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This chapter deals with the two most important routes from pure melody to harmony: the so-called ‘double tonic’ progression, consisting of two alternating triads with basses a tone apart, which is to harmonic progression what the children's chant is to melody; and the other is the drone, which for all practical purposes entered European music from the East.

In this chapter, the author examines the continuing development of the old, established, and developing genres and their syncretization into new forms. In the early years of the nineteenth century, white-to-black and black-to-white musical influences were prevalent. This is a fact documented in several contemporary accounts. The author concludes that the emerging African American genres were not formed by the insertion of African performance practices into the formal structures of European music, as conventional wisdom would have it, but were molded in a process that superimposed European forms on the rich and simmering foundation of African religious beliefs and practices. The foundation of the new syncretized music was African, not European.

This section is devoted to Nono's characteristic expressions as a “political” composer of the 1960s and 1970s. It considers the urgency of grounding the work of composition in an understanding of the historical emergence of social configurations, and represents the logical development of the program announced in 1959 with “Historical Presence of Music Today.” This, in fact, is the prelude to the passionate resumption of the Sartrian question “Why write?”, which, at the turn of a decade, is transformed into a harsh and thorough polemic against contemporary European avant-garde music. During those years, his orientation toward a politically focused musical production was sharpened and radicalized. It was aligned both with an agenda derived from a “progressive” reading of national culture and with that of the international workers' movement.

This chapter examines the impact of musicology on Charles E. Ives's reception by focusing on the contributions made by musicologists to discourse about the composer during the period 1965–1985. It considers how musicologists portrayed Ives through their disciplinary practices and perceptions and shows that their image of Ives was deeply rooted in European music history. The chapter also explores how Ives became the subject of style history by looking at the work of William W. Austin, H. Wiley Hitchcock, and Robert Morgan. Finally, it discusses J. Peter Burkholder's discovery that Ives's commitment to transcendentalism was not so deep nor did it extend quite so far back as had previously been assumed.

This chapter introduces the main themes and arguments of the book, claiming that, in the later eighteenth century, European art music began to take seriously the flow of time from past to future. Until then, music was simply “in time”; “earlier” and “later” mattered little to the way it was experienced and understood. From that point on, music added the experience of linear time, of time's arrow, to its essential subject matter. It could no longer be experienced with understanding unless one recognized the temporal ordering of events. The chapter also argues that this change in the shape of musical time was not a development internal to music alone, but rather, with the onset of modernity, part of a larger transformation in the way educated Europeans began to conceive of time.

Military brass bands communicate ideas and sentiments about the nations they represent. A worldwide brass band movement burst forth during the 19^th century and became iconic of the modern nation. This chapter uncovers how American colonizers neither introduced the brass band tradition to Filipinos nor radically altered it; they simply redirected the meaning of its performance in the Philippines to portray an elaborate logic of benevolent rule, colonial tutelage, and assimilation. Black soldier-musicians were integral to the popularity of American music in the Philippines, thus understanding their unique racial and social position during war provides context to the exceptional rise to fame of Lt. Walter Howard Loving, his rapport with Filipinos, and the role of military bands in alleviating racial tensions between Whites and Blacks and also between Americans and Filipinos in the colonial Philippines.

This chapter explores the reasons why east European Jews sought to study at the Berlin Conservatory. It investigates the dramatic influx of Jewish students, both instrumentalists and composers, that found encouragement and advancement at the Berlin Conservatory between the years 1918 and 1933. It also mentions Władysław Szpilman, Jascha Horenstein, Joseph Rosenstock, and Karol Rathaus that studied in the Berlin Conservatory and went on to find international fame. The chapter analyzes how music functioned as a medium for mobility, nobility, and the transcendence of origins and the strictures of imposed identity. It looks into the eastern European music student's perception of the Berlin Conservatory, which served as a site of self-reinvention and a transit station to the wider world.

