Proof through the Night: Music and the Great War (Includes CD) [Hardcover]

Glenn Watkins (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0520231589 | ISBN-13: 978-0520231580 | Publication Date: December 2, 2002 | Edition: 1

Carols floating across no-man's-land on Christmas Eve 1914; solemn choruses, marches, and popular songs responding to the call of propaganda ministries and war charities; opera, keyboard suites, ragtime, and concertos for the left hand--all provided testimony to the unique power of music to chronicle the Great War and to memorialize its battles and fallen heroes in the first post-Armistice decade. In this striking book, Glenn Watkins investigates these variable roles of music primarily from the angle of the Entente nations' perceived threat of German hegemony in matters of intellectual and artistic accomplishment--a principal concern not only for Europe but also for the United States, whose late entrance into the fray prompted a renewed interest in defining America as an emergent world power as well as a fledgling musical culture. He shows that each nation gave "proof through the night"--ringing evidence during the dark hours of the war--not only of its nationalist resolve in the singing of national airs but also of its power to recall home and hearth on distant battlefields and to reflect upon loss long after the guns had been silenced.
Watkins's eloquent narrative argues that twentieth-century Modernism was not launched full force with the advent of the Great War but rather was challenged by a new set of alternatives to the prewar avant-garde. His central focus on music as a cultural marker during the First World War of necessity exposes its relationship to the other arts, national institutions, and international politics. From wartime scores by Debussy and Stravinsky to telling retrospective works by Berg, Ravel, and Britten; from "La Marseillaise" to "The Star-Spangled Banner," from "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" to "Over There," music reflected society's profoundest doubts and aspirations. By turns it challenged or supported the legitimacy of war, chronicled misgivings in miniature and grandiose formats alike, and inevitably expressed its sorrow at the final price exacted by the Great War. Proof through the Night concludes with a consideration of the post-Armistice period when, on the classical music front, memory and distance forged a musical response that was frequently more powerful than in wartime.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"a brilliant history of musical ideas publicly and privately formulated through the first two decades of the 20th century . . . the discipline of musicology is enormously enriched by this wonderful synthesis of social history, perceptive musical analysis and cultural critique."--"Irish Times

From the Inside Flap

"[T]he contribution Watkins has made is so varied and robust that any social or cultural historian of the Great War simply cannot afford to do without it. Of how many of our colleagues' work can we say the same?"--Jay Winter, Yale University

"The cover of Glenn Watkins' book Proof through the Night: Music and the Great War shows an astonishing Stravinsky manuscript of an innocent march ambushed by the composer's own Futurist-inspired paintings of exploding cannons - a perfect symbol for the book's ground-breaking, earthshaking account of the varied and surprising roles that music played during the First World War. The first musician ever to speak to the international conference of World War I scholars at the Historial de la Grande Guerre in Péronne, France, Glenn Watkins once again leads the way in interdisciplinary cultural studies, weaving together the music, art, and socio-political histories of the early 20th century into a truly meaningful picture of the human condition in a time of international crisis. Glenn Watkins' lectures on Music and the Great War, given at New York's Lincoln Center in preparation for this volume, gave fair warning of an imminent attack on the idea of history as battle maneuvers without considering vital questions of culture. Only a lifetime of intellectual passion and rigorous, relentless scholarship could produce such a book."--Bruce Adolphe, composer and lecturer, The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center

"Music and History intersect magnificently in the scholarship of Glenn Watkins. Politics, nationalism, combat, technology, art, literature and, above all, the sounds - beautiful and horrible - that charged wartime life and accompanied mass death. All these, and more, suffuse the vast symphony of war that Professor Watkins presents so clearly and analyzes so convincingly. Proof Through the Night is a master's work of interdisciplinary, yet disciplined, writing about music."--David B. Dennis, author of Beethoven in German Politics, 1870-1989

"Glenn Watkins's new book is a synthesis of biographical, music-analytical, literary, political, and historical information about European and American music between 1914 and 1918. He combines extremely diverse materials into a single story, by turns fascinating, entertaining, and sad . The book will be a rich source of information and judgments about music and culture in general at a crucial moment of modern history."--John Spitzer, Peabody Conservatory, Johns Hopkins University

"[Watkins's] narrative is vivid and enthralling, as it could hardly fail to be, and I suspect that even seasoned cultural historians specialising in this period will learn new things from Watkins's supremely well-managed synthesis. His background research and reading have reached into the furthest corners: very little of any possible relevance is missed."--Arnold Whittall

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 614 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (December 2, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520231589
• ISBN-13: 978-0520231580
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.2 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,083,312 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Glenn E. Watkins (born May 30, 1927), is the "Earl V. Moore Professor Emeritus of Music History and Musicology" at the University of Michigan and a specialist in the study of Renaissance and 20th-century music.

Contents

1 Biography
2 Awards
3 Work
4 Books
5 External Links


Biography

Born in McPherson, Kansas, Watkins served in the United States Army from 1944-46. During this period he was enrolled in the ASTP engineering program at Oklahoma University, the Japanese language programs at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Minnesota, and was later stationed in Tokyo with the "Allied Translator and Interpreter Section" of MacArthur's General Headquarters. Immediately after the war in 1947 he briefly attended North Texas State University where his first organ teacher, Helen Hewitt, directed him to the field of musicology.

