When Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring" premiered in Paris in 1913,
the crowd rioted in response to the harsh dissonance and jarring
rhythms of its score. This was "noise," not music. In "Sublime
Noise," Josh Epstein examines the significance of noise in
modernist music and literature. How--and why--did composers and
writers incorporate the noises of modern industry, warfare, and
big-city life into their work?
Epstein argues that, as the creative class engaged with the
racket of cityscapes and new media, they reconsidered not just the
aesthetic of music but also its cultural effects. Noise, after all,
is more than a sonic category: it is a cultural value judgment--a
way of abating and categorizing the sounds of a social space or of
new music. Pulled into dialogue with modern music's innovative
rhythms, noise signaled the breakdown of art's autonomy from social
life--even the "old favorites" of Beethoven and Wagner took on new
cultural meanings when circulated in noisy modern contexts. The use
of noise also opened up the closed space of art to the pressures of
publicity and technological mediation.
Building both on literary cultural studies and work in the "new
musicology," "Sublime Noise" examines the rich material
relationship that exists between music and literature. Through
close readings of modernist authors, including James Joyce, T. S.
Eliot, Edith Sitwell, E. M. Forster, and Ezra Pound, and composers,
including George Antheil, William Walton, Erik Satie, and Benjamin
Britten, Epstein offers a radically contemporary account of
musical-literary interactions that goes well beyond pure formalism.
This book will be of interest to scholars of Anglophone literary
modernism and to musicologists interested in how music was given
new literary and cultural meaning during that complex
interdisciplinary period.
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