Francesco Giacomantonio, Il discorso sociologico della tarda modernità. Individui, identità e democrazia [The sociological discourse of late modernity. Individuals, identity and democracy

Saving Abstraction takes up the conflicted history of Morton Feldman’s most important collaboration—his work with Dominique and John de Menil on music for the Rothko Chapel in Houston. These collaborators struggled over fundamental questions about the emotional efficacy of artistic practice and its potential translation into religious feeling. At the center of this study is the question of ecumenism—that is, in what terms can religious encounters be staged for fruitful dialog to take place? And how might abstraction (both visual and musical) be useful to achieving it? This was a dilemma for Feldman, whose music sought to produce sublime “abstract experience,” as well as for the de Menils, who envisioned the Rothko Chapel as a space for spiritual intervention into late modernity. Saving Abstraction develops two central concepts: “abstract ecumenism” and “agonistic universalism.” The former characterizes a broad spiritual orientation within postwar musical modernism and experimentalism that aspired to altered states of ego-loss. This emerged as a renewed religious sensibility in late modernist experimentalism. The latter concept describes the particular religious form that Feldman’s music achieves within Rothko Chapel—an ascetic mode of existence that endures hopefully the aporia of postwar modernization’s destructiveness and modernism’s failure to effectively counter it.

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Developing a Cultural Theory of Music Making and Leisure

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190244705.013.2 ◽

2017 ◽

Author(s):

Karl Spracklen

Keyword(s):

Leisure Time ◽

Cultural Theory ◽

Late Modernity ◽

Music Making ◽

Meaning And Purpose ◽

Cultural Forms

People listen to music in their leisure time, in leisure spaces, as a supposedly free act of agency. Yet social and cultural theorists show that leisure choices and spaces are constrained by hegemonic power, and that cultural forms such as music are products of commodification. This chapter explores these key claims for the use of music and the consumption of music in leisure spaces. It uses the work of Baudrillard on simulacra to explore the potential meaning and purpose of music in the lives of makers, listeners and fans—as a key device in constructing alternative hyperrealities to the capitalized reality of late modernity.

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