the genius of jazz

" ... While this new American music was rapidly developing in the South and Midwest, the Northeast was being educated to European modernism by a mixed group of Wagnerites and Nietzscheans, admirers of Ibsen, Shaw, and the Cubists - James Huneker, Barrett Wendell, Brander Matthews, John Sloan, Alfred Stieglitz, Stephen Crane etc.

To sum up, the gestation of modernism went through three phases: a preparatory period, the Nineties and the Cubist Decade, when the young generation, stimulated by the inventions that transform visible reality and working in parallel with the scientific notions that negate common sense, gives the arts fundamentally altered goals and forms.

At the same time, the great wave of Populism, also rising in the 1870s, inspires a redefinition of history and the social sciences. All that the 20C has contributed and created is a redefinement by analysis or criticism by pastiche and parody. But these manifestations came to public notice only after the wide hiatus of the Four Years' War (World War I)."