country from the advent of American grunge during the
beginning of the decade to the mid-nineties Britpop explosion. Gonçalves
decided to try his luck in London. During the mid-nineties he had relatively
little success there, performing with his bands LX-90, Kick Out the Jams,
and Swamp. While performing with these various acts he would notice how
British rock music was experiencing a renaissance through Britpop acts such
as Blur, Oasis, Suede, and Pulp.30 Gonçalves began to entertain thoughts of a
renewal of a distinctly Portuguese sound. Returning to Lisbon with his band
27 ‘A Portuguesa’ was composed in 1890 as a nationalistic response to the British
demand that Portugal abandon its colonial claims in Africa during the height of what
would later be termed Europe’s ‘scramble for Africa’. In 1911 the song was adopted as
the national anthem of the newborn Portuguese Republic.
28 Jorge Pires, in discussion with the author, 20 April 2011.
30 Britpop is a UK-based subgenre of indie music that came about in the early to
mid-1990s as a reaction to the success of the US-based grunge scene across Britain. In
opposition to this American invasion, bands such as Blur, Oasis, and Pulp referenced
1960s-era British guitar music, accompanied by lyrics that employed slang and themes
unique to the United Kingdom. For more information on this scene, see John Harris,
Britpop! Cool Britannia and the Spectacular Demise of English Rock (Cambridge, 2004).

260 MICHAEL ARNOLD
Swamp, Gonçalves finally had the epiphany that led him to first conceptual-
ize Ovelha Negra’s indie neofado aesthetic:
We had come a lot to Portugal to play, and I was walking down Chiado . . .
and the fado was playing in the van [which, always parked on the street Rua
do Carmo in Lisbon’s Chiado neighborhood, plays fado on loudspeakers to
draw tourists to buy CDs], and I thought, ‘fuck’s sake, this is the only music
that really makes sense in this place. And it’s the music that is of this place;
everything else is imported.’ So I thought, ‘I’m going to do a fado record.’
And then, before I got to the bottom of Rua do Carmo, I had come up with
this concept which was: fado is Catholic, yeah? And what’s the worst thing a
Catholic can do? Turn his back on Jesus. So I wrote ‘Não Há Pior Inferno que
o Amor’ [There is no hell like love]. It just came to me: Someone who, because
he loses the love of his life, renounces religion. He renounces God, and turns
his back on it. And that song came from that. And then I just started writing
all these songs in like . . . sort of using the tradition.31
Gonçalves relates here the creation of his first idea for an indie neofado
song, thereby providing insight into two diametrically opposed worldviews
(ultraconservative and anarcho-punk) that work in unison. Gonçalves has
always liked to experiment with national images and symbols that have the
potential for intense emotional impact, most especially with respect to the
Portuguese military, religion, and politics. Indeed, he has attempted to hold
up a mirror to Portuguese society, highlighting the hypocrisies of the new-
born democracy while paying homage to its traditions. His play with sym-
bolic affirmations evokes restorative nostalgia’s means in order to achieve his
own reflective-nostalgic ends. The indie punk in him aims for the deliber-
ately offensive by juxtaposing two highly charged semiotics—agape/love and
eros/heresy—to reflect on (and undermine) ‘traditional’ Portuguese values.
Throughout Gonçalves’s artistic trajectory, there is a consistent thread of rev-
erence for all things Lusophone, yet none escapes the postmodernist double-
coding, the hyperconscious quotation marks.
In 1998 Gonçalves wrote, recorded, and produced the first commercially
successful indie neofado album, Por Este Andar Ainda Acabo a Morrer em
Lisboa (Despite My Path, I Still End Up Dying in Lisbon), with the assis-
tance of fado (as well as indie, pop, and rock) musicians: Miguel Gameiro
(indie rock and fado vocals and guitar), Rita Guerra (fado-pop vocals), and
José Nobre da Costa (Portuguese guitar). Gonçalves’s album would lay the
groundwork for the slow but steady growth of Lisbon’s indie neofado scene.32
With this album neofado found its audience and the scene was born. While
during the 1980s and 1990s Portuguese indie musicians such as António

32 It would be Ovelha Negra’s only release until 2012, when Gonçalves invited sev-
eral professional fadistas to perform on his follow-up album, Ilumina.

Variaçoes, Nuno Rebelo, Anabela Duarte, Carlos Cordeiro, and Anamar

had textually referenced and even fully embraced fado music (e.g., Anabela
Duarte’s Lishbunah), no musician had so thoroughly integrated fado into the
world of indie-electronic music as did Gonçalves with this album.33
By the time Ovelha Negra had released Por Este Andar Ainda Acabo a
Morrer em Lisboa, Portuguese sovereignty was on the wane as the country
was slowly being incorporated into the European Union. Nevertheless, as
Portugal was about to abandon once and for all its escudos for the suprana-
tional Euro currency in 2001, a renewed nationalistic fervor pushed to pre-
serve Portuguese cultural, political, and economic control. The concern over
national sovereignty grew during the 2010–14 financial crisis which resulted
in multiple European troika bailouts along with the inherent loss of sover-
eignty involved with the process. Portugal’s social programs were severely
slashed due to international and supranational intervention.
In this atmosphere of sovereign uncertainty, Gonçalves decided in
2010—over a decade after having abandoned the project—to record a sec-
ond Ovelha Negra album, Ilumina (figure 11.2). He enlisted a collective
of talented fadistas as well as electronic and indie instrumentalists to help
reignite interest in the nation’s historical patrimony for a generation that
was too young to have experienced the band’s first album. The album’s lyr-
ics celebrate love and loss, life and death, and the traditional fado refer-
ences to Portuguese toponyms, fado stars, and fado itself. The track ‘Amália
Continua a Cantar’ is a homage to the iconic fadista Amália Rodrigues.
The Portuguese guitar lilts beneath a variety of string instruments—violin
(Guillem Calvo), violoncello (Arnulf Lindner), acoustic guitar (Paulo Pedro
Gonçalves), and steel and electric guitar (both played by Sam Harley). The
electric guitar provides the primary rhythmic structure of the song with the
‘Crimson and Clover’-like tremolo effect. Such references to a late-1960s
Anglophone pop are subtle throughout the song, as is the Portuguese gui-
tar, which fades in and out to remind the listener that this song in neither
fado nor indie, but indie neofado. The minimalist inclusion of a wide variety
of instruments gives primacy to the one constant: Kátia Silva’s vocals—an
Angolan transplant morphed into Lisbon fadista.
In ‘Amália Continua a Cantar’, Gonçalves pays tribute to the fado icon
who is equally associated with the restorative nostalgia of Salazar-era fado
and the reflective nostalgia of traditional fado saudade. After the fall of the
Estado Novo in 1974, Rodrigues was ostracized by many Portuguese for her
33 Duarte’s album Lishbunah (1988) precedes Ovelha Negra’s debut release by a
decade. Although Duarte can indeed be considered an indie musician who worked
with fado traditions, her ambitions for Lishbunah were oriented exclusively toward
exploring the Arabic roots of fado instead of toward creating a hybrid sound combin-
ing an indie subgenre with fado.

