‘Savage Minds in British Early-Twentieth-Century Music’

Musicological work on and with bricolage has sought to understand social groupings of popular music, and in particular the subcultures of British youth and their music of the 1950s and 1960s. In the remainder of this chapter, the author offer three readings of such music and some of its metatonal devices in Rebecca Clarke's Viola Sonata and the Cello Sonatas by Frank Bridge and John Foulds: combinations of quartal harmony, octatonic and whole-tone collections, modality, and quarter-tones. It is likely that Clarke recommended Bridge's music to the patron, who entered into an enduring patronship with Bridge. The loosening of tonality's dictate is central to Bridge's bricolage. The idea of an ‘assimilation’ of ‘elements’ taken from an undefined ‘modernity’ and integrated eclectically into a ‘personal style’ mirrors Levi-Strauss’s description of the bricoleur, including the rejection of the engineer’s ‘revolutionary’ structural processes.