This chapter returns to the book's own present, but drags fi-de-siècle Vienna with it, exploring a network of “Mahler pieces” from 1989. The network emerges partly out of unrelated, stylistically disparate works, some of which explicitly cite or allude to the composer, others of which stage Mahlerian scenes or tropes. But the bulk of the network is the result of deliberate effort—European cultural institutions commissioning composers to fantasize on their behalf, to produce collective scenes in which “Mahler” serves as a musical representative of “Europe.” Unsurprisingly, the composers respond in the negative—not with scenes, but with their dismantling; not with representations, but their travesty, ruin, or residue. The remainder of the chapter stumbles into the book's central repression: the presence of Theodor Adorno, whose 1960 monograph on Mahler is taken as an uncanny guide to these later works. The book ends with an extended consideration of Adorno's place in a Lacanian account of European musical modernism.

This chapter examines the representation of Native American resistance in European theater and music during the period from 1710 to 1808. It explains that American subjects in ballets and operas during this period were based principally on Spanish and French encounters with Indians in South and Central America and the dominant themes were the ruthlessness of conquest and the heroism of the Native Americans who resisted. It also describes the specific depictions of North American Indians in eighteenth-century British music.

At first glance, eighteenth-century European art music would seem to have little in common with the blues. Not only do the musical practices themselves bear scant resemblance to one another, but the temporal, geographical, and social locations of the personnel involved—disenfranchised African Americans versus composers working under the patronage of Italian courts and German churches—demand radically different modes of historical analysis. Yet just as many artists during our own era have found the blues a compelling template for musical and cultural expression, so eighteenth-century musicians embraced with great enthusiasm the particular cluster of conventions we call tonality. By juxtaposing these highly conventionalized discourses from two very distant cultural contexts, this chapter proposes to defamiliarize temporarily the musical premises those in musicology most often accept as “purely musical.” As with the blues in Chapter 2, it asks how eighteenth-century procedures intersected with and helped to structure the social world in which they played active roles. The eighteenth century was a period of almost unparalleled confidence in the viability of a public sphere in which ideas could be successfully communicated, differences negotiated, consensus achieved. The chapter asks why the particular musical conventions that crystallized during this period appealed so much to musicians and audiences of the Enlightenment. What needs did they satisfy, what functions did they serve, what kinds of cultural work did they perform? The chapter concentrates especially on tonality, the convention that undergirds and guarantees all the others, discussing how it constructed musical analogs to such emergent ideals as rationality, individualism, progress, and centered subjectivity.

As the title suggests, this is book about a year; about European music; about psychoanalysis; and about modernism. This introductory chapter discusses each of these themes in turn. It also explains Lacan notion of automaton as a companion of what he called tyche. Both are derived from the Aristotelian formulation of cause, and serve as causality's formal remainders. If automaton involves a “spontaneous” repetition of the signifier, something iterable, something that by definition can be repeated, tyche designates the “chance” repetition of what cannot be repeated: something that lies “beyond the automaton.” An overview of the three parts of the book and its chapters are also provided.

This chapter discusses how Befreiung, Kaleidoscope, and Rendering create on their own a series of strange counternetworks, all linked by a common endeavor on the part of European composers to invite some “Other music” into the immediate heterotopian space of the work, and also the greater, more conceptual domain of New Music, and submit it to some form of analysis, un-tying, breaking apart, traversal. For every Rendering, semaphoring its alienated bond to a canonical past, there is also a far less direct work such as György Ligeti's seventh piano étude, “Galamb borong,” whose pidgin title mashes up Balinese and Hungarian roots to conjure a music from an island that does not exist—hence the étude's coexistence in two distinct networks, “Nowheres” and “Composer-as-Ethnographer.” These thematic networks confound many of the more venerable taxonomies of style and school active at the time (and far beyond it).

