Music Divided: Bartók's Legacy in Cold War Culture FREE DOWNLOAD
- Hardcover: 250 pages
- Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (May 24, 2007)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0520249658
- ISBN-13: 978-0520249653
Music Divided explores how political pressures affected musical
life on both sides of the iron curtain during the early years of the
cold war. In this groundbreaking study, Danielle Fosler-Lussier
illuminates the pervasive political anxieties of the day through
particular attention to artistic, music-theoretical, and propagandistic
responses to the music of Hungary’s most renowned twentieth-century
composer, Béla Bartók. She shows how a tense period of political
transition plagued Bartók’s music and imperiled those who took a stand
on its aesthetic value in the emerging socialist state. Her fascinating
investigation of Bartók’s reception outside of Hungary demonstrates that
Western composers, too, formulated their ideas about musical style
under the influence of ever-escalating cold war tensions.
Music Divided
surveys Bartók’s role in provoking negative reactions to “accessible”
music from Pierre Boulez, Hermann Scherchen, and Theodor Adorno. It
considers Bartók’s influence on the youthful compositions and thinking
of Bruno Maderna and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and it outlines Bartók’s
legacy in the music of the Hungarian composers András Mihály, Ferenc
Szabó, and Endre Szervánszky. These details reveal the impact of local
and international politics on the selection of music for concert and
radio programs, on composers’ choices about musical style, on government
radio propaganda about music, on the development of socialist realism,
and on the use of modernism as an instrument of political action.
Post a Comment