Modernist Idiom Research Articles

‘It is absolutely unnecessary, even detrimental, to embellish the façades’

Following World War I, Belgium faced a severe housing crisis, necessitating a comprehensive reform of social housing policy. Established in 1919, the National Society for Cheap Housing (Nationale Maatschappij voor Goedkope Woningen en Woonvertrekken, nmgww) aimed not only to repair material damage but also to address new social and societal demands. However, financial resources were limited, while there was also a severe shortage of (traditional) building materials and skilled labour. Progressive architects attempted to create a new, socially engaged architecture with a modernist vocabulary through the nmgww. They also advocated for the application of alternative building methods that had the added advantage of being financially favourable. The lack of expertise and experience with these alternative methods prompted the nmgww to set up an experimental project at Het Rad in Anderlecht in 1920. It entailed the construction of some sixty houses, employing eighteen different building systems. While most of these systems used concrete blocks, three utilized a prefabricated skeleton, and two opted for cast-in-situ concrete using monolithic casting systems. Nearly all utilized ‘lean concrete’, a type of concrete with a low cement content. Furthermore, in most cases part of the aggregate was replaced with industrial waste products to reduce costs and improve thermal properties. The intention was to perform an extensive evaluation and objective comparison of the different building systems. Yet even before the experiments had been concluded, the nmgww started to actively promote the German casting system Non Plus. For example, it invited local housing associations to participate in a study trip to Merseburg near Berlin to familiarize themselves with the system. Successfully, as it turns out as the system was subsequently used in the garden suburbs of Klein Rusland in Zelzate (1920-1923) and La Cité Moderne in Sint-Agatha-Berchem (1922-1925). The two districts were designed respectively by the architects Huib Hoste and Victor Bourgeois in a modernist idiom. The literature often refers to the economic benefits of the Non Plus system and to the impact of construction techniques on the aesthetics of these garden suburbs. However, in-depth research shows that the relationship between economic, technical and aesthetic aspects is not so straightforward: concrete was not necessarily cheaper than brick, while the plaster exterior often concealed a variety of systems. Moreover, both garden suburbs were initially designed in brick, indicating that there is no causal link between the material and the design language. It was not long, however, before the alternative building systems in lean concrete, particularly the monolithic casting systems, were abandoned. After 1926, as a result of political power shifts, the focus switched to small-scale projects and alternative building systems lost their scale-based economic advantage. Yet the experiment with alternative building practices, however brief, was an important phase in Belgian architectural and construction history. Projects like Het Rad and the modernist garden suburbs in cast-in-situ concrete show the interrelationship between societal, social, political, cultural and economic ambitions on the one hand, and the evolution of building culture on the other.

Nordic national football stadiums: past and present

ABSTRACT National sports stadiums are often deeply affected by the politics of identity and mythology. Questions of ‘nationality’ and the responsibility of safeguarding the idea of a specific ‘national’ sports culture often take a central position in the rhetoric surrounding national sports stadiums. This also has an impact on how they are designed, developed and operated. In this paper, we explore the legacy of Nordic national football stadiums. Our main case is Ullevål stadium in Oslo, which we compare with the national football stadiums in Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Sweden. Through this study, we compare the changing functions and symbolic significances of the respective stadiums in light of national sports narratives and architectural qualities. We argue that the meaning of national stadiums is influenced both by assumptions about national sports identity and expectations embedded in football architecture. A key finding is that the modernist idiom of ‘form follows function’ still seems to reign as a token of football stadium quality, in contrast to the idea of the postmodern stadium, associated with aesthetic confusion, shallow commodification, and the relegation of football to a secondary role. Yet we also found that typical modernist and postmodernist features often co-exist, with examples of multi-functionality evident throughout the history of the national Nordic football stadiums. Another crucial finding is that history continues to play a part in the contemporary configurations of Nordic national stadiums, even in cases where the physical stadium heritage has been completely obliterated or reconstructed beyond recognition from its original physical design. From a theoretical point of view, we build on previous scholarly work on national sports culture, Nordic football culture in particular, as well as geographical, anthropological and architectural studies of football stadiums. Archival research, document studies and literature review are the primary methodological approaches.

