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Breakthrough and Collapse in Carl Nielsen's Sinfonia semplice

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posted on 2023-08-30, 14:47 authored by Christopher Tarrant
The tension between Carl Nielsen’s status as a modernist and his engagement with symphonic form has been a point of sustained scholarly interest in recent years. His Sinfonia 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.

History

Refereed

  • Yes

Volume

41

Issue number

1

Page range

32-49

Publication title

Danish Yearbook of Musicology

ISSN

2245-4969

Publisher

Aarhus University Press

File version

  • Accepted version

Language

  • eng

Legacy posted date

2017-07-28

Legacy creation date

2017-07-11

Legacy Faculty/School/Department

ARCHIVED Faculty of Arts, Law & Social Sciences (until September 2018)

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