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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Christopher Tarrant
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The tension between Carl Nielsen’s status as a modernist and his engagement with sym- phonic form has been a point of sustained scholarly interest in recent years. His Sinfo- nia semplice (1925) has posed some of the most searching questions for musicologists, formal as well as hermeneutic. Although the work’s title alludes to its straightforwardly conventional layout in four movements and its sometimes childlike thematic materials, the events that occur in the course of the symphony, formal, tonal, and narrative, are far from simple. This article offers a reading of the Sinfonia semplice which draws on Adorno’s categories of ‘breakthrough’ and ‘collapse’, Sonata Theory, and Northrop Frye’s theory of narrative. The denial of straightforwardly heroic or tragic narrative trajectories, I argue, offers further insight into the contribution to interwar modernism that can be found in late Nielsen.
Author(s): Tarrant C
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Danish Yearbook of Musicology
Year: 2017
Volume: 41
Pages: 32–49
Online publication date: 01/07/2017
Acceptance date: 01/05/2017
ISSN (print): 1604-9896
ISSN (electronic): 2245-4969
Publisher: Dansk Selskab for Musikforskning, Danish Musicological Society
URL: http://www.dym.dk/dym_pdf_files/volume_41/dym41_1_02.pdf
Notes: Volume ISBN 9788788328325
