Download HISTORIOGRAPHY. Music historiography is the writing of music

HISTORIOGRAPHY.
Music historiography is the writing of music history. Its study reveals the changing
attitudes to music of the past as shown in writings about music,
1. Introduction.
2. Music-historical thinking before ‘music history’.
3. Topics of music historiography since c1750.
1. Introduction.
Since its origins in the 18th century, the writing of formal music history has been
shaped by the more venerable dynastic and national historiographies that established
the historical approach as the ‘most universal and encompassing and the highest of
all sciences’ (Schlegel). Thus music history, like the histories of all the arts, shares
essential tasks and subject areas with general history, among them the critical
examination of sources, chronological narrative, periodization, change and causality,
and biography. Nevertheless, because works of art are their central subject matter,
the histories of the arts differ crucially from other historical disciplines. Apart from
philological topics such as dating, transmission, attributions and editions, the
approach to general historiographical problems is inevitably conditioned by the
aesthetic views of the art historian. Moreover, critical judgments about works have
even more weight in the areas specific to the arts: the elucidation of style (whether
that of an individual artist or of a school or a period) and structure, and, when the
problem is broached, meaning. The very definition of such categories as style
(without which periodization and change cannot be conceptualized) and structure is
conditioned by aesthetic priorities. Even philology, especially in the absence of
(seemingly) incontrovertible source evidence, relies on aesthetics when judgments
about the artistic properties of works must fill that gap.
A highly significant consequence of the work-orientation of art histories has been the
question of autonomy, which extends from general historiographical areas to those
specific to the arts. Because musical works, for example, possess uniquely musical
material, does it follow that music (1) develops according to its own laws and (2) is
understood phenomenologically, or is it so highly conditioned by the greater cultural
processes to which it undeniably belongs that (1) explanations of its development
should not emphasize its autonomy and (2) formal explication is incomplete and
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insufficient? In all its phases music historiography has encompassed both
approaches, supported by the often competing philosophies of history to which every
music historian consciously or unconsciously subscribes.
Music-historical thinking before ‘music history’.
Centuries before antiquarian and historical perspectives began to motivate an interest
in early music for its own sake, medieval and Renaissance writing on music was
informed by a view of the musical past. That view depended in large part on an
uncritical acceptance of ancient legend and chronicle, biblical authority and
theological doctrine; thus it was not a historical view in any modern sense of the
word. Nevertheless, in speculative and practical theory and in aesthetic polemics, the
foundations for music historiography were already being laid. The past – transmitted
by classical and Christian theorists – was used both to defend current practice and to
legitimize innovation. Less frequently the past, notably the recent past, was found
wanting. The declaration of an ‘ars nove musice’ by Jehan des Murs in 1321 and the
attack on it by Jacobus de Liège (Speculum musice, before 1330) anticipated not only
the early 17th-century controversy about the ‘seconda pratica’ but also the general
historiographical problem of periodization and the definition and critical evaluation
of music perceived to be new. In Tinctoris's pronouncement that ‘there does not exist
a single piece of music, composed within the last 40 years, that is regarded by the
learned as worth hearing’ (Liber de arte contrapuncti, 1477), the distinction between
older and newer music is purely evaluative; technical and stylistic criteria are not part
of his argument. Tinctoris's implied rejection of antique and Christian scholastic
theory, and his explicit projection of individual composers – Ockeghem, Regis,
Busnoys and others – into the story of music's development, represent an early stage
of a gradual change in perspective that established music as a subject for humanistic
study and biography as fundamental for the development of music historiography.
The composers Tinctoris favoured were Franco-Flemish; in his Proportionale
musices (c1472–5) he preferred French ‘singing’ to English ‘shouting’ while
conceding the English their status as the ‘fount and origin’ of a ‘new art’. This
perception of national styles goes back to Plato's Republic and Athenaeus's
Deipnosophistae, and looks forward to 18th-century theories of national styles,
Herder's and Rousseau's philosophies of history (the national-linguistic basis for
individual paths of development) and the writing of national music histories.
