Jed Rasula
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780199396290
- eISBN:
- 9780199396320
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199396290.003.0008
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
An innovation essential to Richard Wagner’s music was what he called “endless melody.” This chapter scrutinizes his theory of the concept. While endless melody was instrumental in inspiring the ...
More
An innovation essential to Richard Wagner’s music was what he called “endless melody.” This chapter scrutinizes his theory of the concept. While endless melody was instrumental in inspiring the stream-of-consciousness technique in fiction, its implications for modernism in general have to do with the aspiration to make everything count, to do away with padding and empty formality. Yet a conflation of intensity with grandiosity is part of its nineteenth-century legacy, and the grandiose brings with it the resuscitation of eighteenth-century theories of the sublime. Those theories were inspired by volcanic activity, a geophysical force called up again in early theorists of cinema, in which we find the perpetuum mobile of endless melody aligned with film’s capacity to unfurl a lava flow of images.Less
An innovation essential to Richard Wagner’s music was what he called “endless melody.” This chapter scrutinizes his theory of the concept. While endless melody was instrumental in inspiring the stream-of-consciousness technique in fiction, its implications for modernism in general have to do with the aspiration to make everything count, to do away with padding and empty formality. Yet a conflation of intensity with grandiosity is part of its nineteenth-century legacy, and the grandiose brings with it the resuscitation of eighteenth-century theories of the sublime. Those theories were inspired by volcanic activity, a geophysical force called up again in early theorists of cinema, in which we find the perpetuum mobile of endless melody aligned with film’s capacity to unfurl a lava flow of images.
Jed Rasula
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780199396290
- eISBN:
- 9780199396320
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199396290.001.0001
- Subject:
- Music, History, Western
This book addresses modernism as an expanding historical force generated by the nineteenth-century fascination with music, as all the arts sought renewal by a kind of aesthetic miscegenation. Richard ...
More
This book addresses modernism as an expanding historical force generated by the nineteenth-century fascination with music, as all the arts sought renewal by a kind of aesthetic miscegenation. Richard Wagner’s concepts of the Gesamtkunstwerk and “endless melody” were of paramount historical consequence in elevating music to a universal aesthetic standard, spawning Wagnerism as first among modern isms. Modernism promoted interaction among the arts, with each art aspiring to produce the effects of another artistic medium. In pursuit of this expansive initiative, modernism tacitly adhered to a key precept of German romanticism, namely, that modern art must be the work and the theory of the work at once. Artworks were infused with a premonitory shiver, a synesthetic yearning, as if each painting, literary text, or musical composition might herald an unprecedented domain of human enterprise—auguring some cultural equivalent of the fourth dimension. In order to survey this momentous interplay among arts, this book ranges from literature, music, and painting to theatre, cinema, dance, photography, and civic pageantry.Less
This book addresses modernism as an expanding historical force generated by the nineteenth-century fascination with music, as all the arts sought renewal by a kind of aesthetic miscegenation. Richard Wagner’s concepts of the Gesamtkunstwerk and “endless melody” were of paramount historical consequence in elevating music to a universal aesthetic standard, spawning Wagnerism as first among modern isms. Modernism promoted interaction among the arts, with each art aspiring to produce the effects of another artistic medium. In pursuit of this expansive initiative, modernism tacitly adhered to a key precept of German romanticism, namely, that modern art must be the work and the theory of the work at once. Artworks were infused with a premonitory shiver, a synesthetic yearning, as if each painting, literary text, or musical composition might herald an unprecedented domain of human enterprise—auguring some cultural equivalent of the fourth dimension. In order to survey this momentous interplay among arts, this book ranges from literature, music, and painting to theatre, cinema, dance, photography, and civic pageantry.
