Music and Twenty-first-century Modernism

Abstract

The concluding chapter investigates the return by contemporary writers to modernist music and methods of formal innovation. Richard Powers’s Orfeo and Paul Griffiths’s let me tell you demonstrate an enduring interest in musical transcendence of language, ideology, and using musical forms in literature. The methodology offered in this book offers an angle of vision from which the politics of these novels – conservative in Orfeo’s case, and radical in let me tell you – can be accessed, to show that while Orfeo is about modernist music, let me tell you ought to be considered a modernist novel. This chapter builds towards a new definition of modernism that hinges on one of the book’s central claims: that music has a crucial role to play in on-going attempts to challenge rational thought. A twenty-first-century novel like let me tell you can be modernist because modernism is not just the eschewal of tradition, or a set of established formal techniques, or an early-twentieth-century experiment, but the repeated attempt to break thought of its habits. Today’s writers continue to turn to music in their attempts to imagine and articulate different worlds using aesthetic forms.