From Angels to Demons: Mikhail Vrubel and the Search for a Modernist Idiom

From Angels to Demons: Mikhail Vrubel and the Search for a Modernist Idiom

Aarup 1960 and the poetics of materials

All design has its own conditional modes of expression; however, these are realised through the maker’s sense of the possibilities of materiality. This essay was inspired by a reclaimed piece of 1960s furniture designed in the modernist idiom, and is based upon autobiographical experiences, original works from own and contemporary aesthetic practices, and associated thoughts in the present. A completely new artistic expression was developed, which questioned the strict, use-defined style ideals and let shape reveal other values and statements than function. The intention of this essay is to put into words some of the cognitive processes in which creativity, critical reflection and the senses’ experience-based insights may bring up something new. In creative work, the goal is not to reach a single result; every little discovery made by examining something specific could open up new worlds.

Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American LiteratureBlasphemous Modernism: The 20th-Century Word Made FleshTransatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America

Deafening Modernism: Embodied Language and Visual Poetics in American LiteratureBlasphemous Modernism: The 20th-Century Word Made FleshTransatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile, and Culture in Midcentury America

The Torah Ark of Arthur Szyk

This paper discusses the design and symbolism of a hitherto unpublished work by the artist Arthur Szyk (1894–1951), an ark for the Torah which he designed for the Forest Hills Jewish Center of Queens, New York, and which was dedicated in 1949. The Torah Ark is the central focus of all synagogue worship. Szyk’s ark is unique in its multiplicity of symbols and texts, which was at odds with the modernist idiom of post-World War II synagogue architecture. This research, which also brings previously unpublished material, analyzes the possible sources for the work and its distinctive message, which is exceptional in the world of modern contemporary Jewish art.

Aarup 1960 and the poetics of materials

All design has its own conditional modes of expression; however, these are realised through the maker’s sense of the possibilities of materiality. This essay was inspired by a reclaimed piece of 1960s furniture designed in the modernist idiom, and is based upon autobiographical experiences, original works from own and contemporary aesthetic practices, and associated thoughts in the present. A completely new artistic expression was developed, which questioned the strict, use-defined style ideals and let shape reveal other values and statements than function. The intention of this essay is to put into words some of the cognitive processes in which creativity, critical reflection and the senses’ experience-based insights may bring up something new. In creative work, the goal is not to reach a single result; every little discovery made by examining something specific could open up new worlds.

‘The Whole Work is Full of Primitive Rhythms’: The Folk-Primitivist Origins of Peter Sculthorpe’s National Music

Although the Aboriginal-derived titles and programmes of Peter Sculthorpe’s early music are well known, his works from the 1950s have been interpreted for the most part as landscape compositions or in relation to generalized notions of ‘Australian’ musical character. This article examines the work’s paratexts and Sculthorpe’s chronologically close statements to show that when the pieces were written he was less concerned with landscape than with achieving what he saw as a national character derived from connections between his music and Australian Aboriginal culture. Interpretation of Sculthorpe’s statements in the context of the abundant press coverage of John Antill’s Corroboree combined with analysis of musical topics and gestures in the Sonatina and Irkanda I reveals that sections of these early works are more representational than has previously been thought, and that these representations draw on the discourse of primitivism and the discourse of the folk. One facet of this involves the example of some of Bartók’s folk-derived modernist idioms which served Sculthorpe as a model. Since some of this music includes the first iterations of what became Sculthorpe’s characteristic harmonically static fast music, the interpretation of primitivism presented here has bearing on how we might understand the fast, percussive passages of his later work. Doubt is cast both on Sculthorpe’s claims of the formative influence of Aaron Copland’s music and on the idea that the slow melody of Irkanda I derived from Sculthorpe’s sketching of the landscape around Canberra. Newly accurate dating of the composition of the Sonatina and The Loneliness of Bunjil is given, as well as analysis of aspects of Irkanda I in terms of its early title, ‘Aboriginal Burial (Irkanda)’.

Modern Buddhisms and Democracy: Diverse Encounters in India and Sri Lanka

The article explores the ways in which Buddhism had reinvented itself in a modernist idiom to deal with social and political conditions in India and Sri Lanka. This is done primarily by looking into the work of Anagarika Dharmapala, Iyothee Thass and B.R. Ambedkar. In general, the article is an attempt to place in context how political conditions of specific times and expectations of democracy play an active role in refashioning a religious ideology into an engaging political force.

