19 - Ageing of the new: the museum of musical modernism

Summary

The cultural event that most conspicuously marked the turn of the millennium in Britain was the opening of London’s Tate Modern, the refurbished power station that is now, spatially, the world’s largest museum of modern art. The building itself is significant since it marks a transformation from an industrial utility to a cultural space; together with its contents, it signifies a commitment to modern art at the end of the twentieth century. It is even able to include a replica of Marcel Duchamp’s celebrated urinal – an object designed to test institutional limits. So reconstructed, museums no longer instil a dominant view of culture, nor do they display artists as overbearing bastions of authorial rectitude: they are more likely to present contrasting outlooks and leave spectators to find ways of accommodating them. Like the exhibits in the Tate, modernist musical artefacts cannot survive without support, yet their institutions can evolve and need not be governed by the curatorial attitudes normally associated with museum culture. Institutions, like music, are embodiments of human ideas and are therefore potentially mobile and subject to interpretation.

Institutions and performers

The most remarkable institution of twentieth-century music must surely be IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique). Adjacent to the Centre Georges Pompidou in central Paris, IRCAM is devoted to the technical and creative advancement of music. Remarkably, it derives from the vision of one man, Pierre Boulez, whose stature as a musician enabled him to secure funding from the French government for the development of a music research institute.