British Music and Modernism, 1895-1960. Ed. by Matthew Riley.

Abstract

‘“Modernism” is indeed a grateful and comforting word, a veritable goat-and-compasses for the critic, embracing almost everything with equal benevolence, and reconciling the most seemingly implacable antagonists.’ Philip Heseltine's terminological scepticism—reviewing Eugene Goosens's Modern Tendencies in Music for The Sackbut, 1/2 (June 1920), 69—is a reminder that few items in the music historian's lexicon are as overworked or bluntly imprecise in the sculpting of historical or stylistic distinctions as the M-word. The divining of the presence of moderns (or modernists) is, after all, as old as the hills. If the word is to serve as more than a loose temporal-grammatical shifter—distinguishing now from then—it will be within narratives of historical rupture. Energetic separation is arguably a necessity of the historical process: ‘That person incapable of confronting his or her own past antagonistically really can be said to have no past’, in Schelling's formulation (cited by Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London, 2002), 24). Yet even the crisp fault lines of the break, Jameson remarks, typically dilate into more expansive periods (p. 27). Matthew Riley's collection charts one such moment-become-era: the book covers a chronological terrain spanning, roughly, middle-period Elgar to the twelve-note music of Humphrey Searle.