Music's Monisms: Disarticulating Modernism

Daniel Albright investigates musical phenomena through the lens of monism, the philosophical belief that things that appear to be two are actually one.
 
Daniel Albright was one of the preeminent scholars of musical and literary modernism, leaving behind a rich body of work before his untimely passing. In Music’s Monisms, he shows how musical and literary phenomena alike can be fruitfully investigated through the lens of monism, a philosophical conviction that does away with the binary structures we use to make sense of reality. Albright shows that despite music’s many binaries—diatonic vs. chromatic, major vs. minor, tonal vs. atonal—there is always a larger system at work that aims to reconcile tension and resolve conflict.
 
Albright identifies a “radical monism” in the work of modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot and musical works by Wagner, Debussy, Britten, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky. Radical monism insists on the interchangeability, even the sameness, of the basic dichotomies that govern our thinking and modes of organizing the universe. Through a series of close readings of musical and literary works, Albright advances powerful philosophical arguments that not only shed light on these specific figures but also on aesthetic experience in general. Music’s Monisms is a revelatory work by one of modernist studies’ most distinguished figures.

Daniel Albright (1945-2015) was the Ernest Bernbaum Professor of Literature at Harvard University. He was the author or editor of many books, including Untwisting the Serpent and Modernism and Music, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

Alexander Rehding is the Fanny Peabody Professor of Music at Harvard University. He is the author of Alien Listening: The Voyager Golden Record and Music from Earth, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, Music and Monumentality: Commemoration and Wonderment in Nineteenth-Century Germany, and Hugo Riemann and the Birth of Modern Musical Thought.