‘Existential Irony’ in Subculture and ‘Others’ Musics: Language, Signification, and Sanctification

UDC 78.03

 

Matras Judah – Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Carleton University, Ottawa, University of Haifa, Ph. D, Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Haifa, Israel.

E-mail: judamatras@gmail.com

199 Aba Khoushy Avenue, Mount Carmel, Haifa, Israel

tel.: +972 4-824-0111

«Экзистенциальная ирония» в субкультуре и «другой музыке»: язык, значение и сакрализация

 

Матрас Иуда – Еврейский университет в Иерусалиме, Карлтонский университет, Канада, Университет Хайфы, доктор философии, почётный профессор социологии, Хайфа, Израиль.

E-mail: judamatras@gmail.com

Хайфа, Маунт Кармель, проспект Аба Хуши, 199,

тел.: +972 4-824-0111

Abstract

The topic ‘Irony in Musics’ is generally understood to be inherently “social” in that it is typically related to “otherness” and its expression. In her book and sequence of publications, Esti Sheinberg makes the case for “Jewish Existential Irony” as ‘musical ethos’ in works of Shostakovich and that, indeed, ‘existential irony’ is the “metamessage” in Shostakovich’s music. Sheinberg’s “case” receives support by other scholars; but she does not extend the discussion to ‘existential irony’ in other musics.

 

In earlier papers I have shown i) that ethnic subculture musics are frequently characterized by ‘existential irony’, and that, more generally, musical irony grounded in “otherness” of racial, religious, or ethnic minorities is ‘existential irony’; and ii) that ‘existential irony’ is widely incorporated in Western musical canon. It typically appears in textual or musical representation and correlatives of the motif: “although we suffer disadvantage, discrimination or oppression, we are similarly human, equal and equally-entitled, but different; and we ourselves share a sameness and solidarity in our difference”.

 

In this paper I show the roles of language and signification among post-Baroque composers with “subculture” or “other” identities who, in giving expression to ‘existential irony’ in their musics, have i) introduced sanctifying idioms, motifs, and forms into their musics, and ii) thus rendered their audiences “believers” or “congregations” of sorts. This process, in turn, enhances solidarity in the subculture and “other” minorities and sustains their “otherness”, even as it promotes solidarity in the mainstream and supercultures, as premised by French sociologist, Émile Durkheim. I draw on the “subculture” and “superculture” concepts of Mark Slobin and upon sociological case-study procedures, elaborated by Howard S. Becker; and I present examples of post-Baroque composers and analyze a) their respective “other” origins and identities, b) quasi-sacred facets of their musics, and c) features of their patrons, audiences, and reception.

 

Keywords: irony; ethnic minorities; music; culture; subculture; superculture.

 

Introduction

The topic ‘Irony in Musics’ is generally understood to be inherently “social” in that it is typically related to “otherness” and its expression. In her book and sequence of publications, Esti Sheinberg [63; 64; 65] makes the case for “Jewish Existential Irony” as ‘musical ethos’ in works of Shostakovich and that indeed, ‘existential irony’ is the “meta-message” in Shostakovich’s music. In earlier papers, I have shown:

1) that ethnic subculture musics frequently are characterized by ‘existential irony,’ and that, more generally, musical irony grounded in “otherness” of racial, religious, or ethnic minorities is ‘existential irony’;

2) that ‘existential irony’ is widely incorporated in Western musical canon [11; 44; 45; 46].

 

It appears in representation of the motif: “although we suffer disadvantage, discrimination or oppression, we are similarly human, equal and equally-entitled, but different; and we ourselves share a sameness and solidarity in our difference.”

 

In this paper I show the roles of language and signification among post-Baroque composers with subcultural or “other” identities who, in giving expression to ‘existential irony’ in their musics, have:

1) introduced sanctifying idioms, motifs, and forms into their musics,

2) thus rendered their audiences “believers” or “congregations” of sorts.

 

I present examples of post-Baroque composers and analyze:

1) their respective “other” origins and identities,

2) quasi-sacred facets of their musics.