Janáček's the Makropulos Affair

Janáček's the Makropulos Affair John Tyrrell Leoš Janáček. Věc Makropulos = Die Sache Makropulos = The Makropulos Affair. Libretto by Leoš Janáček. Edited by Jiří Zahrádka, with performance suggestions by Sir Charles Mackerras. Vienna: Universal Edition, 2017. [Preface in Ger. and Eng., p. xi–cxxiii; characters & orchestra, p. [3–6]; score, p. 7–513; ISMN 979-0-008-08753-0; ISBN 978-3-7024-7424-9; pub. no. UE 36511. €89.95.] Only two of Janáček's operas were published in full score during his lifetime: Její pastorkyňa (Jenůfa) and Kát'a Kabanová. Z mrtvého domu (From the House of the Dead) came out two years after his death and, like Jenůfa, in an edition reorchestrated and revised by others. One of the striking achievements in recent years of Janáček's publisher, Universal Edition, has been the systematic preparation of new, scholarly editions of their Janáček stock in full score and study score, together with revised piano-vocal scores and newly-prepared orchestral parts. The "Brno version (1908)" of Jenůfa, stripping the score of Karel Kovařovic's revisions and reorchestration, appeared in 1996, and was followed by critical editions of Janáček's first opera Šárka (piano-vocal score only, 2002) and Příhody lišky Bystrou šky (The Cunning Little Vixen, 2010), both edited by Jiří Zahrádka, curator of the Janáček Archive in the Mora vian Museum Brno. Zahrádka's considerable editorial experience (he is also the editor of Glagolská mše (The Glagolitic Mass) and Osud (Fate) for Bären reiter, and most of Janáček's chamber and solo piano music (for [End Page 146] G. Henle) is well displayed in his superb edition of Věc Makropulos (The Makropulos Affair). Makropulos, Janáček's eighth and penultimate opera, was his most ambitious. The musical language moved up a notch from the easy lyricism of its predecessor, The Vixen, to be one of the composer's most gritty scores, its modernist idiom winning approving words from Theodor Adorno. Working from a ready-made text was not necessarily an advantage. Karel Čapek, the author of the successful stage play on which the opera is based, himself described it as "over-garrulous," and although Janáček by then was an experienced and fearless adapter of stage plays, it needed especially heavy cutting to turn it into a serviceable opera libretto. Putting over musically the long legal explanations in act 1 was a problem, as was the final act, where Janáček com-pressed Čapek's two scenes into one. He didn't get this right the first time, and found himself jettisoning acres of score during the revision of act 3. Conductors usually find Makropulos the most difficult of all Janáček's operas to conduct. The first act is a particular challenge, one of the longest continuous spans in a Janáček opera without the diversion of set pieces as in Jenůfa or even From the House of the Dead. Janáček nevertheless threw himself enthusiastically into composing his new opera, which he began on 11 November 1923, having signed off The Vixen on 10 October 1923. The single month that separates Makropulos from The Vixen suggests a composer full of confidence and just itching to begin, not even waiting until after his Christmas break, as in the previous operas. As he got toward the end, he began mentioning the work excitedly to his friend Kamila Stösslová. But this does not tell the whole story. There were occasions in between when he refused to discuss the opera and when, it seems, he was doing almost anything but compose Makropulos. During the composition of Kát'a Kabanová (1920–21) Janáček retired from the directorship of the Brno Conservatory, giving him much more free time for composition; he also moved over to a systematic and streamlined method of writing operas. His new routine of composing operas was based on intensive bursts, completing an act at a time, followed by a recreative break such as a trip to Prague, a stay at the Moravian spa of Luhačovice, or at...

