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Titre L'esthétique mécaniste dans la musique américaine
Auteur Antoine Cazé
Mir@bel Revue Revue française d'études américaines
Numéro no 117, 3ème trimestre 2008 Les musiques savantes américaines : questions d'esthétique
Page 65-84
Résumé anglais This article presents and analyzes the piano music of four twentieth-century American composers — George Antheil, Henry Cowell, George Crumb, and Conlon Nancarrow — who all share an interest in mechanisms and mechanistic conceptions of art. Using as a theoretical framework the concept of the “technological sublime” first proposed by Leo Marx, we intend to show that the radical calling into question of the limit separating the human from the machine in the music of these composers is not the product of an eccentric avant-garde but, on the contrary, is at the center of an American artistic ethos characterized by the problematic relation between the organic and the mechanic. We suggest that what we call an “aesthetic tension” at the heart of such piano music raises issues of performance that are crucial to understanding how the aesthetic and pragmatic dimensions of art are interrelated.
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