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Tuesday, December 1, 2020

Chiasmus

 I took the phrase vernacular modernism, by which I mean all kinds of folkloric or nationalistic elements in classical music, and turned it around to find the phrase modernist vernaculars, by which I mean vernacular musical idioms that undergo a modernist or avant-garde phase, like modern jazz.  These two phenomena are in dialectical relationship. Well, avant-garde jazz might seem more similar to atonal music, or other forms of unvernacular classical music. In Alex Ross's book The Rest is Noise, Charlie Parker sees Stravinsky in a club where he is playing and quotes from The Rite of Spring in his solo.  

7 comments:

Thomas said...

This feels like a metaphorical use of "vernacular". Are there literal, i.e., literary, examples of vernacular modernism and modernist vernacular?

Jonathan said...

Is it always metaphorical to speak of vernacular in music? I use it instead of "popular" which has too many associations. I'm sure there are vernacular modernisms in literature too, like Robert Frost.

Thomas said...

I guess I use it to mean "ordinary language" (the language of ordinary people). I thought maybe Hemingway would be a vernacular modernist (in a sense that Eliot wouldn't be). WCW vs. Pound might be a clearer example. What would be an example of modernist vernacular? Gertrude Stein?

I guess you could argue that "vernacular" originally just meant "native", so its application to language is already metaphorical. I don't remember whether we've talked about Lisa Robertson's reading of Dante on this point -- "a poetics of the vernacular—the collectively accessible speech of the household and the street."

Jonathan said...

We have talked about that. I think my reaction was that she wasn't writing in the vernacular herself. Not that a theory of the vernacular has to be in the vernacular (Dante's was in Latin, after all!).

Think of the term "vernacular architecture." That might be more in the realms of what I'm talking about. Vernacular always implies a contrast with something else. A building a famous architect is not vernacular. In language, it was everything not Latin, when Latin was official church / state / education language. In music, it is everything except for classical music, so various kinds of folk and commercial genres.

Thomas said...

Yes, but I also think vernacular architecture as a metaphor based on the primary linguistic meaning of vernacular. That could be peculiarity with me, stemming from how I learned the word. Etymologically, it seems to just mean "native" or "domestic", which is something Robertson also plays on.

We might also think of vernacular as simply "ambient culture". So there's actually a sense in when a caricature (or kitsch form?) of classical music is perfectly "vernacular" -- in films, for example. Or as background music.

Your Charlie Parker example reminded me of Mingus's All the Things You Can C# and the Rachmaninov quote.

I think a distinction between "classical modernism" and "vernacular modernism" could be very useful.

And I can cetainly see the idea of "domestic" architecture going through avant-garde periods. Usually with a narrow audience of wealthy home owners, I guess.

Jonathan said...

So the quotation of the first movement of the 1st Bach cello suite in a movie would be vernacular. That is an interesting idea. I'm working toward a definition of middle brow, but then I realized a lot of it is covered by postmodernism. The way postmodern architecture quotes decorative features in a kitschy way...

Thomas said...

With a nod to T.E. Hulme, maybe there's a distinction to be made between "romantic postmodernism" and "vernacular postmodernism". "Wings of Desire" is romantic, let's say, while "Reservoir Dogs" is vernacular. Both are arguably postmodern.