Proof through the Night: Music and the Great War

Capa
University of California Press, 30/12/2002 - 614 páginas
Carols floating across no-man's-land on Christmas Eve 1914; solemn choruses, marches, and popular songs responding to the call of propaganda ministries and war charities; opera, keyboard suites, ragtime, and concertos for the left hand—all provided testimony to the unique power of music to chronicle the Great War and to memorialize its battles and fallen heroes in the first post-Armistice decade. In this striking book, Glenn Watkins investigates these variable roles of music primarily from the angle of the Entente nations' perceived threat of German hegemony in matters of intellectual and artistic accomplishment—a principal concern not only for Europe but also for the United States, whose late entrance into the fray prompted a renewed interest in defining America as an emergent world power as well as a fledgling musical culture. He shows that each nation gave "proof through the night"—ringing evidence during the dark hours of the war—not only of its nationalist resolve in the singing of national airs but also of its power to recall home and hearth on distant battlefields and to reflect upon loss long after the guns had been silenced.

Watkins's eloquent narrative argues that twentieth-century Modernism was not launched full force with the advent of the Great War but rather was challenged by a new set of alternatives to the prewar avant-garde. His central focus on music as a cultural marker during the First World War of necessity exposes its relationship to the other arts, national institutions, and international politics. From wartime scores by Debussy and Stravinsky to telling retrospective works by Berg, Ravel, and Britten; from "La Marseillaise" to "The Star-Spangled Banner," from "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" to "Over There," music reflected society's profoundest doubts and aspirations. By turns it challenged or supported the legitimacy of war, chronicled misgivings in miniature and grandiose formats alike, and inevitably expressed its sorrow at the final price exacted by the Great War. Proof through the Night concludes with a consideration of the post-Armistice period when, on the classical music front, memory and distance forged a musical response that was frequently more powerful than in wartime.

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Páginas seleccionadas

Índice

In Search of Kultur
13
GREAT BRITAIN
31
Pomp and Circumstance
33
The Old Lie
47
The Symphony of the Front
61
FRANCE
81
Mobilization and the Call to History
83
War and the Children
103
The Yanks Are Coming
245
Onward Christian Soldiers
270
The 100 American
282
Proof through the Night
297
On Patrol in No Mans Land
312
Coming of Age in America
333
POSTARMISTICE
355
Goin Home
357

War Games 19141915
122
Charades and Masquerades
140
Church State and Schola
157
Neoclassicism Aviation and the Great War
170
ITALY
197
The World of the Future the Future of the World
199
GERMANYAUSTRIA
211
Dance of Death
213
The Last Days of Mankind
227
THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
243
Ceremonials and the War of Nerves
372
The Persistence of Memory
386
Prophecies and Alarms
403
EPILOGUE
417
Unfinished Business
419
Notes
431
Selected Bibliography
541
Index
575
List of CD Contents
597
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Passagens conhecidas

Página 349 - In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below. We are the Dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields.
Página 61 - Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our English dead ! In peace there's nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and humility ; But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger...
Página 54 - They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.
Página 270 - ... wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended through wastes of their desolated land...
Página 350 - Take up our quarrel with the foe; To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.
Página 426 - I would go up and wash them from sweet wells, Even with truths that lie too deep for taint. I would have poured my spirit without stint But not through wounds; not on the cess of war. Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were. I am the enemy you killed, my friend. I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed. I parried; but my hands were loath and cold. Let us sleep now...
Página 200 - It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.
Página 58 - I vow to thee, my country — all earthly things above — Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love — The love that asks no question ; the love that stands the test, That lays upon the altar the dearest and the best ; The love that never falters, the love that pays the price, The love that makes undaunted the final sacrifice.
Página 270 - ... denied it — for our sakes, who adore thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!
Página 51 - On the idle hill of summer Sleepy with the flow of streams, Far I hear the steady drummer Drumming like a noise in dreams. Far and near and low and louder, On the roads of earth go by, Dear to friends and food for powder, Soldiers marching, all to die.

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Acerca do autor (2002)

Glenn Watkins is Earl V. Moore Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and author of Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists (1994), Soundings: Music in the Twentieth Century (1988), and Gesualdo: The Man and His Music (1991).

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