Ultramodernism in Global Musical Thought, 1900–1950

Abstract

I cast a new critical perspective on music theory’s pre-World War II avant-garde, revealing an integrated intellectual network spread across Russia, Central and Western Europe, North America, and Latin America. In the early twentieth century, I show, teleological music theories divergent from that of Arnold Schoenberg proliferated in experimental and atonal music, only to be suppressed in later reception, largely because of Schoenberg’s perceived continuity with music’s “Great German Tradition.” I recover these alternative music theories through a mixture of global historiography and archival research: In the US, Henry Cowell forged an international coalition with his theories of dissonant counterpoint and acoustics; in Paris as a Russian émigré, Ivan Wyschnegradsky developed alternative axioms for atonal music; and in Mexico, Carlos Chávez and Julián Carrillo negotiated discourses surrounding modernism and Indigeneity, both with each other, and in dialogue with the dissertation’s other protagonists. By taking a transnational approach, I destabilize conceptions of the pre-war avant-garde’s intellectual locus in the Second Viennese School—conceptions ascendant at least since Theodor Adorno’s mid-century writings—in favor of a rich and heterogenous global network.