MORG - Musical Modernism Research Group
This group discusses the transformations that have taken place in composition, performance and musicology during musical modernism.
Musical modernism is changing. From the very outset, this music has been embedded in controversy, discussions of which are far from over.
Many of the leading figures to emerge from Central European musical modernism of the 1950s and ‘60s have passed away in recent times, however, their music is subject to continued historical and musical reinterpretation.
What is the legacy of this powerfully influential movement in Western art music and what is its position and relevance today?
This project discusses the transformations that have taken place in composition, performance and musicology during musical modernism; these changes can be discussed from several perspectives:
•Transformations of compositional writing (écriture) from the 1950s to the ’90s and beyond, including the revision of works and their scores, and the radically changing conceptions of musical form, genre and modes of expression.
•Transformations in analytical approaches, from structural analysis to the interpretation of musical form.
•Transformations of musical performance styles, from early pointillistic idioms to gestural and expressive modes of articulation.
•Aesthetic re-conceptions of musical modernism in relation to contemporary literature, visual arts, philosophy and broader socio-cultural contexts.
•Historical reassessments of postwar modernism’s role in relation to tradition, from ideas of rupture to historical reinterpretation and ‘play’ with historical idioms and figures.
•Historical reassessments of postwar modernism in relation to today’s cultural climate.