Music and the Modern Condition : Investigating the Boundaries

Two crucial moments in the formation and disintegration of musical modernity and the musical canon occurred at the turn of the seventeenth and the first half of the twentieth century. Dr Ljubica Ilic provides a fresh and close look at these moments, exploring the ways musical compositions shift to and away from ideological structures identified with modernity. The key word for modernity is conflict precipitated by very specific socio-economic and cultural changes - the conflict of the individual with previous beliefs, with contexts, and even within the self, and Ilic considers how this kind of conflicted selfhood becomes realised in music. By using the metaphor of space the book explores how the existence of a separate self as a primary feature of Western modernity becomes negotiated through awareness of the subject's own independence and individuality; innerness as something entirely separate from its surroundings - a space of its own, and the collective space of social interaction. Ilic contends that all these issues are reflected in the ways musical pieces begin, develop, and end. A key concept of the book concerns musical compositions that remain without proper conclusions, denying the possibility of final catharsis by means of semantic dissonance or rhetorical indeterminacy. The work is, in this case, still bounded and well-defined, but fractured by the incapability or refusal to satisfactorily conclude: the implicit cut forced upon it changes the expected musical flow or - speaking in spatial terms - it influences the musical form, thus communicating certain meanings in relation to the subjectivity it expresses. More specifically, if the wholesome (musical) work is a manifestation of wholesome subjectivity, the works Ilic explores deny it, reflecting conflict as the basic modern condition.