Annika Forkert
Annika has been a Lecturer in Music at the RNCM since 2020, where she leads the GRNCM course. Research interests include history, analysis, and aesthetics of early-twentieth century music, especially music by British female composers, Franz Schreker's operas, and microtonal and serial music.
Her monograph Elisabeth Lutyens and Edward Clark: The Orchestration of Progress in British Twentieth-Century Music was published by Cambridge University Press (2023).
Previous positions include a lectureship at Liverpool Hope University, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Bristol, and visiting lectureships at Royal Holloway, London, and Leeds Trinity University.
She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and holds a PhD in Music from Royal Holloway, University of London, and a Magistra Artium degree in Musikwissenschaft and Philosophy from Humboldt University Berlin.
Her monograph Elisabeth Lutyens and Edward Clark: The Orchestration of Progress in British Twentieth-Century Music was published by Cambridge University Press (2023).
Previous positions include a lectureship at Liverpool Hope University, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Bristol, and visiting lectureships at Royal Holloway, London, and Leeds Trinity University.
She is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and holds a PhD in Music from Royal Holloway, University of London, and a Magistra Artium degree in Musikwissenschaft and Philosophy from Humboldt University Berlin.
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In this cluster, we argue that in modernism the fragility of collaboration became acute. The cluster circles in on these failed or weak collaborations and networks of modernism and modernists through seven articles, which approach the topic in literature, music, art and design, and crossings between them. The cluster is peer-reviewed and open-access, accesible on Modernismmodernity.org.
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In this cluster, we argue that in modernism the fragility of collaboration became acute. The cluster circles in on these failed or weak collaborations and networks of modernism and modernists through seven articles, which approach the topic in literature, music, art and design, and crossings between them. The cluster is peer-reviewed and open-access, accesible on Modernismmodernity.org.
The paper presents common topics and issues in composition and radio programming in Lutyens and Clark’s work of 1946–8 to outline where a critical biography can begin.
This paper examines the ISCM’s post-War crisis in its intimate connection with Clark, one of the organisation’s most loyal, yet highly problematic, key players. Administrative, financial, political, and personal issues brought an abrupt end to Clark’s ISCM career in 1952, with an additional humiliation when he found himself stripped of his lifetime honorary presidency status after the Oslo incident. Unsurprisingly, Clark is blamed for the ISCM’s declining reputation and finances, but also for the partial loss of its archive (Haefeli, IGNM. Die Internationale Gesellschaft für Neue Musik, Zürich 1982). But with the help of reports of the 1955 court case, Clark’s archive, and other correspondence and documents, a more complex picture of the ISCM’s political challenges after 1945 arises, centring around the administrative structures of the British section and its affiliated organisations (LCMC and ICA), as they sought to secure the ISCM’s position in Britain.
‘I was soon to realize that in spite of the success of Edward’s concerts, we were both to be classified “OUT” by the musical Establishment for backing the wrong horses – such as Schoenberg and Webern – and thereby setting ourselves outside the musical pale in the climate of musical England. To adopt a technique, like the 12-tone, associated with a German, Schoenberg, was ‘mittel-European’, un-English and iconoclastic.’
Clark’s, even more than Lutyens’s, goal was to introduce British audiences to European, particularly Austro-German, New Music. For Clark, modernist music was essentially German, and it was underrepresented in British music life. His pre-WWI studies with Arnold Schoenberg and Oskar Fried in Berlin and his work for the BBC and the ISCM represent the credentials of an important, yet virtually unknown, figure obsessed with establishing a selective canon of twentieth-century continental modernist music in the minds of British critics, composers, and listeners – sometimes with mixed results.
In this paper, I trace and contextualize some of Clark’s most important attempts at disseminating New Music in order to provide a glance at the ideas of nineteenth-century German aesthetics behind his work and at the reception among the public and composers. This necessarily complicates our idea of Britain and Germany as two opposed European musical poles, one the land of atonality, one the land of pastoralism.
