The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music

Abstract

It is quite a task to edit a volume on a topic as evasive as “modernism in music,” and the editors Björn Heile and Charles Wilson have done excellent work with The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music. Still frequently discussed and certainly a pertinent concept across musical practices, the editors present the subject as a challenging gamut of perspectives and issues that “seems forever in need of a theory to account for its existence” (p. 3). They neatly indicate the variety of voices gathered in this volume, emphasizing the distinctions between “modernism in music” as “a general cultural and artistic phenomenon,” “modernist music” with “modernist attributes or modernist aspects in music that we may nonetheless balk from classifying as modernist,” and “musical modernism” for all phenomena falling “somewhere between the two terms” (p. 4). A helpful differentiation of the theoretical framework juxtaposes practices referring to the phenomenon with ambivalent meanings and temporal variables (e.g. “recently” or “just now”), as well as a methodological one (as in “modus”). The authors, in short, authoritatively address the concept “in need of a theory to account for its existence” (p. 3).