Opera has since its beginnings in the late sixteenth century continually struggled between the traditional and the modern. One sees this argument arise alongside tensions between alternating methods of communicating truth or meaning. Thus, we see opera reborn a number of times as new generations abandoned the compositional conventions of the past and breathed new life into the art form. This bears out in recurring debates between the “ancient” and the “modern” ever since the birth of the art form in the early seventeenth century. While the arrival of twentieth-century modernism signals a rejection of bourgeois fetishism for holdovers of the fading ancient régime, itself arising out of intellectual and cultural institutions supported by a bourgeois class, its move away from the dominance of harmony outlined by the composer and music theorist Rameau in the eighteenth century signaled a tectonic shift.
In this new collection of essays, Modernism and...