Forging creation: Avant -garde collaborations between the World Wars.
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Title
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Forging creation: Avant -garde collaborations between the World Wars.
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Identifier
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AAI3090091
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identifier
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3090091
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Creator
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Kozol, Lauren Eve.
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Contributor
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Includes supplementary digital materials | Adviser: Felicia Bonaparte
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Date
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2002
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Modern | Music | Dance | Literature, English | Literature, Romance | Theater
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Abstract
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The first half of the twentieth century was a time of unprecedented individuality in the arts, but among composers, poets, and painters the drive to originality was accompanied by an equally powerful and opposite impulse to collaborate. In the past, the goal of collaborators was to create a seamless merger among the arts, one that concealed the separate genesis of the component parts. Between the wars, however, even when the artists's visions converged, they carefully constructed an aesthetics, not of unity but of incongruity. In this study, I examine collaborations created between the world wars; these works grow out of, react against, and further innovative ideas already established by the Ballet Russes. While the Ballet Russes brought the arts together around the hub of dance, my primary collaborators used language as a central unifying medium. Following the change of focus from movement to words, I begin with a post-war ballet, Darius Milhaud, Blaise Cendrars and Fernand Leger's La Creation du Monde, and then turn to the literary-musical works, so clearly influenced by the dance spectacles of the time. The principal collaborative pairs I examine include Edith Sitwell and William Walton, Colette and Maurice Ravel, Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson, and W. H. Auden and Benjamin Britten. Although the relationship between text and score is primary in this study, I also discuss the work of set designers (Fernand Leger and Florine Stettheimer) and choreographers (Jean Borlin, George Balanchine, and Fredrick Ashton), who play significant roles in the conception and creation of these collaborations.;In each of the pieces, composer and poet reinvent the relationship between words and music. After World War I, these innovators believed they were at the beginning of a new era and at the forefront of a new genre; and thus, they chose to rewrite beginnings. I have structured this study around the reinvention of three moments of origin: the creation of the world, the self, and the nation. In their works, the collaborators continually look to urban America for inspiration; not only do they incorporate the sounds of jazz and blues, but they mimic the brash disjunctions of a city like New York with their multivalent approach. In the final works, America becomes a metaphor for the process of creating afresh and for that tricky balance of juxtaposition and synthesis, so fundamental to avant-garde, multi-media collaboration.*.;*This dissertation is compound (contains both a paper copy and a CD as part of the dissertation). The CD requires the following system requirements: Microsoft Office; Windows MediaPlayer or RealPlayer; Internet Browser.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
