# Music and the city/country divide...



## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

I am interested in how composers related their music to the city, or to cities in general. Also, how the concept of the city changed over time from one of progress to one of something not so positive.

Early on you got Haydn's set of 12 London symphonies composed for that city - which where premiered among the first public concerts, eg. the beginnings of the composer as a freelance, getting away from being owned by the aristocratic courts. These works are a picture of 18th century life, they depict the hustle and bustle of London, a great centre and hub of commerce, empire, culture. I love these works but the end of #104 - appropriately named _London_ - is my favourite. You can hear everything from bagpipe-drones to imitation of peals of bells in this finale. Haydn's music makes me think of Canaletto's near contemporary images of London:










Fast forward to the 20th century and there was a strong movement to get away from the cities, which where viewed more negatively than positively by then. You had Bartok's ballet _Miraculous Mandarin _- with a plot set in a seedy part of the city, with main characters being (or implied as being) a prostitute and her pimp. You got Korngold's opera _Die Tote Stadt (The Dead City) _set in Bruges and mirroring the neuroses of the bougeois and also that sex/death paradigm which reflected the emergence of psychoanalysis. Later on you had the city depicted as a stage of conflict, both physical and ideological, in works like Shostakovich's _Symphony #7 'Leningrad.'_

Something kind of went wrong between papa's idealised city and the darker aspects of it imaged by the likes of Bartok, Korngold and Shostakovich, I think.

As I said, with the folk music movement in the early 20th century, composers tried to get away from the 'stain' of the city, its political intrigues, moral corruption and social unrest. George Grosz's imaging of the city reflects the city as a place of chaos, a contrast to Canaletto's vision of it as a place of order:










You got Vaughan Williams, Holst, Grainger, Bartok, Kodaly, Canteloube and others going to the backwoods to record and preserve folk traditions and music of the country people before it disappeared forever. There was a similar trend here in Australia at that time to preserve the musics and cultures of native Aboriginal peoples.

But even earlier than that, in the late 19th century, many composers in the era of Romanticism and Nationalism did a similar thing - eg. Brahms and his 'Hungarianisms' - although their version of folk music was not based on rigorous study like the guys coming later, more on this music they heard played in cities, ironically. Eg. Brahms grew up listening to Hungarian music played by exiles of that country fleeing the revolution of 1848 and settling in Hamburg. So there was this intersection of cultures, which might also be relevant for this topic.

So its this move from a kind of utopian vision of the city to a dystopian one I am wanting to talk about here. Also, the corresponding retreat to the country - how do you think that turned out? What do you think of the city/country dichotomy - is it still relevant in today's world, or not?

Its a wide discussion, you can talk about your favourite works relating to this, or just give your thoughts.

[But for those 'minders' I got on the forum ready to pounce on my every word, I'll be straight up: try to behave PLEASE.]


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

There has been a streak of pastoralism in the arts going back to the 18th century, at least, and probably before then, but you're probably right that with the industrial revolution in the 19th century, it took on an increased urgency. Remember also that the 19th century saw a rise in pantheism and transcendentalism and other such similar movements that sought the spiritual in a non-traditional way.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Mahlerian said:


> ... Remember also that the 19th century saw a rise in pantheism and transcendentalism and other such similar movements that sought the spiritual in a non-traditional way.


Yes and regarding all that, Australian painter Sidney Long's painting called 'Pan' always makes me think of Debussy's _Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun_. It was painted in the 1890's so of course those trends where going on in the arts - you had that organic type art (art noveau) and also Symbolists and Decadents feeding into that area of fantasy - both idyllic and disturbing.










& one I didn't mention in my OP is that with the increased ease of continental and global travel in the early to mid 20th century you got the composer as tourist, writing pieces about foreign places including cities. So you got things like Gershwin's _An American in Paris_, Copland's _El Salon Mexico_ and Milhaud's _Saudades do Brasil_. Again its not new as Haydn was virtually doing the same sort of thing in the 1790's!


