modernism - rock music  

Not knowing what
the Bauhaus guys were considering as appropriate "modern" (non-representational ? mathematical ?) music, I would guess maybe the most avant-garde stuff of the twenties -- would that be Stravinsky ? Stockhausen ? Satie ?
Taking Mr Wilon's phrase "formal exploration of medium stripped of sentimentality, romanticism, and narrative reference" as a good definition of modernism, I will posit that post-war "cool jazz" is the right sound track to accompany the Case Study and other mid-century modernist architectural movements -- though this is an easy and historically-demonstrated call. . .

SDR.. Thanks for jogging my memory...
I remember visiting the Bauhaus Dessau just after the wall came down... There were photographs of the Bauhaus avant garde theatre, stage sets and costume designs that were fantastic... Mostly atributed to Oskar Schlemmer and artists of the period like Kandinsky and Klee... I have no idea what the music of the dance performances could have been... Anyone know?

Modest Mussorgsky...
"Schlemmer's "Bauhaus dances" and Kandinsky's "Pictures of an exhibition" to the music of Modest Mussorgsky were performed there." "During their time at the Bauhaus, students like Kurt Schmidt, Xanti Schawinsky, or Heinz Loew regularly contributed sketches, costumes, and theatrical experiments to the theater projects."
http://www.bauhaus.de/english/bauhaus1919/buehne1919.htm

modernism - rock music
whitespike wrote:
> Are there any rock musicians known as modernists?
Noting that the thread is actually about "ROCK" Music, I'm gonna' try to bring it all back home.
ROCK Songs that qualify as modern:
Talking Heads-
More Songs About Buildings and Food
Devo-
Duty Now for the Future
Moby-
18
Einsturzende Neubauten-
Strategies Against Architecture, Volume 1
The White Stripes-
De Stijl
Anything by Link Wray should automatically qualify as Modern Rock.

list above this
That list should have been "Albums" not "Songs"

Sonic Youth
The topically generated google ad up top right now is a banner for Sonic Youth's new album, Rather Ripped.
http://www.sonicyouth.com/alt-main/rippedpop.html

Rock by Definition is Modern
Check the dictionary or any generally accepted interpretation of Modern and Rock qualifies although I think dcwilson nails it with the take on Jazz versus rock. But a band that might just qualify as Modern would have to be "Midnight Oil". No romanticism there. Just straight up, "This is the modern world, and what are we going to do about it. They stretch vocally, lyrically, by instrumentation and every other way. Some of the best modern paintings I've ever created were with the Oils pounding into my skull.

Brian Eno and Macolm MacLaren and John Cage
And Yoko Ono and maybe Robert Wilson.
Nuff said.
http://www.Eboniste.com

I am probably completely out...
in left field, but when I think about the links between modernism and music I am inclined to look more at interpretations than at a particular style. A good example might be Glenn Gould's interpretation of Bach. This is Modern music and not German Lutherian renaissance. But if modernism is exploring the basics and create a new formal language (Malevitch/Kandinsky/Albers/Itten/ Rietveld/Van'tHoff etc.) than I would turn to Philip Glass. In that line-up I can also see Kraftwerk...an obvious complement to the Bauhaus. Rock, I find, is closer to romantic abstraction and YES, when Sargent Pepper marched into the design/music world it was indeed the first step into post modernism. One of the most purist modern design critics I have known, was so chocked by it, and by the response it created amoung his students that he retired prematurely from teaching, writing about design, organizing exhibitions etc. a year or two later. When asked later about the reasons he would often mention that particular album and how his 1967 students reacted to it. To him it was the end of modernism and he did not want to be part of it.

Rock is modern in concept...
Rock is modern in concept but not all rock music is modern. I have to agree with Jazz musicians being musci modernists but within the genre of rock, I would say New Wavers are modernists in music, cuz they started the category of "modern rock", so Blondie, Elvis Costello, Devo, David Bowie, etc are modernists.
http://guyinsf

Koen, there seems an important lesson regarding this critic...Pt. 1
one quite independent of which music embodies modernism and the Beatles proto-plunge into post-modernism. The critic you mention I find both moving and foolish. This person withdrew in disillusionment from what the Beatles wrought with Sgt. Peppers and imho did us all a great disservice. He should have kept up his advocacy and, if he had to stay au courant with the young to keep getting published, he should have turned his intellect to developing a complementary new critical criterion for this apparently--in his eyes--aberrant thing called post-modernism.
A critic's job is not to be a censor and rule out forms of artistic expression. A critic's job is to: a) find the tradition that the new work descends from in order to deepen our understanding and appreciation of it; and b) sift the wheat from the chaff in work in this form. Should we recoil at the evolution of a new species of flower, even one we judge a weed, and live in fear that it will extinct the other long bread and refined flowers? Or should we appreciate its new beauty and try to breed and domesticate it as we have previously done with more traditional and prized flowers that were once weeds themselves? Of course we should do the latter to diversify the beauty of the garden.

