title: Musicologia

text:
"enziotempo" <
enzio...@libero.it
> ha scritto nel messaggio
news:35115fc0-5f7d-4809...@h2g2000yqg.googlegroups.com...
On 24 Apr, 23:08, cap <
clamar...@gmail.com
> wrote:
>Battute a parte, vorrei capire cosa intendi per "musicologo".
>(Boulez e Stock sono anche musicologi?)
Boulez è molto più acuto di un musicologo :-))))))))))
Bene, forse conviene spiegare un po' le varie discipline.
Al limite Mila può essere introdotto fra la categoria storica, direi
Buona lettura, comunque. Sperando che la domanda non ricompaia....
Musicology, §II: Disciplines of musicology
II. Disciplines of musicology
1. Historical method.
Historical method in musicology falls into two basic categories. The first
is an empirical-positivistic one, with an emphasis on locating and studying
documents and establishing objective (or would-be objective) facts about and
from them. The second, a theoretical-philosophical one, itself has two
aspects: one that addresses general historiographical problems such as
change and causality, periodization and biography; and one that considers
issues specific to the histories of the arts and literature, such as the
forms and style, or the historical meaning or content of individual art
works or repertories, whether from the perspective of style, aesthetics or
socio-cultural contexts and functions. The literature on historical method
has concentrated on the second category, perhaps because the first seems
unproblematic and less interesting. It is or should be self-evident that
serious historical scholarship of the second category, although it sometimes
tends to deny the legitimacy of the first, depends on as accurate a
historical record as the actual state of the discipline can provide (see
also Historiography).
This essay will also emphasize theory, yet the continuing importance of
positivism (which itself constitutes a philosophy of history) and empirical
work should not be overlooked. In the 18th century, when a music
historiography began to emerge, curiosity about ancient music for its
ancientness (musical antiquarianism) was a principal motivation for
empirical research, and philological interests were also strong. As the
discipline developed, problems such as chronology and transmission,
attribution, palaeography and textual authenticity became even more crucial,
as the archives, libraries and private collections yielded ever more of
their treasures.
Empirical interests were not, however, primary to the work of Hawkins,
Burney and Forkel, whose histories are often considered to be the origin of
'true' historical thinking about music, but rather a (naive) vision of
historical development - the Enlightenment idea of human progress embracing
all cultural activity. In this universal-historical perspective, the
emphasis on human activity and perfectibility as the basis for historical
change distinguishes ideas from earlier views of the past and development;
yet their conclusions about the present state of music differed. Unlike
Burney, Hawkins and Forkel viewed the music of their day with alarm, and
their caution foreshadowed 19th-century perspectives: (i) a notion of
'progress with limits' that underlies conservative historical thinking well
into the 20th century, and (ii) a historicism that replaced the principle of
inevitable progress with that of historical relativism and validated early
music.
It was historicism that provided the single greatest impulse to the
development of music historiography in the 19th century. Despite Hegel's
influence on historical thinking in Germany, continuing progress (or its
necessity) in music was more a concern of journalists with historical
perspectives - A.B. Marx, Schumann, Franz Brendel, Wagner and Hanslick (the
latter two at cross-purposes) - than of most writers of formal music
history. Marx and Brendel, who explicitly identified himself with Hegel,
wrote histories from this perspective, and they have been usually associated
with Hegelianism (as has Ambros), but their debts to Hegel must be precisely
defined: their historical thinking is shaped by the liberal nationalism and
metaphysical idealism that supported Hegel's concept of progress and his
aesthetics, but the dialectical approach, the essential element in his
theory of historical change, is largely absent in Marx's writing and not
rigorously applied in Brendel's. The dialectic method is also foreign to the
historical thinking of Fétis, whose importance as a historian has been
overlooked. His rationalistic (as opposed to metaphysical) belief in
progress is said to have been influenced by the enlightened universal
historical approach of Jules Michelet.
All over Europe, most mid-19th-century music historians turned to music and
musicians from a past that was generally and tacitly understood as ending
with J.S. Bach. Several historians (e.g. Ambros) planned comprehensive
histories but failed to complete them, perhaps because the
empirical-positivistic work in the earlier historical stages exhausted their
energies. The field of biography was less orientated to the distant past,
largely because of Beethoven's celebrity, the continuing interest in Mozart
and Haydn and, late in the century, the fascination with Wagner. Yet the
great monuments in 19th-century biography also include biographies of Bach
by Spitta and Handel by Chrysander, and these are usually considered to be
more important for the development of music historiography because their
subject matter was more remote (see Biography).
Apart from the aesthetic impulses behind the first efforts to revive
performance of Bach and Palestrina in the early 1800s, interest in old and
new music as a historical phenomenon was nurtured by several strong
intellectual and ideological currents in the 19th century. The deepest and
broadest of them was the rise and dominance of historicism in all the
humanistic disciplines and particularly the earlier emergence of the history
of the visual arts. Aesthetics and theory, which had dominated music
scholarship within and without the academy, began to yield room for history,
a process that culminated in the establishment at the end of the century of
the first university chairs explicitly assigned to music history. Surging
nationalism, which in the wake of the Napoleonic period also underlay the
rise of scholarly political and national history, stimulated investigations
of national music traditions that sometimes assumed chauvinist character
(Brendel), occasionally made use of the 18th-century advocacy of folk and
popular culture associated with Rousseau and Herder, or stressed religious
institutions and dogma. The identification of religion and nationalism was
particularly strong in northern Germany. It led to an assertive
identification of Germanness in music, coupling Lutheran tradition with an
attempt to reinvigorate religious feeling through a discussion of art
(Spitta). A nostalgically religious strain in Romanticism saw a purity in
the arts preceding a 'modern' or 'new' time whose earlier or later beginning
depended in large part on the personal aesthetics and degree of historicism
in the thinking of the historian. (A 'Heilige Tonkunst' concluding in 1600
described the first of Carl von Winterfeld's two historical epochs in his
Johannes Gabrielli und sein Zeitalter of 1834.) This attitude transcended
national and denominational differences and helps to explain the widespread
interest in Renaissance sacred music, in particular the Catholic
repertories, which also extended into the 17th century.
Music historians struggled to impose order on the ever increasing body of
music their archival work disclosed. Periodization, and the explanation of
the historical developments underlying the periods, were their foremost
tasks, whereby the former was often presented with disappointingly little
concern for the latter. Epochs and periods based on leading figures provided
a convenient mode of explanation: schools and styles grouped themselves
around the great artists, who produced their art through their own genius
sui generis, or drew on the culture of their time, or (commonsensically
enough) in some way combined the two. The idea of the artist in cultural
context shares features with the Zeitgeist theory of history that was
particularly strong in Germany. Zeitgeist, which owes as much to Herder as
to Hegel, solved two historiographical problems: (i) progress - music
proceeded with general culture, as history advanced from period to period so
too did music; (ii) meaning - music acquired meaning through its
participation in general culture because it shared general culture's
character. Music history benefited from its late origins; it could draw on
general history and art history, which presented it with resonant period
names such as the Renaissance. But shortcomings to this approach emerged
towards the end of the 19th century. Music historians concentrated too much
on biography, did not integrate the technical discussion of individual works
in their histories, and failed to recognize music's (semi-) autonomy and its
'organic' development on the basis of its own materials. The solution was
the formalization of the concept of style drawing again on art history
(Burkhardt and Wölfflin), which became the dominating historical idea in
20th-century musicology. The strength of the concept of 'style' can be
judged from the fact that it was as essential to Riemann, the systematic
scholar, as it was to the humanist Adler (who is most closely identified
with the concept), although they are usually considered to represent
opposing branches of the discipline.
'Style' was extremely useful. It was the alternative to Zeitgeist for the
explication of periodization. It also provided the language for a discussion
of individual works in inherently musical terms, yet still differed
crucially from non-historical, 'theoretical' analysis in that it retained,
refined and lent rigour to established musico-historical ideas such as
periods, schools, national, regional and individual styles, and made
possible a comparative critical approach. Moreover, it was equally
applicable to all historical periods and genres; it could support either a
teleological view of historical development or a relativistic one; it could
even buttress a Zeitgeist approach or a hermeneutic explication of an
individual work. Although style was conceived as a value-free, objective
idea, it later even served national-socialist musicology in determining the
racial and folk basis of national and ethnic styles and their relative
merits.
The emergence of historical musicology as a mature discipline and the
development of the concept of style are inextricable. Style was the basis
for the multi-volume histories (Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, Oxford History
of Music), single-volume period histories (Reese, Bukofzer), genre studies,
and the works part of life-and-works biographies that before and after World
War II have defined the field.
Yet the concept of style has been criticized. Despite its flexibility, its
major impact has been to separate musical historiography from general
historiography, and to de-emphasize or even eliminate questions of meaning
and function. In German musicology before the Nazi period, historians in the
hermeneutic tradition advocated by Wilhelm Dilthey (1823-1911), in his day
the leading German philosopher of the humanistic disciplines, recognized
this danger. Arnold Schering (1877-1941), while recognizing its
achievements, argued that a critical method designed to determine stylistic
common denominators could not do justice to the unique structures and
meanings of individual masterworks, and also perceived that the concept of
style failed to explain the phenomenon of style change. In Anglo-American
historical musicology the most recent major developments - the introduction
of critical perspectives from linguistics and the literary disciplines, and
their combination with a hermeneutics variously derived from the 'new
historicism', Adornoesque social theory, gender studies, reception theory
and history, and anthropology - have sprung from a similar dissatisfaction
with the concept of style, whereby its inability to address satisfactorily
the problem of meaning has been the stronger impetus. (The problems of
periodization and style change, actively pursued in the 1950s and 60s - as
the reports from various international musicological congresses attest -
have lost their urgency. The approach of structural history, which attempts
to grasp the totality of a moment in historical time rather than presenting
the dynamic of historical process, is more amenable to the critical
interests of 'new musicology'.)
The rise of new critical perspectives in English-language music history also
must be understood as a response to the challenges posed by the postwar
vigour and status of two diametrically opposed branches of the discipline:
the 'hard' analysis of 'Theory' as it became institutionalized in American
and British university departments, and, within music history, grandly
conceived philological-positivistic projects. The latter consisted of new
critical editions of the 'great' composers and historical repertories (some
of them exhaustive reworkings of the great monuments of 19th-century
editions); thematic catalogues; RISM in all its breadth; and manuscript
studies of many different kinds that made important advances in method and
technique and significant contributions and corrections to questions of
chronology and transmission, authenticity and compositional process. In the
USA after World War II philology helped support the rapid growth of
musicology, offering virtually unlimited possibilities for dissertations and
publications. Yet a saturation point seems to have been reached in the
mid-1980s, when the call from scholars as dissimilar as Joseph Kerman and
Leo Treitler in the USA, and Carl Dahlhaus in Germany, for a historically
informed criticism (Kerman) or a critically inclined historiography
(Treitler and Dahlhaus) began to bear fruit.