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## deggial (Jan 20, 2013)

I think there were two different things in the 18th century that influenced the two diverging tendencies (cities = yay vs. countryside = so idyllic). Most of the pastoral music was commissioned by the nobility, who owned land and idealized the countryside, while the realistic, everyday life in the city stuff was commissioned by the bourgeoisie, who were entirely urban. Nationalism was indeed the reason 19th century composers rushed to preserve folk music, as did literary types with folk tales etc. Nowadays the general trend is love/hate with the city but what countryside is there left? (or rather, how much?). Plus cities grew a lot starting with the industrial revolution, so the hustle and bustle has turned into traffic jams and overpopulation + unemployment whereas there is no going back to the countryside - not en masse, that's for sure.


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## Rapide (Oct 11, 2011)

Richard Wagner and Bayreuth. No more needs to be said.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

deggial said:


> I think there were two different things in the 18th century that influenced the two diverging tendencies (cities = yay vs. countryside = so idyllic). Most of the pastoral music was commissioned by the nobility, who owned land and idealized the countryside, while the realistic, everyday life in the city stuff was commissioned by the bourgeoisie, who were entirely urban.


Yes, & I see parallels between what was going on in music and the visual arts regarding the things you're talking about. In painting, we can contrast things like Watteau's idealisation of country life in his fetes galantes paintings with Hogarth's imaging of the more seedy and down at heel parts of London (also a contrast with Canaletto which I put in my opening post).





















> Nowadays the general trend is love/hate with the city but what countryside is there left? (or rather, how much?). Plus cities grew a lot starting with the industrial revolution, so the hustle and bustle has turned into traffic jams and overpopulation + unemployment whereas there is no going back to the countryside - not en masse, that's for sure.


There was the hippy movement in the 1960's, that counterculture thing. I don't think it had any long lasting effects, other than that generation which matured at that time kind of rebelling...then they became CEOs of multinational corporations by the time they reached middle age (just kidding there guys, but maybe some of them did?). Of course there where earlier back to nature type movements, eg. the French philosopher Rousseau was an advocate of this type of thing.


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## Mahlerian (Nov 27, 2012)

Sid James said:


> Yes, I see parallels between what was going on in music and the visual arts regarding the things you're talking about. In painting, we can contrast things like Watteau's idealisation of country life in his fetes galantes paintings with Hogarth's imaging of the more seedy and down at heel parts of London (also a contrast with Canaletto which I put in my opening post).


Reminds me of the London of Stravinsky's Rake's Progress (which was based on Hogarth), a contemporary morality play, which opens in pastoral innocence and ends in the squalor of bedlam. On the other hand, it doesn't really take itself seriously.

As for operas that take place entirely in the city, Lulu comes to mind, and it's no surprise that its portrayal is entirely negative. Granted, the protagonist in Wozzeck is utterly mad, making even nature a threat to him (see act 1, scene 2).


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Mahlerian said:


> Reminds me of the London of Stravinsky's Rake's Progress (which was based on Hogarth), a contemporary morality play, which opens in pastoral innocence and ends in the squalor of bedlam. On the other hand, it doesn't really take itself seriously.
> 
> As for operas that take place entirely in the city, Lulu comes to mind, and it's no surprise that its portrayal is entirely negative. Granted, the protagonist in Wozzeck is utterly mad, making even nature a threat to him (see act 1, scene 2).


Well what you say makes me think of how in opera there was this tendency to go back to the past, and with that kind of bypass contemporary life or at least do a metaphorical take on it. Korngold's Die Tote Stadt and Berg's Lulu takes place in the present (well, that is implied, in any case a specific time in history is not stated). But you got others going back in history or doing fables, eg. Bartok's Bluebeard, Stravinsky's Rake's Progress which you point out, Schoenberg's Moses und Aron and operas by Richard Strauss I think tend to go back as well rather than speaking to 'the present.' So again, I see this as maybe a sign of avoiding the 'here and now' as regards the city in early-mid 20th century because let's face it, behind the pomp, glitter and glamour of places like London, Paris, Vienna and so on, things where not so rosy underneath that facade.

