ABSTRACT
At the 1948 Berkshire Music Festival, musicians struggled to make sense of Arthur Lourié’s Concerto da camera for solo violin and string ensemble, a work that did not fit into the aesthetic categories offered in post–World War II America. The retrospective nature of the work allowed Lourié a certain narrative freedom and a lyrical, personal tone, rarely accessed by his contemporaries. In this chapter, I discuss elements of what I call Lourié’s post-neoclassical style, interpreting his Concerto in the context of his 1929 article “An Inquiry into Melody,” in which Lourié advocated the primacy of melody over other elements of music. Lourié’s emphasis on the significance and moral-aesthetic value of melody in music signals the composer’s opposition to Stravinsky’s “objective,” anti-expressive credo. Although Lourié’s work shares some technical properties with those of Stravinsky, such as occasional octatonic sonorities, modal flexibility, and non-developmental processes, his focus on lyrical, expressive, metrically fluid melody makes his music distinctive. My analysis explores this new, melodic aspect of Lourié’s style and analyzes what he called “an illusively suspended moment.” I argue that Lourié’s musical gestures grew out of the underlining aesthetic principle, which, in contradistinction to Stravinsky’s neoclassical credo, strived to reestablish music as a moral force.
