Courses

Course title:Music, Arts and Culture in the Early Twentieth Century: Modernism and Inter-War Avant-Gardes
Faculty:Faculty of Fine Arts and Music
Department:Department of the Theory and History of Fine Arts
Course code:KTD / 2MACE
Credits:4
Semester:Winter
Level of study:Mgr.
Format of study:Lecture 1 [Hours/Week], Seminar 1 [Hours/Week]
Name of the lecturer:Mgr. Martin Čurda, Ph.D. (G)
Language:English
ISCED F broad: 
Annotation:The broad concept of modernism encompasses a complex of aesthetic, intellectual, cultural, socio-political tendencies that shaped European arts and music in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. After modernist innovations challenged conventional aesthetic norms and long-established laws of technique and syntax, the avant-garde movements which emerged around the time of the First World War called for a radical reconsideration of the very concept of art and its role in the rapidly changing cultural and political reality of the time. The objectives of this course are: to explain the key aesthetic concepts (such as Symbolism, Expressionism, Primitivism etc.); to provide insight into the cultural/social/political context in which such ideas were embedded (with particular focus on the particular climate of capitals such as Vienna, Paris, Prague, and Budapest); and to demonstrate how this conceptual and contextual background helps to understand specific artistic products of the modernist era. Although music will be at the centre of attention, references to visual arts and literature will be made continuously throughout the course. The conviction that music is inextricably linked with other art forms rooted in a common cultural background is fundamental to the design of this course.