Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Grant, M. J.
• Wilson, Charles
• Heile, Björn

Titel

The composer as communication theorist

Ist Teil von

• The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music, 2019, p.287-306

Auflage

1

Ort / Verlag

Routledge

Erscheinungsjahr

2019

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Composers of modernist music frequently referred to technical, psychological and sociological theories of communication in their work, work which often addresses the very psychoacoustic and sociological foundations of musical practice. The compositions and theoretical writings that resulted themselves constitute a significant contribution to the understanding of musical communication. The chapter focuses on the ‘high modernism’ of the 1940–1960s, including examples from the work of Stockhausen, Pousseur, Babbitt and Cage, among others. This chapter argues that how modernist composers addressed the issue of musical communication is important not only for an understanding of musical modernism, but for an understanding of human musicality more generally. Communication does not automatically imply understanding, of course: otherwise, there would be no need for all those workshops and self-help manuals. The chapter deals with role of different media in musical communication, which looks more specifically at how modernist approaches led to a new appreciation of the implicit multimodality of all musical communication. The exclusion of any possibility of checking or clarifying is typical of how communication is often thought of in terms of technical systems for communication at a distance. In the work of composers from many very different strands of musical modernism, the conditions and conventions of (all) musical communication are highlighted by centre-staging the media that are supposed to disappear behind the ‘message’ which these media convey.