Maybe things like Munch's paintings reflect that underbelly of neuroses and angst, as does Lulu and Die Tote Stadt:


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## deggial (Jan 20, 2013)

Sid James said:


> Yes, & I see parallels between what was going on in music and the visual arts regarding the things you're talking about. In painting, we can contrast things like Watteau's idealisation of country life in his fetes galantes paintings with Hogarth's imaging of the more seedy and down at heel parts of London (also a contrast with Canaletto which I put in my opening post).
> 
> 
> 
> ...


it's interesting how people like Watteau and Canaletto painted those cheery scenes whereas Hogarth went for the naturalistic perspective. I wonder if it has anything to do with London being on the cutting edge of the industrial revolution whereas France and Italy were still rather feudalistic at the time.

granted I wasn't around in the '60s to have witnessed the hippy years so I'm not sure how this worked out everywhere else, but logically it would have worked best in the US (don't know about Australia at all), since there is a lot more land where people could build a self sustaining, alternative community than anywhere in Europe. The other problem is of course that very few people born and raised in the city could actually live off the land. We don't realize just how far we are from nature.


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## deggial (Jan 20, 2013)

Sid James said:


> Maybe things like Munch's paintings reflect that underbelly of neuroses and angst, as does Lulu and Die Tote Stadt:


definitely; there is a close connection between the arts since all artists are inspired by what's happening around them. Sign of the times and all.

I do think though that Strauss' operas are very much about the present (or rather, _timeless issues_) through the filter of the past (although there is some nostalgia in there about the good ol' Austro-Hungarian Empire, now that I think about it).


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

deggial said:


> it's interesting how people like Watteau and Canaletto painted those cheery scenes whereas Hogarth went for the naturalistic perspective. I wonder if it has anything to do with London being on the cutting edge of the industrial revolution whereas France and Italy were still rather feudalistic at the time...


You might be right there. The English painter Wright of Derby was at the coalface so to speak, alive as the industrial revolution was taking off. So you got paintings of iron foundrys and things like that by him, such as this:










& you also got Turner in the 19th century imaging the steam revolution in this classic image (Rain, steam and speed: The great Western railway) :










But these beg the question as to why English composers didn't engage with these aspects of the city around them. Well, they certainly didn't in the 19th century, did they?



> ...
> granted I wasn't around in the '60s to have witnessed the hippy years so I'm not sure how this worked out everywhere else...don't know about Australia at all...


Well there are still some hippy type commune places like Nimbin, but I think the heyday of all that was in decades past.


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## deggial (Jan 20, 2013)

Sid James said:


> But these beg the question as to why English composers didn't engage with these aspects of the city around them. Well, they certainly didn't in the 19th century, did they?


I'm stumped!


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

^^I am too basically. I suppose that the grimy cities of the UK, with all that industrialisation going on, was not a thing composers wanted to engage with. I know that in the early 20th century though there was this move back to pastoralism and capturing the vanishing old rural lifestyle. Vaughan Williams' folk studies as I mentioned was a big part of this. With the industrial revolution, Western countries became more prosperous. But of course there where downside to all this too. With his Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, RVW was going back to a place of a connection to the land that people had lost, becoming alienated in the cities. & also to some sort of spirituality - although I understand Vaughan Williams was not particularly religious - because again, mechanisation and rationalism where a threat to this. Of course its more comforting than the musical equivalent of this, one of Lowry's trademark images of early 20th century English cities - drab, grimy, monotonous and kind of anonymous (getting lost in the crowd). Edward Hopper of America did his own take on alienation in big cities as well...