262 MICHAEL ARNOLD
Figure 11.2 Album cover for Ovelha Negra’s second release, Ilumina, shot by
Michael Peters Jr. and designed by the Dead Combo guitarist Tó
Trips, 2012.
seemingly close relationship with Salazar. Some of Rodrigues’s best hits did
in fact seem to express Salazar’s restorative nostalgia, affirming the regime’s
gender hierarchies (see, for instance, ‘Novo Fado da Severa’ and ‘Tudo Isto É
Fado’) and social hierarchies (‘Não É Desgraça Ser Pobre’). And yet Amália is
also closely associated with the reflective nostalgic impulse of the Portuguese
poetic tradition which she, along with her intimate collaborator, Alain
Oulmain, helped to cultivate despite Salazar’s misgivings (in songs such as
‘Vagamundo’ and ‘Abandono’, the latter unequivocally scribed in homage to a
man imprisoned by Salazar as an enemy of the state). The song title ‘Amália
Continua a Cantar’, likewise, is caught within each of these nostalgias and
implies the singer’s continued presence in a country divided between those
who hold to either of the national imageries that she personified and those
who wish to leave both behind. Gonçalves honors Rodrigues without giving

ground to either group. As such, the song is a tribute not only to the fado
icon, but to the Portuguese nation:
A cor do céu, a luz do sol, The color of the sky, the light of
the sun,
Uma nuvem dourada, um areal A golden cloud, a sandbox
A sombra do pinheiro manso, The shade of a pine tree,
Uma praia deserta, o cantar da An empty beach, the swallow’s song
andorinha
Que anuncia a primavera— That announces spring—
São doces beijos teus. These are all your sweet kisses.
Quando vires o mar, When you see the sea,

Lembra-te de mim. Remember me.
Eu nunca, nunca te esqueci. I never, never forgot you.
Só o mar It is only the ocean
Me separa de ti, That separates you from me,
Mas eu nunca, nunca te esqueci. But I never, never forgot you.
A noite cai na serra. Night falls on the mountains.

Nas mãos do luar In the moonlight’s hands
A nossa varina continua a cantar: Our fruit peddler still sings:
‘Foi deus que deu voz ao vento . . .’ ‘Twas God that gave voice to the
wind . . .’34
In the first stanza of ‘Amália Continua a Cantar’ a reflective Gonçalves

depicts his first, hazy, impressionistic recollections of life in the homeland—
that is, before being transplanted to Toronto—as an eternal spring. The verse
‘São doces beijos teus’ refers to Portugal itself as his metaphorical lost love.
Portugal, the crown of Europe, the medieval end of the world, would always
‘see the sea’ as it were. In the lyrics Gonçalves remembers his promise to never
forget some distant devotion preserved in the perfecting imaginary of inter-
mittent, yet perpetual, nostalgic loss. The final line quoted above, ‘Foi deus
que deu voz ao vento’ is a reference to the chorus of one of Amália Rodrigues’s
biggest hits, ‘Foi Deus’, which has been covered repeatedly throughout the
last half century with versions by a hybrid fado-jazz musician (Rão Kyao)
as well as indie neofado acts (Hoje, Donna Maria). Gonçalves, however,
does not touch the original. He merely references it, allowing Amália and
her iconic status to stand in as a metonym for the Portugal that the lyricist
idealized and dearly longed for over the course of his expat life. He evokes
a selective, romanticized national past through the monumental figure of
Amália Rodrigues, yet his aim is not to promote a national project of sta-
sis with respect to the past. Instead, Gonçalves basks impressionistic within
34 Paulo Pedro Gonçalves and Ovelha Negra, Ilumina, Eter (2012), CD.

264 MICHAEL ARNOLD
an individual cultural memory that lingers on the ruins and wallows in the
dreams of his own past longings. In writing ‘Amália Continua a Cantar’ he
reminds his audience that indie and national pride are not mutually exclu-
sive concepts. His homage to the iconic voice of Amália Rodrigues—Salazar’s
preferred fado ‘instrument’ of the golden age—displays Gonçalves as sin-
cerely reflective. He wishes to linger for a while on the faded strobe-light
recollections of a fado yesteryear that he could never quite grasp. In this way
Gonçalves oscillates both in lyrics and in music between a reflective and a
restorative nostalgia, between expressions of the lighter, more whimsical or
lethargic, and the forceful and triumphalist.
Dead Combo’s Restoration of Outlaw Lisbon
The Lisbon-based instrumental duo Dead Combo provides a fascinating

comparison to the genre founder, Ovelha Negra. Although Ovelha Negra was
the genre pioneer, Dead Combo is by far the most successful indie neofado
band to date.35 In 2002, four years after the advent of the indie neofado genre,
the Portuguese National Public Radio DJ Henrique Amaro invited the local
indie musician Tó Trips (electric guitar) to contribute a track for a tribute
album in honor of the late fado icon, the Portuguese guitarist Carlos Paredes.
In turn, Trips invited his longtime friend Pedro Gonçalves (double bass) to
work with him on this tribute track, which would become the first Dead
Combo song, titled ‘Paredes Ambience’.36 With this collaboration Dead
Combo was born.
While working on the Paredes tribute, Trips looked for inspiration by way
of altering his listening experience: ‘There is a song by Carlos Paredes called
“Verdes Anos”. If you whistle the tune slowly it’s like a Western. If you put the
song into the computer and slow it down you can imagine a Western.’37 Trips
describes here the sonic origins of the very first track that the duo produced,
which served as the seed for much of the sound and imagery that the band
would utilize for their subsequent albums, performances, and artwork. Dead
35 Dead Combo received critical global and local acclaim for each album release.
The band’s first three albums held the Top 10 on the North-American iTunes charts
for several weeks. Their first release, Vol. 1 (2004), made Charlie Gillet’s 2005 List of
Best World Albums; and the weekly Portuguese newspaper Expresso awarded Lusitânia
Playboys (2009) album of the decade. A Bunch of Meninos (2014) reached number one
on national Spotify and iTunes charts. Dead Combo, ‘About the Band’, deadcombo.
net (accessed 2 July 2019).
36 The recording was included on the Paredes tribute album, Movimentos Perpétuos,
released in 2003 by Universal Music Portugal. Dead Combo has since produced seven
studio albums and two live albums.
37 Tó Trips, in discussion with the author, 25 November 2010.

Combo’s music represents what Wolfgang Holzinger has termed a ‘coales-

cent hybrid’ form.38 It blends the style of fado that originated in the city of
Coimbra with Ennio Morricone’s music for the so-called Spaghetti Western
(i.e., Western film produced and directed by Italians). The Wild West sound
that Morricone developed, sonically girding the gun-slinging anarchy of the
nineteenth-century American outlaw, is diverse. It is typically associated with
a slightly distorted Fender guitar (at times angular, at times noodling), passed
through tremolo, reverb, and echo effects, and often accompanied by whis-
tling, harmonica, Jew’s harp, and trumpet. Any Paredes fan might have a dif-
ficult time reconciling how his light, peaceful, lilting guitar work could be
in any way related to the inherent darkness of Morricone’s soundtracks. Yet
by drastically slowing down Paredes’s compositions for the Portuguese gui-
tar, Trips discovered a hidden Wild West sound in the Coimbra fado that
he would incorporate in his compositions for the electric guitar, but without
employing lyrics.
For live performances, Dead Combo bolstered their musical style with
a visual theme that reaches back to Lisbon fado’s origins. Onstage, the duo
resurrects the iconic fadista figures of old Lisbon to embody the mafioso
(Gonçalves) and the undertaker (Trips)—both protagonists of the old mid-
nineteenth-century underbelly labyrinths of Alfama and Mouraria. Indeed,
Dead Combo symbolically restores fado’s underbelly with a nostalgia rich in
death, danger, and mystique. Dead Combo performs and enacts a restorative
nostalgia in that their representation of ‘authentic’ fadista culture would seem
to claim an absolute truth that negates the subtleties of the genre’s origins and
evolution from the nineteenth century to the present.39 Yet the theatrical-
ity of it all produces the effect of a reflective distance, as if one could watch
this intriguing display of deviance through a lens of safety. In performance,
Dead Combo gives fado the semblance of danger again by allowing the audi-
ence to peer into the nineteenth-century ill-lit Alfama alleyways and tav-
erns, populated as they often were with knife-wielding thugs, pimps, and
vagabonds—but from a safe temporal distance. Through their theatrical
38 Wolfgang Holzinger, ‘Towards a Typology of Hybrid Forms in Popular Music’,

Songs of the Minotaur: Hybridity and Popular Music in the Era of Globalization; a
Comparative Analysis of Rebetika, Tango, Rai, Flamenco, Sardana, and English Urban
Folk, ed. Gerhard Steingress (Münster, 2002), p. 278. The coalescent is the most
opaque of all hybrid forms. It requires the musician who created the hybrid piece to
reveal and explain the discrete combined forms from which it draws.
39 Svetlana Boym claims that restorative nostalgia relies on these hyperbolized refer-
ences to an absolute truth of (simplified and essentialized) ‘authentic’ national tra-

ditions that must be restored in the present to put the nation back on the ‘correct’
path toward resurrecting the past national greatness that restorative nostalgic glorifies.
For more information on this aspect of restorative nostalgia, see Boym, The Future of
Nostalgia, pp. 41–5.

