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Music's Monisms: Disarticulating Modernism

Online ISBN:
9780226791364
Print ISBN:
9780226791227
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press
Book

Music's Monisms: Disarticulating Modernism

Published online:
19 May 2022
Published in print:
5 November 2021
Online ISBN:
9780226791364
Print ISBN:
9780226791227
Publisher:
University of Chicago Press

Abstract

Monism is the philosophical conviction that things that appear to be two are actually one. The large bifurcations by which we make sense of reality (matter versus spirit, concrete versus abstract, body versus soul) are somehow superseded by the monist. This does not mean that all monists agree. Bishop Berkeley was a monist who considered the physical world to be purely ideal, unsolid. Karl Marx, however, was a monist of exactly the opposite character: a materialist, he believed that only the physical world existed. But there is a kind of convergence of these opposites: for Marx and Berkeley alike, all that is solid must melt into air. Of all artistic media, music is perhaps most at ease in demonstrating the collapse of dualities. All composers in all ages have availed themselves of these possibilities for reconciling opposites; the sonata form itself can be understood as institutionalized reconciliation. But among the Modernists, there is a special effort not simply to reconcile opposites but to annihilate them, to deny that they ever existed in the first place. This book explores monism in the works of Richard Wagner, Claude Debussy, Benjamin Britten, Arnold Schoenberg, and Igor Stravinsky.

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