Avant-Garde, Modernism, Postmodernity—: or the ‘Semanticist’s Despair’ of Teaching the History of Twentieth-Century Music

Abstract The topic announced in the title— Avant-Garde, Modernism, Postmodernity—or the ‘Semanticist’s Despair’ of Teaching the History of Twentieth-Century Music —is rooted in the experience of university teaching. The author surveys three concepts central to the history of twentieth-century music, concepts that are widely used but not always precisely. Her starting point is Władysław Tatarkiewicz’s article ‘Romanticism, or the Semanticist’s Despair’ ( Pamiętnik Literacki , 1971), in which he identified twenty-five different definitions of romanticism in the history and criticism of art. Although avant-garde and modernism most often denote a historical period or epoch, and postmodernity is treated in much the same way, all three concepts must also be considered in narrower senses—as doctrine, ideology, an artistic movement, a set of features of a work of art and, above all, an attitude in its most individual dimension. In this context, Carl Dahlhaus’s question, posed in 1977 in Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte , remains current: how can art history be practised with the work itself at its centre without losing sight of its biographical, social and cultural determinants?