Reinscribing modernism: Selected episodes in Venezuelan composition after 1950.

摘要

This dissertation redresses the marginalization of modernist aesthetics in the historiography of Venezuelan music after 1950. It challenges the conventional narrative perpetuated in the music-historical discourse surrounding contemporary Venezuelan composition, which portrays modernism as playing a supporting role in an overarching transition from a relatively homogenous nationalist practice to a postmodernist present. Instead, it argues for the continuing relevance of expressive modes including atonal, serial, and postserial languages from the mid-twentieth century to this day. It does so in two stages, first examining particular instances of approaches to these languages in composition prior to 1980, and then focusing on the language and legacy of one of the most prominent Venezuelan composers working today in a high-modernist vein, Diogenes Rivas (b. 1942). The presence of modernism in Venezuelan composition before 1980 is addressed in two parallel contexts. It is first examined in works of composers traditionally associated with the "nationalist" camp (Inocente Carreno, Angel Sauce, Modesta Bor, Antonio Estevez, and Isabel Aretz) who, flouting the conventions of the so-called Nationalist School, experimented with atonalism, dodecaphonism, serialism, and alternative notational practices to varying extents. It is then located in works by composers who fully embraced high-modernist idioms from the 1950s to the 1970s, including Alejandro Planchart, Rhazes Hernandez Lopez , and Alfredo del Monaco. The work of Rivas, used to illustrate modernist practice in Venezuela after 1980, is contextualized within the framework of musical structuralism, a term that I use in an augmented version of Inge Kovacs' definition. The development of his compositional language is traced through his piano works, whose construction is described in detail in order to highlight structuralist aspects in the compositional process, and its kinship with the compositional philosophy of figures including Pierre Boulez, Iannis Xenakis, and Francisco Guerrero. A final chapter assesses affinities between the aesthetic outlook of Rivas and the movement of geometric abstractionism that took root in the Venezuelan visual arts in the mid-twentieth century, and addresses the legacy of Festival Atempo, the longest-running Venezuelan yearly contemporary-music festival, which under Rivas' stewardship has facilitated access to high-modernist music for generations of Venezuelan listeners and composers.