Avant-Garde, Modernism, Postmodernity—: or the ‘Semanticist’s Despair’ of Teaching the History of Twentieth-Century Music

The topic announced in the title—Avant-Garde, Modernism, Postmodernity—or the ‘Semanticist’s Despair’ of Teaching the History of Twentieth-Century Music—is rooted in the experience of university teaching. The author surveys three concepts central to the history of twentieth-century music, concepts that are widely used but not always precisely. Her starting point is Władysław Tatarkiewicz’s article ‘Romanticism, or the Semanticist’s Despair’ (Pamiętnik Literacki, 1971), in which he identified twenty-five different definitions of romanticism in the history and criticism of art. Although avant-garde and modernism most often denote a historical period or epoch, and postmodernity is treated in much the same way, all three concepts must also be considered in narrower senses—as doctrine, ideology, an artistic movement, a set of features of a work of art and, above all, an attitude in its most individual dimension. In this context, Carl Dahlhaus’s question, posed in 1977 in Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte, remains current: how can art history be practised with the work itself at its centre without losing sight of its biographical, social and cultural determinants?