1 THIS IS THE AUTHOR’S ACCEPTED MANUSCRIPT. THE AMENDED VERSION OF RECORD (VOR) OF THIS MANUSCRIPT HAS BEEN PUBLISHED IN: Björn Heile and Charles Wilson (eds) The Routledge Companion to Modernism in Music (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), 216-38 https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Research-Companion-to-Modernism-in-Music/Heile- Wilson/p/book/9781472470409 . Modernism: The People’s Music? Robert Adlington ‘Not for the first time, then, artistic isolates with massive agendas have moved to heal the wound of popular indifference by broadcasting that popular victory has already been won. Did any modernist manifesto neglect to indicate that its handful of exiled signatories spoke from the destined mountaintop of aesthetic history and in the ultimate interest of twentieth-century humanity?’ 1 Preliminaries: kinds of modernism In her book Modernism and Democracy, the literary historian Rachel Potter explores the articulation within modernist studies of ‘two genealogies of modernism’ in early twentieth-century Anglo- American literature. 2 The first is marked by hostility to a mass public and everyday life, and specifically by suspicion towards liberal and democratic values. Writers such as Ezra Pound and T.S.Eliot proposed that progressive artists should assume a legislative role, forming a new sovereign class in opposition to the debased and discredited laws of the popular commercial sphere. The second genealogy of modernism champions democracy and the popular voice. In modernist studies, this genealogy is associated especially with women writers such as Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein and Mina Loy, who sought to identify progressive literary styles with less authoritarian values, including the foregrounding of self-expression and individual freedom. Having postulated her two genealogies, Potter is quick to problematize them, noting that they are oversimplified and unhelpful in comprehending the subtly different and evolving attitudes of writers to changing ideas of democracy in the early twentieth century. Yet she is not alone in discerning these divergent tendencies within modernism. Raymond Williams – whose penetrating analyses of the politics of modernism I will return to in several places in this essay – notes how the critique offered by I am grateful to Stephen Graham, Neil Smith, and the editors of this volume for offering insightful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. 1 William J. Maxwell, ‘Ralph Ellison and the Constitution of Jazzocracy’, Journal of Popular Music Studies, 16/1 (2004), 40-57. 2 Rachel Potter, Modernism and Democracy: Literary Culture 1900–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 1–4. Potter’s reading is presented as a response to Michael Levenson’s classic study A Genealogy of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).