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

What I'd add to my post above is that of course apart from his Tallis Fantasia, Vaughan Williams also wrote his Symphony #2 named for London, & I think in the 20th century, composers more readily engaged with the cities around them. But things like RVW's London symphony or Elgar's Cockaigne (In London Town) overture make me think more of the city from the bird's eye view, or at least the city from street level, much different from the neurotic and kind of claustrophobic visions of the city offered by Berg in Lulu or Korngold in Die Tote Stadt. Maybe like Monet's images of London, or Kokoschka's even, which I put two of below.

*But a note to say I invite all people here to contribute to this thread. I don't want it to be a one man band, just me and a few others. C'mon give us your thoughts if you've not contributed here! No need to deal with visual art as I have, you can focus on anything artistic - eg. literature or film - but of course just music too if you want.
*


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## deggial (Jan 20, 2013)

after some pondering, I've got two more ideas: one, musicians might have not engaged with the industrial city to begin with because it was a brand new reality, too hard to digest (all new sounds, completely artificial) and two, at the time Continental Europe was caught in a whirlwind of revolutions, which, by and large, are a lot more inspiring to artists (or have been, until the XXth century), so it was only natural that all the action, artistically speaking, happened there.

I like your points about the bird's eye view. Monet's perspective with the skyline calls to mind pictures of modern day metropolises. I think for the XIX century, London was akin to nowadays NYC: aloof, powerful, impenetrable, awe inspiring, difficult to make sense of. Representation of something of this sort might have come off easier in the fine arts until new musical languages were invented to cope with this new reality.


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

But these beg the question as to why English composers didn't engage with these aspects of the city around them. Well, they certainly didn't in the 19th century, did they?

It seems to me that both English music and English painting came into its own with Romanticism... and Romanticism involved a great deal of idolization of "nature". This wasn't a "back to nature" movement. It should be recognized that "nature" was rarely idolized in the way we might think of it today. There were few pure landscape paintings prior to Rubens and the Dutch Baroque masters... and for the Dutch painters, these paintings of the landscape were an act of nationalistic pride in the little country that had only recently earned independence from the Spanish. For most of Europe, the "landscape"... the "wilderness" outside of the immediate protection of the cities/towns was a dangerous place. There were few roads, dangerous mountain and river passes, wild animals, roaming thieves and militia.

As Europe moved into the Industrial Revolution there were a good many artists/poets/authors who recognized the the dangers of Industrialization and what was being lost. William Blake and his followers: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood were quite critical of Industrialization and turned not so much to nature... as to the past... the late Middle-Ages/Early Renaissance and the ideals of the honorable craftsman who could take pride in his labor... rather than simply being a cog in the assembly line.

Beyond these artists, there are few major British painters whose work is well known enough to have provided an image of late 19th century London... certainly no where near the depth of description offered by writers such as Dickens. Still... there are some exceptions. A late Romantic follower of Turner, John Atkinson Grimshaw is interesting:











.....


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

Paris was more cutting edge when it came to painting and from the time of Baudelaire, who really stands as the first great Modernist poet, the city became a major theme of artists: the good, the bad, and the ugly. The Realists... carrying over into Impressionism... presented us with image of modern Paris:

Train Stations:



Bars:



Night Clubs and the Cabaret:



Downtown Paris:



The City Viewed from the Apartments:



The Impressionists were not interested in making grandiose social statements and so they tended to avoid the seedier or uglier sides of Paris... although there were exceptions...


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

You do get Degas' images of Paris brothels...



and these are continued in the work of Toulouse-Latrec... with his images of Paris Nightclubs and prostitues:





Even the views of nature in Impressionism, it should be remembered, are far removed from those of Romanticism. What we are now presented with is nature tamed by man... the man-made parks or landscapes of the suburbs of Paris... no longer wild and overgrown... but wholly domesticated:


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

American artists... in spite of their supposed "provincialism" in terms of being slow to jump on the latest _avant garde_ approaches to painting... were among the leaders in terms of embracing the city... the good and the bad... as a subject matter. I suspect that this has much to do with the American national mythos as the "New World". New York, especially, became an iconic subject matter:

the tenements:



the underpasses:



the rooftops:



the tiny, crammed apartments:



the subways and trains:


