Pyramids at the Louvre : music, culture, and collage from Stravinsky to the postmodernists / Glenn Watkins.

By:

Watkins, Glenn, 1927-

Publication details: Cambridge, Mass. : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1994.Description: ix, 571 p. : ill. ; 25 cmISBN:

0674740831 (acidfree paper)

Subject(s):

DDC classification:

780/.9/04 20

LOC classification:

ML197 .W437 1994

Contents:

1. "And the Moon Descends over the Temple That Was" -- 2. Of Nightingales and Ukiyo-e -- 3. Out of Africa and the Steppes -- 4. "Massacre" and Other Neologisms -- 5. The Creation of the World -- 6. Josephine and Jonny -- 7. The Cunard Line -- 8. Take the "A" Train -- 9. The Valley of the Bells -- 10. Stravinsky and the Cubists -- 11. Obsessions with Pierrot -- 12. Masks and Machines -- 13. Oedipus and Agon: "Husks of Style?" -- 14. Exodus: 1939 -- 15. Tristan's Scissors -- 16. Pyramids at the Louvre -- 17. Envoi: The New Cartography

Summary: A pyramid in front of the Louvre. Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and The Rite of Spring. Schoenberg and Shirley Temple. Just as the odd juxtapositions of Modernism produced a new way of seeing, so now collage, in the hands of Glenn Watkins, offers a new perspective on the art of our age. A rich and revealing picture of twentieth-century music and the arts, Watkins' work shows us what our present Postmodern aesthetic owes to our Modernist past. Behind the many guises of Modernism we find an appetite for opposing impulses: the exotic and the home-grown, high and low, black and white, the passionate and the cool, the cerebral and the instinctive. Watkins shows us these oppositions at play in the music of Stravinsky and Ravel, Debussy and Schoenberg, Ives, Satie, Hindemith, Ellington, and Gershwin, in the art of Picasso and the Cubists, Cocteau, Leger, Brancusi and Noguchi, in the anthologies of Nancy Cunard and Alain Locke, in the ballet companies of Sergei Diaghilev and Rolf de Mare, and in the performances of Josephine Baker. Throughout, collage asserts its power to enlighten through juxtaposition, resist resolution, sponsor pluralism, and promote understanding of an order that eludes all edicts. The masks of Oskar Schlemmer, of Japanese No drama, and of the commedia dell'arte, the mythologies attendant to the retrieval of folk traditions and the emergence of jazz, and the mass relocation of artists in a time of war - all have a place in this depiction and assessment of the legacy of Modernism. A heady exploration of questions surrounding Primitivism, Orientalism, and technology as they surface at either end of our century, this book exposes the millennial preoccupations mutually invested in our search for "first times" and our convictions about "the end of culture."

Holdings
Item type	Current library	Shelving location	Call number	Copy number	Status	Date due	Barcode
Book	NMC Library	Stacks	ML197 .W437 1994 (Browse shelf(Opens below))	1	Available		33039000440833

Browsing NMC Library shelves, Shelving location: Stacks Close shelf browser (Hides shelf browser)

Previous								Next
Previous	ML197 .C768 1994 Extended play : sounding off from John Cage to Dr. Funkenstein /	ML197 .I2 2002 Music and technology in the twentieth century /	ML197 .R76 2007 The rest is noise : listening to the twentieth century /	ML197 .W437 1994 Pyramids at the Louvre : music, culture, and collage from Stravinsky to the postmodernists /	ML197 .W54 2003 Exploring twentieth-century music : tradition and innovation /	ML200 .C36 1998 The Cambridge history of American music /	ML200 .H676 2022 Dvořák's prophecy : and the vexed fate of black classical music /	Next

Includes bibliographical references and index.

A pyramid in front of the Louvre. Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and The Rite of Spring. Schoenberg and Shirley Temple. Just as the odd juxtapositions of Modernism produced a new way of seeing, so now collage, in the hands of Glenn Watkins, offers a new perspective on the art of our age. A rich and revealing picture of twentieth-century music and the arts, Watkins' work shows us what our present Postmodern aesthetic owes to our Modernist past. Behind the many guises of Modernism we find an appetite for opposing impulses: the exotic and the home-grown, high and low, black and white, the passionate and the cool, the cerebral and the instinctive. Watkins shows us these oppositions at play in the music of Stravinsky and Ravel, Debussy and Schoenberg, Ives, Satie, Hindemith, Ellington, and Gershwin, in the art of Picasso and the Cubists, Cocteau, Leger, Brancusi and Noguchi, in the anthologies of Nancy Cunard and Alain Locke, in the ballet companies of Sergei Diaghilev and Rolf de Mare, and in the performances of Josephine Baker. Throughout, collage asserts its power to enlighten through juxtaposition, resist resolution, sponsor pluralism, and promote understanding of an order that eludes all edicts. The masks of Oskar Schlemmer, of Japanese No drama, and of the commedia dell'arte, the mythologies attendant to the retrieval of folk traditions and the emergence of jazz, and the mass relocation of artists in a time of war - all have a place in this depiction and assessment of the legacy of Modernism. A heady exploration of questions surrounding Primitivism, Orientalism, and technology as they surface at either end of our century, this book exposes the millennial preoccupations mutually invested in our search for "first times" and our convictions about "the end of culture."

There are no comments on this title.

to post a comment.