Preface

This book was written chiefly with composers present and future in mind, although the material it covers can be of benefit to anyone with a strong interest in music and the arts, aesthetics, criticism, cultural history, and creativity. The ability to read music and analyze musical scores is necessary to understand certain examples and portions of the text, but most of the contents can be grasped readily without any special expertise.

Orpheus in the Twenty-First Century: Historicism and the Art Music Renascence is offered cost-free to the public as a key component of the ongoing educational outreach mission of New Music Classics, a publisher of new art music in traditional and contemporary styles headquartered in Gainesville, Florida. This book has been archived on the Web to ensure the widest possible international dissemination of the ideas it contains for the benefit of the greatest number of people, regardless of their socioeconomic status.

It is a deplorable fact that most human beings living in the world today—including untold hundreds of thousands of composers, musicians, artists, and scholars—are simply unable to afford the purchase price of expensive hard-bound books. Traditional print publication of a volume such as this, with its many full-color visuals and musical examples, would be exceedingly costly, effectively limiting readership to the affluent few or to those with access to major university or public libraries. It also would preclude the possibility of quick, inexpensive editorial refinements and updates.

The instantaneous global reach and affordable access offered by the Web have done much to remedy these difficulties, and to decrease dependency on manufactured paper products. Because this volume is available in both "html" and "pdf" formats (the latter to be published in 2004), readers will have the option to explore its contents online or to print and peruse portions of the text away from a computer. It is recommended that online users keep a separate window open to display the notes, since a number of these, in addition to amplifying the contents of the text, provide useful links to relevant material elsewhere on the Web.

Orpheus in the Twenty-First Century is organized into five parts. Part One examines the meaning of historicism—"an aesthetic orientation conducive to the creation of new works that are in some significant way informed by the past"—for the twenty-first century. Historicism is compared and contrasted with modernism and postmodernism and placed in a broad historical and cultural context.

Part Two traces the development of antihistoricist criticism and presents rebuttals to some of the most common arguments raised in opposition to historicist musical composition. It is especially intended as a resource for composers creating new music in traditional forms and styles who are vulnerable to attack by critics for refusing to conform to modernist or postmodernist aesthetic expectations.

Part Three introduces several basic categories of historicist art: adaptive, derivative, pure, and eclectic, and provides an exhaustive annotated list of outstanding representative examples for each type in architecture, the visual arts, and literature from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.

Part Four examines why musical historicism, in comparison to the other arts, has necessarily taken a parallel but different course for the past several centuries. Twelve musical examples by Bach, Beethoven, Blackwood, Brahms, Hovhaness, Mozart, Prokofiev, Spohr, and Stravinsky, each illustrative of at least one of the four previously identified types of historicism, are discussed in some detail.

Part Five reviews and critiques recent creativity research by Dr. Howard Gardner of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and concludes with a chapter on the significance of musical historicism in the new millennium.

Orpheus in the Twenty-First Century is the first book of its kind for composers and readers broadly interested in the subject of musical historicism. It is hoped that it will bring artists working in all media to a deeper awareness of the importance of the past as a creative resource, and that it will help to dispel residual misapprehensions that continue to distort the true nature and significance of originality.

I am deeply grateful to my mother, Mrs. Julia Dillon Ford, for the funding and support necessary to pursue the research and complete the writing and publication of this project.