For West German musicology, as it regrouped after the war, positivistic
approaches provided necessary safe alternatives to the ideologically
indefensible nature of musicology under fascism, in whose wake cultural
theory of any kind had become suspect, and to the Marxist historical and
hermeneutic methodologies of the GDR and the socialist bloc. It also
provided a haven to non-Marxist East German and Soviet-bloc musicologists,
who concentrated on such areas rather than pursuing politically sensitive
topics such as meaning and historical causality. But West German musicology
did not ignore style criticism or abandon traditional 'bourgeois' historical
topics such as philosophy and aesthetics or historical music theory (which
were also favoured by non-Marxist scholars in the socialist countries). And
it sometimes engaged in polemical debates about historical causality and
determinism, progress, formalism and the social character and content of
music with its neighbours to the East. The relative cautiousness of West
German historical musicology, as well as the strength of its traditions, has
made it less open to the most recent ('new-musicological') methodological
innovations than its English-language counterpart. The important exception
has been in the area of reception studies, which were stimulated by the work
of the Germans Hans Gadamer (philosophy) and Robert Jauss (literature) and
became established in German musicology well before it was embraced by
musicologists writing in English. On the other hand, in the 1990s the
writings of Theodor Adorno, whose thought stimulated and challenged some of
the leading German postwar historians, have become more fashionable
(although perhaps less well digested) abroad than in his native country. The
nature of Adorno's influence in Germany can perhaps best be measured by the
work of Dahlhaus, who, despite his fascination with Adorno's ideas, rejected
the sociological approach and yet fashioned his own formalist hermeneutics
as a direct response to him.
Historical method in musicology has always relied on its neighbouring
disciplines. It has always been a semi-autonomous field, in part through its
very nature as a historical discipline, in part because the materials of
music are non-semantic and its forms and images are less tied to
representations of material reality than those of the visual arts before the
20th century. As a consequence of this second condition, non-formalist
historians concerned with the problem of musical meaning are almost forced
to borrow. While important axioms such as style and historical periodization
of the historical method still seem useful and entrenched, certain
traditional emphases have been under attack in recent years, for example the
notion of an authentic text, or the concept of the autonomous 'work', or the
idea of a canonic repertory (this last is paradoxical in view of the
preference for 'masterpieces' for the application of innovative
interpretative strategies). As early as the 1970s, Dahlhaus voiced concerns
about the disappearance of the historical method (in its second, theoretical
category) from musicology; yet the discipline, in terms of its institutional
bases - the academy, the professional journal and the published book - is
thriving. Will the influx of new methodologies supplant music history or
give it new life? One thing is certain: its own history is one of change and
adaptation, and this process is a guarantee for its continued vitality.
Glenn Stanley
2. Theoretical and analytical method.
It is questionable whether it is possible to identify a single encompassing
method for music theory and analysis. As an intellectual activity, Western
music theory possesses an extensive and varied literature that extends
virtually without interruption back to the ancient Greeks. At the same time,
many non-Western cultures possess distinguished bodies of theoretical
literature. Music analysis, with which theory is typically paired, has a
more recent genealogy, although it too seems confoundingly diverse in
practice.
Defined simply, music theories may be said to offer generalized descriptions
of musical structure and behaviour. Such descriptive theories may apply only
to a single composition, or they may attempt to account for and perhaps help
define, a class of compositions grouped by historical style, genre or
composer. From this perspective, then, it can be seen how analysis functions
as a dialectical counterpart to theory. Analysis constitutes the detailed
study of musical pieces from which theories may be inductively formulated,
while at the same time serving to test the empirical validity and
application of any theory.
Of course, the relation between theory and analysis is in reality far more
complex. Many music theories, for example, are compositionally conceived and
lack strong empirical verification in practice. That is to say, a given
theory may arise not through induction from musical practice but be
conceived a priori to guide composition. Other theories may make no
empirical claims about particular compositions or historical styles and may
concern themselves with more abstracted musical problems: the nature of
consonance, concepts of time and metre or the ontology of tonality (to offer
some contrasting examples). Still other theories may deal with aspects of
musical perception by analysing compositions according to their affective
qualities, or perhaps as possessing social or programmatic content.
To make sense of this diversity within the field of music theory, and
perhaps to rescue the notion of music theory and analysis as constituting a
coherent and discrete field of study, it is helpful to distinguish
'traditions' of music theory that have historically enjoyed varying degrees
of pedigree. Based on suggestions made by Carl Dahlhaus (1984, p.9), three
such traditions, or 'paradigms' might be identified: (i) Speculative, (ii)
Regulative and (iii) Analytic. While the present article will not attempt to
duplicate the broad historical surveys of theory and analysis found
elsewhere (see Analysis, §I and Theory, theorists), it will be useful to
consider individually the scope and methods historically associated with
these disciplinary traditions.
(i) Speculative traditions.
Speculative music theory (or 'harmonics', as it was often termed) represents
the oldest and in one sense the most authentic tradition of music theory.
Traceable to the earliest surviving Greek and Hellenic writings, musical
harmonics encompasses the abstracted study of musical elements - sounds,
intervals, rhythmic proportions, scale systems and modes - and often the
place of these elements in the general cosmological order. The concern of
the speculative theorist is not the application of musical material to
praxis but rather the ontological essence of music - its nature and being.
Aristotle characterized such knowledge as episteme theoretike, in contrast
to the practical and poetic skills - praktike and poietike - of performance
and composers.
In Greek thought two related branches of speculative harmonics may be
distinguished: a Pythagorean tradition orientated towards mathematics and
represented by Neoplatonists such as Ptolemy and Boethius, and an empirical
tradition represented by theorists such as Aristoxenus. The Pythagoreans
would emphasize the numerical basis of musical relations (for instance, that
all musical consonances could be defined by simple ratios of integers) and
see such musical relations as a model of cosmological order. The
empiricists, however, were concerned with acoustical perception - the nature
of musical sound and its organization into tonal systems. In neither case,
though, were these theorists interested in practical music.
With varying degrees of emphasis, speculative music theory has been a
continuous presence in the history of Western thought. The Pythagorean
interest in the mathematical form of music was sustained within the medieval
Quadrivium of numerical sciences, and found more concrete expression in
various monochord and interval treatises. Most of the intricate tuning and
temperament calculations found in Baroque treatises of musica theorica may
also arguably be aligned with traditions of speculative harmonics. The
empirical Aristoxenian tradition, however, found echo in the work of many
natural scientists of the 17th and 18th centuries who studied the acoustical
basis of consonance and tonality (Galileo, Descartes, Sauveur), as well as
in 19th-century scientific work in the field of tone psychology (Helmholtz
and Stumpf).
The more cosmological side of Pythagorean harmonics receded in the medieval
West until its reinvigoration in the late 15th century under the influence
of Neoplatonic thought (especially in the writings of Marsilio Ficino).
Cosmological harmonics continued to hold fascination for a few individuals,
although it was an interest largely motivated by esoteric or occult beliefs,
as exemplified by writers such as the 17th-century German astronomer
Johannes Kepler, the 19th-century French Masonic historian Fabre d'Olivet,
and in the 20th-century Swiss mystic Hans Kayser (see also Music of the
spheres).
In the 20th century, speculative music theory has continued to flourish,
although under new names and using new tools of analysis. Much research, for
example into tone psychology, timbral analysis and psychoacoustics (see §10,
below), including work by James Mursell, R. Plomp, Wayne Slawson and Ernst
Terhardt, can arguably be filiated to Aristoxenian traditions of empirical
harmonics in that its practitioners attempt to understand the fundamental
nature of discrete musical elements, albeit elements typically defined and
analysed as isolated acoustical stimuli. Mathematical traditions of
harmonics have also enjoyed renewed attention. Catalysed in large part by
compositional problems posed by Schoenberg's method of composing with 12
notes, a number of composer-theorists, beginning in the 1950s, notably
Milton Babbitt, have developed extraordinarily far-reaching mathematical
theories that explore with systematic rigour possible serial relations and
orderings within the equal-tempered universe of 12 pitch classes (see also
Serialism and Set).
The group theoretical principles on which Babbitt based his research were
found by several American music theorists to be useful in accounting for
properties of - and relations between - unordered collections of pitch
classes. For example, Allen Forte extended and generalized some of Babbitt's
work in order to develop a theory of 'pitch-class sets' by which the pitch
structure of a delimited repertory of pre-serial 'atonal' music may be
accounted. David Lewin, on the other hand, worked out a number of
mathematical models by which to describe the transformational mappings of
isomorphically-discrete pitch collections, although the sophisticated
transformational networks that he constructed may also usefully be applied
to relations between chord function, key area and even metrical time points.
Further research by American theorists such as John Clough on diatonic scale
systems, Richard Cohn on symmetrical pitch cycles and Robert Morris on
compositional spaces and contour has extended our understanding of potential
pitch topographies. While much of this scholarship is intended to have
practical applications for both composers and analysts, it is at heart
'speculative' in the most distinguished and venerable sense of the word - as
an exploration of the properties and potential of musical materials. In the
closing decades of the 20th century, the spectacular reinvigoration of
mathematical harmonics constituted one of the most remarkable chapters in
the long history of music theory.
(ii) Regulative and practical traditions.
If music theory in its oldest and most authentic sense was understood as the
ontological speculation of musical material, undoubtedly its most
consequential and resonant activities have concerned the regularization of
this material into systems possessing practical applications for performers
and composers. Such pedagogical writings, it is true, were not at first
considered to be properly 'theoretical' (significantly, no practical
treatise before the 18th century ever presented itself under the title of
'music theory'). But increasingly, musica theorica and musica practica were
recognized, and treated, as complementary domains of investigation.
The propadeutic tradition of music theory is first evident in the West in
several Carolingian manuscripts dating from the 9th and 10th centuries that
sought to answer the Church's growing need to systematize, codify and notate
a burgeoning liturgical chant practice. Several intersecting problems were
posed that have served as an agenda of music-theoretical research ever
since: clarifying a tonal space in which this music was sung; devising an
efficient notation for setting it down for practice and dissemination;
establishing a vocabulary for segmenting and analysing the music's
structure; and, finally, classifying the repertory of chant into categories
of species or 'modes'. Later, other conceptual problems with practical
implications arose to which theorists turned their attention, particularly
the need to develop an accurate means to notate rhythmic duration and
proportion.
