Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: popular music and the experience of modernism
- PART I MUSICAL MODERNISM: POPULAR MUSIC IN THE TIME OF JAZZ
- 1 Classical modernity and popular music
- 2 Twentieth-century modernism and “jazz” music
- PART II GERSHWIN, PORTER, WALLER, AND HOLIDAY
- Conclusion: popular music and the revolution of the word
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Twentieth-century modernism and “jazz” music
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: popular music and the experience of modernism
- PART I MUSICAL MODERNISM: POPULAR MUSIC IN THE TIME OF JAZZ
- 1 Classical modernity and popular music
- 2 Twentieth-century modernism and “jazz” music
- PART II GERSHWIN, PORTER, WALLER, AND HOLIDAY
- Conclusion: popular music and the revolution of the word
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
THE MODERNIST CULTURE OF DESIRE
Both Enlightenment and twentieth-century modernisms made things “new,” but the intensity of newness, as both Stephen Dedalus and David Landes suggested, was particularly pronounced in the later era (or at least it seems that way to us, living in that later era). In fact, this intensity of feeling – of dislocation, of vague wonder, of free-floating anxiety, of inchoate need – seems to me to be a signal distinguishing feature between Enlightenment modernity and the cultural modernism of the early twentieth century. This feature has to do with the role of desire – again, dislocated, free-floating, vague, inchoate – within social, psychological, and linguistic cultural formations. In a review of Regenia Gagnier's study of aesthetics and economics in the late nineteenth century, John Coates notes that
in the summer of 1930, as America spiraled into the Great Depression, R. C. Leffingwell, a partner at the Wall Street firm of J. P. Morgan, proposed what was to him an obvious solution to the crisis: People, he said, should “stop watching the ticker, listening to the radio, drinking bootleg gin, and dancing to jazz; forget the ‘new economics’ and prosperity founded upon spending and gambling, and return to the old economics based upon saving and working”…Leffingwell was wrong about what the economy needed. But he was right about one thing: in the decades leading up to the crash, two unlikely allies – art and economics – had united in a common front against the old order. Laissez-faire, balanced budgets, the puritan work ethic, sexual prudishness – one by one, these Victorian orthodoxies had been upended.[…]
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- Modernism and Popular Music , pp. 54 - 78Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2011