Abstract
I have never been quite convinced by the way the story of ‘high modernism’ has generally been told. More often than not, it has been a saga of radical ruptures and new starts—a ‘progress narrative’ involving limitless constructivism and the increasing rationalisation of musical language and compositional technique. In short, the simplest historiographical tropes seem to have prevailed. Moreover, technical analyses of the music in question often fail to account for the actual listening experience. The hegemonic language of structural analysis and modernist historiography from the last fifty-odd years falls short of the musical imagery, poetic sensuality, and strangeness present in works by Messiaen, Stockhausen, Ligeti, Xenakis, Berio, Saariaho, or Sciarrino. [...]
This is an accepted version of chapter from the book "Transformations of Musical Modernism," published by Cambridge University Press © 2015