ABSTRACT
The title of this chapter is appropriated from Carl Dahlhaus, who did so much to explain the musics of both romanticism and modernism. In the collection of essays that are covered by this title (Dahlhaus 1989), Dahlhaus looks at various different musics from both romanticism and modernism, and considers the relationships between the two. Specific territory covered by Dahlhaus in that book includes compositional issues - ‘the musical idea’, ‘musical prose’, ‘endless melody’ and ‘expanded tonality’ - that reflect the romanticism of Wagner and the modernism of Schoenberg. However, although some of these issues will appear in this book, my appropriation of Dahlhaus’s title looks in a rather different direction. I use this title not to consider some historical, compositional and/or stylistic transition, but to identify the sustained balance between the two concepts. In effect the objectives of this process revolve around the situating of a contemporary musical practice that clearly cannot belong to either romanticism or modernism in a chronological sense, but that displays reflections and traces of the historical, stylistic and ideological images of both. This contemporary practice will ultimately seek to explore the space between these two powerful constructions but from a perspective shaped by a certain distance and detachment.
