Beethoven biography jan swafford brahms

The aftershocks of wars and other titanic events reverberate through the generations, and that process affects music as much as any other human endeavor. The term "postwar" is often used as a simple historical marker, but the postwar experience is far more complex than that.

A postwar period is a frame of mind, something on the order of culture-wide post-traumatic stress. Also bearing on art are the great movements and ideas of an age: the wave of revolution and reaction across Europe in Beethoven's time; the science of evolution in the American Progressive era (the time of Charles Ives); the influence of Freud and cultural exhaustion and nationalistic reaction in Vienna during Schoenberg's early career.

Here I will attempt an admittedly over-large, over-labeled flyover of American music in the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st, its ending point this summer's Aspen Music Festival.

The hope is