With the appearance of several treatises dealing with the singing of organum
and discant in the early 12th century an entirely new kind of prescriptive
theory is to be seen - one that attempts to regulate the compositional
process of music (or in this case, an improvisational process). By laying
down rules for singing with a given chant melody, regulating what
dissonances may be introduced and prescribing the opening and closing
formulae of the organal voice, the anonymous authors of one notable example
(the Ad organum faciendum; ed. H.H. Eggebrecht and R. Zaminer, 1970)
inaugurated a species of compositional theory that would soon dominate the
discipline (see also Organum).
Throughout the late medieval and Renaissance periods, the primary concern of
compositional theory was the regulation of dissonance within the
increasingly dense polyphonic textures written by composers or improvised by
singers (see also Counterpoint and Musica ficta, §2). Another regulative
problem addressed by theorists during this time concerned rhythm, and
specifically the codification of a mensural system by which metrical time
points could be plotted, subdivided and noted (see also Notation, §III and
Rhythm, §II). For some Renaissance theorists, a particular empirical
challenge was that of modal classification. The eight ecclesiastical modes
inherited from monophonic chant practice (later expanded by Glarean and
Zarlino to 12) could be made to accommodate expanding polyphonic and
chromatic textures only with great ingenuity on the part of theorists (see
also Mode, §III).
In the Baroque period, with a general stylistic evolution towards more
homophonic textures and a sharper bass-soprano polarity, it was the
classification of chords and an explanation of their succession that
received the attention of theorists. Similarly challenging to explain and
codify for theorists was a coalescing major-minor, transposable key system.
Many treatises of thoroughbass from this time, though ostensibly aimed at
training performers, can be seen as theoretical treatises that provided
pratical answers to these questions. It is thus not surprising that the
first treatise to attempt a full theory of this tonal practice - Rameau's
Traité de l'harmonie of 1722 - was one that was conceived within the
paradigm of thoroughbass pedagogy. Counterpoint remained important as a
pedagogical discipline throughout the 18th century, although as seen in a
work such as Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum, this necessitated drawing sharp
distinctions between 'strict' styles of composition codified within his five
species and a 'free' style of dissonance use, characteristic of the seconda
pratica.
As these various examples suggest regulative music theory is possible only
when there is a relatively stabilized musical practice that can be
circumscribed by which a particular compositional parameter may be analysed
and codified. Some of these practices may be global and cut across specific
compositional styles, historical period or genres (such as shared systems of
harmonic tonality, metre or timbral juxtaposition), while others may be more
stylistically focussed. For theorists of the late 18th century one such
stylistic issue that required attention was the nature of melody - its
components, construction and development (Riepel, Koch); for theorists of
the 19th century, however, it was the increasingly subversive chromatic and
modulatory practices of composers that demanded explanation, as well as the
more elaborate forms employed (Marx, Fétis, Reimann; see also Harmony, §4
and Form).
In the 20th century, regulative theory continued to play an important
pedagogical function, although it was more typically applied in retrospect
to delimited historical repertories or styles of music. (Schenker's theory
of tonality is paradigmatic in this respect; Jeppesen's codification of
Palestrinian 'style' of counterpoint and Lendvai's codification of Bartók's
compositional practice are other good examples of retrospective regulative
theories.) More common has been the development of original theories of
composition to establish and regulate harmonic vocabulary, rhythmic
structure or tonal syntax. Sometimes such theories may be rigorously
formalized, as in the case of many serial theorists, such as Krenek, Eimert,
Babbitt, Boulez and Perle. Other compositional theories may be more
informally conceived, such as the 'modes of limited transposition'
inventoried by Messiaen, or the theories of compositional 'intonation' and
'modal rhythm' conceived by the Russian theorists Boris Asaf'yev and
Boleslav Yavorsky. Even Cage's aleatory theory and Xenakis's stochastic
method of composition can be seen as belonging to this tradition of
regulative theory, although both involve elements of chance and
indeterminacy. But as compositional practice in the 20th century has
fractured into a multitude of individual styles and syntaxes, such broadly
prescriptive theorizing has more and more given way to a particularist kind
of descriptive analysis.
(iii) Analytic traditions.
It is useful to distinguish music analysis as a subdiscipline in music
theory from the regulative traditions just described, even though the two
are interdependent. While a fuller history and taxonomy of music analysis is
recounted elsewhere (see Analysis), it will be appropriate here to say
something about the methods and claims of music analysis and its relation to
be broader epistemology of music theory.
In music analysis one is primarily concerned with the structure and
individuating features of a particular piece of music. Typically, this
involves two tasks: (1) to inventory the components of a particular
composition deemed significant by the analyst; and (2) to explain the
particular disposition and relationship of those components. Of course, any
kind of analysis presupposes a theoretical stance: that is to say, it is not
possible to undertake an analysis without theoretical presumptions, however
informally conceived, that help determine the questions to pose and the
kinds of language and method by which these questions may be answered. But
unlike the systematic traditions of regulative theory described earlier, the
goal of music analysis is normally an understanding and aesthetic
appreciation of the musical piece itself as an ontologically unique artwork,
not the exemplification of some broader norm of structure or syntax.
A good example of such particularist analysis is seen in E.T.A. Hoffmann's
famous review of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, published in 1810. Unlike many
earlier examples of music 'analysis' that offered generalized taxonomies of
particular pieces (often using rhetorical terminology) in order to
illustrate classical norms of structure and process, Hoffman undertook his
analysis to reveal what was distinguishing and unique in Beethoven's
composition. For Hoffmann, much of this uniqueness stemmed from the music's
particular motivic material and its ingenious development. Not surprisingly,
such close analytic readings were indebted to Romantic ideologies of
historicism and the cult of artistic genius; far from being models for
compositional emulation, the musical objects of analysis tended to be drawn
from a canon of irreproduceable 'masterworks'. Analysis revealed at once the
singular features that made up a particular composition (these typically
being unusual thematic and harmonic material or special deviations from
formal conventions) as well as the means by which these features cohered as
an organic whole, to cite a favourite metaphor of the 19th century. Of
course, a more pragmatic tradition of analysis continued with the
19th-century pedagogical Kompositionslehre. That is, musical pieces might be
analysed for the purpose of learning and testing norms of chordal succession
or form. But by the 20th century, with the loss of a common grammar of
tonality and received forms of organizational structure, music analysis was
increasingly becoming piece-orientated.
Heinrich Schenker occupies a particularly important place in 20th-century
music analysis, not simply because his ideas have enjoyed such unparalleled
influence - especially in Anglo-American academic circles - but because his
work so clearly reflects the dialectic relation of music analysis and
theoretical systematization. Originating through an intensive study of a
select canon of tonal masterworks (especially Beethoven), Schenker's mature
theory of the Ursatz and its 'prolongation' through structural levels
emerged only after many years of struggle and thought. Although presented as
an a priori systems of tonal logic, Schenker's theory also receives
empirical validation - and indeed, can only be known - through practice,
albeit a practice that is highly selective and arguably self-confirming.
Schenker's theory presents itself as both a universal theory of tonality and
a sophisticated tool of analysis by which an individual piece of tonal music
may be opened up for inspection and its individuating features of harmony,
form and thematic content delineated with unprecedented precision (see
Schenker, heinrich).
At the close of the 20th century, music theory and analysis seemed finally
to have matured as intellectual disciplines. Particularly in North America,
although increasingly elsewhere, many academic programmes of music theory
were established in universities and music conservatories alongside more
traditional programmes of historical musicology. At the same time, numerous
academic journals and professional societies devoted to music theory and
analysis were founded, including the Journal of Music Theory (1957), Musical
Analysis (1981) and Musiktheorie (1986), and the publications of the Society
for Music Theory (from 1977).
It is ironic that just as music theory seems to have become institutionally
accepted, strong criticisms have been voiced within those institutions
concerning its conservative domain and scientistic aspirations (Kerman,
1985). Most compellingly, perhaps, many music theorists and analysts have
been criticized for their penchant for considering musical pieces and styles
largely from a formalistic, autonomous point of view rather than within
broader historical and cultural contexts. At the same time, theorists have
been faulted for too often disregarding questions of affect, expression or
meaning in musical pieces at the expense of structural description.
It is true that in the course of the 20th century, much scholarship in music
theory could be characterized as highly formalistic. Logical positivism, in
particular, was an obvious influence on the work of many theorists such as
Babbitt, who famously demanded that all analytic statements about music
should adhere to strictly scientific criteria of formulation and
verification (Babbitt, 1961, p.3). Other potent influences on music analysis
(particularly in the 1960s) were developments in literary theory and
specifically the movements of 'New Criticism' and structuralism, by which
texts were analysed as discrete and autonomous objects standing apart from
questions of historical origin or authorial intention. Certainly, a number
of music theorists in their analytic work have tested a formidable array of
tools and models borrowed from neighbouring disciplines that on the surface
suggest positivist and structuralist pedigree, including mathematical group
theory (David Lewin), cognitive psychology (Leonard Meyer, Eugene Narmour),
information theory (Kraehenbuhl and Coons), generative linguistics (Lehrdahl
and Jackendoff), and semiotics (Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Kofi Agawu and Robert
Hatten). Probably little of this research would stand the test of Babbitt's
strict rules for theoretical formulation and verification. As in many other
scholarly disciplines, the explicitly positivistic and structuralist
aspirations of music theory in the 1960s and 70s have considerably receded.
If in reality music theory and analysis were ever as uniformally
conservative and narrow in scope as their critics have implied, it was
certainly not true at the close of the 20th century. The repertories of
music considered by analysts expanded dramatically to include virtually all
historical periods, as well as much non-Western music and popular or
vernacular musics. At the same time, many theorists showed increased
sensitivity to problems of historical and social context, affective content
and reception in their analyses. In particular, interpretative and critical
modes of analysis (whose origins may be traced back to late 19th-century
traditions of 'hermeneutic' analysis) are strongly evident in much recent
musicological scholarship (Scott Burnham, Rose Subotnik, Brian Hyer), as are
radically subjective 'phenomenological' modes of analysis (Thomas Clifton,
Benjamin Boretz, Marion Guck) and post-Freudian theories of compositional
influence and repression (Joseph Straus, Kevin Korsyn). Even issues
regarding gender and sexuality so dominant in much 'postmodern' cultural
criticism have been provocatively addressed by some recent musicologists
(Susan McClary, Lawrence Kramer; see §II, below). Yet if music theory and
analysis are to continue to retain identities as authentic intellectual
traditions, it is perhaps desirable to maintain some degree of
epistemological formalism and empirical rigour. Far from suggesting a
weakness in the programme of music theory, a certain autonomy - and
tension - in relation to historical musicology and cultural criticism may
indeed be a healthy sign of its vitality and integrity.
