Introduction: Traversing Time, Place, and Space

Weber, Ryan R.

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-01860-3_1

Ryan R. Weber⁴

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature ((PASTMULI))

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Abstract

The case of Edvard Grieg is one that attests to the challenges many composers faced at the end of the long nineteenth century. Living in the shadow of Wagner and faced with increasing pressure at home to advocate only for the national domain, literature became a useful catalyst for producing a broader appeal and contesting hegemonic forces of exclusion sustained by artists and audiences alike. Therefore, this introductory section takes a revolving look at the careers of Grieg, MacDowell, Grainger, and the authors who influenced their cosmopolitan aesthetic. Additionally, this chapter lays the foundation for understanding how Nordic themes became a common nexus for shaping a transatlantic dialogue between artists who viewed the interaction of nationalism and cosmopolitanism not merely as a problem to be solved but also as a creative tension to be exploited.

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Notes

1.
“A Cosmopolitan Credo,” in Edvard Grieg: Diaries, Articles, Speeches, ed. Finn Benestad and trans. William H. Halverson (Columbus: Peer Gynt Press, 2001), 96–97.
2.
Ibid., 216.
3.
Ibid., 384.
4.
Illit Grøndahl and Ola Raknes, Chapters in Norwegian Literature (Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, 1923), 173.
5.
Quoted in Ibid., 179.
6.
Edvard Grieg: Letters to Colleagues and Friends, ed. Finn Benestad and trans. William H. Halverson (Columbus: Peer Gynt Press, 2000), 120–21.
7.
Ibid., 134. Emphasis added.
8.
Ibid., 137.
9.
Ibid., 141.
10.
Ibid., 95. I revisit this passage in Chap. 3.
11.
Hamlin Garland, Roadside Meetings (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1930), 323.
12.
Ibid., 324–25.
13.
Lawrence Gilman, MacDowell: A Study (New York: John Lane, 1909), 50.
14.
Ibid., 14.
15.
E. Douglas Bomberger, MacDowell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 194.
16.
Ibid., 51.
17.
Edward MacDowell: A Study, 40.
18.
Ibid., 101–2.
19.
Letters to Colleagues and Friends, 484. Emphasis added.
20.
Here I invoke Homi K. Bhabha’s concept discussed in The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994), 312–19.
21.
Roadside Meetings, 322–23.
22.
Letters to Colleagues and Friends, 263. As I will argue, this mutual understanding would be short lived on Grainger’s part, though the influence of Grieg—both direct and indirect—would last throughout the ensuing decades of his career.
23.
Grainger on Music, 136.
24.
Ibid., 326.
25.
Ibid., 343–44.
26.
The All-Round Man: Selected Letters of Percy Grainger 1914–1961, eds. Malcolm Gillies and David Pear (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 206–7.
27.
Ibid., 208.
28.
Bob van der Linden, Music and Empire in Britain and India: Identity, Internationalism, and Cross-Cultural Communication (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 14. Herein he cites Grace Brockington, “Introduction: Internationalism and the Arts,” in Internationalism and the Arts in Britain and Europe at the Fin de Siècle, ed. Grace Brockington (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), 22.
29.
Ibid., 3.
30.
(Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2012), 3.
31.
Cyrus R. K. Patell, Cosmopolitanism and the Literary Imagination (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 142.
32.
See, for instance, “Beatless-Notation Machine” in Grainger on Music, 29–34. This manuscript dates from 1902 to 1903 and outlines some of Grainger’s earliest ideas regarding the emancipation of rhythms and pitch from notational constraints—a preoccupation that he would explore in earnest throughout his career.
33.
“Grieg: Nationalist and Cosmopolitan,” in Grainger on Music, 329–30.
34.
See, for instance, Mimi Sheller, “Cosmopolitanism and Mobilities,” in The Ashgate Research Companion to Cosmopolitanism, ed. Maria Rovisco and Magdalena Nowicka (Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), 349–365.
35.
Cosmopolitanism and the Literary Imagination, 23.
36.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991), 9–36.
37.
Ulrich Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), 76.
38.
Ibid., 77.
39.
Although I focus on Grieg’s response to the language debate in the following chapter, see Ståle Kleiberg’s article for a related case study: “Following Grieg: David Monrad Johansen’s Musical Style in the Early Twenties, and His Concept of a National Music,” in Musical Constructions of Nationalism: Essays on the History and Ideology of European Musical Culture, 1800–1945, ed. Harry White and Michael Murphy (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001), 142–162.
40.
Daniel S. Malachuk, “Nationalist Cosmopolitics in the Nineteenth Century,” in Cosmopolitics and the Emergence of a Future, eds. Diane Morgan and Gary Banham (New York: Palgrave Macmillan: 2007), 142.
41.
Elisabeth Oxfeldt, Nordic Orientalism: Paris and the Cosmopolitan Imagination, 1800–1900 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2005), 20.
42.
Robert J. Holton, Cosmopolitanisms: New Thinking and New Directions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 15.
43.
See David Inglis, “Alternative Histories of Cosmopolitanism: Reconfiguring Classical Legacies” in Routledge Handbook of Cosmopolitan Studies, ed. Gerard Delanty (New York: Routledge, 2012), 11–24.
44.
Cosmopolitics, 2.
45.
Ibid., 9.
46.
Sarah Collins and Dana Gooley, “Music and the New Cosmopolitanism: Problems and Possibilities,” The Musical Quarterly 99 (2017): 160.
47.
Cosmopolitan Vision, 76.
48.
Ibid., 76–77.
49.
Reprinted in Hamlin Garland, Prairie Radical, ed. Donald Pizer (Urbana: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 123–24.
50.
Arne Garborg, Weary Men, trans. Sverre Lyngstad (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1999), 37.
51.
Letters to Colleagues and Friends, 136–37.
52.
(Burlington: Ashgate, 2011), 1. See also Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice, eds. Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
53.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 17.
54.
Cosmopolitan Vision, 80.
55.
Cosmopolitanisms, 208–11.
56.
Ibid., 210.
57.
Formative Fictions: Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Bildungsroman (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 31.
58.
Cosmopolitanism and Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), 117.
59.
Ibid., 13. Emphasis added.
60.
Ibid., 52–54.
61.
Ibid., 6.
62.
See Daniel Grimley’s discussion in Grieg: Music, Landscape and Norwegian Identity (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer), 109–146.
63.
“Percy Grainger and American Nordicism” in Western Music and Race, ed. Julie Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 124.

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Misericordia University, Dallas, PA, USA
Ryan R. Weber

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Weber, R.R. (2018). Introduction: Traversing Time, Place, and Space. In: Cosmopolitanism and Transatlantic Circles in Music and Literature. Palgrave Studies in Music and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01860-3_1

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01860-3_1
Published: 27 October 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
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Online ISBN: 978-3-030-01860-3
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