2) The medievalist origins of (British) modernist music

The Middle Ages—both “real” and “imaginary”—have inspired more than a century of ostensibly forward-thinking artistic modernism, a contradiction whose recognition, I contend, might do much to shake up an increasingly tired narrative concerned, principally, with notions of “progress” and the breakup of tradition. For musical strains of modernism, specifically, that sense of the “medieval” leaves its enigmatic trace, redolent of a strange dialogue with traditions whose “sounds” are truly lost t...