Book review : The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music

Abstract

This is a very large book. It is over 500 pages of 1.5 spaced A4 paper in very small (11- point, I believe) font. Its editors, Björn Heile and Charles Wilson, have assembled a dense phalanx of scholars offering interpretations and methodological approaches to the question of musical modernism which often diverge and mutually contradict. Some, like J. P. E. Harper-Scott, present what is in essence a primer to a much more detailed and expansive methodological framework. Others, like Mark Berry and Eva Moreda Rodríguez, provide what read like corollaries to a broader research project that they have been working on for some time, as sort of cross-sections of contemporary scholarship on expanded musical modernisms. Still others take a far more meta-approach, as in Martin Iddon’s chapter, which gives something of a précis of how various methodologies institutional studies might be fruitfully applied to various centres of New Music. [excerpt]