Contemplative Spectator, Universal Art, Contingent Realities: Aesthetic Trajectories in Two Early “Art Films” In Malayalam

For the earliest attempts in Malayalam cinema seeking to evolve a poetic aesthetic, the paradoxical relation toward urban modernity that emerged among the middle class by the middle of the twentieth century—defined by antagonism as well as fascination—operated as the axis around which new spectatorial relations could be maneuvered. This article takes up for discussion two Malayalam films from the mid-1950s—Newspaper Boy (dir. P. Ramadas, 1955) and Rarichan enna powran (Citizen Rarichan, dir. P. Bhaskaran, 1956)—as cinematic experiments in conceiving the urban space from two influential ideological positions, and as attempts in adapting to modernist idioms of international cinema. Modalities of imagining the urban space, the author argues, attained crucial historical significance in aesthetics and politics: it enabled the cultural producers to aesthetically situate the films within global cultures of cinema, thus invoking and molding the contemplative viewer; politically, these films mark the earliest attempts to conceive the region's relation to modernity through the grids of imagining the urban.

Australian Modernists in London: William Dobell’s The Dead Landlord and Patrick White’s The Ham Funeral

When Patrick White was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973, it was primarily for his novels. Less well recognised is the significance of White’s dramatic literature and his involvement in the theatre. This article offers a new analysis of White’s first notable breakthrough into theatre and drama, The Ham Funeral, which he wrote in postwar London and which was produced in Adelaide in 1961. This article argues that a modernist idiom of 20th-century Australian drama can be found in this play that laid the groundwork for a poetics of language, image and theatricality. The play’s aesthetic modernism is found primarily in the blend of expressionist and surrealist elements, the poetic language, the alienated creative subject and the representation of sexuality and the unconscious. White’s thematics also become political, concerned with power, masculinity and gendered assumptions about rationality and emotion, poetry and the body. Having lived in London during the interwar years, White was also part of the networks that included Australian-born artists, and he was exposed to influences from visual arts as well as theatre. Of these, the artist William Dobell was central to the genesis of The Ham Funeral, as was the Polish-born modernist artist S. Ostoja-Kotkowski, who was critical to the design of the brooding expressionist set that set the standard for subsequent stage realisations of the play.

Attitudes Towards Modern Living: The Mid-century Showrooms of Herman Miller and Knoll Associates

The independent manufacturer’s furniture showroom, as defined by Herman Miller and Knoll in the mid-twentieth century, presented a highly controlled and controllable context in which both companies and their designers familiarized American architects, designers and consumers with new ideas about living with modern furniture and architecture. Embracing consumerism within a modernist idiom, these mid-century furniture showrooms provided a unique interior typology wherein the reconciliation of modernism, mass-produced goods and personal expression was not only possible, but also accessible. Challenging long-held practices and beliefs within the nation’s conservative home furnishings market, Herman Miller and Knoll superseded retail buyers by reaching out directly to customers. The independently-run showrooms allowed both companies to engage their customers in a sophisticated and sustained proposition about the role of modern furniture and architecture in daily life. Examining the showrooms designed for Herman Miller and Knoll Associates during the latter 1940s and early 1950s, this article explores the ways in which these spaces were utilized as both laboratories and showcases, demonstrating the adaptability of modern furniture and interiors to individual lifestyles. Key words Charles and Ray Eames display design furniture Herman Miller Knoll Associates modernism showrooms

Teaching abstraction? Art historical and sociological perspectives on Nils Wedel and the basic form course at Slöjdskolan in Gothenburg, Sweden 1946–1957

SummaryFrom the perspective of art history and sociology, this article investigates the artist Nils Wedel (1897–1967) and his position as head teacher to the department of decorative painting at the art and design school Slöjdskolan in Gothenburg 1938–1953. The article argues that the recruitment of Wedel can be seen as a strategic outcome of combination of his deviant interest in abstract art (compared to his more successful expressionist contemporaries) and his modest career. Supporting his family as a graphic designer, he was, due to his abstract “inclinations”, isolated from the dominant networks of Francophile and well-tempered expressionist art in Stockholm and Gothenburg in the 1930s and 1940s. However, this homology of aesthetic and social characteristics that positioned him in the margins of contemporary Swedish art made him the perfect teacher to meet the increased demand in Sweden in the late 1930s for art and design artists tuned to modernist idioms and skilled in professional methods of visual design. In commercial work in visual imagery, such as advertisements, shop window displays, or even carpet design, abstraction had become fashionable by the early 1930s. Wedel's introduction of a basic form course in 1946 can be seen as a pedagogical confirmation of this attraction of modernist idioms. In the geographical, social and aesthetic periphery, it was possible to build a pedagogical setting that introduced students to the then historical avant-garde of abstract art and modern idioms while also training skills valuable for a commercial career.