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

As Andre/Sid already pointed out, Edward Hopper was a master at capturing the alienation... and often the understated sexual tension... of urban America. The "film-noir" like images were both influenced by film... and a major influence on film. Alfred Hitchcock especially acknowledged a debt to Hopper:







Perhaps one of the most interesting of the American early Modernists who embraced the city, is the painter Stuart Davis... almost a precursor to Pop Art... who gave artistic form to the graffiti and commercial signs... and jazz of the era:



And then there was Joseph Stella who turned the Coney Island Amusement Park into a raucous, chaotic, jazz-infused roller-coaster ride:



Both of these painters clearly echo the work of the French painter, Robert Delaunay:


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

I would add to what dieggal and stlukes say that I definitely see some change happening at the turn of the 20th century regarding how creative artists saw the city.

Re what you say dieggal, I think its true that innovations had to happen in music for it to catch up with what was happening on the ground. But there where already composers taking it in. Varese's pieces are for me inseperable from New York, where he lived on and off for decades. Also American born composers where also taking in the city. You had Gershwin, but also Copland in his earlier jazz inspired period (works like his piano concerto and piano sonata are examples). You got Ives too in some works, him replicating the sounds of industry, so too Virgil Thomson in his film scores. Thomson's film scores like The Plough that Broke the Plains and The River, written in the 1930's and '40's after industrialisation had scarred the American landscape, come across as a critique of a system that seemed to prioritise machines over people. Maybe its a kind of early environmentalism?

But of all these works, those two works by Copland featuring piano are for me the equivalent of Hopper and (the separate) ASh Can School (some of those in Stlukes posts of NYC images). That sense of movement and many people around you and at the same time a kind of emptiness and isolation. & maybe a bit of being part of something new, and of course with that come things that notions of life in the 19th century - & what was going on in the arts, eg. Romanticism - didn't quite account for or prepare people for.

Re the pre-Raphaelites which you mention stlukes, there is the famous case of Ruskin slamming a painting by Whistler, saying he was throwing a pot of paint in the public's face or something of the sort. Ruskin was a supporter of the pre-Raphaelites whereas Whistler did engage with London as the modern city in painting like Battersea Bridge. & the second image is the one that caused Ruskin's ire, which is of fireworks, another phenomenon of the city. These are close to the French Impressionists which stlukes showed/listed above, Whistler like them had similar concerns and was influenced by Japanese artists:

















I would also say its significant how you get Europeans doing what the Americans where doing in the early 20th century. Eg. Honegger's Pacific 231, which is a bit like the Futurists with their glorification of technology. But there was also a darker and dystopian side to these dreams of the cities of the future. Fritz Lang's film Metropolis is a good example - coming from Central Europe, so you got Expressionism in the mix, and all that psychological stuff.

On the left is Boccioni's sculpture of man in motion, becoming like a robot, and to contrast that an image from Metropolis:

















But re the French Impressionists, I see as their equivalent, in terms of their concern with the modern city, as not so much to be Ravel or Debussy but more to be things like verismo opera, which can be said to have sprung from Paris with Bizet's Carmen. Even though the movement was short lived it did produce some significant works - esp. Puccini's La Boheme - but I think that things like Ravel's Bolero may also be relevant though - that kind of mechanised rhythm. Maybe even both Ravel's and Debussy's incorporation of ragtimes/jazz and use of pentatonic scale influenced by gamelan, reflecting Paris as an international city, receptive to outside influences from afar. & Debussy's 24th prelude for piano is titled 'Fireworks' and has these bursts of sound, appropriately, and a fragmented quote at the end of the Marsellaise, played on Bastille Day for example.

So it depends.


