Text

After the Avantgarde.

To Appear
No book may have been more influential on Dutch thought about modern music than Dutch composer Ton de Leeuw’s book Music of the Twentieth Century - A Study of Its Elements and Structure. It has been translated in German, and recently also in English by Amsterdam University Press - almost thirty years after it’s last Dutch edition. Someone must have felt it still has a wider relevance to understanding music in our century. And the book is indeed remarkable for its approach, bearing the mark of that Dutch speciality, ethnomusicology, which was in many ways developed by Jaap Kunst, one of De Leeuw teachers (another was Messiaen, yet another Dutch composer Henk Badings), of whom he may have inherited his penchant for Indonesian music. Because of a long felt sympathy, it is with melancholy that I take leave of De Leeuw’s approach in this retro-review, written in 1996 - shortly before his death, I am sorry to say, but long before the translations, and long before Richard Taruskin (in the, or rather his New Oxford History of Western Music) made an end to the dominance of the avantgarde viewpoint. First published in the Dutch Jounal of Music Theory, 1/2 (1996). TO APPEAR