 

1. On the Ubiquity of Existential Irony in the Musics of Minorities and Subcultures

Musical irony grounded in “otherness” of minorities is “existential irony”; and is widely incorporated in Western musical canon. The population of the United States comprises primarily descendents of immigrants, and the musics of the United States reflect the country’s multi-ethnic population and identity-subpopulations. An interesting recent study of nine major immigrant groups to the US in 1830–1930 century (Irish, Germans, Scandinavians and Finns, Eastern European Jews, Italians, Poles, Hungarians, and non-European Chinese and Mexican), by historian Victor R. Greene [25], whose very title, A Singing Ambivalence: American Immigrants between Old World and New, 1830–1930, tells us that the major finding and thesis of the study is the similarity, across different ethnicities, of a deep ambivalence. Their songs reveal ambivalence about coming to America, pessimism about achieving their goals, homesickness, employment concerns, fear of inability to overcome obstacles, guilt towards those left behind , but also persistent optimism. Greene in effect demonstrates the ubiquity of existential irony in the musics of American immigrant groups.

 

Outside North America there have been innumerable studies of musical activity and expression among ethnic minorities. In his book, Focus: Music, Nationalism, and the Making of the New Europe [10], Philip Bohlman examines the evolvement of national music from folk music and song collections and their incorporation in nationalist popular and art music in Central Europe nation-states. Bohlman concludes with observations and hypotheses concerning post-Cold War Europe’s integration processes, new musics and new nationalisms. He projects retention of nationalism as reflecting continuation of variants of ethno-existential irony addressing and negotiating with their respective “othernesses” and ethos. Indeed in his earlier publication [8], Bohlman has made the point that “Europe is unimaginable without its others. Its sense of selfness, of Europeanness, has historically exerted itself through its imagination of others…” [8, p. 188].

 

2. Otherness, Subculture Identities, and Existential Irony in Musics of Post-Baroque Composers

The social origins of melody and art music are in the “folk musics” of peasant and working classes [21]. Before the 19th century musical nationalism, composers of the Baroque music drew extensively on folk musics and motifs. They were typically supported by courts, clergy, and aristocracy, and alongside differing ruling arrangements, began the creation of profound national expression. But it is not readily possible to associate them with minority or subcultural populations, or contrasting hegemonic supercultures; and whatever the individual expressions of musical or textual irony, we do not ordinarily have compelling reason to impute “existential irony” to their musics.

 

By contrast composers in the Classical period, also drawing extensively on folk musics, were taken up with struggles against aristocracy and authority. The three giants of the period: Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, were personally engaged – each in his own way and circumstances – in search of “liberation” from servitude and obedience to authority, influenced by the French Revolution, and with connections to liberal anti-feudal movements, most notably Freemasonry, and in the case of Beethoven, the Illuminati movement, all documented by their respective biographers. Thus they and contemporaries incorporated substantial elements of existential irony into the emerging Western “Classical” art music canon [cf.: 6].

 

Even more: chroniclers of the Romantic period have described the nationalist themes emerging in Western Art music and their connections to folk musics in detail. Thus Einstein [19] in his Music in the Romantic Era devotes a chapter specifically to “Nationalism,” making the interesting point that:

In the formation of national music, the political influence is not to be separated from the influences of the Romantic movement in general. The inhabitants of free nations among the lesser countries, like the Swiss, the Swedes, and the Danes, were less eager for the coinage of a national style than were the people of subject countries. Is it not remarkable that a national musical style springs up most vigorously in times of national misfortune, as in Poland around 1830, where all the feelings of the nation seemed to find expression in Chopin’s music? Or among peoples denied free… expression of their essential spirit, as in Russia —itself enslaved ? A similar state of things prevailed in Bohemia… such was the case…with Schubert in Austria before the revolution of March, 1848, when Metternich was in power… also in the border states of the monarchy [19, pp. 296–297; cf.: 42].

 

In his Oxford History of Western Music [74], Vol. 3, Music in the Nineteenth Century, Taruskin presents detailed analyses of Romantic Nationalist musics emerging, including origins of “otherness” consciousness and the emergence of the concept of “folk” ideas, cultures, and musics. Finkelstein, Einstein, Longyear, and Taruskin converge in confirming that the great bulk of emerging 19th century or Romantic era nationalist musics reflect existential irony in the minority musics composed and incorporated into the Western Art Music canon.