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Tinctoris, like later proponents of the new, was not entirely dismissive of the old,
especially the very old; his introduction to Proportionale musices celebrates the
distant and recent past in music and music theory. Other humanist theorists
increasingly relied on antique thought rather than on Christian doctrine. Both the
advocates of the great stylistic innovations of the second half of the 16th century
(e.g. Vicentino, L'antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica, 1555; Galilei,
Dialogo della musica antica et della moderna, 1581) and the defenders of ancient
music and the more recent polyphonic music that was already considered to
constitute (without the term being used) a ‘classic’ style (L'Artusi, overo Delle
imperfettioni della moderna musica, 1600) drew on Greek theory to suppport their
positions. But the Christian theory of the divine origin of music maintained itself into
the early 18th century and posed a problem for authors who emphasized musical
development: how could something God-given be made better by man? Calvisius
maintained a balance implicit in the title of the historical section of his Exercitationes
musicae duae (1600), ‘De origine et progressu musices’: he acknowledged the divine
perfection of the original music, song; credited a man, Jubal, with the invention of a
less perfect vocal music; and, like Tinctoris, associated the progress of the previous
century with great composers, among them Josquin and Lassus. Calvisius's notion of
progress was, however, a pre-Enlightenment one; it was theologically grounded in
the Platonic-Christian tradition that viewed musica humana as an inferior
anticipation of the perfection of the music of the spheres to be revealed upon human
salvation.
Both Calvisius, who criticized Pope John XXII for his campaign against elaborate
polyphonic liturgical music, and Praetorius, who wrote a ‘Historische Beschreibung
der alten politischen und weltlichen Musik’ in Syntagma musicum (1614–18), were
Protestants, and their focus on progress and secular national tradition reflected
broader Protestant attempts to legitimize the Reformation through the idea of
historical development. Catholic writers on music, notably Mersenne (Harmonie
universelle, 1636–7), clung to established orthodoxy; the sensual aspect of music was
minimized, its divine character emphasized, and ancient music was discussed in
greater detail than that of the recent past. For Mersenne the history of music was still
‘divine history’. Yet not long after the publication of the Harmonie another Catholic
writer, the German Kircher, took a more comprehensive view, anticipating the
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universal-historical approach of the 18th century: within the musical curiosities and
legends in the Musurgia universalis (1650) are discussions of music in Old
Testament times, folk music and the secular music of the Mediterranean world.
The music-historical literature of the century after 1650 displays the same kinds of
internal contradictions that arose in the late 15th century. Printz (Historische
Beschreibung der edelen Sing- und Kling-Kunst, 1690) did not disavow divine
origin, but also stressed the sounds of nature and the role of human reason and
passion in the development of music. His influential chapter on ‘the most famous
musicians’ contains biographical sketches in chronological order in which the
cultural functions of music are also discussed. The chronology begins with the
mythical Jubal, but the emphasis rests on contemporary musicians. Bontempi
(Historia musica, 1695) perpetuated the scholastic approach to music as a
mathematical discipline in his comparative discussion of ancient and modern music.
The Bonnet-Bourdelot Histoire de la musique (1715) combines elements of
scholasticism with a nationalist perspective that, in the context of the ‘querelle des
anciens et des modernes’, argues for the superiority of contemporary French music
over Italian. The end of the century witnessed the gradual disappearance of the belief
in divine origins, an increasing acceptance of the validity of secular music, and a
strengthening interest in source studies (especially historical treatises on early music
and theory, which were cited at length). Chronological narratives were often based
on excerpts from earlier literature that, like Printz's, discussed individual composers
and the role of music in daily life (e.g. Walther, Musicalisches Lexicon, 1732).
Mattheson's negative review of Bontempi's Historia and his admonition that the
accuracy of secondary sources should not be taken for granted (Der vollkommene
Capellmeister, 1739, chap.22) reveal the influence of a nascent critical empiricism
and positivism fostered by the burgeoning natural sciences, all of which were crucial
to the development of modern historiography.
Topics ofMusic Historipgraphy since c
(i) Progress and historicism.
(ii) Formalism, autonomy and racialism.
(iii) Process and causality.
(iv) Periodization.
(v) Culture, style and work.
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(vi) The ‘new musicology’.
(i) Progress and historicism.
The strongest impetus to music historiography was, however, the old question of
progress in music, which became more acute in the intellectual climate of the
Enlightenment and as an offshoot of the ‘querelle’. This controversy, which began in
France in the late 17th century, centred on a debate about the superiority of classical
over contemporary literature but was soon extended to the other arts. In music it
helped trigger the ‘querelle des Bouffons,’ the long-running 18th-century argument
about the relative merits of contemporary Italian and French music. As late as 1780,
when La Borde's Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne (the most important
French music history of its time) was published, the dispute shaped historical
thinking in France. The ancient-modern dispute was the primary context for the
development of an enlightened ‘philosophy of history’ (a term coined by Voltaire)
which ushered in the age of true historical thinking and was in large part defined by
the notion of progress.