266 MICHAEL ARNOLD
performance of outlaw Lisbon, the duo gives fado an allure to an audience

that grew up always associating this music tradition with the conservative, the
boring, the stale, the vapid tourist, and the old regime. Trips and Gonçalves
waxed (reflectively) nostalgic on fado’s own ‘Wild West’:
Pedro Gonçalves: That is something that is closer to us than the Lisbon

nowadays.
Tó Trips: Yeah, the antique Lisbon . . . If you see the antique post cards—
images of Lisbon, the people live in small streets; don’t have shoes—this kind
of ambience . . .
Pedro Gonçalves: Dark, spooky, mysterious images.
Tó Trips: In old Lisbon the only guys who would have tattoos would be the
fadistas: sailors, prostitutes, these kinds of people.
Pedro Gonçalves: It’s kind of like they were the outlaws. The players were like
pimps, the singers . . . prostitutes.40
In live performance Dead Combo restores a sense of a lost ‘authentic’ fado

that belongs on the margins—a fado that once gave cohesion to the nation in
all its nineteenth-century lawless splendor.
During one live show the band performed ‘Mr. Eastwood’, a track
recorded on 1 March 2006 in tribute to the star of so many classic Spaghetti
Western films, Clint Eastwood.41 As do other pieces, ‘Mr. Eastwood’ juxta-
poses tranquil rhythms with primal beats and melodic guitar sounds with
cacophonous distortions. During the performance, Trips allows his guitar to
slowly hum to the mafioso’s slow moving crescendo before launching into a
frenetic tremolo-pick crescendo, which seems to lull the audience into hyp-
notic trance—allowing for a proper jolt when Trips suddenly hammers out
his chaotic feedback-laden guitar, cutting the audience with a sonic razor.
Trips flips a Euro coin into the air to signal the end of piece. Silence ensues,
captivating the audience. The toss of the coin is a literal evocation of fado, a
direct reference to the ill-fated fado underworld.
The musician who provided the inspiration for Dead Combo’s sound,
Carlos Paredes, was an accomplished guitar virtuoso from Coimbra.42 Yet
40 Pedro Gonçalves and Tó Trips, in discussion with the author, 25 November 2010.
41 Dead Combo, Vol. II: Quando a Alma Não é Pequena, Dead & Company (2006),
CD.
42 Carlos Paredes comes from a long lineage of Coimbra fado musicians. Carlos’s
father, Artur Paredes, was an influential figure among early-twentieth-century

Coimbra Portuguese guitar players. Carlos’s grandfather, Gonçalo Paredes, was also

his compositions defied the classic stylistic differences between Coimbra

versus Lisbon Portuguese guitar, integrating elements of both while creating
something altogether different. Paredes began to compose for the Portuguese
guitar in the 1940s and his unique guitar style attracted a new audience for
the Coimbra fado (much of it rebellious, leftist Portuguese youth during the
1960s), especially after Paredes was invited to compose the soundtrack for
the 1963 Portuguese film Os Verdes Anos.43 What Carlos Paredes did then
with the Portuguese guitar, Dead Combo does now for fado by infusing fado
with Spaghetti Western elements and thereby attracting a new audience.
Paredes always separated himself from the Coimbra fado traditions of the
great Portuguese guitarists (such as his own father, Artur Paredes), and, in so
doing, he created a space for those of his generation to voice their rebellious
spirit in a distinctly Portuguese manner. In clear parallel, Dead Combo speaks
to a defiant, disenchanted, melancholic malaise that seemed to saturate the
city during the early twenty-first century. Both have provided their audience
with a distinctly Portuguese cathartic experience through instrumental music
and visual symbols.
From Historicity toward an Open Temporality
Ovelha Negra and Dead Combo lie on opposite ends of the indie neofado
spectrum. Whereas the former relies on fado’s musical style and lyrics, the
latter draws from a variety of Anglophone indie subgenres (and is conse-
quently more respected across global indie scenes). Their differences in their
relation to fado, Portugal, and the past are also apparent in their names.
a Coimbra Portuguese guitar player. Gonçalo Paredes has been credited with various
compositions on the Coimbra Portuguese guitar as well as for being one member of
the movement to establish the Coimbra guitar style as distinct from that of Lisbon.
This was an initial remove of the Coimbra guitar from the world of Lisbon fado
which Artur would push further as a prolific composer. Carlos carried forward the
work of his father and grandfather by establishing both styles of the Portuguese guitar
as instruments that need no accompaniment. Henrique Amaro, in discussion with the
author, 3 February 2011.
43 Os Verdes Anos [1963], directed by Paulo Rocha (Lisbon, 2015), DVD. Rocha’s
film (Tender Years or Green Years in English) is considered by many film critics to be
the founding film of the Portuguese Cinema Novo (New Cinema). Cinema Novo is
an avant-garde Portuguese film movement highly influenced by the French Nouvelle
Vague (beginning in the late 1950s) and Italian Neorrealismo (beginning in 1945)
films in vogue across Europe throughout the mid- to late twentieth century. Os Verdes
Anos is considered a classic of Portuguese cinema due to its strikingly realistic por-
trayal of early-1960s urban Portugal, its narrative agility, the light air of the dialogues,
and, above all, the poetic charge that Carlos Paredes’s Portuguese guitar gives it.

268 MICHAEL ARNOLD
Ovelha Negra maintains a Portuguese name, which in its original language

and in its English translation (‘black sheep’) designates a pariah. It implies
improper conduct and transgression of social norms. It relates to Gonçalves’s
self-identification, as he affirms: ‘Also growing up and as a professional musi-
cian I always felt myself to be an outsider. People would say I was wild, crazy
or difficult. So Ovelha Negra was the perfect name.’44 It is noteworthy that
although Gonçalves grew up as an expat in Toronto, he chose a Portuguese
name for his band, a name that recalls the fadista fashion to always dress in
black and don a black shawl. But it also implies being an outsider—to conser-
vative politics, to fado tradition, to Portugal itself. In contrast, Dead Combo
suggests the end of time, a dead end as it were, perhaps the end of an era. To
be sure, both bands draw on dark topics (negra and death), thus contrasting
with the (melancholic) optimism of contemporary commercial fado and per-
haps marking the symbolic end of the traditional genre.
The underlying difference in naming supports the idea that these two
bands have different temporal connections vis-à-vis fado. Indeed, they ref-
erence different fado pasts: whereas Dead Combo points to the mid- to
late-nineteenth-century fado, Ovelha Negra recalls the three Fs (os três Fs:
fado, futebol, e Fátima) of the 1950s, elements the dictator wished to estab-
lish as essential Portuguese values—in the case of fado this applied to the
lyrics, which after being heavily censored would help promote conservative
principles by reinforcing faith, gender roles, patriotism, strong work ethics,
and other national values. Prostitution, the celebration of the degenerate
vagabond, sovereign challenges, and other transgressive elements inherent in
nineteenth-century fado culture would be simply erased from the collective
memory over time.
Ovelha Negra comments on this recent fado past (and present) while
looking to the future as the black sheep trickster bent on revolutioniz-
ing what Gonçalves considers a stale and fixed form. In its representation
of the national past Ovelha Negra is rootless but personal. It wanders mel-
ancholic through an opaque Lusophone semiotic. Gonçalves is detached
yet intimate in his attempt to penetrate an Estado Novo yesteryear that no
other Portuguese indie peer deigns to revisit with any semblance of sincerity.
Nevertheless, throughout his career he has revealed a deep emic understand-
ing of the conservative ideologies that still lie beneath the surface of contem-
porary Portuguese society, channeling Portuguese exceptionalism with Heróis
do Mar through throwback military uniforms, Knights Templar flags, fascist
salutes; and with Ovelha Negra by way of Amália, God, and the Empire.
Indeed, the band pays homage to fado traditions forged during some of the
darkest days of the Estado Novo dictatorship. Its nostalgia sifts through the
violence and beauty of a Portuguese era both dreamlike and nightmarish. The
44 Paulo Pedro Gonçalves, e-mail message to the author, 3 March 2016.

