White musical mythologies : sonic presence in modernism / Edmund Mendelssohn.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Mendelssohn, Edmund, author.

Series:

Sensing media (Series)

Sensing media: aesthetics, philosophy, and cultures of media

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Modernism (Music)--History--20th century.

Modernism (Music).

Avant-garde (Music)--France--History--20th century.

Avant-garde (Music).

Modernism (Aesthetics)--France--History--20th century.

Modernism (Aesthetics).

Music--Western countries--Foreign influences.

Music.

Music--Philosophy and aesthetics.

Philosophy, French--20th century.

Philosophy, French.

Postcolonialism and music.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (308 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, [2023]

System Details:

Mode of access: World Wide Web.

Summary:

"Examining a series of modernist thinkers and composers who engaged with non-European cultures as they pursued pure sound as a privileged presence, White Musical Mythologies pairs Erik Satie with Bergson, Edgard Varèse with Bataille, Pierre Boulez with Artaud, and John Cage with Derrida to offer an ambitious intellectual history of the colonial roots of modernist musical thought. Each of the musicians studied in this book re-created or appropriated non-European forms of expression as they conceived music ontologically, often thinking music as something immediate and immersive: from Satie's dabblings with mysticism and exoticism in bohemian Montmartre of the 1890s to Varèse's experience of ethnographic exhibitions and surrealist poetry in 1930s Paris, and from Boulez's endeavor to theorize a kind of musical writing that would "absorb" the sounds of non-European musical traditions to Cage, who took inspiration from Eastern thought as he wrote about sound, silence, and chance. Edmund Mendelssohn suggests that the Euro-American idea of "pure sound," and the twentieth-century quest to produce it, was premised on an assumed authority of "the West" over Europe's others. Intended for readers in philosophy, musicology, art theory, the history of modernism, sound studies, and postcolonial studies, this book demonstrates that we cannot fully understand French theory in its novelty and complexity without music and sound"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Prelude : a silence filled with speech

The ontology of the ineffable : Satie and Bergson

Ontological machines : Vare`se and Bataille

Ontological appropriation : Boulez and Artaud

The written being of sound : Cage and Derrida

Postlude : a simulacrum of presence.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9781503636644

150363664X

OCLC:

1380465997