Because the idea of progress depends on the more basic idea of change, theories of
progress were developed in conjunction with theories of historical process, the motor
of change. The advocates of recent and contemporary culture grounded their
arguments for progress on evolutionary development according to natural law. This
view – abstract and metaphysical – shares the mechanism of the ‘divine plan’ of
history, but is not based on theology and allows for human activity and perfectibility.
The process of history – the advancement of reason through the different phases of
civilization – is universal, embracing all humankind. An understanding and
appreciation of the present and any earlier period can be obtained only through a
consideration of the human race's entire progress. This notion promoted the
encyclopedic approach and universal history, and, in the literature on music,
strengthened the century-old tradition of locating music's origins and tracing its
earlier phases (see §3(iv) below). A crucial difference can be discerned, however, in
the rising interest in the music of the past for its own sake, and not only for the ways
in which it led to the present state. This shift in perception, which spawned
historicism, arose virtually simultaneously with the idea of progress and became its
strongest competitor in the 19th and 20th centuries.
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The belief in progress underlies several of the most important late 18th-century
music histories, yet their authors – Burney (A General History of Music, 1776–89),
Hawkins (A General History of the Science and Practice of Music, 1776) and Forkel
(Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik, 1788–1801) – all celebrated past achievements
and the significance of music in earlier cultures, and recognized that progress had
limitations and was not inevitable. Hawkins took a progressive stance in his critique
of William Temple, who saw in Greek music (and poetry and visual arts) an absolute
standard of beauty that could never be surpassed. How were such views possible,
asked Hawkins, in an age that gave birth to a Byrd, a Palestrina or a Shakespeare?
Yet on the basis of his retrospective aesthetic preferences Hawkins championed stile
antico church music and opposed post-1600 instrumental music and Italian opera,
while acknowledging the merits of Corelli and Handel. Moreover, in his attack on
Addison's relativistic argument that English opera should exclude Italian-style
recitative because it was foreign to English culture, Hawkins embraced the absolutist,
ahistorical aesthetic categories that he rejected in Temple's work. Burney, whose
three volumes on ‘the present state of music’ in continental Europe (1771–3) are the
most detailed (and valorizing) discussion of contemporary music culture before the
19th century, de-emphasized the liturgical tradition in favour of secular genres,
notably Italian opera. He rejected the idealization of classical cultures and (like
Mattheson) criticized the authority enjoyed by ancient and medieval music theorists
and, by implication, the practice of heavy citation of older literature. But Burney,
whose popularizing history is full of the value judgments more usually found in
music journalism, did find fault with the state of his preferred genre after 1760.
Neither Hawkins nor Burney appears to have thought deeply about the conceptual
bases for their views, but Forkel, whose position as music director at Göttingen
University brought him into the sphere of the so-called Göttingen Historical School,
was very conscious of the aesthetic and historical problems surrounding the question
of artistic progress and undecided about his own stance (see ‘Versuch einer
Metaphysik der Tonkunst’ in volume i of his Geschichte). He shared Hawkins's and
Burney's interest in the contemporary situation (but devoted hundreds of pages to
ancient Greece); his primary concern was Lutheran church music and its decline after
J.S. Bach, the first ‘classic’ composer. Bach's sacred and secular music represented
the culmination of a long historical process; Forkel's recommendations for church
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music reform foreshadowed the general concern for contemporary music on the part
of such 19th-century German historians as Marx and Brendel, and Spitta's more
narrowly focussed effort to rejuvenate Protestant music (‘Die Wiederbelebung
protestantischer Kirchenmusik auf geschichtlicher Grundlage’, 1892). Similar efforts
were made on behalf of Catholic church music in the German-speaking lands, France
and Italy.
Forkel was less confident about the evaluation of earlier music. In his commentary
on Hawkins's critique of the aesthetic absolutism of Temple (Musikalisch-kritische
Bibliothek, 1778–9), he sided with Hawkins, conceding that the primitive cultures
preceding ancient Greece and Rome had their own sense of beauty and order, and
acknowledging that ‘not just a few believe that there could be a music that is very
different from ours, but still not less beautiful, perhaps even more beautiful and
perfect’. Yet he stressed the difficulty in judging the music of the very distant past
because the ‘entirely differing intervallic relationships between the older and more
recent scales [Tonleiter]’ prevented adequate aesthetic evaluation and, hence, secure
conclusions about progress. Faced with this problem, Forkel resorted to enlightened
absolutist thinking, universal history and the traditional glorification of antiquity:
preclassical cultures do not derive their values from the ‘natural law of artistic beauty
and order’ which links Greek ‘high culture’ with that of the present day. Antique
music must be ‘perfect’ on the same basis as other antique arts – poetry and drama,
architecture and sculpture – which are not as difficult to decipher and comprehend.
