| In this study I examine collaborative European musical works that use narrative strategies, especially narrators, to reflect and comment upon contemporary cultural anxieties about technology after the First World War. In contrast to the general optimism toward technology held during the nineteenth century, the decades surrounding the war underwent a transformation of attitudes: optimism was replaced by disillusionment. Mass destruction effected by the widespread use of machine guns, airplanes, tear gas, and other weapons, could not but change European faith in the so-called progress of technological innovation. The repertoire that I examine---in music, dance, drama, and stage design---embodies feelings of both fascination and foreboding toward technology, expressed by collaborative groups of artists who had lived through the First World War. My argument centers on the premise that the shattered optimism about technology resulted in artists gathering to offset its alienating and inhumane potentialities by working together to produce art that represented related anxieties. Within this framework, I interpret the narrators used in collaborative works as a humane compound voice who speaks for the group.;Chapter 1, "Setting the Stage," introduces my topic, describes my New Historicist approach and adaptation of narrative theory, and briefly reviews relevant and recent scholarship. Chapter 2, "Pre-War and Wartime Precursors: Schoenberg, Satie, and Stravinsky," explores musical-theatrical traditions from which post-war works emerged, namely Erwartung (1909), Pierrot lunaire (1912), Parade (1917), and Histoire du soldat (1918). Chapter 3, "'Watch for the Little Bird': Narration and Technology in Les Maries de la Tour Eiffel," focuses on the Ballets Suedois ' 1921 collaboration with Jean Cocteau and five composers of Les Six and closes with a discussion of Walter Benjamin's views of mechanical reproduction. Chapter 4, "'Something Lies Beyond the Scene': Experimental Music by Arthur Bliss and William Walton," uncovers Bliss' post-war pieces as a model for Walton's Facade (1922--28). Chapter 5, "Phone-Crossed Lovers: Dehumanizing Technology Revisited in Poulenc's La Voix humaine," studies the collaboration of Poulenc, Cocteau, and Denise Duval on Poulenc's final opera in 1958--9. Finally, my conclusion synthesizes previous chapters and looks forward to the 1970s and America, by discussing John Cage's Address (1977). |
