Barber and the Bomb: Music's Response to Anxiety and Annihilation in the Age of the Machine

Abstract

University of WashingtonAbstract Barber and the Bomb:Music's Response to Anxiety and Annihilation in the Age of the Machine Limuel Forgey III Chair of the Supervisory Committee: Thomas Harper Department of Music In 1945, the United States navigated an unprecedented geopolitical landscape following World War II. The devastating attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki forced civilians and policymakers to confront an unbearable new truth: weapons now existed that could incinerate entire cities in seconds, radically changing the scope of modern warfare beyond the limits of imagination. The raw power of nuclear weapons became an inescapable presence in the collective consciousness of global citizens. This marked a critical transition into a more intricate geopolitical era, whose oppressive shadow would eventually permeate and transform classical music.Yet, before the bomb, technology had already begun to alienate people from the natural world. Industrialization promised progress, but with this progress came also stress, fear, and disquiet. Factory noise replaced birdsongs, and assembly lines would move farmers from the fields to the warehouses of industry. As these advancements transformed lifestyle, work, and leisure, something fundamental was diminished. Mechanization introduced a disquiet and estrangement from nature. Worse yet, the consequences of accelerating technological advancement reshaped individual identity, influenced cultural expression, and instilled anxiety in ordinary lives. These tensions, whether acknowledged or subconscious, became inevitably infused with musical composition, with the nuclear bomb emerging as the culmination of these technological pressures. But there are new technological advancements, such as artificial intelligence (AI), that promise to aid and influence everyday life in expedited and magnified ways. This dissertation investigates how composers have translated technological anxiety into sound. The composers are six: Samuel Barber, Krzysztof Penderecki, Alexander Mosolov, Sergei Prokofiev, John Adams, and Aaron Copland. Each negotiated in their own way the encounter between nature and the emerging industrial landscape of the nuclear age, and their music. Three theoretical frameworks ground the musical evidence: Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden, Jacques Attali’s Noise: The Political Economy of Music, and Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Marx names the tension. Attali argues that music anticipates social change, and Pirsig points toward integration. Across two centuries of music, I trace how composers have heard the arrival of the machine. Their responses tell us about living, listening, and reimagining humanity inside the acceleration of the technological present.