Thomas Christensen
3. Textual scholarship.
Textual criticism embraces several central sciences: palaeography (the
decipherment of handwritings), diplomatic and bibliography (the study of the
formal make-up of manuscripts and printed books respectively), editorship
and collation (the identification of errors in the text of a document and
the reconciliation of variant readings). Ancillary to these are such
sciences as the studies of printing techniques and processes, of paper
manufacture, of binding, of illumination and of book illustration. All these
bodies of knowledge contribute directly to the establishment of a critical
text. The first five have venerable scholarly traditions extending back into
the early 19th century; the rest have developed in the 20th, with such works
as Charles Briquet's Les filigranes (Geneva, 1907), Allan Stevenson's The
Problem of the Missale speciale (London, 1967) and Charlton Hinman's The
Printing and Proof-Reading of the First Folio of Shakespeare (Oxford, 1963)
as landmarks.
In the context of music, the decipherment of notational systems (ekphonetic,
neumatic, mensural, tablature etc.; see Notation, §I) forms an important
part of musical palaeography - and also the decipherment of verbal text
matter. The special demands of music on printing require study as processes;
they carry their own peculiarities and tendencies to particular errors which
must be known before the text can be fully elucidated (see Printing and
publishing of music). The procedures of music writing, of the production and
copying of the musical source, are again activities not yet fully
appreciated in their own terms; to understand the 'psychology' of the
producer of a text is half the battle in understanding the text itself (see
Sources, ms, §I).
In the study of music printing the groundwork was laid by scholars such as
Anton Schmid in his survey of the output of the Petrucci press (1845), by
Robert Eitner, and by Emil Vogel in his Bibliothek der gedruckten weltlichen
Vocalmusik Italiens (1892). Vogel's work was carried on by Claudio Sartori
in his Bibliografia della musica strumentale italiana stampata in Italia
fino al 1700 (1952-68) and by Howard Mayer Brown in Instrumental Music
Printed before 1600 (1965). Basic studies of early French music printers and
publishers were made by François Lesure and Geneviève Thibault, of the early
English by Charles Humphries and William C. Smith, and of the early Viennese
by Alexander Weinmann. More recent work has concentrated on single issues in
early publishing (such as Boorman's work on the interpretation of features
in madrigal publications) or individual publishers (Forney's work on Susato,
Jackson's on Berg and Neuber, Lewis's on Gardane).
In manuscript studies, much attention has been given in recent years to the
18th century. Studies involving stitching marks from original bindings
(Dürr), paper-making and watermarks (Tyson, Wolf) and handwriting (Plath)
have brought about important revisions in the chronology of the works of
J.S. Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Moreover, a new understanding of the
creative processes of composers - notably of Beethoven and Wagner - has
developed as a result of close examination of preparatory materials such as
sketchbooks, drafts and preliminary scores (see Sketch).
The principles of editing are another supporting science of musicology. They
embrace not only the surface questions such as how to distinguish editorial
emendation and interpretation from original readings and how to lay out
suppressed readings in a critical commentary along with a description of
sources (although these are matters on which no conformity has been reached
among scholars), but also the much more fundamental issues of critical
editing: how far editors should go in correcting and interpreting a text,
and whether the variants of a particular text are separate entities or lead
back hierarchically to an original exemplar - and thus whether the readings
given in an edition of a work with many variant sources should seek to
establish by reconstruction a hypothetical archetype, or simply present the
best surviving text intact, or set out the variants or alternatives in
several textual traditions (see Editing).
In music, the concepts of 'Urtext' and of critical edition are in principle
distinct. Urtext represents an attempt to present the contents of an
original source free of editorial additions (slurs, bowing marks, extra
dynamics etc.): it is 'pure', yet is to some extent a translation into
modern notation. The concept is now largely discredited, however, in that it
precludes editorial intepretation or even correction. Further to the same
end of the spectrum is the so-called diplomatic transcription - a hand
facsimile of the original notation still much used in German dissertations
but properly replaced by the photographic facsimile. The critical edition,
at the other end of the spectrum, is a presentation of the text after it has
been subjected to critical scrutiny and a certain construction placed on it.
The issues involved in editing from an earlier notation - 'translating' the
music - are perceptively addressed by Bent (1994).
Many scholars at the beginning of the 20th century (e.g. Aubry and Beck)
were trained as philologists before turning to musical scholarship. They
brought a particular awareness of the problems of textual transmission,
above all to the thorny field of medieval monophony. The series Paléographie
Musicale (1889-) published by the monks of Solesmes exemplifies this dual
approach to textual criticism which combines facsimiles of original sources
with editions in more modern notation, later to be attempted systematically
by Beck in his Corpus Cantilenarum Medii Aevi (1927-38) for all surviving
troubadour and trouvère songs (never completed).
Textual criticism was itself a product of the search for authenticity which
began in the 19th century and preoccupied 20th-century historical thought.
In music this was manifested particularly in the production of critical
editions of the works of leading composers. Following the foundation of the
Bach Gesellschaft in 1850, European scholars started a series of
Gesamtausgaben, definitive editions of the complete works of Beethoven,
Mozart, Lassus, Palestrina, Schubert, Schumann, Schütz and Victoria, among
others. Few of these sets reached the state of completeness envisaged by
their editors, but they marked significant steps in the development of
editorial techniques and in the bibliographical control of sources. Parallel
to the Gesamtausgaben were the Denkmäler sets devoted to the publication of
'monuments' of national music. Among the earlier projects of this nature
were Franz Commer's Collectio Operum Musicorum Batavorum (1844-58), a
pioneer edition of early Flemish music, and Robert Julien van Maldeghem's
Trésor musical (1865-93). These established a continuing pattern of critical
editions of historically significant music originating in Germany, Austria,
France, Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, England and other countries.
However, new discoveries and changing ideas of source and textual criticism
led to increasing discontent with the 19th-century collected editions, and
new editions of the work of many composers were begun in the years after
World War II (including Bach, Handel, Mozart, Beethoven, Schütz and
Josquin). The Mozart edition was completed in 1991: even before it was
finished, some Mozart scholars were pointing to the need for yet another new
edition. (See Editions, historical.)
An important adjunct to text-critical study is the compilation of
inventories and cataloguing of primary source materials. The towering figure
in this area was Robert Eitner (1832-1905) who published numerous music
catalogues and inventories in Monatshefte für Musikgeschichte (1869-1904)
and who brought the results of his vast knowledge of European archives into
evidence in his ten-volume Biographischbibliographisches Quellen-Lexikon der
Musiker und Musikgelehrten der christlichen Zeitrechnung bis zur Mitte des
19. Jahrhunderts (1900-04). The ideals that Eitner initiated in this great
work have served musical scholarship for a century and are still alive in
the form of an 'International Inventory of Musical Sources' (RISM) published
under the auspices of the International Musicological Society and the
International Association of Music Libraries. The catalogues of the works of
individual composers - those by Köchel for Mozart, Schmieder for J.S. Bach,
Baselt for Handel, Hoboken for Haydn, Zimmerman for Purcell, McCorkle for
Brahms, Rufer for Schoenberg, for example - often give information on the
textual transmission of each individual work, enabling the user to locate
all primary material and know its status. The first part of Ludwig's
Repertorium (1910) was a model of another type of source catalogue: the
catalogue raisonné of the materials of a repertory laid out according to
stylistic dictates and explained as an evolutionary picture (see Thematic
catalogue).
Vincent Duckles/R
4. Archival research.
Archives are documents issued in the process of administration, whether it
be of central government or a private business, a ducal household or a
parish church (see also Archives and music). They are of interest to the
historian for study of the institution to which the archives refer, or for
study of people or objects or events associated with that institution. Their
essential feature is that they are generated automatically in the process of
administration, and this makes them in principle different from almost all
other sources of history. Unlike a chronicle, a diary or a newspaper report,
which are selective historical accounts, they record everyday detail as
faithfully as the unusual. Often the recorder does not participate in the
events recorded.
As the centralization of archives into principal depositories got underway
during the early part of the 19th century and the science of archive keeping
began to develop, historians, following Ranke, turned to them as objective
truth. 'Ultimate history' (Acton, 1896) seemed only a generation or two
away. National series of archive transcripts were begun: Monumenta Germaniae
Historica (1826-), Collection de Documents Inédits sur l'Histoire de France
(1850-), the British Rolls Series and Calendars (1856-) and others. Only
slowly was it realized that the proper use of archives could be made only
after painstaking study of how the documents were produced, and that even
then, error and fabrication could be uncovered.
Early musicological studies included some transcripts, either of entire
series of documents concerning musical administration (such as Edward
Rimbault's The Old Cheque-book, or Book of Remembrance of the Chapel Royal,
London, 1872) or of selected items pertaining to music from more general
documents (such as those in Casimiri's periodical Note d'archivio, 1924-42,
relating to the Cappella Sistina in Rome), but air travel and microfilm
contributed to a postwar wave of comprehensive archival studies on composers
and musical activities in city, court and church. More recent archival
studies have drawn on the administrative records of music printers,
publishers, orchestras, opera houses and of the media, and on a broader
historiographical base.
Vincent Duckles (with Barbara H. Haggh)
5. Lexicography and terminology.
The lexicography of music is a form of applied scholarship the object of
which is to condense, organize (normally in alphabetical order) and clarify
the terms musicians use to communicate their ideas about and their
experience of their art; it is commonly extended to include biographical
material on individual musicians. This interest has given rise to a long
tradition of dictionary-making beginning with Brossard in 1701 and extending
through Walther, Rousseau, Grassineau and Koch to such distinguished modern
representatives of the genre as Willi Apel's Harvard Dictionary of Music
(1944, 2/1969), the subject volume ('Sachteil') of the Riemann Musik Lexikon
(12/1967) and the first edition of Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart
(1948-68). After a decade described by Michael A. Keller as 'the era of
reprinters', lexicography received a fresh impetus with the publication of
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians in 1980. The present
revision appears at a time when other major projects, including the second
edition of Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart (1994-) and The Garland
Encyclopedia of World Music (1998-), are already underway, yet which may
prove, for economic and practical reasons, to be the high-water mark in the
history of printed reference works in general. (See Dictionaries and
encyclopedias of music for a historical review of the genre and a
comprehensive list of works.)