 

A recent monograph by Cicora [14] is one of very few works to address the topic of “Romantic Irony” in Richard Wagner’s operas. A citation from the introductory chapter lays out the main thread of her analysis:

Wagner’s irony as regards myth results from his works being a nineteenth-century reconstitution of myth using mythic material. He has written a myth with a practical, political purpose… The Ring shows a modern self-consciousness as concerns its dual mythical nature, and it reflects its own metaphoricity as a quasi-mythical explanation of history… the Ring dramatizes the contradictions inherent in the nineteenth-century aesthetics… It dramatizes, in particular, Wagner’s theory of tragedy as a rebirth of myth. It demonstrates the basic irony and the paradox in its mythological nature, for this essentially forms the plot and determines the action of the work.

 

Thus the identification of Wagner with pre-consolidation German “otherness”, and discontent with minority status and identity and with “nationalist” visions, vis-a-vis more oppressive classes together with identification and portrayal of Romantic Irony in Wagner musical, textual, and dramatic expression justify imputing “existential irony” to the Wagnerian ouvre in Western Art Music.

 

The case for imputing “existential irony” to the music of Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), has been made by Johnson [37] in his Mahler’s Voices. Expression and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies. Johnson devotes a chapter to the idea of “musical voice”, in Mahler’s works, illustrates it in examples; and he devotes a chapter to the idea of “plural voices”, including the Bakhtinian concept of “carnival humor”, the prominence of irony and tone in Mahler’s song and symphonies (with explicit citation of Sheinberg’s concept of “existential irony”). In the closing passage of his book, Johnson writes:

What distinguishes above all is the intensity with which acts of expression continue in the face of their own deconstruction. Mahler’s music shares with the irony of early romanticism and the irony of modernism a radical self-critique of its own musical language [37, p. 288; see also: 1; 2].

 

3. On Linguistic Structure of Worship and Musicological Structure of Sacred Music Parallels: Intertextuality and Heteroglossia

Issues concerning the similarities of music and language have been and remain controversial. We can nonetheless point to certain parallels between the linguistic structure of worship and the musicological structure of sacred music in that both embody intertextuality and heteroglossia in their composition and effects.

 

Intertextuality is the shaping of a text meaning by another text. Intertextual figures include: allusion, quotation, plagiarism, translation, pastiche, and parody, Examples of intertextuality are an author’s borrowing of a prior text, and a reader’s referencing of one text in reading another. A central idea of contemporary literary and cultural theory, intertextuality, has its origins in 20th-century linguistics, particularly in the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913). The term itself was coined by the Bulgarian-French philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva in the 1960s.

 

Heteroglossia (multilanguagedness) is a term which originated with Mikhail Bakhtin and particularly in his work “Discourse in the Novel”. Heteroglossia refers to the multiple variations of languages and ideas/perspectives within those languages. Another way of thinking about it is: Heteroglossia is all the different ways people speak to one another: and how each appropriates each other’s speech/ideas and attempts to make it his own. These different ways are different because of class, gender, culture, dialect, accent, demographics, and so on. The “hybrid utterance”, as defined by Bakhtin, is a passage that employs only a single speaker – the author, for example – but one or more kinds of speech. The concept of ‘polyphony’ is central to this analysis. Polyphony literally means multiple voices.

 

A number of linguistic scholars have invoked the concepts of intertextuality and heteroglossia directly in discussion and analysis of structure of religious language and worship. In her book, Reading the Liturgy: An Exploration of Texts in Christian Worship, Juliette J. Day [17] devotes a full chapter to the topic of Intertextuality, introducing the analysis by noting that:

“The recognition of other texts in a liturgical text is not an uncommon experience… liturgical authors are influenced by other prayer texts… Intertextuality refers to the presence of texts within texts and its study may provide us with a means to investigate the processes of selection and incorporation of texts and how they work upon the reader (worshipper) to influence their meaning-making” [17, p. 8; cf.: 15; 38].

 

In a paper on a “socio-linguistic approach to religious language” Ron Holt [32] invokes the concepts of heteroglossia and intertextuality directly to indicate and present examples showing that “word meanings contained in texts are interactive and dynamic, that each word use is to some extent a recontextualization, …the various text-types we daily encounter (whether written or spoken or pictorial) are not independent but highly interactive” [32, pp. 7–8].