While analysis easily shows the limits of both attempts at breaking the predominance of material over form in musical modernism, their direction of thrust deserves consideration. In order to award the idea this consideration, this paper examines the formal structures of Holst’s orchestral piece Egdon Heath of 1927 (on a motto from Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native) in order to expose Holst’s formalist strategies and poetics and to trace form as a signifier of modernism in early twentieth-century art music. In this piece, traditional sonata form coincides (or collides) with a free 19-part structure, held together by six themes, which each ‘modernise’ traditional musical forms from different periods of music history. With this unique outline, Egdon Heath sits as uncomfortably with the Adornian idea of modernism as it does with Taruskin’s maximalism or indeed more traditional approaches to form. The paper concludes its examination with a discussion of what is to be done in this situation, in which the possibilities and limitations of a formalist take on modernism are laid bare.
‘I was soon to realize that in spite of the success of Edward’s concerts, we were both to be classified “OUT” by the musical Establishment for backing the wrong horses – such as Schoenberg and Webern – and thereby setting ourselves outside the musical pale in the climate of musical England. To adopt a technique, like the 12-tone, associated with a German, Schoenberg, was ‘mittel-European’, un-English and iconoclastic.’
Clark’s, even more than Lutyens’s, goal was to introduce British audiences to so called New Music from Europe, and particularly from Germany and Austria. For Clark, modernist music was essentially German, and it was underrepresented in British music life. His pre-WWI studies with Arnold Schoenberg and Oskar Fried in Berlin, his refusal to leave the country at the outbreak of the War and following internment at Ruhleben, and, after his return to England, his work for the BBC and the International Society of Contemporary Music until his death in 1962 represent the credentials of an important, yet virtually unknown, figure working towards making a selective canon of twentieth-century German music available to British composition and performance through concert and broadcast programming and conducting – sometimes with mixed results.
In this paper, I follow and contextualize some of Clark’s most important attempts at disseminating German music in order to provide a glance at the ideas of German music behind his work and at the reception among the addressed public and British composers. This complicates our idea of Britain and Germany as two opposed European musical poles, one the ‘land of music’, the other the ‘land without music’.
In meinem Vortrag vollziehe ich die aufeinanderprallenden Kräfte nach – auf der einen Seite Lutyens in ihrer spitzzüngigen Autobiografie und ihrer Kantate für Sopran und Kammerensemble O saisons, ô châteaux! von 1946, auf der anderen Seite der Londoner Musikbetrieb der 1940er mit seinen konservativen Kritikern und seiner vorherrschenden Ästhetik. Mithilfe von textueller und Rezeptionsanalyse verteidige ich die These, dass Lutyens nicht als Kleinmeisterin einiger gelungener Miniaturen abzutun ist, wenn der prinzipiell maskulinistische Diskurs der Neuen Musik hinterfragt wird. Vor dem Hintergrund der besonderen Situation der Neuen Musik in Großbritannien während der ersten Hälfte des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts ist Lutyens‘ Musik vielmehr als entscheidende Frühentwicklung einer britischen Avantgarde anzusehen, die dem Land bisher stets abgesprochen wurde.
In this paper, I give an impression of the clashing forces – on one side Lutyens in her sharp-edged autobiography and in her cantata for soprano and chamber orchestra O saisons, ô châteaux! of 1946, on the other the English music establishment with its dominant critics and aesthetics. Lutyens’s music can be saved from being dismissed as uninteresting miniatures by yet another minor woman composer is the masculinist background of modernism as it is currently understood is exposed in the undercurrents of the cantata’s critical reception, as I demonstrate through textual analyses of pieces of critique. As a consequence, the composer emerges as a powerful example of an avant-garde modernist of the kind Britain has been said not to possess before the 1960s."
In my paper, I argue that these three alternatives labour under issues that make them as problematic as the original, ‘strict’ concept of modernism signified by atonality. I therefore suggest a rescue mission for modernism itself, based on a model from Alain Badiou’s Logics of Worlds (2009 [French original from 2006]). This model aims to make sense of history as a succession of periods dominated by defining Events which trigger three different types of response from everyone within the Event-affected group. Modernism as such an Event becomes more inclusive and can encompass a possibly much wider group of twentieth-century composers than the strict version, but without exploding the concept. However, the filling of this Event of modernism with essential characteristics is problematic and finally begs the question of the ontological status of modernism. If anything, I suggest the composers’ Choice between different harmonic (a)tonal systems as the essence of modernism.
