Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists

Glenn Watkins

Published by Harvard University Press 1994

Pyramids at the Louvre

Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists

Glenn Watkins

https://doi.org/10.4159/harvard.9780674437418

Overview
Contents

About this book

A pyramid in front of the Louvre. Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and The Rite of Spring. Schoenberg and Shirley Temple. Just as the odd juxtapositions of Modernism produced a new way of seeing, so now collage, in the hands of Glenn Watkins, offers a new perspective on the art of our age. A rich and revealing picture of twentieth-century music and the arts, Watkins' work shows us what our present Postmodern aesthetic owes to our Modernist past.

Behind the many guises of Modernism we find an appetite for opposing impulses: the exotic and the home-grown, high and low, black and white, the passionate and the cool, the cerebral and the instinctive. Watkins shows us these oppositions at play in the music of Stravinsky and Ravel, Debussy and Schoenberg, Ives, Satie, Hindemith, Ellington, and Gershwin, in the art of Picasso and the Cubists, Cocteau, Léger, Brancusi and Noguchi, in the anthologies of Nancy Cunard and Main Locke, in the ballet companies of Sergei Diaghilev and Rolf de Math, and in the performances of josephine Baker. Throughout, collage asserts its power to enlighten through juxtaposition, resist resolution, sponsor pluralism, and promote understanding of an order that eludes all edicts.

The masks of Oskar Schlemmer, of japanese No drama, and of the commedia dell'arte, the mythologies attendant to the retrieval of folk traditions and the emergence of jazz, and the mass relocation of artists in a time of war-all have a place in this depiction and assessment of the legacy of Modernism. A heady exploration of questions surrounding Primitivism, Orientalism, and technology as they surface at either end of our century, this book exposes the millennial preoccupations mutually invested in our search for "first times" and our convictions about "the end of culture"

Reviews

An ambitious attempt to understand our inherited Western musical culture...An entertaining and clearly written chronicle, no little part of which is new insights and previously slighted historical accounts. And equally valuable to the reader is the exhilarating fun of discovering new details among the familiar.

Impressive....Utilizing an immense store of knowledge, Watkins explores the unusual juxtapositions of our century--exotic and indigenous, old and new, black and white, high and low, cerebral and instinctive (the 'collage' of the title). In 17 essays that examine major movements and figures, he draws on music, art, literature, sociology, and cultural history...Much is provocative.

[Watkins's] argument is that, just as I. M. Pei's glass pyramids at the Louvre pluralistically resonate against the Napoleon III architecture which provides a backdrop, so the cultural experience of twentieth-century music owes much to the special concern of composers with varieties of collage--with 'cut and paste' methodologies that bring the Orient into alignment with the Occident, the primitive with the sophisticated, the organic with the clockwork. Watkins...brings his infectious cultural curiosity to bear on what we might define, borrowing one of his own phrases about the cinema, as a concern with 'promoting the comprehensibility of fracture'...This book...keeps the crucial questions alive, and nourishes them in an attractively personal and provocative way.

The real value of the book lies in the intricate network of cross-fertilisations and syntheses it reveals between things we're used to thinking of in isolation. Watkins is an assiduous and enthusiastic cultural detective, adept at ferreting out the obscure lineage of an idea...[An] ambitious and impressive book.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
Preludes and Postulates Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
THE ORIENT
1 "And the Moon Descends over the Temple That Was" Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	13
2 Of Nightingales and Ukiyo-e Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	38
THE PRIMITIVE
3 Out of Africa and the Steppes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	63
4 “Massacre“ and Other Neologisms Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	84
5 The Creation of the World Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	112
6 Josephine and Jonny Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	134
7 The Cunard Line Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	164
8 Take the “A“ Train Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	187
CLOCKWORK
9 The Valley of the Bells Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	215
10 Stravinsky and the Cubists Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	229
MASQUERADES
11 Obsessions with Pierrot Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	277
12 Masks and Machines Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	310
13 Oedipus and Agon: “Husks of Style?“ Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	342
СUT AND PASTE
14 Exodus: 1939 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	377
15 Tristan's Scissors Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	398
16 pyramids at the Louvre Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	419
17 Envoi: The New Cartography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	443
Notes, Bibliography, Index
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	477
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	525
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	555

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Edition: Reprint 2014
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Front matter: 9
- Main content: 571
Illustrations
- Other: halftones, line illustrations, musical illustrations
Keywords: MUSIC / Genres & Styles / Classical; SOCIAL SCIENCE / General; Music -- 20th century -- History and criticism.; Music -- Philosophy and aesthetics.

eBook

Published: October 1, 2013
ISBN: 9780674437418

Hardcover

Published: February 5, 1994
ISBN: 9780674437425