national past is seen here in all its glory through an ironic indie lens, and
yet the nod to fado is quite sincere. In this way does Ovelha Negra oscillate
between the dichotomies of liberal/conservative and indie/fado.
In turn, Dead Combo recalls an earlier national past, old Lisbon, which
the audience can experience from a temporal distance. The duo recalls the
fado underworld that had been erased by the Estado Novo. The music they
produce allows this early vagrant fado culture to coexist in the present with
other modern marginalized cultural products (jazz, blues, tango, flamenco)
and peoples (African-Americans, the Argentine gaucho, Andalusian gypsies,
cosmopolitan gangsters, Wild West gunslingers, vagabond loners). In this
way Dead Combo’s music spans different literal and figurative time zones
and spaces: the prohibition-era hot clubs and speakeasies of New York City
and Chicago, the mid-nineteenth-century cafés cantantes in Seville and Cádiz,
the early 1900s brothels spotting a booming urban Rioplatense, and the gold-
rush-era Deadwood saloon and Tombstone cathouse. It thus inhabits a lost
past, evidencing the reflective ends that Boym points to which ‘explore ways
of inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones’.45 But
by performing a caricature of fado’s cultural yesteryear and by deconstruct-
ing the genre’s musical offshoots (Carlos Paredes and Coimbra fado), the
duo also distorts the past. Dead Combo evidences no affinity for the musical
genre itself. It rather evokes the long dead subculture that gave birth to fado
via a postmodernist pastiche performance style that is reminiscent of similar
global phenomena in music and film (for instance, Tom Waits, Nick Cave,
Sergio Leone, and Tim Burton).46
Both groups embody reflective and restorative nostalgias in sound and
style but with different emphasis. Whereas Ovelha Negra represents a reflec-
tive nostalgia of the Salazar-era’s restorative nostalgic fado, Dead Combo aims
at a nostalgic restoration of fado’s pre-Salazarian reflective nature. With all
the diversity it entails, indie neofado is thus a product of the restorative nos-
talgic fado composed under the right-wing authoritarian regime of Antonio
Salazar, and of the saudade-laden reflective nostalgic fado that preceded the
dictatorship (as well as the many nostalgias experienced in between). But
indie neofado also suggests a departure from restorative nostalgia in ends.
Despite the subtle variations in indie neofado, these bands generally
desire to preserve selected aspects of fado tradition while simultaneously
45 Boym, The Future of Nostalgia, p. xviii.

46 Tom Waits and Nick Cave are two contemporary musicians who have cultivated
a kind of troubadour lyricism that delves with empathy into the darker side of human
emotion, relating murderous passions, love, loss, and lunacy on the margins. Tim
Burton (analogous to Dead Combo’s direct references to Sergio Leone’s Spaghetti
Western films vis-à-vis Ennio Morricone) has developed a style of gothic caricature
film that provides the societies inhabiting so many seedy underbellies and dark urban
alleys a quirky aesthetic. They are beautifully pathetic, their evil endearing.

270 MICHAEL ARNOLD
purging the genre of the entrenched conservative codes and practices that
resulted from fado’s decades-long appropriation by Salazar’s repressive
Estado Novo regime. Similarly, the musicians harbor no inclination to res-
urrect the ‘golden age’ of fado or the Lusophone empire as it once was, but
rather attempt to reimagine them both as they could be: open to reinter-
pretations of the past, inclusive of foreign influences that sprout from con-
tact with immigrant cultures in present-day Lisbon, and of those that come
via the global awareness of other cultural products made available by and
through the internet. Indie neofado thus serves as a metonym for a cross-
section of Portuguese youth still eager to belong to a European and global
community yet increasingly uneasy with the disintegration of national
identity/sovereignty as a product of Anglophone cultural hegemony and
European economic austerity.
Indie neofado bands look backward to explore and challenge the cultural
identities that compose their national patrimony. They introspectively look
inward for self-identification. Their look outward culminates in a hybridity
that uniquely expresses who one is and where one comes from. Their music
is one that pines in portents and revels in redemption. It is a music that
preserves and transforms Portuguese patrimony in order to safeguard it for
the generations yet to come. As such, indie neofado relies on multiple layers
of pastness: the pre-fado past that formed the foundation of saudoso long-
ing and lyricism of Lusophone urban folk pioneers; the transatlantic birth of
fado from the slaves to the sailors to the slums to the sighs of Severa; fado’s
black sheep adolescence as a regressive stain on a ‘progressive’ republic; fado’s
final acceptance by Salazar (and thus, the nation) as the song of Portugal; its
maturity through Amália; its rejection as tool of the oppressor; and, finally, its
vindication by the novo fadistas of late-twentieth-century Lisbon. In this way
do fado and its offshoots provide us with a layered temporality or a temporal-
ity of concentric circles, one that can and perhaps will expand further as fado
takes its course through time.
Appendix: Discography
The following discography presents a selection of the respective albums

released by all current and former indie neofado bands relevant to this study.
The only exception is Heróis do Mar, which, though not neofado, is critical
to an understanding of this essay and of the trajectory of the genre’s pioneer,
Paulo Pedro Gonçalves.
A Naifa
Canções Subterrâneas. Columbia, 2004. CD.
3 Minutos antes de a Maré Encher. Zona Música, 2006. CD.

Uma Inocente Inclinação para o Mal. Universal Music Portugal, 2008. CD.
Não Se Deitam Comigo Corações Obedientes. Antena Portuguesa, 2012. CD.
As Canções d’A Naifa. Antena Portuguesa, 2013. CD.
Dead Combo
Vol. 1. Transformadores, 2004. CD.
Vol. II: Quando a Alma não é Pequena. Dead & Company, 2006. CD.
Guitars From Nothing. Rastilho Records, 2007. CD.
Lusitânia Playboys. Dead & Company, 2008. CD.
Lisboa Mulata. Dead & Company, 2011. CD.
A Bunch of Meninos. Universal Music Portugal, 2014. CD.
Odeon Hotel. Sony, 2018. CD
Deolinda
Canção ao Lado. Iplay, 2008. CD.
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1990), pp. 81–96.

