Untwisting the Serpent

[Dave Monroe]

Albright, Daniel.  Untwisting the Serpent:
   Modernism in Music, Literature, and Other Arts.
   Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.

>From its dissonant musics to its surrealist spectacles
(the urinal is a violin!), Modernist art often seems
to give more frustration than pleasure to its
audience. In Untwisting the Serpent, Daniel Albright
shows that this perception arises partly because we
usually consider each art form in isolation, even
though many of the most important artistic experiments
of the Modernists were collaborations involving
several media--Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring is
a ballet, Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts
is an opera, and Pablo Picasso turned his cubist
paintings into costumes for Parade. 

Focusing on collaborations with a musical component,
Albright views these works as either figures of
dissonance that try to retain the distinctness of
their various media (e.g. Guillaume Apollinaire's Les
Mamelles de Tirésias) or figures of consonance that
try to lose themselves in some total effect (e.g.
Arnold Schoenberg's Erwartung). In so doing he offers
a fresh picture of Modernism, and provides a
compelling model for the analysis of all artistic
collaborations. 

http://www.press.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/hfs.cgi/00/13696.ctl

"The surrealist Remedios Varo painted a picture,
Embroidering the Terrestial Mantle, that showed 'a
number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge
eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a
circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which
spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking
hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other
buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and
forests of the earth were contained in the tapestry,
and the tapestry was the world." (p. 284, citing
Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 [New York:
Bantam, 1967], p. 10)

And see as well ...

Albright, Daniel.  Quantum Poetics: Yeats, Pound,
   Eliot and the Science of Modernism.  New York:
   Cambridge UP, 1997.

http://us.cambridge.org/titles/catalogue.asp?isbn=052157305X

Albright, Daniel.  Stravinsky: The Music Box and
   the Nightingale.  New York: Gordon & Breach, 1989.

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