This chapter examines the President Forbes Burnham administration, and how he recognized the importance of public entertainment as a vehicle for the citizenry to let off steam, for diverting attention, for mobilizing the society in times of crisis, and for the promotion of a political regime. Under Burnham's leadership, the state acquired a range of assets with which to execute the panis et circenses tradition. By 1980, the nation's calendar of holidays, festivals, and anniversaries provided the framework on which to organize and influence “entertainments.” After governing the Guyanese society for the first half of the 1980s, the impact of his decisions remained evident throughout the remainder of the decade. The chapter also shows how the 1980s was not a great decade for European classical music in Guyana.

This chapter attempts to expound a Lacanian discursive theory of New Music, and of aesthetic modernism more generally—a theory not just of how actors and subjects “talk” New Music, but how they more broadly “language” it, forging social links and desiring structures through the excessive materiality of music as much as the denotative operations of the signifier. What kind of subject—what “little God of the world,” as Goethe put it in Faust, part 1—is the modernist? What sort of desire founds its subjectivity on the new, literally throws itself under this mastering signifier of the not-yet? The chapter considers whether Rendering, Kaleidoscope, and Befreiung can be categorized as New Music.

This chapter adopts Michel Foucault's canonical conception of heterotopia as another heuristic, a way of suggesting that New Music, as an otherwise extremely heterogeneous field of labor and mode of cultural production, could be considered precisely such an “other space,” one in which the more robust and hegemonic cultural fantasies of greater Europe are analyzed, broken apart and broken down, eventually traversed. It further suggests that these hegemonic fantasies first come to New Music as music. That is, it is in the medium, the form and format of (older) music, that these fantasies are made accessible to New Music in the first place. New Music encounters “joyful brotherhood” not primarily as a complex signifier, but insofar as it has a sound, a body, a coordinate in the symbolic order “music” that is, in this case, Beethoven's Ninth.

This chapter surveys the “neighborhood” music of Detroit’s many subcultures in a city based on massive migration for auto industry work: European immigrants (including Polish, Armenian, Greek, Croatian, and others); southern white immigrants, with a focus on country music; and African Americans from the South, bringing jazz, blues, church, and other community musical expressions. Details include the networks and institutions each community built in Detroit, with regional and national connections.

Soundscape is defined as the sound or combination of sounds that comes from the sounds heard in our surroundings. This chapter describes how the Quay Brothers attempted to create an audiovisual experience for their viewers using their own version of soundscape called “nonvococentricism,” which pertains to the complete lack of spoken dialogues. The Quay Brothers used nonvococentricism to define the uniqueness of their films in a way that the voicelessness of the films demands that viewers interpret the images on their own rather than have their meanings supplied to them. This chapter also explores the Eastern-European-inspired music metaphors used by the Quay Brothers in order to showcase nonvococentricism in their films.

This chapter examines the fifth symphony of Sergey Prokofieff, which is perhaps the best evidence for his contribution to European classical music, since it is the most recent traditional “numbered” symphony to be an indisputable part of a repertory wherever “Western” classical music is played. Composed in the summer of 1944, when the tide of World War II had turned decisively, it was a victory celebration. Prokofieff called his fifth symphony “a symphony about the grandeur of the human spirit.” Its greatest technical achievement, as well as its most moving expressive effect, is the way in which that dissonance is gradually resolved and brought to optimistic repose. It is quite true that an optimistic ending was a Soviet requirement. Prokofieff's fifth symphony proves that an imposed style may nevertheless be a beautiful style, worn with sincerity and deployed with mastery.

This chapter slowly teases apart a psychoanalytic notion of fantasy from the more common parlance, to illustrate not simply the differences between “fantasy and fantasy,” but also their antagonism. While common everyday fantasy is always on some level a site of freedom—or at least its image—psychoanalytic fantasy is a site of bondage and constraint, a way of being framed, often enough for a crime the fantasist cannot recall committing. In a serendipitous turn, this tension also plays out in the Western historical genre of the musical fantasy, and it becomes the chapter's emergent aim to identify an uncanny repetition of sorts between the discursive logic of musical fantasy in middle- and late-period Beethoven and that of Bernstein et al. in 1989.