The Cathedral of the Future and Young Classicality

Abstract This chapter documents Busoni’s extensive knowledge of architecture and describes how this knowledge contributed to his development of a metatonal treatment of the musical language in which intersections of independent voices generated new harmonies, scales, and textures. Moreover, it reveals ways Busoni incorporated architectural metaphors into his writings and shows how he used them to inform some of his aesthetic theories, such as Young Classicality. The chapter explains Busoni’s approach not as retrogressive, but as a “historicist modernist” expansion of the diatonic tradition as it builds upon the music of J. S. Bach and W. A. Mozart. It demonstrates ways Busoni realized these ideals and his new metatonal treatment of the musical language in An die Jugend, BV 254, and Fünf kurze Stücke zur Pflege des polyphonen Spiels, BV 296. It is noteworthy that some of the latter pieces were performed at the Bauhaus exhibition in Weimar in 1923.