Reyland, NW (2015) The Spaces of Dream: Lutoslawski's Modernist Heterotopias. Twentieth-Century Music, 12 (1). 37 -70. ISSN 1478-5730

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Abstract

This article offers a revisionist perspective on the contested notion of Witold Lutosławski's authenticity as a modernist composer. In doing so, it seeks to contribute to musicology's increasingly nuanced narration of the story of musical modernism. The case is argued partly by relating Lutosławski's output to broader traditions in twentieth-century modernism, including musical representations of alienation, loss, violence, and nostalgia. Crucially, however, it is also argued by interpreting the more conventionally gratifying aspects of his pieces as something other than a hedonistic cop out. Adapting ideas from Michel Foucault, such passages are deemed heterotopian in function and interpreted in a wider-ranging sociohistorical context including Poland's responses to modernism and to Soviet Cold War oppression. The article's other main objective, therefore, is to interpret as heterotopian (and thus alternatively authentic) the expressive, structural and symbolic functions of passages in Lutosławski's works, thereby introducing Foucault's little-known idea to a wider audience of music scholars – given the concept's potential to contribute to critical explorations of a much wider diversity of musical texts and phenomena. Analysis of Lutosławski's Les espaces du sommeil for baritone and orchestra (1975) interconnects these strands.

Item Type: Article
Additional Information: © The Author, Cambridge University Press
Uncontrolled Keywords: music
Subjects: M Music and Books on Music > M Music
Divisions: Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Humanities
Depositing User: Symplectic
Date Deposited: 23 Mar 2016 10:05
Last Modified: 08 May 2019 12:00
URI: https://eprints.keele.ac.uk/id/eprint/1596

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