Historiographically, this invention of British modernism in mostly tonal music is overdue. The ideological motivation behind it is the belief that the inclusion of British art music in the canons of modernism would finally guarantee it a position in the narratives of Western art music. However, the claim has its limits. With the inclusion of newly tuned signifiers stretching the concept of modernism, arguably to or even beyond its resilience, it loses its attraction.
In this paper, I elaborate the ideological challenge the authors under scrutiny are responding to before analysing the language of their claims, using the example of J. P. E. Harper-Scott’s Edward Elgar, Modernist and its central setting of signifiers, which depends entirely on links with famous literary narratives.
Instead of relying on these links, I propose to trial music for its compatibility with the overarching system of Alain Badiou’s theory of an Event of modernism and four types of response to it. Thus, certain existing and potential future signifiers of British modernism can be earthed as signs of responses to the original Event. Chained to this Event, responses can be intimately connected with the concept of modernism without distending it further, smoothing away strategic concerns of critics and defenders alike. A notion of a solid British musical modernism will emerge from this operation, justifying British twentieth-century art music’s claim to modernism.
In this paper, I give an impression of the clashing forces – on one side Lutyens in her sharp-edged autobiography and in her composition for soprano and chamber orchestra O saisons, O châteaux! of 1946, on the other the English music establishment with its dominant figures and aesthetics. Lutyens’s music can be saved from being dismissed as uninteresting miniatures by yet another minor woman composer with a theory, adapted from Alain Badiou, that accounts for contradictions and struggles between differing positions in the arts as well as in politics, science, or love. Viewed through the prism of the three consecutive conflicting responses to an Event that Badiou lays out in Logics of Worlds (2006), Lutyens’s music can be understood as one of the few ‘faithfully’ modernist British voices in art music before the 1960s.
An argument pro British modernism in mostly tonal music is overdue. The motivation behind it is the belief that the inclusion of British art music in the canons of modernism would finally guarantee it a secure position in the narratives of twentieth-century music. However, the claim has its limits. With the inclusion of newly tuned signifiers stretching the concept of modernism, arguably to or even beyond its resilience, it loses its attraction for these freshly integrated additions to the canon. Moreover, the integration cannot run smoothly in all cases as not all signifiers can be turned into reliable bearers of modernisation, free-floating and in lack of an overarching theory as they are.
In this paper, I briefly elaborate the challenge authors under scrutiny are responding to before examining a central, yet problematic signifier of this extended version of modernism. Within the growing body of attempts concerned with the construction of a canon of modernist British music (encompassing technical and aesthetic signifiers and designed to raise respectively one piece of music or one composer to the perceived heights of modernism), J. P. E. Harper-Scott’s defence of William Walton’s First Symphony as a pilgrimage in four movements from high modernism to a secluded northern English modernism is bold and problematic. Crucially, his reading emerges with the thesis of an English modernism surpassing a classical modernism and thereby poses questions about the nature of the concept and of the validity of the reading, which I access critically.
Readings such as this are a recipe for disaster for the concept of modernism itself. Instead of creating more lose signifiers, I therefore propose in conclusion to trial signifiers for their compatibility with the overarching system of Alain Badiou’s theory of an Event (in this case of modernism) and four types of response to it. Thus, certain existing and potential future signifiers of British modernism can be earthed as signs of responses to the original Event, as I explain by considering the example of two different signifiers. Chained to the original Event, these responses can be intimately connected with the concept of modernism without distending it further. A notion of a solid British musical modernism will emerge from this operation, justifying and cementing the significance of British twentieth-century art music’s claim to modernism.
Rhiannon Mathias (Bangor University)
Annika Forkert (RNCM)
Steph Power (Composer, Author and Editor, Wales Arts Review)
This conference seeks to engage with all kinds of collaborating couples, be it cases where traditional roles are intact, reversed, or changed otherwise.
Keynotes
Prof. Frances Spalding CBE, FRSL
Anthony Payne & Jane Manning OBE
Convenor and Programme Committee
Dr Annika Forkert (Convenor; Music, University of Bristol)
Dr Adrian Paterson (English, NUI Galway)
Dr Sarah Terry (English, Oglethorpe University)
Dr Tom Walker (English, Trinity College Dublin)