Index
A Naifa (band) 250–1, 270–1 Arróspide, César 144

Adams, John 3–4, 8, 55–8 Asenjo Barbieri, Francisco 201, 202,
Absolute Jest 64–6 213 n.49
Century Rolls 67–8 Augustine, Saint 7
City Noir 68–9 authenticity 69, 75, 100, 168, 176, 227,
The Death of Klinghoffer 58, 59, 64 252, 265, 166
El Niño: A Nativity Oratorio 58, 59 relation to nature 233, 236, 247
The Gospel According to the Other avant-garde 9, 62, 64, 83, 88, 97, 98
Mary 58, 64 n.21, 99, 107, 124, 148, 149, 154, 160,
Grand Pianola Music 61, 65 170, 245
Harmonielehre 55, 63 reaction against 8, 35, 69–71, 72
My Father Knew Charles Ives 57 Ax, Emanuel 67
Nixon in China 58, 60–2 Azcárate, Pablo de 196–8, 208, 209
Phrygian Gates 55 Azorín 215
String Quartet, no. 2 65
Adler, Guido 130 Baba, Meher 245
Adorno, Theodor W. 104, 105 Babbitt, Milton 10, 57, 70, 123
Ästhetische Theorie 76 Bacarisse, Salvador 202 n.26
Philosophie der neuen Musik 76, 96, Bach, Johann Sebastian 21 n.10, 26, 52,
98 53, 64, 67, 128
Advis, Luis 138–9, 160, 167 Das wohltemperirte Clavier 20, 22
Agawu, Kofi 121 n.9, 131, 132, 133, ‘Es ist genug’ (chorale) 38, 47, 48,
134 50
Aguardela, João 250–1 Passions 58, 142
aleatoricism 84, 149, 154, 156, 160, 162 reception in Chile 6, 10, 139, 140–
Alexander, Leni 149, 164, 165 6, 147, 148, 151, 153, 161, 162
Allende, Pedro Humberto 149 Bal y Gay, Jesús 201, 202 n.26
Allende, Salvador 139, 150 Balmaceda, José Manuel 153,
Amaro, Henrique 164, 267 n.42 Barcelona 203–4, 205, 211, 212, 213,
anachronism 7, 8, 22, 37, 38, 40–1, 43, 214
52, 53, 54, 176 Baroque music 7, 21, 22, 26, 93, 95
Anacrusa (group) 140, 145 n.28 n.12, 169, 179, 187
Anamar 261 reception in Chile 138, 140, 141,
Anderson, Ian 234, 240, 243, 244, 247 143, 146, 147, 153, 160
Anderson, Norman Douglas 13 Bartók, Béla 38, 52, 53, 83
Anglés, Higinio 212, 213, 214 Bashour, Frederick 133
Arias, Joey 173–4, 177 Batstone, Philip 123
Arlen, Harold 170 n.7, 181 n.45 Baudrillard, Jean 9, 59–60
Arrau, Claudio 142 Bauman, Zygmunt 2 n. 4, 4

298 INDEX
Baur, Jürg 8, 78, 79, 82–5 Busoni, Ferruccio 44, 83

Bautista, Julián 202 n.26
Beach Boys (band) 174 cadenza 41–4, 54
Beatles 133, 227 by Alfred Schnittke 7–8, 37–40,
Becerra-Schmidt, Gustavo 141 n.9, 45–53, 54
151, 155, 157, 163, 166, 167 Cage, John 55, 58
Bee Gees (band) 174, 175 n.24 Callas, Maria 172, 177 n.33
Beeson, Roger 128 Calvo, Guillem 261
Beethoven, Ludwig van 21, 43, 53, 59, Campo, Conrado del 140
61, 65, 66, 113, 114, 121 Campo, Mallo del 219
string quartets 19 n.5, 36, 85 canon (form) 20, 59, 108
Violin Concerto 7, 8, 37, 38, 39, canonicity 10, 22, 48, 79, 89, 120, 128,
40, 41, 44, 45–9, 52 129, 143, 162, 256
Benjamin, George 3, 7, 33, 35 cantata 99 n.26
Benjamin, William 132 in Chile 138–9, 142, 143, 146–51,
Berg, Alban 38, 44, 47, 48, 52, 53, 89 153, 154, 158, 160, 161, 162,
Berio, Luciano 35, 66–7, 79 n.9, 81, 98, 163–7
99, 105 Carter, Elliott 57, 63
Bernard, Jonathan 132 Carter, Tim 128
Bernheimer, Martin 37 Casella, Alfredo 114 n.68
Bernstein, Leonard 58, 59 Castellanos, Rosario 58
Best, Steven 59 Castro, Fidel 154
Bible 31, 32, 92, 163, 164, 240 Caupolicán, Sebastián Vásquez 153
Blacher, Boris 87, 114 n.68 Cavalli, Pier Francesco 174 n.22
Blake, William 29, 30 Cave, Nick 269
Boccaccio, Giovanni 33 Chile 11, 58, 138, 139
Bon Iver (band) 249 avant-garde 148
Bonham, John 238, 239 history 156, 158, 161
Boretz, Benjamin 125–7, 136 reception of Johann Sebastian
Bose, Hans-Jürgen von 98, 99 Bach 140–4, 146, 161, 162
Bouglé, Célestin Charles Alfred 102 Christie, Lou 173 n.18, 174
Boulez, Pierre 55, 62 Cinnamon, Howard 133
Bowie, David 172, 173, 174, 176 n.31 Classical era 7, 21, 35, 114
Boym, Svetlana 13, 228 n.12, 239, 246, Claudel, Paul 146
247, 252, 253, 265 n.39, 169 Clementi, Muzio 44
Brahms, Johannes 38, 44, 47, 52, 53, Coimbra 265, 266, 267, 269
126, 127, 128 Colby, Barrington 237, 238
Brendel, Franz 95 Colman, Pamela 238
Brian, Havergal 79 Cone, Edward T. 1
Britten, Benjamin 81, 89, 114 n.68, Cook, Nicholas 10, 121–2, 124–5, 126,
179 n.42 128, 129, 130
Abraham and Isaac 7, 31–32, 34, 35 Copland, Aaron 58, 59, 89
Brown, Marshall 20, 21 Cordeiro, Carlos 261
Buber, Martin 5 Corvalán, Luis 159
Budde, Elmar 106 Cotapos, Acario 152, 153, 164
Burney, Charles 95 Couperin, François 88
Burton, Tim 269 Cournot, Antoine 102

INDEX 299
Cowell, Henry 79 exile 84, 139, 150, 195–7

Crimp, Martin 3, 7, 33 relation to temporality 4, 12, 198,
Crowley, Aleistor 237–8 219–22
Cruz, Sor Juana Inès de la 58 of Eduardo Martínez Torner 208–
19, 222–24
Dadelsen, Hans Christian von 98
Dahlhaus, Carl 100 fado 251–7, 258, 260, 261, 263, 264,
Darío, Rubén, 58, 216 265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 270
Darwin, Charles, 55, 102 Fairport Convention (band) 227, 238
Dead Combo (band) 13, 262, 264–7, Falabella, Roberto 150, 151, 154, 164
268, 269, 271 Falla, Manuel de 203
Debussy, Claude 36, 99 n. 26, 145 Feldman, Morton 7, 29, 31
Delaere, Marc 106 Fiedler, Leslie A. 108
Deleuze, Gilles 39, 52, 53 Fink, Robert 121, 129, 130, 131
Deller, Alfred 174 n. 22 Focke, Fré 149
Denny, Sandy 238, 241 folk music 250, 257
Derrida, Jacques 19, 27, 178, 188 Forte, Allen 132, 133, 134, 136
Dietrich, Marlene 169 Franco, Francisco 198, 203, 211, 213,
Donna Maria (band) 263, 271 216
Dowland, John 170 n. 7, 174 n. 22, Fukuyama, Francis 9, 89, 105 n. 49
183, 190
Draeseke, Felix 75 Gameiro, Miguel 260
Druckman, Jacob 56, 69 García Ascot, Rosa 202 n. 26
Dryden, John 177 García de Castro, Ramón 217
Duarte, Anabela 261 García, Fernando 148, 158, 164, 165,
Dubiel, Joseph 126, 133 166, 167
Dufay, Guillaume 88 Gehlen, Arnold 101, 103, 104, 105
Dunsby, Jonathan 132 Gershwin, George 59, 68, 69
Gesualdo, Carlo 84, 85
Eastwood, Clint 266 Gilbert, Steven 133, 134
eclecticism 6, 56 n. 4, 189, 190, 237, Glass, Philipp 55, 71
240, 245, 250 globalization 57, 58, 59, 60, 63, 67, 68,
Eco, Umberto 228 n. 11, 237, 69, 72
240–1 Gonçalves, Paulo Pedro 257–64, 265,
Egk, Werner 114 n. 68 266, 268, 270
Eisler, Hanns 76 González Cobas, Modesto 196 n. 6,
Eliot, Thomas Stearns 28 217
Ellington, Duke 59 González Videla, Gabriel 150
England 228, 231, 233, 234, 238 Górecki, Henryk 98
Enlightenment 18 n. 2, 72, 92, 93, 94, Goyri de Menéndez-Pidal,
97, 101 María 200–1
Entwistle, William 208, 209, Grupo de los Ocho 202
Epstein, David 1, 132 Guattari, Félix 39, 52, 53
Ercilla, Alonso de 150, 166 Guck, Marion A. 134
Escobar, Roberto 148 n. 36, 165 Guerra, Rita 260
Escudero, José Castro 201 Guevara, Ernesto (Che) 151, 153, 154,
Evan, John 240 166, 167