 

Musicologists, historians, and other scholars have increasingly cited and drawn upon the heterglossia and related intertextuality concepts and ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin in their analytical and comparative writings [12; 13; 29; 30; 31; 60]. In his detailed survey of Domenico Scarlatti’s keyboard sonatas, Sutcliffe [72] confronts the issue of multiplicity of origin, styles, and structural characteristics of the individual works and Scarlatti’s biography in a chapter entitled “Heteroglossia”… “Existence itself is heteroglossia… ceaseless struggle between centripetal forces, which strive to keep things together, unified, the same, and centrifugal forces, which strive to keep things various, separate, apart, different” [72, p. 82]. Klein [40] analyses actual or imputed “borrowings” among the 19th century compositions and attempts to characterize them often challenging more traditional accounts of such intertextual relationships. Thus, though identity between music and language is consistently denied [e. g. 28; 36; 39; 73], concepts and analytical strategies of “heteroglossia” and “intertextuality” adopted in studies of linguistic structure of worship and musicological structure of sacred music suggest parallels and commonalities among them.

 

4. Post-Baroque Examples: Intertextuality, Heteroglossia, and Sanctification

In this section I show examples of post-Baroque composers, all identified as “others” and all with works characterized by “existential irony”, all or parts of whose compositions incorporated original or “borrowed” elements of sacred musics. Such “sanctification” of their musics renders both performers and audiences participants in ritual-like events, with the musicing experienced by either or both taking on the characteristics of non-divine non-theistic religious practice. More than a few scholars have remarked the affinity of performance or reception of Western Art and/or other musics to religious ritual and observance [12; 68; 56; 74].

 

Joseph Haydn (1732–1809): Haydn’s early years were famously shaped by his experiences as a choirboy and student at St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna and in his long tenure at the Esterhazy estate he composed both secular and religious vocal music. Matthew Riley’s study of Viennese minor-key symphonies [56] imputes sacred music influence and borrowings to Haydn’s choosing to compose minor-key symphonies and in his detailed analyses of four of Haydn’s. And he cites the analyses of other prominent Haydn scholars in this vein:

“Few writers have tried to find an overall pattern in Haydn’s minor-key symphonies…The most interesting attempts are those of H. C. Robbins Landon and Daniel Heartz. Both believe that Haydn began from what Landon called the ‘sonata de chiesa symphony’ (church sonata symphony) – with explicit liturgical associations”.

 

In his visits to England Haydn was so moved by performances of Handel oratories and, in particular, Messiah, that he subsequently turned much more actively to composition of his own Creation and succession of masses both during and subsequent to the Esterhazy tenure [22; 35; 76].

 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791): Mozart’s search for patronage, his connections and commitment to Freemasonry, and his connections with father Leopold Mozart and with the Salzburg Cathedral and its Bishop Colloredo are extensively documented [75; 77]. But in his study of Mozart’s symphonies, Neal Zaslaw [77] gives prominence to his borrowings from plainchant music and psalm settings and to religious motives in them. Mozart’s religious kingdom on earth is much more clearly a Christian – and even particularly a Catholic – kingdom, founded upon the gospel of forgiveness”. Till [75] cites Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro, Idomeneo, Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail in asserting that “All Mozart’s operas deal with the theme of ultimate forgiveness in one form or another, charting a passage from transgression of some sort (usually betrayal of trust, or faith,) to a desire for vengeance and thence to forgiveness” [75, p. 170].

 

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827): In his book, Beethoven and the Voice of God (1983), Wilfrid Mellers identifies Beethoven as a “religious composer” in the earliest pages and proceeds to show that both Beethoven’s musical works and his sketches and sketchbooks, his Conversation Books, his Heiligstadt Testament, and his Tagebuch support this assertion. Mellers goes on to present evidence to show Beethoven as a religious and philosophic preacher to himself and his audience through musicological features of his scores.

 

A similar understanding is indicated by Maynard Solomon in his book, Late Beethoven [69], Solomon includes a full chapter, entitled “Intimations of the Sacred” (Chap. 10), documenting both citations of Beethoven’s relevant borrowings of analyses of earlier scholars and, in detail, musicological evidence in Beethoven’s keyboard works. He writes:

… but it is evident from these examples that Beethoven’s late oeuvre greatly expands the variety of topics and musical-rhetorical figures expressive or symbolic of religious experience, the totality of which surely add up to a sacred style … one that goes well beyond the churchly style employed in earlier or more conventional examples of religious musical genres….these have to do primarily with associations between musical and/or textual events and religious concepts, ideas, and figures …identification of these scarcely exhausts the sphere of the sacred in late Beethoven, which also includes invocations of religious feeling and explicit allusions to the deity…In these and in the hymns and hymn-like melodies …in late Beethoven sonatas and string quartets that they become a signature feature of his last works, the intention to denote aspects of the sacred is apparent” [69, p. 200; see also: 16].

