Music’s Nordic Breakthrough: Aesthetics, Modernity, and Cultural Exchange, 1890-1930

Following the end of the Cold War, a former East-West binary model of European identity has been replaced with a series of more complex and variegated patterns. Northern Europe is one such territory, and the idea of the ‘North’ more generally has come in for increased critical scrutiny. This volume reappraises the work of Sibelius, Nielsen and their contemporaries, but it also reassesses the wider implications of the ‘Nordic Breakthrough’ for fields such as the visual arts, theatre, literature and architecture.

Music’s Nordic Breakthrough adopts an interdisciplinary methodology and expands the geographical reach of the ‘Nordic zone’ to include interactions with Russia, the Baltic states and Great Britain; a new understanding of the region emerges as an arena of artistic affinity, cutural exchange and shared preoccupations. At the same time, the book constitutes an attempt to re-map and recentre early twentieth-century European modernism through a distinctively Nordic lens. The thematic approach on display reveals the complex interaction of networks, individuals, ideologies and the transfer of ideas. The book will beof interest to musicologists working in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century repertoires, as well as those more broadly interested in modernism in music and its neighbouring arts. The book also offers important reading forart historians, theatre scholars and literary critics.

CONTRIBUTORS: Charlotte Ashby, Leah Broad, Daniel M. Grimley, Louise Hardiman, Kevin Karnes, Pirjo Lyytikainen, Tomi Makela, Julia Mannherz, Arnulf Christian Mattes, Philip Ross Bullock, Kirsten Rutschmann, and Mikkel Zangenberg.