300 INDEX
Halbreich, Harry 100 Holländer, Friedrich 169, 173 n. 18,

Halffter, Ernesto 202 n. 26 181 n. 45
Halffter, Rodolfo 202 n. 26 Hölsky, Adriana 179 n. 40
Handel, Georg Frideric 21, 59, 64, Honegger, Arthur 79
143 Horkheimer, Max 104, 105, 110 n. 49
Harley, Sam 261 Hovhaness, Alan Scott 79
Harris, Roy 79 Howard, Ron 173
Harrison, Lou 58 Huidobro, Vicente 58, 164
Hartmann, Karl Amadeus 79, 89 Humeres, Carlos 143
Harvey, Jonathan 133 Husserl, Edmund 5
Haydn, Joseph 31, 35, 121 Hutcheon, Linda 39, 52
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 95, hybridity 185, 270
100
Heidegger, Martin 5 indie neofado 4, 13, 251–2, 256, 257,
Hendrix, Jimi 227 260, 261, 263, 264, 269, 270
Henze, Hans Werner 79, 80, 110 indie rock 249, 250, 259, 260
Heraud, Javier 151, 153, 166 Iselin, Isaak 93, 95
Heróis do Mar (band) 257, 258–9, 268, Ives, Charles 51, 59, 64
270, 271
Hindemith, Paul 76, 79, 84, 89 Jackendoff, Ray 132
historicity 10, 12, 14, 78, 81, 82, 83, 85, Jameson, Frederic 3, 5, 8, 13, 67, 72,
86, 122, 128, 136, 139, 140, 147, 162, 220
168 n. 3, 178 Jarnach, Philipp 83, 114 n. 68
relation to nostalgia 198, 220 Jethro Tull (band) 12, 227, 229, 231,
relation to temporality 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, 232, 233–4, 240, 243, 244, 246, 247
8, 9, 11, 169, 191, 267 Joachim, Joseph 44
historiography 7, 9, 40, 52, 89, 92, 93, Johnson, Philip 51
101, 104, 106, 130, 137, 143, 168, 198 Jones, John Paul 238
history 5, 6, 7, 8, 14, 17, 18, 28, 32, 34, Jonigk, Thomas 187
39, 51, 59, 62, 68, 72, 78, 84, 85, 86, Joplin, Janis 227
94, 95, 127, 129, 131, 135, 136, 138, Judd, Cristle Collins 128
168
concept of 4, 52–3 Kagel, Mauricio 66, 113, 114
end of 8, 9, 89–90, 91, 92, 93, 101, Kant, Immanuel 93, 96
102, 104, 105, 106 Kassler, Michael 123
loss of 8, 91, 101, 103, 104, 106 Kelly, John 173
of Chile 138, 139, 150, 151, 156, Kelner, Douglas 59
158, 160, 162 Kerman, Joseph 10, 120, 123–4, 125,
philosophy of 91, 93, 97 128, 136
posthistoire 8, 91, 101, 102, 103, 104, Kielian, Marianne 134
105, 106 Kierkegaard, Søren 32
relation to time 1, 2, 4, 9, 20, 35, 77, Killmayer, Wilhelm 8,78–82, 83, 85,
170–1, 191, 221 88, 114
Hoffman, Kristian 173 n. 18, 181 n. 45 Klee, Paul 62
Hogar Español 208, 209 Kleist, Heinrich von 86–8
Hoje (band) 263 Klemm, Eberhardt 100
Hölderlin, Friedrich 82 Koch, Rudolf 238

INDEX 301
Koechlin, Charles 143 Man, Hendrik de 101, 103

Komar, Arthur 123 Mantecón, Juan José 202 n. 26
Kopp, David 133 Martin, Henry 133
Korsyn, Kevin 121, 135 Martínez Ruiz, José see Azorín
Kramer, Jonathan D. 1, 7, 19, 39, 50 Martínez Torner, Eduardo, 4, 12, 198
Krebs, Harald 133 flight from Spain 195–8, 203–8
Kreisler, Fritz 44 life in Spain 199–203
Kremer, Gidon 37 London exile 208–19, 220–2
Kresky, Jeffrey 125 Martinů, Bohuslav 89, 114 n. 68
Kyao, Rão 263 Maturana, Eduardo 149, 151, 153, 154,
159, 167
Lachenmann, Helmut 185 McDermot, David 172
Landauer, Gustav 5, McFarland, Mark 280
Lasso, Orlando di 50 McTaggart, J.M.E. 5
Latin America 57, 138, 139, 140, 150, Mead, George Herbert 5
151, 154, 156, 160, 162 medievalism 227, 228 n. 11, 236, 237,
Latour, Bruno 18–19, 29, 35 238, 240, 241, 242 n. 55, 243, 244,
Le Corbusier 129, 130 246, 247
Led Zeppelin (band) 12, 225, 227, 229, memory 3, 11, 28, 81, 82, 84, 87, 168,
232, 233, 234, 237, 240, 241, 244, 170, 191, 195, 214, 219, 228 n. 12,
246, 247 247, 253, 259, 264, 268
Leech-Wilkinson, Daniel 134 Mendelssohn–Bartholdy, Felix 44
Leone, Sergio 269 Mendes, María Antónia see Mitó
Lerdahl, Fred 132 Messiaen, Olivier 79
Lester, Joel 133, 134 metanarrative 6, 39, 51–2, 53, 72, 120,
Letelier, Alfonso 146–7, 148, 163 127, 130, 136, 161
Liberace, Władziu Valentino 61 Mexico 58, 150, 221
Ligeti, György 81, 89 n. 27, 179 n. 40 Meyer, Ernst Hermann 12
Lindner, Arnulf 261 Middle Ages 128, 147, 227, 236 n. 32,
Lisbon 13, 249, 250, 253, 254, 255, 237, 240
258, 259, 260, 261, 265–7, 169, 270 Middleton, Richard 133
Liszt, Franz 63, 132 Milhaud, Darius 68, 131
Littlefield, Richard 121 minimalism 8, 9, 55, 56, 62, 64, 65, 71,
Loeb, David 128 245
Lomax, Alan 215 Mistral, Gabriela 58, 165
London 12, 146 n. 29, 196, 197, 198, Mitchell, Katie 33
208–11, 212, 219, 220, 221 Mitchell, William 133
Lutosławski, Witold 79, 80 Mitó 251
Lyotard, Jean-François 17, 39, 51, 72 modernism 3, 13, 29, 51, 51, 69, 72, 75,
n. 45, 120 76, 78, 84, 86, 88, 89, 119, 139, 140,
147, 229
Machado, Antonio 203, 208 reaction against 8, 9, 11, 53, 108,
Machaut, Guillaume de 134 160
Madrid 140, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, Monteiro, Ana Maria Alfacinha de Brito
203, 214, 217 see Anamar
Mahler, Gustav 28, 35, 51, 63, 64, 67, modernity 1, 2 n. 4, 3, 4, 18, 20, 32,
81, 82, 97, 99 n. 26 129, 145, 162, 230