The history, purpose and practice of dictionary-making have been much
discussed. According to Harold E. Samuel, 'the lexicographer is expected to
synthesize existing knowledge, not to undertake new research'. Indeed, the
practice of lexicography has often been denigrated as mere compilation or
popularization; yet all scholars use dictionaries, whether they acknowledge
them or not. Speaking in 1969, H.H. Eggebrecht remarked that the interest
and historical value of a dictionary resides more in the integrity of its
conception than in the individual articles. At a practical level, 'the art
of lexicography consists largely in finding optimal compromises'. The
quality of the result depends on finding contributors with the rare
combination of specialist knowledge, enthusiasm for the task and a gift for
dictionary style, combined with agreement on the classification and limits
of topics. Jan LaRue has commented further on the natural inclination of
scholars towards expansion rather than conciseness and their difficulty in
committing to paper anything short of a definitive version; he suggested
sending drafts of articles prepared in-house or by graduate students to
consultants who would react quickly and gleefully to every error of fact and
interpretation.
Among the constant problems faced by lexicographers are issues of accuracy,
content, balance and bias. The derivative nature of dictionaries leads to
many pitfalls; Nicolas Slonimsky has chronicled the amusing fate
occasionally befalling such eminent figures as Percy Scholes, Eric Blom and
Slonimsky himself, along with 'Grove-diggers' in general. Viorel Cosma has
made numerous suggestions for overcoming discrepancies caused by questions
of translation and transliteration, including the use of multilingual
headwords and standardized abbreviations, together with more precise
documentation of sources. Some degree of national bias in lexicography
remains almost inevitable and in some ways desirable, but the general trend
has been towards greater inclusiveness and objectivity. As early as 1768
Rousseau went beyond a purely eurocentric view of music, and the
terminological reference works of recent decades have offered enhanced
coverage of non-Western and popular music. D.M. Randel drew attention to
this tendency in his edition of The New Harvard Dictionary of Music (1986),
although Apel's original had been regarded as a model in its day. Stanley
Sadie has argued that any possible bias in favour of the music of
English-speaking countries in The New Grove dictionaries is justified,
indeed appropriate, on the practical grounds that those countries are where
they would principally be used and about whose musical life fuller
information would be sought. Defending the Riemann Musik Lexikon against the
charge of European bias, Eggebrecht stated that the balance of art music to
folk music reflected the quantity and quality of existing scholarship rather
than any assumed value judgment as to their relative importance.
Furthermore, non-Western music can be described only in its own terms and is
not necessarily susceptible to analysis by the methods of Western
musicology.
Dictionaries of music reflect the use of terms in all kinds of primary
sources, musical, theoretical and documentary. At the same time, they
themselves become historical phenomena furnishing primary evidence of the
musical mentality of past eras. It is evident that terms often change their
meanings over time, and may coalesce in groups or undergo mutations; logical
classifications are constantly at risk of being upset by the march of
history. The phenomenon of 'term-families' and their behaviour was of
particular interest to Wilibald Gurlitt, who projected a Handwörterbuch der
musikalischen Terminologie that would trace the lineage of the vocabulary of
music in a manner similar to that used in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Such a work would provide a historical analysis of musical terms according
to their inherent relationships and family groupings. The first issue of a
handbook under Gurlitt's title, edited by Eggebrecht, came out in 1972, and
his scheme was still in the process of being realized in 2000. The
loose-leaf format of this work allows constant revision and updating but
condemns it to a state of perpetual incompleteness. A similar approach has
been adopted in biographical dictionaries where currency is of prime
importance, such as Hanns-Werner Heister's Komponisten der Gegenwart, begun
in 1992.
The historical analysis of terms serves as a means to gaining an
understanding of the development of concepts, but there is another aspect of
the relationship between word and music that confronts the musicologist with
a fundamental dilemma - the need to apply verbal symbols to an art that
conveys its meanings through the medium of sound. One can talk or write
about music, but the experience of music itself can be known only through
its own 'language', the language of sound. The effort to resolve the
disparity between verbal and tonal discourse was a lifelong preoccupation
for Charles Seeger, who saw little chance of bringing these two realms of
meaning into complete coincidence. Until recently it was the inevitable fate
of the musicologist to suffer what Seeger called the 'linguocentric
predicament', from which the advent of multimedia technology now offers, in
theory at least, the possibility of an escape. The CD-ROM Microsoft Musical
Instruments (1992), for example, presents an introduction to the subject
using text, pictures, maps and recordings to place individual instruments in
their cultural and aural context. Most such products, however, are
educational rather than scholarly, and sometimes openly commercial, in their
objectives.
The compilation and presentation of electronic dictionaries on the World
Wide Web overcomes at a stroke the limitations of space but raises more
acutely the issues of content and editorial control. In the field of music,
many such ventures are compiled by amateurs whose technological expertise
surpasses their musicological credentials, and the results consist mainly of
links to existing documents or of randomly-contributed material whose
accuracy and objectivity cannot be guaranteed. Enthusiasts have created
numerous terminological lists for particular musical styles, as well
discographies inviting users to submit their own opinions. Among the few
scholarly dictionaries of music available on-line is The New Grove
Dictionary of Opera, a revision of the four-volume edition published in
1992. As compared with the printed version, this offers enhanced search
facilities, factual updating and links to related sites and images, yet it
remains essentially text-based and has barely begun to exploit the
theoretical potential of the electronic world which it inhabits. The
harnessing of that potential, in musicology as in other disciplines, will be
among the foremost challenges to lexicographers of the 21st century.
Robert Balchin
6. Organology and iconography.
(i) Organology.
Organology, the study of musical instruments in terms of their history and
social function, design, construction and relation to performance, has
interested scholars since at least the 17th century. Michael Praetorius, in
Syntagma musicum (ii, 1618-19), included an important section on
instruments, including some non-Western types, with realistic illustrations
drawn to scale. Other technical discussions appear in encyclopedic works of
Mersenne (Harmonie universelle, 1636-7) and Kircher (Musurgia universalis,
1650). Modern organologists and reproducers of historical instruments (who
might be called 'applied organologists') have benefited from the
observations of such early scholars, particularly where well-preserved
original instruments are rare or non-existent (see also Organology).
In addition to providing practical information useful to performers and
instrument makers, organologists seek to elucidate the complex,
ever-changing relationships among musical style, performing practices and
evolution of instruments worldwide. This study involves authenticating and
dating old instruments by scientific means, discerning the methods by which
instruments of different cultures have been designed and produced, and
investigating the many extra-musical influences - such as advances in
technology and changing economic conditions - that lead to innovation and
obsolescence. The symbolism and folklore of instruments are subjects that
organology shares with music iconography and ethnomusicology.
Since the late 18th century, interest in instruments of all kinds has served
an ethnomusicological purpose by providing a common avenue of approach to
the music of diverse cultures. G.A. Villoteau (1759-1838) made the first
scientific study of ancient Egyptian music largely on the basis of
depictions of instruments in tombs and temples; later archaeological
discoveries of actual if fragmentary Egyptian instruments allowed his
conclusions to be refined and corrected. Organology as an academic
discipline came into its own after the 19th-century development of large,
permanent instrument collections in Europe and the USA. Once these
repositories were established, organologists, who were often also museum
curators, confronted the challenges of comprehensive classification and
description. Curt Sachs's Real-Lexikon der Musikinstrumente (1913), a
pioneering effort to systematize knowledge of instruments on a worldwide
basis, and the widely-adopted classificatory scheme devised jointly by Sachs
and Erich von Hornbostel, were based on Victor-Charles Mahillon's research
on instruments collected at the Brussels Conservatory beginning in the
1870s. Nicholas Bessaraboff, who in 1941 introduced the term 'organology' in
the sense used here, applied a classification derived from those of Francis
W. Galpin (1910, 1937) to the collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
The study of instruments per se became an important resource for comparative
musicology (e.g. Hornbostel's adducing of panpipe tunings as evidence of a
cultural connection between Brazil and Polynesia); but ethnomusicologists
have tended to subordinate a purely object-orientated approach to a broader
consideration of instruments' musical and social contexts. Especially in
traditional and non-literate cultures, the shapes, materials and decoration
of instruments, no less than their sounds, convey meaning essential to their
functions; seeking to understand these features, organologists might
collaborate in field research with ethnologists and native informants.
Efforts to interpret ancient and prehistoric sound-producing implements have
thus far usually proven inconclusive or unconvincing, in part because of the
difficulty of faithfully reconstructing scattered fragmentary remains. Since
primitive noisemakers often served multiple purposes, the sonic function of
an excavated artefact might even go unrecognized.
Recent studies of Western instruments have produced important though
sometimes controversial results in such matters as pitch and tuning,
historically appropriate string materials, and the origin and dissemination
of various instrument types. Technological advances (e.g. in
dendrochronology and computer-assisted tomography) have broadened the scope
of organological investigation and helped raise standards of
connoisseurship. During the last quarter of the 20th century, John Koster
and G. Grant O'Brien contributed valuable new information concerning the
construction and uses of early stringed keyboard instruments, and Peter
Williams explicated the obscure history of organs. Karel Moens raised
fundamental questions about the authentication of antique bowed string
instruments, while Herbert Heyde, a specialist in the development of
woodwind and brass instruments, demonstrated the relevance of geometric
proportional schemes and local units of measure to instrument design. Such
studies as these depend on close examination of extant instruments and
primary documentary sources, including treatises, patent claims and musical
compositions, as well as iconographic evidence.
One striking conclusion to emerge from analysis of a wide range of data is
that, contrary to common belief, major advances in instrument design often
precede rather than result from musical style shifts, as innovative
instrument makers, responding to general market conditions, introduce novel
types having expressive potentials that might take generations for musicians
to explore. The history of the piano and of the saxophone exemplify
instances where, so to speak, the medium anticipated the message.
Observations such as this demonstrate the power of organology to shift
perceptions of music history.
Vincent Duckles (with Laurence Libin)
(ii) Iconography.