Grupo Antillano: The Art of Afro-Cuba

In this age of e-books and mobile media, of pages on screens and images in malleable pixels, this book is the antithesis of all that. A gorgeous, weighty volume with gleaming reproductions and bilingual columns of text, it is a reminder of the sensory pleasures books can inspire. But this book appeals beyond the aesthetic. As a history, archive, and catalogue of Cuba's forgotten Grupo Antillano, it is also a necessary intervention in the political and cultural histories of race in the Americas. The Grupo Antillano was an art collective comprised of Cuban artists who exhibited their work between the years of 1978 and 1982. Led by the sculptor and printmaker Rafael Queneditt Morales, this loosely organized group of visual artists understood themselves to be revaluing the disparaged legacies of afrocubanismo and negritude. Their art posited an ongoing African presence in Cuban culture, drawing from surrealist, abstract expressionist, and modernist idioms in provocative rebukes to racism in socialist Cuba. More than that, they aimed to incorporate music, dance, history, and literature in their resuscitation of cultural forms. Working across disciplines, they collaborated on performances, organized forums, and staged concerts within exhibits in efforts to create a broad public. This short-lived assemblage of creative energy faded and left only the faintest traces, until now, in Cuban history and art history.The book itself compiles different kinds of texts and images. A testimonial section includes short essays by the artists with their reflections on the intentions and motivations of the Grupo Antillano's project. Replicas of press clippings, posters, and reviews reconstruct the exhibits from multiple perspectives. Perceptive short essays by the art historian and critic Guillermina Ramos Cruz on each of the artists, excerpts from reviews and critiques, and reproductions of the art highlight the participants' specific qualities. Finally, a sampling of works from a recent exhibit that paid tribute to the Grupo Antillano completes the volume and reminds readers of ongoing artistic dialogues about blackness in contemporary Cuba. The array of media provides a visual and discursive immersion in this creative milieu.As the editor, Alejandro de la Fuente uses his essay to situate the Grupo within the Cuban state's long and twisted relationship with Afro-Cuban cultural production. Opening with a brief account of “drapetomania,” the nineteenth-century pathologizing diagnosis of slaves' desire to flee their bondage, he traces shifting meanings and comes to rest on a notion, developed by Caribbean intellectuals such as Edouard Glissant and René Depestre, of cultural cimarronage, understood as an effort to use aesthetic creation to reshape dire histories. De la Fuente frames the work of the Grupo Antillano with this idea: they were, according to him, the then-contentious and now forgotten inheritors of efforts to sustain and reinvent connections to African cultural forms in Caribbean contexts and to voice critiques of the marginalization of those legacies.From a historian's, rather than an art critic's, perspective, the volume's emphatic beauty does not mute the controversial, political nature of the art. The changing status of Afro-Cuban spiritual and artistic practices in the revolution, ranging from initial condemnation as decadent to Castro's eventual declaration of Cuba as an Afro-Latin country, existed in parallel to but did not extinguish the everyday disregard for people of African descent. Grupo Antillano's artists intended to intervene and reconfigure this with their invocations of Yoruba gods and captive pasts. They did so by drawing from the kinds of bold abstractions that Wifredo Lam, an acknowledged influence and eventual participant, used to conjure coexistent beauty and pain. At the height of the Grupo's public presence, Volumen Uno, a rival artistic movement that would eventually become emblematic of Cuban contemporary art, declared such modern formalism passé. The political and aesthetic roots of the evaluation and subsequent demise of Grupo Antillano remain entangled, and de la Fuente's deft presentation invites further inquiry. The volume does not resolve the debates surrounding the representation of slavery, race, spirituality, and belonging, but it recovers the visual and textual contexts, both in the late 1970s and the early twenty-first century, in which those debates took place and persist.

