ABSTRACT
To an observer in the last decade of the twentieth century it might have seemed implausible that a newly minted Research Companion to Modernism in Music would be needed in the second decade of the twenty-first. Back then, critical debates on modernism, not to mention modernist practices in music and elsewhere, were finding themselves increasingly subject to challenge. It was almost as if modernism, styled first as a breaker then as a maker of taboos, had itself become taboo. In music composition the late work of established (and invariably white male) modernist figures – among them Harrison Birtwistle, Pierre Boulez, Elliott Carter, György Ligeti and Iannis Xenakis – continued to garner attention. Modernism retained much of its authority too in music theory and analysis and in the rapidly burgeoning field of source studies on twentieth-century music. But in both the ‘new’ musicology and critical theory more generally, the fall from grace seemed unmistakable. In his book A Singular Modernity of 2002, Fredric Jameson reeled off the putative charge sheet: phallocentrism (and, with it, logocentrism); authoritarianism; repressiveness; ‘the teleology of the modernist aesthetic as it proceeded on triumphalistically from the newer to the newest’; the ‘cult of the genius or seer’; and, last but by no means least, the ‘non-pleasurable demands made on the audience or public’. 1 More recently, however, the pendulum has swung in the other direction.