The first generations of musicological scholars in the late 18th and early
19th centuries were acutely aware that their discipline differed from
neighbouring ones in so far as the objects of their study were invisible and
bound to process in time, and hence more ephemeral than the painted or the
written ones. The lack of tangible evidence inevitably led scholars to
explore secondary sources such as pictures and texts about music. Thus
Martin Gerbert appended to his De cantu et musica sacra (1774) a few plates
(xxiii-xxxiv) with pictures of medieval musical instruments from illuminated
manuscripts. In the main text he discussed their shape, purpose and terms
and sketched a history of the use of musical instruments in the Church (iii,
chap.3). A similar approach to visual material was taken 50 years later in a
study of non-Western music. G.A. Villoteau, as a member of the Napoleonic
expedition to the upper Nile valley, collected pictorial material on the
music life in ancient Egypt and compared it with the ethnic evidence of his
own day in Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean. The results were extensive
articles with illustrations published as a part of the Description de
l'Egypte (1809-22).
Throughout the 19th century the motive for iconographical studies continued
to be the interest in the tangible objects of past cultures
(Realienforschung). Musicologists found themselves in the good company of
cultural historians of various kinds. Particularly important promoters of
this area of research were the antiquarian societies such as the Société
Française des Antiquaires in Paris, which inspired the iconographical work
on medieval music by Fétis, Coussemaker and Bottée de Toulmon published in
the decade 1839-49. Since that time an interest in musical iconography, in
tandem with organology and performing practice, has been a hallmark of
French scholarship. It bore fruit in the foundation of the Société pour la
Musique d'Autrefois in the 1920s by Geneviève Thibault and in the doctoral
dissertations of Evelyn Reuter (1938) and Claudie Marcel-Dubois (1941).
Given the close contacts between art history and musicology, which led, for
instance, to the adoption in musicology of the art-historical terms
Renaissance and Baroque from Jakob Burckhardt and Heinrich Wölfflin, one
might have expected musical iconography to be a field of intense
collaboration between art historians and musicologists. That, however, has
rarely been the case. Emile Mâle, the most prominent art historian in France
around the turn of the century, had little influence on French musical
iconography despite his very influential work on themes in medieval art.
Only after World War II did French scholarship enter a new era with the
publications of Albert P. de Mirimonde.
For German, Spanish, Scandinavian and British musicological scholarship,
too, the initial incentive for studying works of art was the interest in
objects from past cultures, and so it remained until World War II. The first
anthological collections of pictures with musical subject matter began to
appear, culminating in Georg Kinsky's Geschichte der Musik in Bildern (1929,
translated only a year later into English, French and Italian) and Heinrich
Besseler's Musikgeschichte des Mittelalters und der Renaissance (1931), a
historical survey with a superb selection of illustrative material. After
the war, Besseler and Max F. Schneider, and later Besseler's student Werner
Bachmann, published the multi-volume serial Musikgeschichte in Bildern.
Before it came to a halt with the closure of the East German publishing
house in 1990, it had produced 18 volumes of European and eight of
extra-European material.
As early as 1914 Hugo Leichtentritt, in his article 'Was lehren uns die
Bildwerke . ?', voiced scepticism about the indiscriminate use of pictorial
evidence for the reconstruction of instruments and performance. But it was
another half-century before a methodological base was laid, by Steger
(1961), Winternitz (1961), Hammerstein (1964), Seebass (1973) and Droysen
(1976). Since then a number of British and American scholars, such as Mary
Remnant, Ian Woodfield, Edward Ripin, Howard M. Brown, Keith Polk and Colin
Slim, and in Italy Elena Ferrari Barassi, have provided models of cautious
and successful scholarship; McKinnon also offered methodological reflections
(1982). So, to the end of the 20th century, the number of scholars using
musical iconography as an auxiliary discipline is considerable. Without
their efforts and those of others, successful reconstructions of musical
instruments and the revival of performing practices no longer in use would
not have been possible. These areas of interest have made a spectacular move
forward and enabled the Early Music movement to be a serious force in the
global music business. The role accorded to musical iconography in the study
of performing practice and musical instruments is also acknowledged by
editors of such journals as the Galpin Society Journal, Early Music, Journal
of the American Musical Instrument Society and Basler Jahrbuch für
historische Musikpraxis, who occasionally accept articles in this area.
Interest in the visual arts as a source sui generis for the study of
intellectual and social concepts of music is of a more recent date. Like
literary sources, pictures can provide information about the place that
society accords to music, what it thinks about music and how it is moved by
music. The beginnings go back to the studies of visual symbolism in the
mid-19th century (see Piper, 1847-51/R; Pougnet, 1869-70), but serious
scholarship began only through the activities of the Warburg circle. There,
for the first time, interdisciplinary cooperation between art history and
musicology (and also literature) was set in motion. Much of the movement
lost its impetus through the dislocation of the leading figures during the
Nazi period, but at least two articles (Schrade, 1929, and Gurlitt, 1938)
established a methodological standard that could serve, after the war, as a
basis for musical iconography and iconology (in the Panofskyan sense). By
the end of the 1970s it had been definitely established with the
publications of Hammerstein, Winternitz, Seebass and McKinnon. A different
perspective that had its sources in Besseler's approach focussed on the
sociological side. Bachmann and in particular Walter Salmen are its
representatives, as to a degree is Richard Leppert, who combines it with
gender critique.
Meanwhile the International Association of Music Libraries had put a
bibliographical network in place and began to work on its series of
Répertoires. In 1972, as a parallel music-iconographical undertaking,
Geneviève Thibault-de Chambure, Barry S. Brook and Harald Heckmann founded
the Répertoire international d'iconographie musicale (for reports of its
activities see Fontes artis musicae). It spawned a number of cataloguing
centres in various countries, the publication of a bibliography (Crane,
1971), catalogues, a newsletter and a yearbook, Imago musicae. Several
centres have developed software for the computerized cataloguing of pictures
with musical subject matter.
The last two decades of the century brought a steady increase of scholarship
that can partly be connected to the increased number of academic positions
(in Italy in the early 1980s, in Spain in the 1990s). The activity in Italy
surpasses that in any other country (see Barassi, 1996, and Seebass, 1994)
with theses, academic courses, conferences, publications and regional
cataloguing centres. Besides the traditional avenues of scholarship, such
neglected fields as scenography and the iconography of folk music have
attracted development there.
Research in synaesthetic questions is of relatively recent origin. It began
in 1949 with Thomas Munro, who was followed by T.H. Greer (1969) and Edward
Lockspeiser (1973); since then it has increased at a rapid pace.
Distinguished scholarship has been produced about individual figures such as
Schoenberg, Klee and Cage, but otherwise few steps have been taken beyond
the collection of materials in lavish exhibition catalogues and their
enumeration in surveys. The pluralism of style in the visual arts, the
breakdown of traditional genres and the subjectivism of verbalizations by
artists and art critics (which has also affected musicologists) have so far
prevented the formation of a reliable terminology for historical analysis.
Much remains for future scholars.
Research in folk music and the music of the other continents has been a
stepchild of musical iconography. The model study by Jaap Kunst and Roelof
Goris on Hindu-Javanese instruments (8th-15th centuries), had found no
worthy successors by the end of the century. The most productive groups
include the scholars interested in India and those formerly active at the
Research Centre at the Kunitachi College of Tokyo. In the long run the
volumes of Musikgeschichte in Bildern covering non-European countries should
have their impact. In 1986 the International Council for Traditional Music
established a Study Group for Musical Iconography that led to an
intensification of research, with some of the results published in Imago
musicae. Pluralistic methods of analysis are increasingly relevant for
iconographical research in non-Western historical materials because they
seem particularly apt for handling the emic-etic tensions that arise in
interpretation.
See also Iconography.
Tilman Seebass
7. Performing practice.
The study of the way music has been performed has been closely connected
with the historical performance movement but is by no means identical with
it (see Early music). Although 'old' music was performed in various circles
in earlier times (Bach and Handel at Gottfried van Swieten's concerts in
late 18th-century Vienna; Palestrina in the churches) performers used the
then 'modern' style with which they were familiar. The discipline can thus
hardly be said to have existed (save to an unimportant extent in a few 16th-
and 17th-century treatises that deal with the music of the ancient Greeks
and Romans, and in the interest of 18th-century writers such as Martini and
Hawkins in the same music) until after the various revivals of earlier music
began in the 19th century, for example, Mendelssohn's performances of music
by J.S. Bach and the publication of historical editions of old music and
editions of the works of Bach, Handel and others. Most performers in the
19th century and surprisingly many in the 20th assumed that older music must
be improved by performing it, for instance, on modern instruments with their
greater volume and brilliance, and even editors of medieval and Renaissance
music have often followed the same idea in their own way, modernizing
notation to resemble that to which their contemporaries were accustomed.
Other musicians, however, began to think that unexpected meanings, and
unexpected beauties, might be revealed if older works were performed in a
manner close to that heard by the original audiences.
An important landmark in the history of performing practice was the
publication in 1915 of Arnold Dolmetsch's book on the interpretation of
music in the 17th and 18th centuries, and a number of other studies appeared
about the same time or in the following few decades: Beyschlag on
ornamentation (1908/R), F.T. Arnold on figured bass (1931/R) and Robert Haas
on performing practice in general (1931/R). Much of this early work centred
on the problems of performing music by J.S. Bach and his contemporaries, and
was concerned with relearning obsolete instrumental techniques and
conventions of performance: improvising embellishments, realizing keyboard
parts from figured and unfigured basses, adding implied accidentals,
inventing appropriate scoring where none is indicated and so on. The usual
sources of information were treatises, dictionaries and other
contemporaneous accounts, and the notated music itself.
After World War II such scholars as Robert Donington, Thurston Dart,
Frederick Neumann, Sol Babitz, Michael Collins and Putnam Aldrich refined
pre-war ideas about performing Baroque music and advanced new ones; their
ideas have not always been accepted by the musical world or even the
scholarly community. From the 1950s the discipline enjoyed a gradual
expansion: performing practices of both earlier and later periods were
investigated and more sophisticated approaches were developed. Paul and Eva
Badura-Skoda's study of performing conventions in Mozart's keyboard music
(1957) moved research on performing practice forward from the Baroque era.
The revival of medieval and Renaissance music was an active collaboration of
makers, players and scholars: musical sources are often demonstrably
incomplete, instruments survive only as depicted in iconographical sources
and must be reconstructed, writings on musica ficta are difficult to
interpret, and so on. An important figure in establishing this new style of
research was Howard Mayer Brown. The investigation of the performing
practices of all periods has since benefited from this type of
collaboration: treatises, archival notices, literary works and works of art
have been used by those investigating later practices, as well as by
medieval and Renaissance scholars. Other techniques have also been added:
paper analysis, for example, has been used to aid in determining the state
of a manuscript at the time of a particular performance, and rigorous
techniques of measurement and physical analysis have aided in the recovery
of earlier techniques of instrument making, which in turn has helped in
determining how instruments worked and what they sounded like.
