Music in Relation to its Times

To assess music as the purveyor of the spiritual is Antony Copley’s project in this compelling and erudite study. He undertakes his exploration by approaching the music of 20th century Europe through the biographical, cultural and philosophical planes. He tackles his mission as Everyman, he emphasizes apologetically, and not as a musicologist. Dismissing ‘art for art’s sake’ as an ‘extraordinarily arrogant’ assertion that the artist and art are somehow separate from their context, Copley insists on seeing music in relation to its times. A central premise of the study is ‘the impossibility of escaping politics in the intensely political 20th century’. This was ‘an Age of Extremes, an Age of Anxiety’ and above all ‘an Age of Fear’. Citing Jonathon Glover’s representation of ‘unspeakable evil’ demonstrated in Nazism, Stalinism and tribal civil wars in the Balkans and elsewhere, Copley asserts that ‘confronting evil is one inescapable challenge to human creativity in the 20th century’.