 

Johannes Brahms (1833–1897): Brahms spent a considerable part of his career as conductor of choirs and choral music; and publication and popularity of his German Requiem was followed by the cantata Rinaldo, the Alto Rhapsody, and the Song of Destiny. Thus he was an experienced conductor and composer of sacred and vocal music. In his tenure as conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic Society, he staged and conducted many choral works drawing on his thorough understanding of sixteenth-century a cappella music and seventeenth and early eighteenth-century musics. Composition of his symphonies, concerti, and chamber music follow these; and inevitably melodies, modes, and structure of the choral and vocal works were incorporated.

 

Brahms composed an extensive range of sacred music including motets and most famously his German Requiem. In addition he composed a very large number of secular songs, lieder, generally settings of poetry or texts by German, and occasionally non-German, authors or folksongs which he rearranged. Very often Brahms rendered these strophically, i. e. having the same or similar music for successive stanzas, in hymn-like fashion. In a full chapter in his Music in the Nineteenth Century devoted to Brahms under the heading “The Return of the Symphony” music historian Richard Taruskin [74] characterizes public concert events as its own “grand rites of secular religiosity, with the “music of the classical masters… a kind of liturgy;” and in the chapter he casts Brahms as, in effect, the high priest in this drama. And he shows in detail Brahms own sanctification and use of historical elements in his symphonic and instrumental music [cf.: 50; 54; 70].

 

Richard Wagner (1812–1883): Wagner is said to have championed Italian Renaissance sacred music throughout his life. Whatever his own religious beliefs or practices, it is clearly Wagner who was most successful among nineteenth-century composers in sanctification of his works, primarily operas. Firstly, Wagner’s operas and librettos themselves incorporate:

1) belief and quasi-religious pagan and mythical motifs,

2) innumerable examples of strophic hymn-like passages,

3) very extensive and effective repetition of themes, characterized, recognized, and denoted uniquely in Wagner’s operas as “leitmotivs” though familiar and characteristic as well in psalmody, hymnody, and sacred music generally.

 

Secondly, Wagner’s very extensive writings and publications, on music and art primarily and on philosophy and politics secondarily, widely read and publicized, accorded him the additional status as a public intellectual of sorts, and with a certain amount of “authority” and credibility as composer and critic, both adding to the sanctification of his composed works [24; 67]. Thirdly, Wagner’s success in realization and operation of the Festspielhaus in Bayreuth added to the sanctification of his operatic oeuvre.

 

Patronage and lavish support of King Ludwig II of Bavaria enabled Wagner to carry off his personal and priestly life in high style [53]. Not less, perhaps, the emergence of a cultural “Wagnerism”, a broad acknowledgement of the qualities of Wagner’s composed music and his nouveau-nationalist and political ideas and pronouncements, that supported sanctification of his music among the very large numbers and adherents of Wagnerism [23; 33; 34; 61].

 

Gustav Mahler (1860–1911): Mahler was well versed in traditional and contemporary sacred and liturgical music [49, p. 356]. His Eighth Symphony was famously based on the Latin text of the Veni creator, spiritus hymn and the final scene of Goethe’s Faust, and his symphonies and songs include passages entitled or marked “Funeral March,” “Resurrection,” “Lamentation” and so forth suggestive of liturgy and worship [48; 49; 55]. But just as he had not been a “practicing” or “orthodox” Jew in early years, neither was he a “practicing” or “orthodox” Christian following his conversion to Catholicism. As Blaukopf has noted [7]: “the religious impulse was for him part of a general acceptance of European culture, of ‘assimilation’ to the artist’s predetermined homeland.”

