{"id":3451,"date":"2025-04-18T23:44:13","date_gmt":"2025-04-19T03:44:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=3451"},"modified":"2025-04-18T23:44:16","modified_gmt":"2025-04-19T03:44:16","slug":"three-who-quit-ives-elgar-sibelius-and-the-crisis-of-modernism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2025\/04\/three-who-quit-ives-elgar-sibelius-and-the-crisis-of-modernism.html","title":{"rendered":"Three Who Quit: Ives, Elgar, Sibelius and the Crisis of Modernism"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-jetpack-tiled-gallery is-style-rectangular\"><div class=\"\"><div class=\"tiled-gallery__gallery\"><div class=\"tiled-gallery__row\"><div class=\"tiled-gallery__col\" style=\"flex-basis:60.55261%\"><figure class=\"tiled-gallery__item\"><img decoding=\"async\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/image-1-808x1024.png?strip=info&#038;w=600&#038;ssl=1 600w,https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/image-1-808x1024.png?strip=info&#038;w=900&#038;ssl=1 900w,https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/image-1-808x1024.png?strip=info&#038;w=1200&#038;ssl=1 1200w,https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/image-1-808x1024.png?strip=info&#038;w=1500&#038;ssl=1 1500w,https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/image-1-808x1024.png?strip=info&#038;w=1800&#038;ssl=1 1800w,https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/image-1-808x1024.png?strip=info&#038;w=2000&#038;ssl=1 2000w\" alt=\"\" data-height=\"5180\" data-id=\"3477\" data-link=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?attachment_id=3477\" data-url=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/image-1-808x1024.png\" data-width=\"4086\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/image-1-808x1024.png?ssl=1\" data-amp-layout=\"responsive\" tabindex=\"0\" role=\"button\" aria-label=\"Open image 1 of 3 in full-screen\"\/><\/figure><\/div><div class=\"tiled-gallery__col\" style=\"flex-basis:39.44739%\"><figure class=\"tiled-gallery__item\"><img decoding=\"async\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/image-2.png?strip=info&#038;w=600&#038;ssl=1 600w,https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/image-2.png?strip=info&#038;w=697&#038;ssl=1 697w\" alt=\"\" data-height=\"698\" data-id=\"3478\" data-link=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?attachment_id=3478\" data-url=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/image-2.png\" data-width=\"697\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/image-2.png?ssl=1\" data-amp-layout=\"responsive\" tabindex=\"0\" role=\"button\" aria-label=\"Open image 2 of 3 in full-screen\"\/><\/figure><figure class=\"tiled-gallery__item\"><img decoding=\"async\" srcset=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/image-3.png?strip=info&#038;w=194&#038;ssl=1 194w\" alt=\"\" data-height=\"182\" data-id=\"3480\" data-link=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?attachment_id=3480\" data-url=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/image-3.png\" data-width=\"194\" src=\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/image-3.png?ssl=1\" data-amp-layout=\"responsive\" tabindex=\"0\" role=\"button\" aria-label=\"Open image 3 of 3 in full-screen\"\/><\/figure><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p><em>The current &#8220;Musical Opinion&#8221; (UK) carries an essay of mine: \u201cThree Who Quit: Ives, Elgar, Sibelius, and the Crisis of Modernism.\u201d Strange bedfellows? Think again. Ultimately, my topic is the dead end afflicting twentieth century classical music. My final sentences read: \u201cThe dialectical tension between present and past, long the mainspring for musical creativity, has gone slack. In Ives, Elgar, and Sibelius, in Stravinsky and Schoenberg, this conundrum, differently manifest, ran its fatal course.\u201d  What follows is an extract \u2013 my closing sally \u2013 with key points in\u00a0<strong>boldface<\/strong>. (The same issue &#8212; which you can download below &#8212; carries an excellent piece on Shostakovich):<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<div data-wp-interactive=\"core\/file\" class=\"wp-block-file\"><object data-wp-bind--hidden=\"!state.hasPdfPreview\" hidden class=\"wp-block-file__embed\" data=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/Musical-Opinion-April-June-2025.pdf\" type=\"application\/pdf\" style=\"width:100%;height:460px\" aria-label=\"Embed of Musical Opinion April - June 2025.\"><\/object><a id=\"wp-block-file--media-a4617e23-f9c0-4ddb-bedf-83613f230297\" href=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/Musical-Opinion-April-June-2025.pdf\">Musical Opinion April &#8211; June 2025<\/a><a href=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/Musical-Opinion-April-June-2025.pdf\" class=\"wp-block-file__button wp-element-button\" download aria-describedby=\"wp-block-file--media-a4617e23-f9c0-4ddb-bedf-83613f230297\">Download<\/a><\/div>\n\n\n\n<p>A glance at the leading musical modernists contemporaneous with Ives is instructive. Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg &#8212; not the residual Romantics Elgar, Sibelius, and Ives &#8212; are latter-day Fausts, craving experience new and original. Courageously, perilously, they undertook a radical transformation of their own stylistic signatures.