Oh no! This cranky curmudgeon is back to further adulterate this perfectly self-respecting blog. Can anything be done? Sorry, but I cannot be flunked until the end of semester.

So what's my beef today? Well, the good professor graced us with a succinct summary of Tuesday's half-attended class, but deftly overlooked my plaint about the flurry of usage of the term "modernism" in the class. After hearing fellow classmates note the modernism of certain 16th-century composers and the like, I felt impelled to remark that "Modernism" has been used as a reference to a particular era in history, which, only now may I declare, as best as I understand the term, would be the early 20th-century to, or maybe a little past, WWII. My remark was met with a round of spluttered denials, yet the history books I feel will support me. Modernism the era was established through efforts throughout Western culture of particular time; as Schoenberg veered towards atonality, so did Picasso paint eyes where the ears were expected, and Joyce write stream-of-consciousness prose, all struggling to find new modes of expression beyond the inheritance of previous centuries.

Not that any of us in this class has the slightest competence in this domain, least of all myself, nonetheless a glance at the architecture of this time may merit attention. Of all artforms, architecture may be the most kingly, as it typically takes years and millions of dollars to accomplish, and so may the most representative of its own time. We all can distinguish vintage of the Old City Hall (and every American town has one) from an I.M.Pei glass box; both sorts of buildings shriek their time-of-construction to the viewer, the International Style of the latter telling us that it had to have been built no earlier than this date, and in this "postmodern" era not any later than that date.

Of course, Monteverdi was as daring an innovator as Debussy, and for his efforts he helped inaugurate the Baroque era. But to suggest that "Orfeo" invited us to the exact same understanding as did "Le Sacre du printemps" is to attempt an abolition of the timeline inherent in history, and for that I can see no help in it.

Before me, as I write my tirade, lies Taruskin, vol.4, pp1-5. Sure enough, he defines modernism as the impulse, not the era, and of course the urge to innovate renders Gabrieli and Webern in some sense brethren, and while he is welcome to appropriate established terms, devising new definitions for them, let us not become confused by this. As for the other term he throws about willy-nilly in his discussion of Ives, "maximalism", myself, I had only heard this word before uttered by Milton Babbitt in his staunch refusal to be ever, ever confused with the minimalists. So far as I know, Babbitt is the coiner of the term, and I do not doubt for a second that Taruskin picked up the word from the same source. And that, so far as I comprehend his explanation, to use the word to mean "intensification" is to liberate it from any time and place, such as Babbitt's studio in the late 20th century.

All this is to admit some doubt as to the redefinition of words to suit one's thesis. I suppose that Taruskin is eager to be held as a controvert, but I, for one, tire of quibbling over definitions and usages of words, and I cannot help but wonder if, with a little more effort on his part, Taruskin could have found terms that the OED cheerfully supports his exact meaning. I could try and sit here, attempting to think of such words, but must admit that Taruskin has a six-volume head start on me. Nonetheless, I prefer established usages and I will always be inclined to consider Babbitt a maximalist, and not Brahms.