The concept of Authenticity in performance exercised scholars in the 1980s
especially: a prominent, if controversial, thinker in this area was Richard
Taruskin. Studies of recordings (available only from the late 19th century;
a few musical clocks and barrel organs have provided interesting evidence of
earlier performing styles) have revealed, among other things, how quickly
ideas of musical performance change. Investigation in the late 20th century,
while continuing to treat technical aspects, also came to encompass cultural
context, the acoustics of performance spaces, aesthetics, relationships
between composers, and relationships between modern and old perceptions of
performance.
See also Performing practice.
Vincent Duckles (with Janet K. Page)
8. Aesthetics and criticism.
Music aesthetics seeks to answer the questions: what is music? how does it
carry meaning? what is its place in human life, culture and society? What is
greatness in music? Answers have been provided by some of the world's
greatest philosophers: Plato and Aristotle, St Augustine, Thomas Aquinas,
Kepler, Leibniz, Descartes, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche
and Marx. Scholars in acoustics and psychology, such as Stumpf, Helmholtz
and Seashore, have made a large contribution. In the 20th century the most
significant contributions have been offered by Adorno, Dahlhaus, Ingarden,
Langer, Meyer, Scruton and Zuckerkandl.
Aesthetic questions are present in almost all types of musicological
writing. They arise when music historians discuss the role of music in a
social milieu or the impact of personal environment on individual musical
development, or liken music to other arts, or define the terms of a specific
style; they are raised by acousticians who seek their bases in physical
properties; they are invoked by analysts as foundations for theories and
methods of operating, and underlie their attitudes towards musical material,
the process of hearing and the function of performance; they appear
constantly in the writings of music critics wherever the criteria for
judgment of craftsmanship, imagination in composition, and technical skill
and interpretative insight in performance come into play; they penetrate the
works of iconographers and experts in performing practice, just as they do
the deliberations of performers, when leaping the gap - imaginative, despite
its historical conditioning - between evidence and statement or performance.
They are thus expressed in many different styles of writing: scientific,
scholarly, literary, philosophical. They also occur outside the literature
of musicology, in systematic philosophical writings from Pythagoras to
Leonard Meyer, and in general histories of art and culture.
Specialist writing in musical aesthetics extends back to the Middle Ages,
above all in the speculative tradition which was inherited from classical
Greek philosophy, and which extended through the Renaissance to the early
Baroque period. It was with the theory of emotive meaning in music, the
so-called theory of the Affect, that aesthetics took on a sharply different
character. Scheibe and Mattheson were the most important figures in the
development of this theory. In the 19th century Hanslick's theory of music
as 'tonally moving forms' founded a line of aesthetic thought that rejected
emotional and programmatic interpretations of music, a formalism that has
been followed by Combarieu, Stravinsky, Langer and others. Kurth's theory of
music as a stream of tension, and as expression of the will (in the
Schopenhauerian sense) belongs to the same line of thought. Kretzschmar, on
the other hand, took the view that music had meaning and emotional state,
and that these could be directly deduced. There is an influential body of
Marxist aesthetic or critical theory in music, particularly in the work of
Adorno, Bloch, Lissa and Supicic. Many composers have contributed to the
theory of aesthetics, among them Wagner, Busoni, Schoenberg, Stravinsky,
Hindemith, Sessions, Cage, Cowell, Schaeffer and Stockhausen.
In the last decades of the 20th century, the aesthetics of music has
broadened in scope. Its arena of concerns has moved beyond the domain of
classical or high music to incorporate more popular forms, diverse in
social, ritualistic and cultural ramifications. Ethnomusicological research
has contributed to this general broadening of scope. Feminist, semiological
and more overtly political theorizing has entered into the field alongside
the continuation of a formalism that dominated music theory and philosophy
for a large part of the 20th century. The philosophy of music presupposed by
all the areas of music has become more critical and self-aware as the
tendency towards theory has predominated.
See also Criticism and Philosophy of music.
Vincent Duckles (with Lydia Goehr)
9. Sociomusicology.
That music is a social activity and not just a collection of musical
artefacts in organized sound was realized by the earliest writers in the
Western intellectual canon. Both Plato and Aristotle stressed the importance
of music as an activity in society and sought to establish criteria for its
evaluation as a social phenomenon. In the subsequent development of musical
thought a different tradition, emanating from Aristotle's pupil Aristoxenus
and centred on the investigation of music as a pure sounding phenomenon,
gained a supremacy which remained largely unchallenged until as late as the
18th century, when Charles Burney, avoiding the Aristoxenian tradition,
discussed music as a phenomenon influenced by manners and social
circumstances.
In the climate of an increased importance of social sciences, several
19th-century music historians, while still adhering to the idealist
philosophical tradition (Winterfeld, Spitta, Jahn) sought to incorporate
ideas about the social position of music and musicians into their
biographical studies. However, though interested in music as a social
phenomenon, Guido Adler thought of the study of musical institutions as only
an ancillary musicological discipline. At the end of the 19th century and
during the early 20th, advances in general sociology enabled, among others,
Lalo, Combarieu, Bücher and Max Weber to formulate theories about the
interdependence of musical and social phenomena.
All the major ideological currents of the 20th century left their mark on
the study of music as a social phenomenon. The positivist tradition
reflected itself in the fact that, on the simplest level, social phenomena
relating to music were being explored quantitatively, employing statistics
to determine popularity of works and authors, modes of transmission and
audience response. Some adherents of the German philosophical tradition
sought to establish social history of music as a critique of processes in a
capitalist society, uncovering tensions arising from the confrontation of
individual creativity and social dictates (e.g. T.W. Adorno). Leninist
Marxists dominated the thought in the Communist bloc in the middle of the
century with a rigid distinction between the 'base' (society, economy) and
the 'superstructure' (cultural and artistic phenomena) - thus discrediting
those aspects of Marxism that were otherwise capable of providing the social
history of music with criteria by which to judge the subtle distinctions
that arise between musical pursuits - either of producers or of consumer of
art - and the forces of tradition and social responsibility which,
consciously or subconsciously, shape attitudes and help create forms of
musical life.
About the middle of the 20th century, a dilemma began to be felt about
whether sociology of music and the social history of music (or, to broaden
the term somewhat, sociomusicology) are a single discipline or two separate
disciplines. A contention exists according to which the sociology of music
is simply a narrowing of general sociological principles applied to music as
an object of inquiry (approaching it 'from the outside'), whereas
sociomusicology examines social roles of music, musicians and musical
institutions 'from within'. This is in practice difficult to establish, and
the rich development in the last quarter of the 20th century of the study of
'classical' music as a form of cultural practice, as well as the claim of
ethnomusicology that not just Western art music but all musics are
essentially social phenomena, to be judged by the same criteria, confirm the
lack of a clear distinction.
See also Sociology of music.
Bojan Bujic
10. Psychology, hearing.
The areas of musicology that have witnessed the strongest links with
psychological studies of hearing are theory and analysis. Theories of
musical organization and investigations of the human response to music have
been associated since the time of classical Greek writings on music (see
Barker, 1989), and music was the focus for one of the earliest contributions
to modern psychology - Helmholtz's treatise of 1863, Die Lehre von den
Tonempfindungen als physiologische Grundlage für die Theorie der Musik,
which already took account of differences between a perceptual and a
musicological outlook. While asserting the importance of a scientific
approach to the issue of consonance and dissonance, Helmholtz nonetheless
noted that the distinction 'does not depend . on the nature of the intervals
themselves but on the construction of the whole tonal system' (Eng. trans.,
p.228).
In the development of new music theory and analytical method after World War
II, psychological principles played an important role. Meyer (1956R), for
example, made use of Gestalt principles of perceptual organization to
account for the ways in which listeners' musical expectations might be
generated and manipulated, and thus for a theory of musical affect and an
analytic method which gave an account of melodic and rhythmic processes
based on the same principles. He later (1967) took the idea of expectation
and developed it into a theory of implication couched within the framework
of information theory. Meyer was not alone in associating music with
information theory, but while the more formal attempts to understand musical
processes and listeners' responses to them in these terms fell by the
wayside as information theory failed to live up to its rather heady
promises, Meyer's project, in which Gestalt and information-processing ideas
were woven into music theory, continued to move forward both in another book
of his own (1973) and in the work of Narmour (1977). Narmour's two
subsequent volumes (1990, 1992) represent a culmination of this particular
line of thought, presenting a painstaking investigation and classification
of melodic processes still based very largely on Gestalt principles, but
couched within the dominant paradigm of cognitive psychology.
An indication of the impetus to find common ground between psychological
research and musicology was the founding in 1981 of the journal
Psychomusicology (a term coined by Laske in a paper of 1977), whose position
statement expressed the desire to bring together the perspectives of
psychology and musicology in a consideration of music. A significant book in
this domain is Lerdahl and Jackendoff's theory of tonal music (1983), which
takes both the basic principles of generative theory from linguistics and
perceptual principles from psychology to create a theory which states in its
first sentence that the authors 'take the goal of a theory of music to be a
formal description of the musical intuitions of a listener who is
experienced in a musical idiom' (p.1). The interpenetration of listening and
musicology can seldom have been more directly expressed. The form of the
theory is a set of rules that generate hierarchical structural descriptions
of musical surfaces, allowing for inevitable differences of interpretation
and inherent structural ambiguities through the device of 'preference rules',
which adjudicate between different interpretative possibilities in an
interactive manner. Many of these preference rules are based on Gestalt
principles, and the authors regard the theory as a contribution both to
cognitive science and to music theory. The theory has been extended to
tackle atonal music (Lerdahl, 1989), and has formed the basis of a
cognitively based critique of compositional systems (Lerdahl, 1988).
From the perspective of the psychology of listening, musicology has made its
mark in the recognition that empirical and modelling work should take
account of the theoretical framework provided by musicology. An early
example is Francès's wide-ranging treatment (1958), which considers a
variety of issues, such as musical semantics and rhetoric, which have only
recently made their way back into the perceptual literature. Krumhansl's
research (1990) on the perception of tonal structure is another example, as
is Parncutt, who has developed (1989) an explanation of harmonic function
and harmonic process based on a psychoacoustic principle first investigated
by Terhardt (1974). Similarly, the perception of tonality has been tackled
using empirical studies based on set-theoretic principles which themselves
occupy the boundary between what would be called systematic musicology in
some traditions, and formal modelling or cognitive science in others
(Butler, 1988-9). Other meeting-points of this kind can be found in the
edited collections by Howell, Cross and West (1985, 1991) and in Bigand
(1993), who considers a variety of ways in which research in music
perception has contributed to an understanding of auditory cognition more
generally.