Koen, there seems an important lesson regarding this critic...Pt. 2
I happen to love Sgt. Peppers. My seven year old son happens to love it, too. I think Sgt. Peppers is one of most brilliant, endlessly listenable collections of popular songs ever recorded. I don't confuse it with Beethoven or Phillip Glass. And I am quite able to retain my affection for, respect of and connection to the tradition and contemporary expression of more complex orchestral music, whether classical or modern, or post modern. I think the critic was betraying an acute loss of faith in his fellow man (something that is easy to have happen, if one is not vigilant about one's cynicism and arrogance). Frankly, the persons he feared were lost to modernism because of Sgt. Peppers were never going to be devoted to modernism, or any other ism in the first place, at least for long. "-Isms" can never save or doom humankind from being itself. They can help, or they can savage humanity, but they cannot essentially change humanity into something other than what it was, is and is always in the process of becoming more of--human.
The lesson worth learning, or perhaps warning worth heeding, is this: neither artist, nor critic, should ever allow him or herself to fall victim to the notion that ordinary folks are only capable of embracing one category or style of art or "ism" at a time. True many of us can be fooled and herded like sheep by oligarchs, politicians, propagandists, priests, and artists for a time, but never for very long by any one of them. Ordinary human beings are complicated things. To throw ones hands up and give up on any one aspect or dimension of human beings' sensibilities, simply because they exhibit a great, even an irrational enthusiasm for one style in a medium one finds repugnant is foolishness of a high order.
Art must never be allowed to be reduced to ideology, either by artists or critics. Artifacts that occassionally ascend to art are the residue of human minds searching for meaningful and "feelingful" fit between themselves and their universe.
I hope this man you once knew found his way back into the river of art for his sake and for our sakes.
There are so very few well educated, knowledgeable persons with the necessary refinement of intellect and sensibility one needs to be an effective critic, that it would be a great shame to lose even one to something as ultimately inconsequential as self-disillusionment with a generation of kids being seduced by Sgt. Peppers.

A side note on Sgt. Peppers...Pt. 1
I just read the CD notes by Sgt. Peppers' producer George Martin about the making of Sgt. Peppers and I think reveals something about the Beatles and Sgt. Peppers that may refine all of our insight into this rather persistently fascinating and freakish concept album in the river of rock and roll.
Martin said the Beatles were always interested in trying to do things differently. I'm interpreting here a bit, but he also said that by the time they began to make Sgt. Peppers "doing it differently" had become kind of an artistic creed of theirs. And their goal at the time was to make this album as utterly different as they possibly could.
For example, Martin said that Sgt. Peppers did not even start out as a concept album, but rather evolved into one as part of the general attempt to concieve something antithetical to the usual collection of songs that was then a rock album.
Martin and the Beatles carried this idea of "different" and anti-thetical into as many levels and dimensions as they could think of and execute. The subject matter of the songs had to be antithetical to what rock and roll songs were usually about. The sound of every instrument was intentionally distorted in some way. Unfamiliary instruments were introduced, because they were unfamiliar. Animal sounds were introduced simply because animal sounds were not found in rock and roll songs. The album cover was conceived to be systematically "different" than any album cover. On the outside, their pictures were undersized and hidden amidst the pictures of those who had influenced the Beatles, rather than large and front and center as was conventional. The cover is a celebration of the grave of the Beatles being looked upon by paintings of the early Beatles and by photos of the current Beatles in Sgt. Peppers garb. On the inside where collages usually were placed, a giant portrait was placed instead. They picked clothing as antithetical to rock musicians as they could imagine--a synthesis of marching band uniforms and Salvation Army Uniforms. And so on.

A side note on Sgt. Peppers...Pt. 2
It turns out that the Beatles were not alone in doing this. Bob Dylan had been up to much the same thing for a longer period of time, as his recent autobiographical volume "Chronicles" reveals. Dylan's idea of creative expression in his music was to take some lyrical theme, or melody, or rhythm, or style of music and invert it. He took folk and country music into urban folk. He took urban folk and electrified it. He took electrified folk into country western. He took country western into gospel rock. And so on. The object of the game was to invert whatever he had been doing into the next thing.
I'm going on here, because I trying to lay out what was being done by these musicians, so that others more knowlegeable of design than me can say whether this act of inversion is inimical or characteristic of post modernist process and resultant artifacts.
Is Robert Venturi, or any other post modernist architect or designer you can think of systematically inverting modernism, or seeking to embody its antithesis? Or are they, as Venturi suggested in Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, simply trying to reintroduce some pleasing complexity and contradiction into modernist forms to take modernism to the next evolutionary step.?
I ask these questions, because it seems to me that the Beatles and Bob Dylan, for two examples from mid to late 60s rock and roll, were rather single mindedly focused on producing the opposite of what had come before them, whereas Venturi and post modernists sought something more evolutionary.
Or perhaps Venturi et al were far more revolutionary than I gave them credit for.
Thoughts?

Hi doctor Wilson...
You are quite right on the role of the art , design or architectural critic. Unfortunately modernism always had a dark dogmatic corner, and missing the intellectual flexibility you are advocating is certainly one of it's weak points. It was indeed unfortunate that the person in question never returned to design and architecture as many had hoped, but he just could not see how useful the critical element of the post-modern period could be. As for Mart Stam (who shared with Breuer the idea of the cantilever chair) modernism in design and architecture was for him one component of a much larger social mouvement (Mart Stam turned his disillusion into labor union activism) Somehow turning modernism inside out as you put it was abandoning the idea that design served a social role and not one of self expression or individualism. I did not want to imply that Sgt Pepper was so influencial, but somehow he identified it as a "sign" of the times.
I remember the album being put on the player in the design office I was working at the time, and everybody was so impressed by it that we just played it over and over again for the rest of the day.(rather load music was one of the priveledges of the design office in that)