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## deggial (Jan 20, 2013)

Sid James said:


> But re the French Impressionists, I see as their equivalent, in terms of their concern with the modern city, as not so much to be Ravel or Debussy but more to be things like verismo opera, which can be said to have sprung from Paris with Bizet's Carmen. Even though the movement was short lived it did produce some significant works - esp. Puccini's La Boheme -


YES! I always felt that La Boheme was the perfect musical equivalent to Toulouse-Lautrec's paintings with a bit of Degas thrown in (Mimi is more or a Degas heroine, imo, but Musetta is Toulouse-Lautrec's through and through). I also think that the Impressionists were a lot more subversive than they get credited.

another thing, it does make sense that verismo would find its start in France, given the naturalism of Zola.


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## ptr (Jan 22, 2013)

Very rewarding thread! ... I'm in tears because I don't have anything valuable to ad!!








But I think You could do a modernistic urban parallel to what happened in Russia during the two first decades after the revolution with fx. Kazimir Malevich and the *Stenberg Brothers*, Mayakovsky and composers like fx. Nik. Rozlavets and Alexander Mosolov and film makers like Dziga Vertov. 
The line gets very clear when you compare the art, film and music after the Stalin purges of the late 1930's..

/ptr


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

Some of the most striking social critique visually of the 19th-century city was that of Doré´s London scenes (1870s):

























Georg Grosz was likewise very harsh in his critique of the post-WWI city:









As a side remark, we have had Robert Storm Petersen in Denmark, influenced by French and German early 20th-century currents, but with a humourous twist, celebrating the non-conformist:


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## deggial (Jan 20, 2013)

joen_cph said:


> As a side remark, we have had Robert Storm Petersen in Denmark, influenced by French and German early 20th-century currents, but with a humourous twist, celebrating the non-conformist:
> 
> View attachment 14314


(don't want to hog the thread, but this humorous painting really reminded me of one day, 14 years ago, when, at around 8am on a Wednesday, I took the commuter train on my way *to* the beach, while the blank faced commuters were shuffling on the opposite platform. Let me tell you, it was a great feeling).


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## Eschbeg (Jul 25, 2012)

Speaking of the French, I consider Poulenc to be a fundamentally urban composer. A lot of his music consists of webs of musical references and quotations, and in many cases these allusions are in some way evocative of Paris. His Concerto for Two Pianos, for example, has extensive allusions to Ravel's G Major Piano Concerto, which was premiered in the same year as the Concerto for Two Pianos, as well as imitations of gamelan music, which featured prominently in the Paris Colonial Exposition of the previous year. As a result, I hear the piece as a collage of the musical goings-on in Paris in the early 1930s.


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

I think that the German Expressionist artists of the Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity... especially Otto Dix, George Grosz, and Max Beckmann... could all be brutally honest in their portrayal of the seedier undersides of the Modern City... and especially of political and social horrors. Still they were unquestionably in love with the cities all the same. Like the Renaissance artists who lectured the viewers against the sins of lust and sensuality in paintings that clearly reveled in the same... Dix, Groz, and Beckmann clearly loved the garish unnatural lights and urban architecture of the cities, the chaos and noise, the jazz music and the crowds, the nightclubs and brothels. Beckamnn wrote of the great cities as as the Modern Babylon, alive with the roar of chaos, living on the edge of the Apocalypse in the shadow of the barbarians.

Dix:



Dix clearly revels in the image of himself as a Modern man of the city... dressed in his American-style suit, clutching his telephone like the contemporary hipster might clutch his or her i-pad, American jazz blaring in the background.









Dix' view of the seedier aspects of "Sex in the City" is unflinchingly honest and brutal... and yet one sense that the artist himself greatly enjoyed the sexual freedom of the Modern city... and his ability to revel in the portrayal of such.


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

Grosz clearly loved the unnatural artifice of neon lights which resulted in the most ghastly and intense colors... as well the hard geometry of Modern architecture which lent a maze-like quality to the urban landscape. Like Dix, his portrayal of sexuality is harsh and often ugly... and yet one gets the feeling that he wholly loves it.


