The Late Style

Catalog description

As listeners and readers, we yearn to understand the works of art that help define our worldview. We pose and explore the fundamental questions: do great artists develop linearly, evolving continuously from earliest works through a middle period and ultimately to a late period? And, more comprehensively, does the creative impulse operate multi-dimensionally, searching for outlets in nuanced ways where artistic temperaments intersect with the cultural environment? Starting with the final study of the great polymath critic, Edward Said, this course will examine the final career trajectory of pianist Glenn Gould, followed by the late period works of Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Strauss, and Stravinsky. The overarching concern is to determine if there is a definable unity among these (i.e., along what parameters are late styles understood) or if these late styles constitute fragmented elements. As Edward Said wrote in support of a late style, it is a moment when artists, who are fully in command of their medium, nevertheless abandon communication with the established social order of which they are a part and achieve a contradictory, alienated relationship with it. Late works, accordingly, are a form of exile from their own milieu.