302 INDEX
Morgan, Robert 123, 133 new tonality 56, 100 see also
Morla Lynch, Wanda 144 neo-tonality
Morricone, Ennio 265, 269 n. 46 New York 51, 172, 178, 181 n. 48, 209,
Morris, Keith 229 n. 16 221, 231, 269
Morrison, Jim 227 Newton, Isaac 94
Mosch, Ulrich 9, 91, 101, 107, 116 Nietzsche, Friedrich 6
Motte-Haber, Helga de la 9, 101, 105 Nobre da Costa, José 260
n. 50, 106, 107 Nomi, Klaus 4, 169, 172–7, 178, 188,
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 20–1, 22, 189
38 n. 5, 43, 85, 133 reception of 170, 181, 183, 185,
Müller-Siemens, Detlev 98, 114–6 187, 191
Mumford, Lewis 103, 104, 105 Nono, Luigi 88 n. 26, 98 n. 18, 108–9,
Mundry, Isabel 8, 78, 85–8 110, 179 n. 40
Murail, Tristan 179 n. 40, 185 nostalgia 11–13, 161, 221, 226, 227,
Musica Elettronica Viva (group) 113 228, 232, 234, 237, 268 see also
musicology 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 39, 40, 130 saudade
in Germany 91–2, 97–101, 106–7, historical nostalgia 227, 229, 236,
116 244
in Spain 198, 211–15, 217, 219, reflective nostalgia 252, 253, 254,
220, 221 255, 256, 262, 264, 269
in the United States 120, 122 relation to time 220, 230, 237
Musil, Bartolo 181 n. 48 restorative nostalgia 252, 255, 256,
mythology 12, 176, 226, 228, 236–4, 260, 261, 262, 264, 265, 269
259 Novack, Saul 128, 133
Numan, Gary 175
Nancarrow, Conlon 64, 68 Nuñez Navarrete, Pedro 148 n. 36, 165
Narmour, Eugene 10, 123–5, 127–8,
129, 131, 136 Oliveira de Salazar, António 250, 255,
Narváez, Luys de 202, 212 256, 258
nature 147, 148, 154, 226, 228, 230, Orrego-Salas, Juan 141 n. 9, 146, 147,
231, 233, 234, 235, 236, 241 148, 150, 151, 159 n. 61, 163, 165
neoclassicism 5, 6, 26, 114 n. 68, 122, Ortega y Gasset, José 216
145, 147–8, 156, 162 Os Faíscas (band) 257, 258
neoromanticism 122 see also new Oulmain, Alain 262
Romanticism Ovelha Negra (band) 251, 257–64,
neo-tonality 56, 100 see also new 267–9, 271
tonality
Neruda, Pablo 10, 139, 150, 153, 156, Page, Jimmy 225, 230, 237, 238, 241,
160, 163, 164, 165, 167 242
Neumeyer, David 121, 132 Palmer, Tony 56
Neuwirth, Olga 4, 169, 171, 178, 181, Paredes, Carlos 264, 265, 266, 267, 269
185, 188 Paris 149, 171 n. 13, 175, 197 n. 7, 219
Hommage à Klaus Nomi 11, 170, Parra, Viviane 250
179–180, 182–184, 186–7, 189, Parrish, Man 178 n. 36
190, 191 Pärt, Arvo 59
new Romanticism 56 see also passacaglia 85
neoromanticism Pedrell, Felipe 202

INDEX 303
Peña, Ruiz de la 217 Reyes Basoalto, Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí

Penderecki, Krzysztof see Neruda, Pablo
Pergolesi, Giovanni Battista 66 Ribera, Julián 202
Pidal, Ramón Menéndez 200, 201 Rienäcker, Gerd 106, 107 n. 53
Pittaluga, Gustavo 202 n. 26 Riesco, Carlos 141 n. 9, 159
Plant, Robert 225, 229 n. 16, 233, 239, Riethmüller, Albrecht 100
243 Rihm, Wolfgang 97–9, 100, 105, 107,
Plum, Karl-Otto 133 108, 110–13, 114, 116
polystylism 7, 38, 39, 40, 50 Riley, Terry, 7, 29, 30, 31, 58
Portugal 13, 250, 253, 254, 257, 259, Rochberg, George 98
261, 263, 267, 268, 270 rock 178, 225, 227, 233, 234, 237, 238,
postminimalism 56, 57 241, 246, 249 see also indie rock
postmodern time 7, 18, 19, 27, 28, 31, Rodrigues, Amália 251, 256 n. 22, 256
35, 36 n. 24, 261–4
postmodernism 7, 9, 18, 28, 29, 39, 67, Romanticism 44, 62, 63–4, 84, 86, 97,
259, 139–40, 161 110, 119, 226, 238
concept of 3, 17, 69, 89, 91–2, 99 Rothgeb, John 134
theories of 39, 40, 50, 51, 52, 53, Russell, Ethan 231
101, 108, 132, 135 Rzewski, Frederic 113 n. 65
postmodernity 2, 10, 18 n. 2, 28, 36
concept of 2–3, 4, 7 Sabbe, Herman 106
post-stylism 8, 56, 57, 59, 67, 69, Sabella, Andrés 150, 166
71–2 Sachs, Curt 12
Pound, Ezra 33 Sadie, Stanley 21
Presley, Elvis 172 Saint-Saëns, Camille 172, 173
Proctor, Gregory 121 n. 9, 133 Salas Viu, Vicente 141 n. 9, 143 n. 16
Prokofiev, Sergei 26, 35 Salazar, Adolfo 199, 213 n. 49, 224
Proust, Marcel 83 Salzer, Felix 10, 128–31, 132, 133, 136
Purcell, Henry 169, 170, 173, 176, 177, Samber, Robert 243
181, 189, 190 Santa Cruz, Domingo 139, 140–4, 145,
146, 147, 149, 161, 163, 165
Quantz, Joseph Joachim 41, 42 Santiago de Chile 140, 142
quotation 7, 17, 19, 27, 38, 39, 40, 45, Satie, Érik 67
47, 50, 51, 53, 65, 67, 77, 85, 99 n. 26, saudade 252–5, 257, 261, 269 see also
113, 154, 167, 168 nostalgia
Scandello, Antonio 88
Ravel, Maurice 35, 59, 64, 67, 87, 89, Scelsi, Giacinto 64
99 n. 26, 144 Schachter, Carl 133
Rebelo, Nuno 261 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph
Regener, Eric 123 von 95
Régio, José 254 Schenker, Heinrich 119–21
Reich, Steve 55, 57, 58, 59, 71, 121, Schenkerian theory 121, 122, 136
181 n. 48 criticism and reception of 123–8,
religion 32, 91, 143, 144, 145, 146–8, 129–31, 132–5
153 239, 240, 248, 260 history of 119–21
Remacha, Fernando 202 n. 26 relation to postmodern condi-
revival 5, 6, 26, 227, 238 tion 121, 137