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## StlukesguildOhio (Dec 25, 2006)

Beckmann... the greatest of the Neue Sachlichkeit... the greatest of the German painters of the 20th century... viewed the city as a grand theater or stage where the whole of life passed him in an almost Shakespearean manner... all players who have their exits and their entrances... poor players that strut and fret their hour upon the stage and then are heard no more... a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The theater or stage became a symbol or metaphor for the whole of life... especially in the crammed and chaotic cities. Beckmann was especially masterful in blurring or bringing together both the "low" and the "high" on his stages... just as the city brings both ends of the spectrum into close quarters:


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Thanks for all your responses. I got limited time now. I plan to return to address other's responses but I'll just go into what ptr said, since he's got onto a hobby horse of mine - the Soviet era and all that.



ptr said:


> Very rewarding thread! ... I'm in tears because I don't have anything valuable to ad!!
> View attachment 14304
> 
> 
> ...


Well that's something I think is relevant. You got things like that Russian constructivist movement/style that was tolerated under the Lenin regime, but Stalin suppressed such modernist tendencies and looked back to Classicism with his wedding cake buildings (the Nazis did similar of course). Malevich's abstractionist paintings where similar.

But in terms of music and the modern/industrial city, Mosolov's 'Iron Foundry' piece is a good reflection of all this. So too things like Prokofiev's more adventurous phase, and Roslavets is highly relevant, him becoming persona non grata under Stalin (written out of the history books).

Lenin's brand of international Communism was far less isolationist and shut off than Stalin's. If the Lenin type ideology had continued, there would have probably been more engagement with Western trends in music, architecture, the arts in general. But of course its all a kind of pipe dream in a way, thinking one can reform a society dogged by hundreds of years of oppression and brutality with a single ideology, however that issue is too wide a thing for this thread.

With Shostakovich's music you do get this line going through from works that had to be suppressed under Stalin (either censored, or written for 'in the drawer' or withdrawn like the 4th symphony to the showpieces - eg. the Leningrad symphony - to when things where a bit more relaxed under Khrushchev and finally stagnation under Brezhnev). Shostakovich in effect charts those times, that journey from idealism to harsh reality hitting home hard. This is not only to do with the city but wider, however I think that St. Petersburg (Leningrad) where he was born and grew up is pretty pivotal to his journey as a composer.

So, contrast *Tatlin's* modernist construction (Monument to the 3rd International) with one of several* 'wedding cake' towers Stalin built in Moscow*. Maybe there is a parallel here in terms of Modernism being tolerated, even encouraged under Lenin, then after the crack down, oppressed under Stalin in favour of basically what he liked (hard to generalise here, but the correspondence is he liked Classicism in architecture - well Classicism on steroids! - and his favourite composers included Mozart, of the Classical Era). So?

















You can compare* Malevich's move from a more industry/city centred aesthetic back to the farm and country *as he had to bend to the dictates of STalin. On the left is one that is decidedly futurist, on the right you got something more conservative by comparison.

















Same thing happened to composers. Seem the city was seen as a kind of threat. Physical 'progress' was fine up to a point. But what about intellectual progress and looking outwards? Hard to believe but Stalin even thought Khatchaturian's style too much like Ravel (eg. too Western, decadent, bourgeois). Even given the subject matter of collective farms and revolution etc in his ballets.

















In the Khrushchev era, Shostakovich's Babi Yar symphony was just as big a statement as the Leningrad symphony was under Stalin during the war. Babi Yar was one of his most controversial works. Almost all the Jewish population of Kiev where executed in the massacre (150,000 people). So this brings the city as a sight of atrocities, of genocide. A similar work is by Schoenberg, his Survivor from Warsaw.

