ABSTRACT Title of Document: BRITISH MODERNIST ... - DRUM

more classical context, as by Beethoven. Single movements that include both scherzo
and fugue are most common in the latter half of the twentieth century, coinciding
with a postmodern move to revisit traditional musical forms. “Scherzo and Fugue” in
particular thus speaks directly to a postmodernist impulse to re-purpose, hybridize,
and juxtapose traditional forms.
In general, the section sub-titles are, metaphorically, statements about each
section’s genre. Collectively, they indicate not only a parallel musical form, but
specifically the form of a concert-piece that collects into a single work multiple
sections with independent styles and themes. Traditionally, these movements would
be connected by a key, a tonal center which grounds the movements and describes
their relationship to each other. The further we get from late eighteenth-century
classicism, however, the more the movement’s fixed relationship to a key is broken;
simultaneously, later works are more likely to connect the movements thematically.
The musical form implies a connection between the novel’s unstable form and the
unstable forms of classical music, both of which seek to bind together a large amount
of often disparate material into a unitary whole. In any such work, the question of the
middle is essential: beginnings and endings can supply thematic material, and they
can supply direction (from the former or towards the later) in which the thematic
material is developed, but as single points, they cannot hold a long work together.
Middles define the relationship between beginning and end—they define how the
disparate materials of a novel are bound together, for they are themselves the binding.
The modernist middles I have been exploring bind explicitly disparate materials—
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