Popular and leamed music in the beginning of the 200' century: Alban Berg and Igor Stravinsky

Abstract

Through two emblematic figures of the popular, Berg's Wozzeck and Stravinsky's Histoire du soldat, it is the divorce between popular and learned music that affirms itself at the beginning of the 201h century. The two works indeed present an important amount of popular material, but through many distortions and manipulations. The analysis of these fragments evidences in both cases an interesting distance - painful in the first case, ironie, to say the least, in the second. Two conceptions of music are opposed here, yet both questioning, at the dawn of mass enter­tainment, the relation between the two spheres of music.