The First World War--Music History's "Seminal Catastrophe"?

As we know, in 1979 the American historian and diplomat George F. Kennan called the First World War "the great seminal catastrophe of this century". Was this war the "seminal catastrophe" for music history also? And if so, in what way? Towards answering this question I would like...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inMagyar zene Vol. 52; no. 4; pp. 432 - 440
Main Author Danuser, Hermann
Format Journal Article
LanguageHungarian
Published Budapest 01.11.2014
Subjects
Culture
Interpretation
Musicology
World War I
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Summary:As we know, in 1979 the American historian and diplomat George F. Kennan called the First World War "the great seminal catastrophe of this century". Was this war the "seminal catastrophe" for music history also? And if so, in what way? Towards answering this question I would like to contribute some thoughts, on two quite different levels. Today, in a globalized world, one cannot discuss the first "world war" on a national basis; one should pursue international research, as the latest books by Christopher Clark, Herfried Münkler and Jörn Leonhard demonstrate. The first level lies conceptually in a sacrificial semantics-- in Latin "victima" or "sacrificium" --which reveals itself in Arnold Schönberg in a close connection between scandal and war, or peace. The second level touches on the historiography of music after the First World War: I propose that we cannot conceive of the world war only as an eruption of a new system of genres (according to Carl Dahlhaus, the sign marking off a historical period), but rather as the implosion of a musical culture, one which should be understood as a global genesis of partly overlapping, partly independently existing musical part-cultures (the creation culture of new music: avant-garde; the compositional culture of new music: modernity; traditional musical culture; the culture of interpretation; multimedia sound culture; jazz and dance culture); in other words as a "seminal catastrophe" indeed. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
ISSN:0025-0384