Pyramids at the Louvre: Music, Culture and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists - Tapa dura

[Watkins's] argument is that, just as I. M. Pei's glass pyramids at the Louvre pluralistically resonate against the Napoleon III architecture which provides a backdrop, so the cultural experience of twentieth-century music owes much to the special concern of composers with varieties of collage--with 'cut and paste' methodologies that bring the Orient into alignment with the Occident, the primitive with the sophisticated, the organic with the clockwork. Watkins...brings his infectious cultural curiosity to bear on what we might define, borrowing one of his own phrases about the cinema, as a concern with 'promoting the comprehensibility of fracture'...This book...keeps the crucial questions alive, and nourishes them in an attractively personal and provocative way. The real value of the book lies in the intricate network of cross-fertilisations and syntheses it reveals between things we're used to thinking of in isolation. Watkins is an assiduous and enthusiastic cultural detective, adept at ferreting out the obscure lineage of an idea... An ambitious and impressive book. -- Ivan Hewett "Musical Times" An ambitious attempt to understand our inherited Western musical culture...An entertaining and clearly written chronicle, no little part of which is new insights and previously slighted historical accounts. And equally valuable to the reader is the exhilarating fun of discovering new details among the familiar. -- Alan Andres "Boston Book Review" Impressive....Utilizing an immense store of knowledge, Watkins explores the unusual juxtapositions of our century--exotic and indigenous, old and new, black and white, high and low, cerebral and instinctive (the 'collage' of the title). In 17 essays that examine major movements and figures, he draws on music, art, literature, sociology, and cultural history...Much is provocative. Watkins's argument is that, just as I. M. Pei's glass pyramids at the Louvre pluralistically resonate against the Napoleon III architecture which provides a backdrop, so the cultural experience of twentieth-century music owes much to the special concern of composers with varieties of collage--with 'cut and paste' methodologies that bring the Orient into alignment with the Occident, the primitive with the sophisticated, the organic with the clockwork. Watkins...brings his infectious cultural curiosity to bear on what we might define, borrowing one of his own phrases about the cinema, as a concern with 'promoting the comprehensibility of fracture'...This book...keeps the crucial questions alive, and nourishes them in an attractively personal and provocative way. -- Arnold Whittall "Music & Letters" equally valuable to the reader is the exhilarating fun of discovering new details among the familiar. detective, adept at ferreting out the obscure lineage of an idea...[An] ambitious and impressive book. book...keeps the crucial questions alive, and nourishes them in an attractively personal and provocative way. 'collage' of the title). In 17 essays that examine major movements and figures, he draws on music, art, literature, sociology, and cultural history...Much is provocative.

A pyramid in front of the Louvre, Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and "The Rite of Spring", Schoenberg and Shirley Temple - just as the odd juxtapositions of modernism produced a fresh way of seeing, so collage, in the hands of Glenn Watkins, offers another perspective on the art of this age. In creating a picture of 20th-century music and arts, Watkins's work show how much the current postmodern aesthetic owes to its modernist past. Behind the many guises of modernism, is found an appetite for opposing impulses: the exotic and the home-grown, high and low, black and white, the passionate and the cool, the cerebral and the instinctive. Watkins reveals these oppositions at play in the music of Stravinsky and Ravel, Debussy and Schoenberg, Ives, Satie, Hindemith, Ellington, and Gershwin; in the art of Picasso and the Cubists, Cocteau, Leger, Brancusi and Moguchi; in the anthologies of Nancy Cunard and Alain Locke; in the ballet companies of Diaghilev and de Mare; and in the performances of Josephine Baker. Throughout, the technique of collage asserts its power to enlighten through juxtaposition, resist resolution, sponsor pluralism, and to promote understanding of an order that eludes all edicts. The masks of Oskar Schlemmer, Japanese Noh drama, and the "commedia dell'arte"; the mythologies attendant to the retrieval of folk traditions of artists in time of war; all have a place in this depiction and assessment of the legacy of modernism. An exploration of questions surrounding Primitivism, Orientalism and technology, as they surface at either end of our century, this work exposes the millenial preoccupations mutually invested in our search for "first times" and our convictions about "the end of culture".