Writing About Modernist Painting Outside Western Europe and North America

The history of modern painting is conventionally told following a trajectory from European artists like Manet, Cezanne through Picasso and artistic styles ranging from expressionism, surrealism, cubism, and other avant-garde movements and stylistic trends on to abstract expressionism. Art historians all over the world share this conventional narrative, although it is the uneasy confluence of several Western master narratives that largely exclude the artistic production evolving in processes of modernization elsewhere in the world. Consequently, painters fostering a modernist idiom for example in China, India, South-America or even Eastern Europe appeared - and still appear until today – if at all - as agents of a “belated modernity.” At best they are credited with the pursuit of an “alternative modernism,” which still harkens back to the Euro-American centre as its main reference point. More often, they are dismissed in art critical and historical accounts as derivative in their attempt to emulate this centre. I argue that in the age of economic, media and cultural globalization after the end of the Cold War, there still exists no critical approach to modernist painting that is effectively free of the Eurocentric and universalist master narrative of western modernism, even though a strongly multicultural art-critical, art historical and curatorial literature has developed that intends to look beyond western Europe and North America. It seems crucial to continue to engage the main trajectory and the entire institutional, critical, and historiographic apparatus that supports it, as outmoded and ideologically limited as they may seem, because they still underwrite the conditions under which modernist practices can appear as history. This paper collects and examines the approaches that are currently in use, in order to further conversation on the subject.

Britain's first steps in Modernism: Cressing Road and the Clockhouse Way estate 1918–20

In this paper architectural Modernism is used to describe the unadorned flat-roofed houses constructed using modern materials such as concrete, reinforced concrete and steel, and built mainly in the period following the First World War. This is a sparse definition that fails to do justice to the much broader interpretation of Modernism, which affected not only architecture, but all the arts in the first quarter of the twentieth century, a movement that reached maturity around 1930. However, even though the definition fails to reflect the richness of the Modernist idiom, the houses have long been recognised as representing Britain's first inroads into Modernist architecture as acknowledged by, for example, Gould, Bentley, Collins and Bettley.

A new map of hell: Satō Haruo's dystopian fiction

In this paper, I examine two major aspects of Satō Haruo's dystopian imagination as articulated in his absurdist, futurological story of 1929 titled A Record of Nonchalant, referring to the eponymous city in which the story was set. First, I trace how Satō experiments with the construction of a science-fiction-type dystopian world before the concept and the terms to express it gained acceptance in modern Japanese literature. Second, I place his story in the narrative upheavals of his time, when proletarian literature, mass fiction and modernist expressions were jostling for a place in the 1920s and 1930s literary scene. Much of so-called modernist literature was influenced by a fascination for the erotic, grotesque and nonsensical, or ero guro nansensu, aspects of interwar culture. Capturing a time when narrative modes were undergoing dramatic transformation because of the changed relationship between the production, distribution and consumption of literature, Satō uses the modernist idiom to construct a dystopia in which art becomes a mere commodity. In assessing the value and internal conflict of this minor work of a major writer, I hope to identify its relevance and legacy in Japanese modernist literature and, at the same time, to position it in the larger intellectual discourse of utopian/dystopian literature, which until now has been largely dominated by the West.

Anointing with Rubble: Ruins in the Lebanese War Novel

When the Lebanese civil war officially broke out in 1975, the conflict looked a lot like one of the numerous proxy wars that hitched local animosities to the East-West ideological struggle. Within a year, however, the cart began pulling the horse as ethnic-sectarian struggle preempted secular and Cold War imperatives. For literature, wartime chaos punctured the myth of progress and along with it realist literature predicated on a knowable world. After a half century of serving the Arab cause, realism became an overnight anachronism and from its grip emerged the Lebanese war novel. The result is a retooled modernist literature that stresses the ideological preconditions for renewal in a new notion of human dignity. Hassan Daoud's 1983 Binayat Mathilde (The House of Mathilde), Hoda Barakat's 1990 Hajar al-dahik (The Stone of Laughter), and Rashid al-Daif's 1995 'Azizi al-sayyid Kawabata (Dear Mr Kawabata) show how violence and coercion infuse the city and humiliate the self during war. Human dignity emerges in these novels only as a longed-for memory or vision of what was or ought to be. In Arabic literature nothing is more redolent of memory and longing than the medieval literary motif of “stopping before the ruins” (wuquf 'ala al-atlal), to remember former people and places. Hilary Kilpatrick's pioneering work has revealed how the motif can be reappropriated to probe “deeper layers of consciousness,” and is “connected with the role of memory in literature today as a device for structuring experience.” This essay argues that the Lebanese war novel has also quietly incorporated “stopping before the ruins” into a modernist idiom. This is not simply to state that the abandoned campsite has now become the burned-out home and that the ex-lover has become one's family, neighbors or associates. In these novels the ruins motif sets in motion the mental processes that condition the conviction that human life is possessed of innate dignity regardless of how history and war may compromise it. I argue in a final section of this essay that this socio-literary practice corresponds closely to Julia Kristeva's account of psychosexual trauma in her theory of infantile abjection.

Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon (review)

Reviewed by: Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon Elizabeth L. Keathley (bio) Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon. By Ellie M. Hisama. Cambridge Studies in Music Theory and Analysis, Ian Bent, general editor. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Figures, tables, musical examples plus seven movements or works reprinted in their entirety. Bibliography and index. For at least the last two decades feminists have urged publishers and authors of music history textbooks to include music by women composers. A quick perusal of recently published textbooks intended for the music history sequence reveals that they all include only a small number of works by the same handful of women composers and that analytic discussion of these works is lacking in detail. Moreover, music analysis continues to be underrepresented in feminist treatments of works by women composers, a crucial issue given that academia confers value [End Page 111] on canonical compositions through music analysis based on meaningful methods.1 Such conferral of value through analysis is particularly important for marginalized groups like women whose nonconformance to conventional procedures is more likely to be construed as incompetence than as compositional innovation: in the absence of significant music analysis women's compositions will not be accorded the prestige they deserve. However, conventional analytic methods, which were developed to explain and evaluate canonical works, do not necessarily support feminist interpretations of music and music history. Hisama's Gendering Musical Modernism not only brings innovative tools to the project of analyzing the music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon but also confronts the problem of reading the formalist analyses through feminist theory: for this and other reasons, it is a tour de force of feminist music scholarship. Each of the seven analyses offered here uses a different method, as suggested by the music and the contexts of the composers' lived experiences as gendered subjects, "entwining" music analysis and social critique (181). Hisama makes no global claims about essential difference but rather documents the circumstances and attitudes of Crawford, Bauer, and Gideon through their diaries, letters, and published writings and demonstrates how the musical structures of these particular works comprise analogies to the composers' unspoken protest, experiences of marginalization, sexuality, identity, and political commitments. Her readings do not rely on that always suspect category, the "composer's intention," but rather situate Hisama's own hearing of the music from her subject position as an Asian American woman with experiences similar to those of her subjects. These are powerful premises for musical interpretation, for, as feminist theory's notion of "situated knowledge" shows, there are always epistemological limitations to "truth claims," which this methodology avoids, and these limitations proliferate when interpreting artworks. Because analogy and metaphor are important means for perceiving and interpreting musical works, it is significant that Hisama's analytical methods focus on audible musical features, such as contour, register, texture, and timbre. Although some of her analyses employ pitch class set theory, probably the preeminent method of analyzing posttonal music, her original analytical tools stem largely from recent theories of contour, whose perceptibility offers clear advantages. Hisama's analyses are verifiable by listening and therefore are meaningful and satisfying. Significantly, Hisama rejects the conventional wisdom that modernism is inimical to the aesthetics and interests of women. This is a matter dear to my heart because much feminist music inquiry—following, it seems, the lead of feminist literary scholarship—seems to have leapt from nineteenth-century Romanticism to late-twentieth-century postmodernism, relegating modernism to the domain of men, machismo, and misogyny. This lacuna disadvantages women with modernist sensibilities, leaving their works underrepresented, their participation in modernist projects undertheorized, and a significant segment of musical expression politically unavailable to them.2 Hisama's compelling analyses demonstrate that women composers have indeed used modernist idioms to create original works that also speak to feminist concerns. The analytical methods employed in the seven analyses, although selected—and sometimes invented—to examine the particular material at hand, are in no way exclusive to these works; that is, they are models that may be applied to other musical works, although perhaps (or probably) [End Page...