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>And they do not [like the anti-modernists Elgar, Sibelius, and Ives] invoke Nature. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov did \u2013 most profoundly in his late opera&nbsp;<em>The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh<\/em>, composed in 1907 when Stravinsky was his prize pupil, virtually a surrogate son. The twittering, shimmering forest music of Stravinsky\u2019s&nbsp;<em>The Firebird<\/em>&nbsp;(1910) is a sequel to Rimsky\u2019s. Gustav Mahler, a seminal inspiration for Schoenberg and his followers, was a supreme Nature poet. And so, initially, was Schoenberg, in the comparably twittering, shimmering Prelude to&nbsp;<em>Gurre-Lieder<\/em>&nbsp;(1910) \u2013 but never thereafter.&nbsp;<strong>As post-World War I modernists, Stravinsky and<\/strong>&nbsp;<strong>Schoenberg were dissident, deracinated<\/strong>. No less than the modernist painters and novelists, their predilection was to deconstruct and reformulate. Elgar, Sibelius, and Ives eavesdrop on Nature \u2013 a posture of humility, comity, and subordination. Concomitantly: for them, the past remained a daily background presence. Stravinsky and Schoenberg were emigres dislodged by world events; Stravinsky\u2019s St. Petersburg, Schoenberg\u2019s Vienna were no more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But can the past ever be evaded? In 1928 Stravinsky composed a ballet<em>, The Fairy\u2019s Kiss<\/em>, adapting more than a dozen Tchaikovsky songs and piano pieces. The plot reads as an allegory of Tchaikovsky\u2019s fate: kissed by the muses at birth, doomed to an early death. The two Tchaikovsky works most tellingly cited say it all: \u201cLullaby in a Storm\u201d and \u201cNone but the Lonely Heart,\u201d both plaintive songs.&nbsp;<em>The Fairy\u2019s Kiss<\/em>&nbsp;is Stravinsky revisiting his own childhood, confiding his emotional roots.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In 1948 Schoenberg wrote a short essay titled \u201cOn Revient Toujours.\u201d It begins by remembering \u201cwith great pleasure\u201d a leisurely journey in a Viennese fiacre through the Black Forest \u2013 that is, a Nature experience both seductive and frightening. Schoenberg applies this adventure to his recent reversion to an older, tonal style \u2013 an occasional desire \u201cto dwell in the old.\u201d \u201cA longing to return to the older style was always vigorous in me,\u201d he admits. \u201cAnd from time to time I had to yield to the urge.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>If even for Stravinsky and Schoenberg musical retrospection proved inescapable, for Ives, Elgar, and Sibelius \u2013 and also for Gustav Mahler \u2013 it acquired&nbsp;<strong>a new tone: not just an embrace of the past, but a yearning compelled by dislocation from the present: a chronic impulse, exigent and unwilled.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Some two centuries after Johann Sebastian Bach, Ives, Elgar, and Sibelius felt spent. Stravinsky, too, eventually discovered himself in crisis, unable to compose \u2013 and opted for Schoenberg\u2019s 12-tone method. But \u2013 we can now admit \u2013 12-tone music proved a wrong turn, a dead end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>Straddling a transitional moment they could not command, Ives, Elgar, and Sibelius foretold the terminus of the symphonic canon; they are casualties of uprooted tradition. Significantly, the final contributor to the mainstream orchestral repertoire, Dmitri Shostakovich, composed behind an Iron Curtain that kept modernism and cosmopolitan modernity at bay: he could feast on Bach and Beethoven, Mussorgsky and Mahler.&nbsp;&nbsp;Today, too many new orchestral works sound like makeshift music, erected in sand.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><strong>The dialectical tension between present and past, long the mainspring for musical creativity, has gone slack. In Ives, Elgar, and Sibelius, in Stravinsky and Schoenberg, this conundrum, differently manifest, ran its fatal course.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><em>&#8220;Three Who Quit&#8221; is an excerpt from my book-in-progress &#8220;Why Ives?&#8221; Another chapter adapts <\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2024\/09\/mahler-ives-and-todays-cultural-memory-crisis.html\">my essay on Ives and Mahler<\/a><em><strong> <\/strong>for &#8220;The American Scholar.&#8221; The&#8217;yre both  offshoots of the Ives Sesquicentenary, and of the four NEH-funded Ives festivals I co-curated with J. Peter Burkholder.  <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The current &#8220;Musical Opinion&#8221; (UK) carries an essay of mine: \u201cThree Who Quit: Ives, Elgar, Sibelius, and the Crisis of Modernism.\u201d Strange bedfellows? Think again. Ultimately, my topic is the dead end afflicting twentieth century classical music. My final sentences read: \u201cThe dialectical tension between present and past, long the mainspring for musical creativity, has [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3451","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-TF","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3451","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3451"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3512,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3451\/revisions\/3512"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}