J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

and Maxwell Davies—other modernist composers Clarke instances in this connection)
the issue of post modernism is partly one of period, analogous to the question of how
far the later works of Beethoven can be said to participate in musical Romanticism.
When, however, Clarke defines post-modernism as ‘a retraction from some of
modernism’s previous extremes amounting to a measured assimilation of previously
outlawed codes and channels of meaning from the past,’ 59 it does suggest a wider
application. If ‘outlawed’ is a rather strong way of describing the galant attitude to
counterpoint (although, on reflection, the pronouncements of J. J. Rousseau are
scarcely less doctrinaire than those of the high priests of modernism such as Boulez or
Adorno), this reversal or deflection of apparently inexorable historical processes is an
important aspect of Beethoven’s later style.
It is not just a question of Beethoven’s preoccupation with fugue. Adorno has
pointed out the way in which many different kinds of musical conventions lie exposed
on the surface of the music instead of being fully digested by its subjective
expressivity: ‘Everywhere ... one finds formulas and phrases of convention scattered
about. The works are full of decorative trill sequences, cadences, and fiorituras. Often
convention appears in a form that is bald, undisguised, untransformed: the first theme
of the Sonata op.110 has an unabashedly primitive accompaniment in sixteenths that
would scarcely have been tolerated in the middle style; the last of the Bagatelles
contains introductory and concluding measures that resemble the distracted prelude to
an operatic aria—and all of this mixed in among some of the flintiest strata of the
polyphonic landscape, the most restrained stirrings of solitary lyricism.’ 60 The self-
regard of these works, the way in which Beethoven refuses to mediate between
stylistic discontinuities, the fact that they step away from the grand narrative of
59 Clark, ‘Tippett’, 80.
60 ‘Late style in Beethoven’, Raritan 13/1 (Summer 1993), 102-7, at
http://helicon.vuw.ac.nz:4879/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f5h&AN=9312271222&site=ehost-live
(accessed 26 October 06).
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