Modernist Music and Literature

Playlist:
Richard Thompson Mirror Blue
Various Artists Nick Hornby Songbook

The connection between modernist music and modernist literature continues to astound me. Maybe it is because both of the classes I have on Monday deal with this. It just seems to me that you can’t get through a Joyce piece without music entering in, and Joyce and other modernists seem to be omnipresent in modernist music. It must really be true that when you are an artist/philosopher/composer on the fringe there is much overlap.

It also makes me think of what drove art in this direction. Again I think of the Proud Tower, and Tuchman’s explanation of culture and the build up to World War I, it seems like modernism could be a direct reaction to World War I, but this isn’t the case. There are modernist pieces that predate the War, there were elements present in society that made modernism possible. What is it? I don’t know but there is certainly a feeling once the western world has industrialized that technology should be utilized to change the world for the better. There is some understandable backlash to ths idea post WWI, but the fascination with technology and newness survives. The change in how one views the artist and how the artist views the artist is very important. It makes me think of Joyce writing to Ibsen, how Ibsen was an artist that he put on a pedestal, but his correspondence with him makes you realize that the pedistal that the artist sits on is crumbling. The artist can no longer be separate from everything, the artist can no longer command absolute respect and awe. Joyce is an upstart student who is struck by awe, but still impudent when writing to his hero. The artist is no longer separate from the world so he can work, the artist is now down among the chaos. The chaos is very important. In the music, in the writing, everything was shaken up, traditional form mutated into a freer, yet possibly more complex style that was manipulated into a layered yet simple piece. When you look at Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or Allemande you might first glimpse a simple scene or hear a simple song, but the complexity of the art lies beneath the surface. The art is complex in a way that is subterranean and subtle.