NE PLUS ULTRA (GOING AS FAR AS YOU CAN GO)

Chapter:

CHAPTER 2 Indeterminacy

Source:

MUSIC IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Author(s):

Richard Taruskin

It also says a lot about Romanticism. Cage's activity, more than that of any other individual, reveals the latent continuity between the Romantic impulse and the impulses that drove modernism, even (or especially) its most intransigent, avant-garde wing. His unsettling presence on the scene replayed the esthetic battles of the nineteenth century, splitting the avant-garde all over again into what the German poet Friedrich Schiller had called “naive and sentimental poets” in a famous essay of 1795. Sentimental poets were the kind “whose soul suffers no impression without at once turning to contemplate its own play.”¹⁸ Such artists were egoists, forever proclaiming their purposes and analyzing their methods, even when consciously directing their purposes and methods toward the elimination of ego. Hence the need for magazines like Die Reihe, the organ of the “sentimental” Darmstadt school, full of scientific or pseudoscientific explanations, formal justifications and, above all, rationalizations.

Citation (MLA):

Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 2 Indeterminacy." The Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford University Press. New York, USA. n.d. Web. 27 Apr. 2025. <https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume5/actrade-9780195384857-div1-002003.xml>.

Citation (APA):

Taruskin, R. (n.d.). Chapter 2 Indeterminacy. In Oxford University Press, Music in the Late Twentieth Century. New York, USA. Retrieved 27 Apr. 2025, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume5/actrade-9780195384857-div1-002003.xml

Citation (Chicago):

Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 2 Indeterminacy." In Music in the Late Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press. (New York, USA, n.d.). Retrieved 27 Apr. 2025, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume5/actrade-9780195384857-div1-002003.xml