 

The sanctification of Mahler’s music took place essentially in three ways. First, Mahler adopted a number of compositional features familiar in Gregorian chant and in Renaissance and Baroque sacred music. The strophic, hymn-like structure both of Mahler songs and of his symphonic composition, probably first analyzed by Adorno [1], has also been extensively described by Mitchell [49]. Extensive use of minor keys [48] and especially A minor works, and chromaticism and marches – including funeral marches – are noted. Second, the texts which Mahler chose in his songs and in his symphonies dealt not only with “Life and Death”, as suggested by the title of Mitchell’s study, Gustav Mahler Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death [49], but comprised motifs and phrases familiar in sacred music, or of individual personal predicaments and fears, e.g. death, darkness, “lost to the world, /Lord of death and life, /Thou keepest the watch at midnight” (Ruckert Songs); “Death of Children”, “evil befell” “It is sad, it is sad…let me sing a song of sorrow” “The lonely one in autumn” “Parting” “the world goes to sleep.” “Forever, forever”. Third, performance and critique of Mahler’s songs and symphonies after his death in 1911, and active promotion by eminent conductors Mengelberg, Walter, Bernstein, and others [e. g., 41; 2] have clothed Mahler, his biography, and his compositions with an aura of mystique, righteousness, victimization, and sanctity.

 

Arnold Schoenberg (1874–1951): After World War I ended the impressive first part of his career, and after a complex sequence of wartime military service episodes, composer/theorist (Jewish-origin, who had converted to Protestantism by choice, at age 24, in 1898) Arnold Schoenberg was appointed director of the Composition Masterclass at the Berlin Academy of Arts, and in 1926 he and his family moved to Berlin. After the Nazi assumption of power on January 30, 1933, Schoenberg was immediately declared persona ingratisima and dismissed from his position on both racial and Entartete Music (“degenerate music” in Nazi lingo). He departed from Berlin to Paris where he returned formally and even ceremoniously (now aged 59) to the Jewish religion, and he continued to the United States, where he spent the rest of his life [43; 58; 62]. He moved to Los Angeles, became a naturalized American citizen, relentlessly initiated actions for saving Jews from the impending catastrophe [see also: 51; 26 for detailed discussion]. Highlighting Schoenberg’s preoccupation with Judaism, were the condition and fate of European Jewry, and the politico-Zionist directions which he entertained and advocated all alongside his musical innovations and accomplishments [57]. Altogether we learn from these that Schoenberg “sanctified himself,” in our sense. He composed sacred music, viewed himself, and received status as, a prophet and visionary as well as a victim.

 

5. Concluding Remarks: Composer – “Seekers of the Sacred”

Thus I conclude that the examples cited above: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, Mahler, and Schoenberg were all examples of artist “seekers of the sacred” in the sense of cultural sociologist, Steve Sherwood, in his paper, “Seeker of the Sacred: A Late Durkheimian Theory of the Artist.” Significant parts of their compositions have incorporated original or “borrowed” elements of sacred musics, rendering both performers and audiences participants in ritual-like events, taking on the characteristics of non-divine non-theistic religious practice. For some, these are substitute belief-systems, substitute religious observance, substitute “totems” in the Durkheimian sense (see: 18; 66]. For others, these may take place in addition to more conventional religious observance. Sherwood writes:

“As we have seen, the totem may be seen to embody or represent the creative principle or creative force… Durkheim tells us that ‘society wields a creative power that no palpable being can equal, and ‘society is constantly creating new sacred things.’ … In this sense the artwork can itself be seen as a kind of totemic emblem, the artist and public may be seen as the ‘worshipers’ who revere and worship it, and the relationship on which this ‘worship’ is based may be regarded as a ‘religious’ one. It is in this way that we may define the artist (and, indeed, the public), in a creative sense, as a seeker of the sacred” [66, p.86].

 

In this paper I show that, though identity between music and language is consistently denied, the “heteroglossia” and “intertextuality” adopted in studies of linguistic structure of worship and musicological structure of sacred music suggest parallels and commonalities. And I have developed the hypothesis that: in giving expression to existential irony in their musics, post-Baroque composers with “other” identities frequently, or even generally, have:

1) introduced sanctifying idioms, motifs, and forms into their musics,

2) thus rendered their audiences “believers” or “congregations” of sorts.

 

I present examples to support the hypothesis by citation and analysis of:

a) their respective “other” origins and identities,

b) quasi-sacred facets of their musics.

 

Further study should examine features of their patrons, performers, audiences, and reception as well.

 

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Ссылка на статью:
Matras J. ‘Existential Irony’ in Subculture and ‘Others’ Musics: Language, Signification, and Sanctification // Философия и гуманитарные науки в информационном обществе. – 2015. – № 2. – С. 24–37. URL: http://fikio.ru/?p=1669.

 
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