Contemporary music and the utopia of aesthetic modernism

In the 1930s, the musicologist Antoine Goléa imagined that in the year 2000 the man in the street would be whistling Schoenberg’s atonal music. These days, it’s clearly lazy to label a contemporary work with the outdated term “avant-garde”, implying that the audience will catch up with it some time in the future once they have been enlightened by progress. Since Schoenberg, the futuristic utopia of erudite art seems to have run its course. This talk will question the relationship that contemporary music has had with the utopia of aesthetic modernism since the ruptures of the post-war period.

With
Camille Lienhard
Musicologist and member of the Centre for Research and Experimentation on the Artistic Act at the University of Strasbourg