A number of commentators have cautioned against a simplistic collapsing of
musicological and psychological perspectives: musicology and psychology have
rather different aims, and unsystematic leakage between the two can lead to
shortcomings on either side being disguised and concealed (Clarke, 1989).
Similarly, analysis offers a mythopoeic rather than scientific view of
musical structure, and attempts to test analytical descriptions with
empirical tasks are epistemologically confused (Cook, 1990); further,
empirical work in the psychology of music has often been concerned with a
kind of listening that is quite unrepresentative of spontaneous behaviour
and is heavily influenced by the categories and concepts of musicology
(Cook, 1994). Thus the attempt to compare musicological predictions or
pronouncements with empirical results becomes a circular exercise with
little relevance to the listening experiences of most people most of the
time. While offering an optimistic view of the potential for interactions
between music theory and cognitive science, Agmon (1989-90) points to
misunderstandings that have resulted from confusing or collapsing different
domains (physical, perceptual, cognitive) and different types of theory
('competence' and 'performance' theories).
Lastly, there have been attempts to make use of perceptual principles in
constructing a theory of structure and meaning in electro-acoustic music - a
development that is understandable given the inappropriateness of
notation-based methods for this music. The relationship between different
modes of listening has been explored (Smalley, 1992, based on those
described by Schaeffer, 1966) and the dual capacity of sounds both to
specify their sources and also to become bound up in the more abstract
structural relationships that have been the primary focus of most theory and
analysis. Windsor (1994) makes the link with perceptual theory more
explicit, and opens the way for a more thoroughly perceptual theory of
electro-acoustic music. A significant and closely related body of work is
that of Bregman (1990), whose approach to audition has been influential in
perceptually motivated accounts of polyphonic structure, melodic and
harmonic organization, and the whole matter of how listeners identify an
'auditory scene' in the complex context of the acoustical environment. If
the relationship between perceptual studies and musicology has been uneasy
and uncomfortable at times, and has seen its fair share of epistemological
'ships in the night', there is now at least a greater awareness within
musicology of the contribution that psychology might make, and equally a
more musicologically informed approach within the psychology of music.
See also Hearing and psychoacoustics, Information theory and Psychology of
music.
Eric F. Clarke
11. Gender and sexual studies.
Until very recently musicologists rarely addressed issues related to gender
or sexuality. The vast majority of the musicians examined by the field were
male and assumed to be heterosexual. Because 'male' and 'heterosexual' count
as unmarked categories (as opposed to 'female' and 'homosexual') within
traditional epistemologies, they did not seem to require comment. Only with
the rise of women's, feminist and gay and lesbian studies in the other
humanities and social sciences have gender and sexuality become significant
areas of research within musicology.
(i) Women in music.
The first venture within the discipline to focus on gender was the attempt
begun in the 1970s to recover the history of women in music. Before that
time very little was known - or at least remembered - about women in music
history: their name rarely appeared in textbooks or journals, except for the
occasional woman (e.g. Clara Wieck Schumann and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel)
noteworthy because she was related to a famous male composer. Since then,
however, there has been an explosion of information concerning women
composers, performers and patrons. The women who have received extensive
attention in scholarship, recording and performances include Schumann and
Hensel but also Hildegard of Bingen, Barbara Strozzi, Elisabeth-Claude
Jacquet de La Guerre, Amy Cheney Beach, Cécile Chaminade, Ethel Smyth,
Florence Price and Ruth Crawford Seeger. Contemporary women composers have
benefited from this increasing interest, and they too have received an
unprecedented degree of attention from music historians, critics and
performing organizations.
The first contributions in feminist musicology dealt with individual women
or with specific historical contexts, but a number of pioneering books from
the 1980s began piecing together more continuous accounts of women in music.
Unlike the more traditional surveys that trace a succession of 'masters',
these accounts tend to pay attention to many kinds of music-related
activities besides formal composition, and they also observe far more
closely the social conditions within which musicians have operated (see
Bowers and Tick, 1986; Briscoe, 1987; Marshall, 1993; Neuls-Bates, 1982;
Pendle, 1991; and Sadie and Samuel, GroveW).
As in other disciplines, the more musicologists have learnt about the women
previously overlooked by the canon of accepted masterworks, the more they
have realized the need to reassess the historical processes that had
resulted in its formation - in whose interests canons operate, what gets
included, what excluded, and by means of what criteria (see Citron, 1993;
Bergeron and Bohlman, 1992). Similar projects have focussed on the histories
of women in jazz and popular music and have altered received notions of
those traditions as well (see Carby, 1990; Dahl, 1984; Davis, 1998; Gaar,
1992; Gourse, 1995; Harrison, 1988; Placksin, 1982; and Rose, 1994).
Just as many music historians have turned their attention to women musicians
from earlier times, so ethnographers have come to incorporate questions
concerning gender ideologies into studies of music culture, both Western and
non-Western (see Herndon and Ziegler, 1991; Koskoff, 1987; and Sugarman,
1997). As ethnomusicologists have studied gender-based divisions of labour
across cultures, they have helped to diminish the longstanding gap between
the Western art tradition and cultures of 'others'. For comparing structures
and justifications for gendered hierarchies in different cultures sheds
light not only on people in remote parts of the globe, but also on European
and North American cultural practices and traditions, which have long
claimed exemption from ethnographic analysis (see Bohlman, 1993, and
Robertson, 1989).
Bringing women into music studies counts among the most remarkable
contributions to musicology of the last 30 years of the 20th century. The
number of institutions offering courses on women and music has increased
dramatically, and most undergraduate music history surveys now include at
least some music by women.
See also Women in music.
(ii) Gender and music.
As soon as women became a focus for music research, the reinterpretation of
male musicians as 'gendered' inevitably followed. Many dimensions of music
study that had seemed objective began to appear in new lights, motivating
innovative scholarship in several different directions.
The first cluster of publication on women in music concentrated on sources
and biographical information. As musicologists turned to the music itself,
however, they began reassessing the standards and analytical devices then
brought to all music, without regard to intended content. This reassessment
helped precipitate a move in the discipline towards criticism or
interpretation. Two isolated yet influential studies of feminist-based music
criticism, Rieger and Clément, appeared in the 1980s. Before their
publication, musicologists had not even addressed representations of gender
in the actual plots of operas, let alone the possibility of gender-encoding
in non-theatrical music. Accordingly, feminist music criticism began with
these pioneering volumes, which introduced into musicology the kinds of
critique that had long since become familiar - almost de rigueur - in
literary, art and film studies concerning cultural representations of women
and men, masculinity and femininity.
The 1990s witnessed the development of several kinds of criticism focussed
on gender. Some writers (e.g. Kramer and McClary) have brought a critical
perspective to the study of music, often dealing in detail not only with
plots or lyrics but also with the music itself. Nor do these studies usually
concentrate on representations of gender alone, but they also treat class,
race and exoticism, domains often mapped on to gender in operas. They also
address how the music itself - its codes and more basic structural
procedures - participates in the production of these representations and
also predisposes listeners to certain points of view (Bellman, 1998; Lewin,
1992; and Locke, 1991).
This research has radically destabilized some of the assumptions that had
sustained musicological narratives of music history. For instance, Kallberg
(1992) has researched attitudes towards the genre of the nocturne and has
found how 'the feminine' was projected on to that repertory, the composers
who wrote such pieces and even the piano itself; Cusick (1993) has examined
the gendered polemics of the Monteverdi-Artusi controversy; Austern (1989)
and Leppert (1989) have investigated how gender has influenced musical
production and performance at various moments in Western music history;
McClary (1992) has been concerned with discerning how historically
constituted ideas of gender, sexuality and the body have informed even the
most basic of musical procedures from the 16th century to the present.
Many scholars involved in gender studies maintain strong allegiances with
the music of the canon (see Abbate, 1991, 1993) and justify those
allegiances by means of a variety of feminist theoretical strategies. The
collections of feminist musicology of the 1990s (Blackmer and Smith, 1995;
Cook and Tsou, 1993; Dunn and Jones, 1994; and Solie, 1993) offer a broad
spectrum of political positions: there is no monolithic position within this
area of musicology.
With the rise of gender-based criticism, other areas of music research have
likewise opened up to questions of gender. Music education, for instance,
long populated mostly by women under male supervision, has begun to rethink
philosophical premises and revise curricular planning (see Lamb, 1987; and
Green, 1997). Perhaps most surprising, given the separate nature of their
discipline, a number of music theorists too have started developing ways of
dealing with gender (see Guck, 1994; Hisama, 1995; Kielian-Gilbert, 1994;
Lewin, 1992; Maus, 1993; Straus, 1995).
See also Feminism and Gender (i).
(iii) Sexuality.
In most humanities disciplines, the feminist research of the 1970s had
already established itself before sexuality became a matter of widespread
scholarly interest. But the Gay Liberation Movement that emerged after the
Stonewall riots in 1968 and Foucault's theoretical rethinking of this and
other aspects of subjectivity made serious research on the history of
sexuality possible for the first time in history. As a consequence, the
1980s saw the growth of scholarship focussed variously on social identities
based on sexual preferences, structure of desire or erotic pleasure,
histories of the body and subcultures organized around same-sex erotic
inclinations.
Feminism appeared late in musicology, however, and research and theoretical
work on gay and lesbian issues emerged concurrently with the growth of
feminist music criticism. The individual most responsible for securing a
space for such work within musicology is Philip Brett, whose work on Britten
relates the relevance of the composer's homosexuality to his music. Wood and
Cusick have been at the centre of lesbian work in musicology, because of
both their work on women composers and their theoretical essays linking
sexuality and the perception of music. The principal publication to date
concerning sexuality and music is the collection edited by Brett, Wood and
Gary Thomas, Queering the Pitch: the New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (1994).
Some of the projects concerned with sexuality deal with specific artists
(Thomas on Handel, 1994; Solomon, 1988-9, and McClary, 1993, on Schubert;
see also Gill, 1995); others deal with lesbian and gay reception, especially
of opera (see Blackmer and Smith, 1995; Koestenbaum, 1993; and Morris, in
Solie, ed., 1993).
When research on gender and sexuality first began to appear, some
musicologists objected that it would bring prurient concerns into the
discipline. Far from diminishing or tainting the repertories it studies,
this research has opened all music to important questions about cultural
understandings of the body, gender and erotic experience as crucial aspects
of subjectivity.