45 - Solidarity with the long-departed: fifteenth-century echoes in twentieth-century music

Summary

The twentieth century was an age of sonic archeology. It made the music of the past available as never before to the musicians of the present, so that old music could influence new music directly. Ralph Vaughan Williams, steeped in nineteenth-century meliorism, saw the distant past only as a foreign country where they did things differently, and less well. Pierre Boulez and the Italian musicologist Domenico De Paoli (1894-1984, author of biographies of Monteverdi and Igor Stravinsky) exemplify the Cold War avant-garde, whose most advanced members and spokespersons journeyed enthusiastically back to that foreign country to justify their most radical ideas. With Anton von Webern, one can encounter the confluence of musicology and advanced composition that made the twentieth century - the century of modernism. Stravinsky's knowledge of early music, acquired largely outside the academy, marks his case as exceptional. Paul Hindemith's considerable activity on its behalf was largely a by-product of academic employment.