CHAPTER 1 Reaching (for) Limits
Modernism: Mahler, Strauss, Schoenberg
Richard Taruskin
This is the whole flaw of “emotional” music. It is like a drug: you must have more drug, and more noise each time, or this effect, this impression which works from the outside, in from the nerves and sensorium upon the self—is no use, its effect is constantly weaker and weaker.1
—Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound, an American poet living in London, wrote these weary words in 1914. By then he had lots of evidence with which to back his pronouncement up, evidence that we will be tracing in this and the following chapters. The period we will be investigating, from the last decade of the nineteenth century to the year in which Pound made his disillusioned diagnosis of its effects, is sometimes called the early modernist period. It was a time of enormously accelerated stylistic innovation, accompanied by an enormous expansion of technical resources. The two accelerations were symbiotic: neither can be called the effective cause of the other, but each fed the other since both fed off the same underlying drives, drives at which Pound was rather darkly hinting.
- Citation (MLA):
- Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 1 Reaching (for) Limits." The Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford University Press. New York, USA. n.d. Web. 6 Dec. 2023. <https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume4/actrade-9780195384840-chapter-001.xml>.
- Citation (APA):
- Taruskin, R. (n.d.). Chapter 1 Reaching (for) Limits. In Oxford University Press, Music in the Early Twentieth Century. New York, USA. Retrieved 6 Dec. 2023, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume4/actrade-9780195384840-chapter-001.xml
- Citation (Chicago):
- Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 1 Reaching (for) Limits." In Music in the Early Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press. (New York, USA, n.d.). Retrieved 6 Dec. 2023, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume4/actrade-9780195384840-chapter-001.xml
