Forgotten Pasts and Imagined Futures
The First International Webern Festival and the 1962 Seattle World's Fair
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 21728452 |
|---|---|
| Authors | David H Miller (0000-0003-1315-7616, University of California, Berkeley, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 21 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 144-163 |
| Publication date | 2024-06-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | twentieth-century music (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1478-5722 • E-ISSN: 1478-5730 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s1478572223000014 |
| OpenAlex | W4367183132 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 8 |
In an April 1962 article previewing the First International Webern Festival, Hans Moldenhauer promised that Anton Webern's music would one day be known as ‘the music of the space age’. Moldenhauer chose his words carefully. The Webern Festival was set to take place in Seattle at the same time as the World's Fair (an event also known as the ‘Century 21 Exposition’ and ‘America's Space Age World's Fair’) and its opening night concert would be held on the grounds of the World's Fair. Yet the two ‘W.F.s’ made for an awkward pairing. Far from space-age music, the lush textures and sweeping gestures of the Webern's Festival's posthumous premieres revealed a young Webern rooted in nineteenth-century Romanticism. Critics and scholars’ responses to these premieres reveal much about the contested place of Webern's music – and modernist music more generally – within mid-century mainstream culture
Art · Art history · Literature · Mainstream · History · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Philosophy · Theater, Performance, and Music History · Weber, Simmel, Sociological Theory
| Highly cited | No |
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