304 INDEX
Scherzinger, Martin 126 Starr, Kevin 68

Schidlowsky, León 141 n. 9, 149, 150, Steeleye Span (band) 227
151, 153, 154, 164, 166 Stein, Deborah 133, 134
Schlözer, August Ludwig von 93, 95 Stern, David 128
Schnittke, Alfred, 50–2, 54, 79, 98 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 7, 19, 31, 32,
cadenza (1975) 7–8, 37–40, 41, 44, 58, 99 n. 26, 113, 114
45, 47–50, 53 Momente 29–30, 36
Schoenberg, Arnold, 26, 63, 76, 89, 97, Straus, Joseph N. 129
99 n. 26, 145 Strauss, Richard 75, 84, 87, 88, 89, 99
theories of 63, 132 n. 26
Schubert, Franz 35, 85, 121 Stravinsky, Igor 26, 59, 66, 79, 83, 84,
Schwarz, David 121 87, 97, 145
Schweinitz, Wolfgang von 98, 114 viewed by theorists 121, 129, 130
Schweitzer, Albert 143, 144 Swift, Richard 133
Schweitzer, Corinne 187 symphony 28, 31, 35, 38, 45, 57, 65, 66,
Second Viennese School 64, 145, 158 67, 68, 72, 148
Sedlmayr, Hans 101 late-twentieth century 50, 78–82,
Segerstam, Leif 79 83–85, 110–11
Seidenberg, Roderick 102–3, 105 in theory 125, 126
Sellars, Peter 58
serialism 56, 62, 69, 70, 149, 158 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich 87, 88
Serís, Homero 209, 217, 221 Telemann, Georg Philipp 143
Serwer, Howard 123 temporality 1, 2, 9, 10, 19, 20, 22,
Severa, Maria 254, 270 29–30, 35, 128, 135, 162, 169, 176,
Shakespeare, William 33, 58 n. 10, 178 178, 189, 191, 198, 221, 241, 247
Shostakovich, Dmitri 35, 37, 38, 44, concept of 3, 5, 6, 13, 14
47, 52, 53, 79, 81, 89 conjunctive 12
preludes and fugues 7, 20, 22–7 disjunctive 12
Sibelius, Jean 44, 59, 63, 81, 89 double 11, 170, 171, 187, 190
Siebert, Wilhelm Dieter 113, 114 heterogenous 10–11, 139, 149
Siff, Ira 173 n. 20 horizon 13
Silva, Kátia 261 layered 10, 161, 270
Smith, Charles J. 134 nonlinear 14, 161
Smith, Peter H. 121 n. 9 relation to anachronism 56
socialist realism 6, 139, 158, 159, 162 relation to historicity see historicity
Somfai, László 131 simultaneous 240
Spain 12, 147, 195, 198, 199–203, 205, sphericity 8, 11, 77, 84, 89
208, 211, 213, 214, 215, 216, 219, Thomas, Craig 233 n. 27
220, 221, 222 Thomas, Dylan 149, 164
spatiality 4, 11, 28, 57, 84, 87, 126, 135, Tippett, Michael 80
139, 176, 227, 234, 234, 241, 243 Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel 237, 241,
in music 1, 23, 26, 82, 88 242
relation to temporality 12, 13, 14, Torner, Florentino 221
33, 198, 226, 228, 230, 239, 246, Townshend, Pete 231, 235, 244, 245,
247, 269 246
Spengler, Oswald 130 Toynbee, Arnold J. 101
Sperber, Klaus see Nomi, Klaus Trips, Tó 262, 264, 265–6

INDEX 305
Trojahn, Manfred 98, 107, 108, 116 Waits, Tom 269

Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques 94 Waldman, Jack 175
Turina, Joaquín 203 Webern, Anton 83, 89, 99 n. 26, 149,
Türk, Daniel Gottlob 42–3 154 n. 53
Weinöhl, Jörg 87, 88
Ungaretti, Giuseppe 83–4 The Who (band) 12, 227, 231, 240–41,
urban criticism 226, 227, 228–30, 232, 244–5, 246, 247
233, 234, 236 Williams, Alastair 39, 128
Ustvolskaja, Galina 79 Williams, Ralph Vaughan 114
n. 68
Valle-Inclán, Ramón del 215, 216 Wilson, Harold 226, 227 n. 9
Varatojo, Luís 250, 251 Wolfe, Thomas 149, 164
Varèse, Edgard 72, 179 n. 40 Wolter, Michael 80
Vargas, Darwin 148 n. 36, 163 Woolf, Virginia 190 n. 69
Variaçoes, António 260–1
Velvet Underground (band) 249 Young, La Monte 58
Verdi, Giuseppe 173
Victorian era see Romanticism Zeeuw, Anne Marie 131
Vinci, Leonardo da 62, 149, 165 Zender, Hans 86
Vivaldi, Antonio 143 Zhdanov, Andrei 27
Zimmermann, Bernd Alois 76, 78, 79,
Wadleigh, Michael 229 81–7
Wagner, Richard 59, 61, 62, 63, 64, 72, sphericity of time 8, 11, 77, 89
95, 97, 126 Zola, Émile 75

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Postmodernity’s Musical Pasts

Published online by Cambridge University Press

THE BOYDELL PRESS

Published online by Cambridge University Press

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First published 2020

ISBN 978 1 78327 496 3

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Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Part I. Time and the (Post)Modern

2 ‘Aesthetic Indigestion’: Alfred Schnittke, Anachronism, and the

3 John Adams’s Post-stylistic Approach to the Past: A Response

Part II. Manifestations of History

5 Visions of the ‘End of History’, ‘1968’, and the Emergence of

Part III. Receptions of the Past

Published online by Cambridge University Press

7 From Bach to Neruda: Historicity and Heterogeneous

8 Time Re-Covered: Double Temporality in Olga Neuwirth’s

Part IV. Nostalgias and the Temporalities of Belonging

10 Historical Nostalgia, Nature, and the Future in Three Iconic

11 Indie Neofado’s Temporality: A Tale of Two Nostalgias 249

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2.1 Gravestone of Alfred Schnittke in the Novodevichy Cemetery,

5.1 Luigi Nono, Intolleranza 1960, p. 8. © 1962 by Ars Viva

9.1 Opening of ‘El ritmo en los estilos literarios’, Profesionales de la

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9.6 A page from the original manuscript of Torner’s Rítmica musical

11.1 Paulo Pedro Gonçalves, 11 June 2017. Reproduced by

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1.1 Dmitri Shostakovich, Fugue in F♯ major (1950–1), conclusion.

2.1 Alfred Schnittke, cadenza for Beethoven’s Violin Concerto

7.1 Acario Cotapos, Balmaceda (1956), microfilm of the manuscript

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8.1 Olga Neuwirth, Hommage à Klaus Nomi (1998), ‘Remember’,

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Michael Arnold is Lecturer in Spanish and Portuguese Studies at the

Susana Asensio Llamas, musicologist, works at the Consejo Superior de

Georg Burgstaller works as Editor at Répertoire International de Littérature

Caitlin Vaughn Carlos is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Music History at

Daniela Fugellie is Assistant Professor of Musicology at the Universidad

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John Koslovsky is on the music theory faculty at the Conservatorium van

Lawrence Kramer, Distinguished Professor of English and Music at

Beate Kutschke is currently steering the project Historiography of Musical

Laurenz Lütteken is Professor and Chair of Musicology at Zurich University.

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Max Noubel is Associate Professor at the University of Burgundy and an

Joshua S. Walden is the author of Sounding Authentic: The Rural Miniature

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Many institutions and individuals were instrumental in the creation and

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Published online by Cambridge University Press

Published online by Cambridge University Press

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

trans. Andrew Jenkins (Cambridge, MA, 2003), p. 19.

Tina Frühauf (Editor) - Postmodernity's Musical Pasts-Boydell Press (2020)

Tina Frühauf (Editor) - Postmodernity's Musical Pasts-Boydell Press (2020)

Tina Frühauf (Editor) - Postmodernity's Musical Pasts-Boydell Press (2020)