Above you got the visual equivalents of these, *the monument in Kiev to Babi Yar *and one of the images of *Kathe Kollwitz,* a bunch of prisoners which was a common sight in cities during totalitarian regimes. This was the dark side of these ideologies that Shostakovich imaged so well, and at times with similar brutal honesty.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

& in our own time, you got *modern Holocaust memorials/monuments*. Below the one in* Berlin*:










& the one in *Boston*, USA. Again, as I said in my OP about 1848, there is this issue of modern diasporas and cities absorbing migrants. New countries like USA and Australia expanded greatly after the war, still are.










& of course America had *9/11*. I don't want to be too political here, but its relevant. There is a physical memorial to it on the site, and of course American composers like *Steve Reich* and *John Adams *have written pieces commemorating the tragedy. So this concept of the city dealing with such traumatic events is still relevant in our time, unfortunately no place is immune to conflict and the city will never stop being a stage for conflict.


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## Sid James (Feb 7, 2009)

Some people (eg. dieggal) earlier mentioned *the revolutionary city*, which I thought I'd expand on.

Its obvious to many here but Beethoven's Symphony #3 'Eroica' epitomises the ideals and frustration of the ideals of the Enlightenment. It was all in all, in terms of practical outcomes, a failure. But it spurred on great art, such at that work, as well as his Fidelio but also things like Delacroix's iconic image, Liberty leading the people:










In Delacroix's painting, the bare breasted woman symbolising republican France, bearing the tricolour, leads people from all classes - from workers to intellectuals. Of course the reality of the situation as you got the revolution - and others throughout the 19th century (esp. 1848) being a bloodbath and just leading to imposition of same old ancien regime values. But its Dore's images which joen_cph posted earlier that typify the expanding 19th century city's dark side. So too Honore Daumier's pointed critiques of that rigid class system. Here, his iconic image of a third class train carriage. Where's liberty, fraternity and equality here? In your wallet, maybe.










I don't really know what's the musical equivalent of the Daumier image. Maybe Offenbach's operettas, some of them pointed satires at the France of Napoleon III's Third Republic, thinly veiled by plots going back to antiquity. They've probably lost their bite now, but back then they where considered quite subversive by some (not only sexually as the famous Can-Can dance obviously was).

As stlukes talked to, the Impressionists where the first painters of the modern city. & here you got the cafes cabarets, a pivotal artfrom which was to influence many in the 20th century. Satie worked as a cabaret pianist, and his music was to influence many from contemporaries Debussy and Ravel, to Les Six and others beyond 1945 like John Cage.

Here an image of the cafes cabarets by one of my favourite Impressionist painters, Edgar Degas:










In terms of revolution in the 20th century, you had many. The Russian revolution of 1917 is now seen by some historians as little more than a coup, not a legit revolution. As I said in an earlier post, Shostakovich's city of St Petersburg (Leningrad) was at the centre of all that, not only the one in 1917 but the one in 1905 - which was the subject of his 11th symphony - and of course also the events of the siege of the city during WW2, covered in his 7th symphony.

An interesting parallel is that while Shostakovich was composing his 11th symphony commemorating the massacre of St Petersburg civilians by tsarist troops, in 1956 another revolution was going on. Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest that year, crushing Hungarian democracy. Some writers on music see this symphony as less about the event of 1905 and more about the events of 1956. Its a bit like the metaphors in Offenbach's operettas, isn't it?

Below, an image of the head of the Stalin statue in Budapest which was destroyed by the revolutionaries. & also the statue before it was dismembered, surrounded by the people of the city. Scrolled on it prominently is "W.C" or Water Closet, meaning toilet, which is exactly what people thought of the Stalinist regime.

















1956 and the other big one in Prague in 1968 - a year that there where also troubles in Paris - spelled the end of any kind of idealism or maybe a kind of innocent belief in the good of certain ideologies. So as far as I know you get no more big statements about these things like Shostakovich's 11th symphony. Good might triumph in the end but now its a case of how can we tell good apart from evil? I'll just leave it at that for now and invite people to comment if they wish or add to this thread what you think relevant...


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