He received his B.A. (1948) and M.Mus (1949) from the University of Michigan; and Ph.D. from the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester, in 1953. Watkins was the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship at London and Oxford, 1953-54. He studied organ with Jean Langlais in Paris in 1956 and analysis and organ at Fontainebleau with Nadia Boulanger, who commissioned him to play the Poulenc Organ Concerto for the composer. His teaching career began at Southern Illinois University from 1954-58, and continued at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1958-63. In 1963 he moved to the University of Michigan, where he taught until retiring in 1996.

Awards

In addition to the Fulbright Award, Watkins has received an American Council of Learned Societies Grant, and Senior Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities. He has published numerous articles, reviews and editions, and is co-editor of the complete works of Gesualdo. His critical study of that composer, Gesualdo: The Man and His Music (1973), which carries a Preface by Igor Stravinsky, was a 1974 National Book Award nominee. It was translated into Hungarian in 1980 and into German in 2000, and a second revised English edition was published in 1990. In 2005 he was awarded the Premio Internazionale Carlo Gesualdo and was elected as an Honorary Member of the American Musicological Society.

Work

Watkins's editions of the works of Sigismondo d'India and Carlo Gesualdo have been recorded by numerous international groups, including the Deller Consort, the Consort of Musicke, the Tallis Scholars, La Venexiana, The Kassiopeia Quintet, and Les Arts Florissants. His text Soundings (1988) offers a synthetic overview of music in the 20th century, and his book Pyramids at the Louvre (1994) argues the idea of collage as a foundation for musical Modernism and a catalyst for the rise of Postmodernism. Watkins's most recent book, Proof Through the Night: Music and the Great War (2003), investigates the variable roles of music during World War I primarily from the angle of the Entente nations' perceived threat of German hegemony. His current project, The Gesualdo Hex (2010) traces not only the recognition accorded to a Renaissance prince from his own time to the early twenty-first century but places it within the context of ongoing historiographic debates and controversies.

Watkins has lectured widely in America for universities, orchestras and art organizations, and his interest in both late Renaissance and 20th-century studies is reflected in numerous invited papers for international conferences as well as in projects for Columbia, Nonesuch, Pye, L'Oiseau Lyre, Harmonia Mundi, Glossa, and Deutsche Grammophon records and for BBC, German, and Italian television.

Books

Gesualdo: The Man and His Music. 2nd edition. Oxford, 1991. ISBN 0-19-816197-2 National Book Award Nominee, 1974
Soundings: Music in the Twentieth Century, 1988, 1995. ISBN 0-028-73290-1
Pyramids at the Louvre. Music, Culture, and Collage from Stravinsky to the Postmodernists, 1994. ISBN 0-674-74083-9
Proof through the Night: Music and the Great War, 2002. ISBN 0-520-23158-9
The Gesualdo Hex, 2010. ISBN: 978-0393071023

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Six Star (******) Triumph of Cultural History, March 16, 2004

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Craig Matteson (Saline, MI) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Proof through the Night: Music and the Great War (Includes CD) (Hardcover)

There was a period a few years ago when bestseller lists contained more than an occasional book on the First World War. For example, the John Keegan book was a concise military history recounting the politics and battlefield actions of the war. Niall Ferguson's "The Pity of War" set out to explain WWI and offers an iconoclastic view that attempts to show how it was not inevitable. What these and the others really do lack is a sense of the cultures that were torn apart, reshaped and died.

As I was reading "Proof Through The Night" I was shocked how vividly Professor Watkins evokes the cultural issues of the times leading up to the War, the convulsions during the War, and the cultural memory and recounting of these events that echo even today. Most of us know little of that time and we don't understand the roots of present issues. We see the surfaces and strange interactions. We see artifacts from the past, but do not understand their context and react all too anachronistically to them. While we are entitled to reinterpret the past and use what we will and how we wish to use it, there is so much to be gained by at least making an attempt to come to terms with what those who lived meant to say to each other and to us by inheritance. We cheat ourselves of our patrimony by only shallowly understanding the culture of a time.

Professor Watkins surveys cultural issues that were active in Great Britain, France, Italy, Germany - Austria, and the U. S. neighboring to the war years. He does this by demonstrating what was happening in painting, sculpture, drama, popular culture, and above all, music. He takes us deep inside a few pieces such as Ravel's "Tombeau de Couperin"(particularly the Toccata), certain paintings of Otto Dix and the music of Hindemith to the work of Matthias Gruenewald, and Britten's "War Requiem" to the resolution and memory of the Great War even in 1961.

There is so much in this wonderful book that I cannot even begin to list more than a few incidental points. I really do want you to get a copy and immerse yourself in it. Professor Watkins has provided us with so much that I found I had to take my time and read other things to get more background to get full enjoyment from this treasure.

There is a CD that contains 17 tracks of some of the most important pieces he refers to in the book. They are chosen well and you will never hear them the same after reading the deep context this book provides. There are also many wonderful pictures and illustrations in the book. The only wish I have is that at least some of them could have been in color. But you know how it is with "academic" books.

There are also many pages of footnotes (endnotes). Nowadays most footnotes are simply citations of references. Not here. There is a great deal of valuable and enlightening information on these pages and I encourage you to read them.

This book should not be ignored. I believe reading about the culture and the wrenching changes during and after the War will actually tell you more about your life today and its connection to that time than a shelf full of books on battlefield struggles, troop movements, and weapons development. It isn't the usual way to read about War, but it is terrific.

Everyone - at least everyone who cares about WWI- should read this book.