Alexander Kolassa | (Rethinking) Modernism through Medievalism in British Twentieth-Century Music

Event details

Speaker: Alexander Kolassa (The Open University) 

Date: Thursday 10 February 2022

Time: 5.15 - 6.45pm.  

Venue: ECA Main Building, West Court

Abstract

This talk will cover some of my in-progress research and thinking toward a future monograph tentatively entitled Modernist Medievalism in British New Music. Here, I hope to interrogate and problematise narratives of modernism—typically progress-orientated and teleological—through the discursive lens of an interdisciplinary medievalism that emphasises not merely the use and influence of the distant past, but the past’s contradictory, animating, presence in innovative works of ‘contemporary’ music.

Such a perspective has much to offer the study of modernism more generally (and, indeed, globally). But for a British twentieth-century music that tends to sit uncomfortably in the prevalent modernist story anyway, its insights should have immediate impact. Uniting an aberrant pre-war musical conservatism with schools of erratic post-war radicals, a troubled fixation with inherited mythologies of medieval continuity can be seen to strike at the heart of British identity and its vexatious negotiations with its own pasts, presents, and futures.

More to the point, though, is medievalism’s potential also to disrupt strict binaries or hierarchies that so often relegate ‘serious’ music to some place outside history and (mass) culture. By drawing on some case studies in the form of music by composers (pre- and post-war) Kaikhosru Sorabji and Peter Maxwell Davies, I want to situate experiments in British musical modernism in contexts encompassing late nineteenth-century socialist reform, science fiction and fantasy and literature, medieval revivalism/pageantry, and cult horror cinema spectacle. Between the scholarly science of medievalist study and its Other (that is, pure historical invention), lies a modernist medievalism that creates a past more real than history—one with great relevance to diverse publics.

Biography

I am a Lecturer in Music at the Open University, where I have worked since 2018. Prior to that I taught at the University of Nottingham and was then involved in research projects at the University of Cambridge and University College London. I completed my PhD in music composition at Nottingham in 2015, and my music has been performed nationally: I have also scored for award-winning multimedia theatre projects. 

More recently, I have focussed on musicological work, developing research in and around subjects connected to modernism and medievalism, as well as on sound and music in film, television, and video game music. I have journal articles and book chapters, recently published and forthcoming, on topics ranging from Russian Cinema, the video game Bloodborne, intertextuality, and opera, with Cambridge University Press, Boydell & Brewer, Routledge, and Intellect. my co-edited collection Recomposing the Past: Representations of Early Music on Stage and Screen was published in 2018, and I am working on both a follow-up to that and a monograph provisionally entitled Modernist Medievalism in British New Music.