This music sounds as if ´was coming from afar. From the world of yesterday.
Franz Schubert cuts and paste a popular dance tune – the Austrian Ländler – in his advanced string quartet as a sounding symbol of that loss of immediacy that seems to be the an indispensable part of the modern condition.
Here, I will start my contribution to our conference's discussion of the issue of ‘identity of music between authenticity and contemporarity'. The Ländler's dreamlike evocation of a pre-modern rural world where ‘such things as home, nature and immediate life' still are not uprooted by modernity here stands for the feeling of loss of authenticity that I claim to be ‘inscribed in modernity'.
By this, I signal that I focus on a particular aspect of the authenticity debate. What I particularly have in mind is music's contribution to the discussion of how we in the modern world access our pasts and how our views to the past take part in the negotiation of modern cultural identities