Steer, Roslyn
(2022)
Beyond Boundaries: The Aesthetics of the Scream in the Music of the
Second Viennese School.
PhD thesis, National University of Ireland Maynooth.
Abstract
This study investigates the complex relationship between the scream and music in
the work of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. Taking Kundry’s
scream in Wagner’s Parsifal (1882) as a key point of departure, this project draws on
theories of psychoanalysis and hysteria which emerged in the late-nineteenth and
early-twentieth centuries and complements them with more recent critical theory to
offer an expanded understanding of both the scream itself and its affective realisation
in the music of the Second Viennese School.
As well as the more explicit or literal manifestations of the scream found, for
example in Schoenberg’s Erwartung (1909) and Berg’s Lulu (1934), works that are
generally categorised as part of a broader movement of expressionism, this project
embraces a more figurative understanding of the scream as a manifestation of the
modernist desire to transcend reason, order, and the gloss of civilization through
music. That is, the project asks how testing the limits and extremes of musical
expression (a recurring feature of the vocal and instrumental music of these
composers) can be productively related to the affective extreme of the scream as an
utterance beyond expressive and communicative norms.
I argue that the transformative nature of the New Viennese aesthetics of the
scream was key to the lasting resonance of this aesthetics throughout
twentieth–century music and culture and that this potential to enact a transcendence
or synthesis of seemingly opposing or mutually exclusive states (the conscious and
the unconscious, the body and the soul, noise and silence, male and female) places
the scream at the heart of key questions occupying artists in the cultural foment of
fin-de-siècle Vienna. By identifying the scream as a significant, yet under-researched
feature of the aesthetics of the Second Viennese School and situating it within the
broader cultural climate of expressionism, the project sheds light on practices and
ideas with important implications for modernist culture.
| Item Type: |
Thesis
(PhD)
|
| Keywords: |
Beyond Boundaries; Aesthetics of the Scream; Music of the
Second Viennese School; |
| Academic Unit: |
Faculty of Arts & Humanities > Music |
| Item ID: |
16512 |
| Depositing User: |
IR eTheses
|
| Date Deposited: |
13 Sep 2022 15:52 |
| URI: |
|
| Use Licence: |
This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available
here |
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