Proof through the Night: Music and the Great War (Includes CD) - Hardcover

Watkins, Glenn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520231589 ISBN 13: 9780520231580

Publisher: University of California Press, 2002

Synopsis

Carols floating across no-man's-land on Christmas Eve 1914; solemn choruses, marches, and popular songs responding to the call of propaganda ministries and war charities; opera, keyboard suites, ragtime, and concertos for the left hand—all provided testimony to the unique power of music to chronicle the Great War and to memorialize its battles and fallen heroes in the first post-Armistice decade. In this striking book, Glenn Watkins investigates these variable roles of music primarily from the angle of the Entente nations' perceived threat of German hegemony in matters of intellectual and artistic accomplishment—a principal concern not only for Europe but also for the United States, whose late entrance into the fray prompted a renewed interest in defining America as an emergent world power as well as a fledgling musical culture. He shows that each nation gave "proof through the night"—ringing evidence during the dark hours of the war—not only of its nationalist resolve in the singing of national airs but also of its power to recall home and hearth on distant battlefields and to reflect upon loss long after the guns had been silenced.

Watkins's eloquent narrative argues that twentieth-century Modernism was not launched full force with the advent of the Great War but rather was challenged by a new set of alternatives to the prewar avant-garde. His central focus on music as a cultural marker during the First World War of necessity exposes its relationship to the other arts, national institutions, and international politics. From wartime scores by Debussy and Stravinsky to telling retrospective works by Berg, Ravel, and Britten; from "La Marseillaise" to "The Star-Spangled Banner," from "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" to "Over There," music reflected society's profoundest doubts and aspirations. By turns it challenged or supported the legitimacy of war, chronicled misgivings in miniature and grandiose formats alike, and inevitably expressed its sorrow at the final price exacted by the Great War. Proof through the Night concludes with a consideration of the post-Armistice period when, on the classical music front, memory and distance forged a musical response that was frequently more powerful than in wartime.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

"[T]he contribution Watkins has made is so varied and robust that any social or cultural historian of the Great War simply cannot afford to do without it. Of how many of our colleagues’ work can we say the same?" Jay Winter, Yale University

"The cover of Glenn Watkins’ book Proof through the Night: Music and the Great War shows an astonishing Stravinsky manuscript of an innocent march ambushed by the composer’s own Futurist-inspired paintings of exploding cannons a perfect symbol for the book’s ground-breaking, earthshaking account of the varied and surprising roles that music played during the First World War. The first musician ever to speak to the international conference of World War I scholars at the Historial de la Grande Guerre in Péronne, France, Glenn Watkins once again leads the way in interdisciplinary cultural studies, weaving together the music, art, and socio-political histories of the early 20th century into a truly meaningful picture of the human condition in a time of international crisis. Glenn Watkins’ lectures on Music and the Great War, given at New York’s Lincoln Center in preparation for this volume, gave fair warning of an imminent attack on the idea of history as battle maneuvers without considering vital questions of culture. Only a lifetime of intellectual passion and rigorous, relentless scholarship could produce such a book." Bruce Adolphe, composer and lecturer, The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center

"Music and History intersect magnificently in the scholarship of Glenn Watkins. Politics, nationalism, combat, technology, art, literature and, above all, the sounds - beautiful and horrible - that charged wartime life and accompanied mass death. All these, and more, suffuse the vast symphony of war that Professor Watkins presents so clearly and analyzes so convincingly. Proof Through the Night is a master's work of interdisciplinary, yet disciplined, writing about music." David B. Dennis, author of Beethoven in German Politics, 1870-1989

"Glenn Watkins’s new book is a synthesis of biographical, music-analytical, literary, political, and historical information about European and American music between 1914 and 1918. He combines extremely diverse materials into a single story, by turns fascinating, entertaining, and sad . The book will be a rich source of information and judgments about music and culture in general at a crucial moment of modern history." John Spitzer, Peabody Conservatory, Johns Hopkins University

"[Watkins's] narrative is vivid and enthralling, as it could hardly fail to be, and I suspect that even seasoned cultural historians specialising in this period will learn new things from Watkins's supremely well-managed synthesis. His background research and reading have reached into the furthest corners: very little of any possible relevance is missed." Arnold Whittall

About the Author

Glenn Watkins is Earl V. Moore Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and author of Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists (1994), Soundings: Music in the Twentieth Century (1988), and Gesualdo: The Man and His Music (1991).

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0520231589
• ISBN 13: 9780520231580
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 614