The progress of European music history was, then, the unfolding of new
manifestations of the already perfect. Yet Forkel did not endorse the idea of
continuous necessary evolutionary progress, which would have contradicted his
pessimism about the contemporary situation. The ‘fall’ of music after Bach was the
last phase of a tripartite process of origin, development and decay posited by
numerous historical theories developed in the 18th century (Vico, Bacon, Rousseau,
Herder) and modified in the 19th and 20th centuries. These theories are described in
historiographical literature variously as organic or biological, or in terms of lifecycles (youth, maturity, old age). Progress depends on the beginning of a new cycle.
Although Hawkins maintained little hope for a new beginning, he incorporated this
scheme into his writing and may have influenced Forkel, who approved of Hawkins's
work. Another influence has been seen in Winckelmann's four-part theory set forth in
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his epoch-making Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (1764), in which a period of
differentiation (Veränderung) precedes the fall. Forkel's discussion of the many
forms of perfection in music since classial antiquity reflects this perspective. But
Winckelmann viewed development as autonomous; his concern, foreshadowing style
history, was with the ‘essence of art’, which can always regenerate itself. Forkel's
pessimism stemmed from his critique of the totality of contemporary culture in light
of his absolutist aesthetic ideal. In an age of decline he found little to look forward
to: his organic historical view was irreconcilable with his cautious belief in progress.
In the wake of the French Revolution and Restoration, 18th-century historical
thinking was challenged by a rise in scepticism about progress per se and an
increasing reverence for an idealized past that was often stimulated by religious and
nationalistic perspectives. These tendencies strengthened the appeal of historicism,
an important aspect of which is a view of the past as equal or superior to the present.
Historicism developed as an alternative to Enlightenment teleology as the basis for a
philosophy of history. In the histories of the arts it promoted the abandonment of an
absolute standard of beauty and a consciousness of the validity of sharply divergent
artistic forms and styles over the course of history. Thus aesthetic relativism
developed concurrently with historicism, and both tendencies supported the growing
positivistic-empirical emphases of music historiography that coincided with the
gradual establishment of music history as an academic discipline. Although the
length of the discussion of progress and process in this article might suggest the
contrary, historicism (which requires less explication and did not take as many
different forms) was the single most important impetus to the development of music
historiography in the 19th century. Apart from biographers, who devoted roughly
equal attention to recent and distant composers, most music historians concentrated
on the music of the past, which was generally understood to have concluded with
Bach. (This view conflicts somewhat with the widespread idea that ‘new’ music
began in 1600; see §3(iv) below.) This emphasis fostered the development of
research techniques that are the basis for the positivistic-empirical aspects of modern
historical musicology, and also motivated the introduction of monographic studies
and articles on narrowly focussed topics (notation, sources, genres, styles etc.) in a
limited time span along with traditional universal histories. Both developments
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allowed for more thorough and rigorous treatment of subject matter than had been
imaginable earlier.
A preference for religious music often accompanied the historicist rejection of
continual progress and its frequent de-emphasis of universal history, historical
process and contemporary music. Martini championed Palestrina, while Gerbert was
primarily concerned with the historical relationship between the Roman Catholic
liturgy and music. Winterfeld adopted their idea of a ‘holy music’ in Christian
Europe before 1600. A clear indication of Winterfeld's historicism is his appreciation
of the modes, which differed both from Forkel's admitted lack of understanding (as
well as his view of the development of modern scale systems) and from his
contemporary Kiesewetter's view that the modes represented a preliminary stage in
the development of the tonal system.
Nationalistic historicism treated folk and religious music, and recent secular art
music, especially opera, as equally valid elements of national tradition, while some
countries, notably Austria and Germany, in line with German Romantic musical
aesthetics, attributed their cultural superiority to their recent instrumental music.
Such thinking underlay the writing of national music histories all over Europe. It had
acute political implications in Germany and Italy – which until well after 1850 were
unified cultures (despite Catholic-Protestant divisions and tensions in Germany) but
not unified states – and in countries such as Russia, where a native ‘art’ music
tradition was in its formative stages in the early 19th century. It was also important in
those central European areas (Hungary, Poland and the future Czechoslovakia) which
could claim a longer tradition but whose ‘high’ culture and political life had been
dominated by their German, Austrian and Russian neighbours.
Nationalism, universal-historical views and support for the legitimacy of secular
music of the present and the past went hand in hand with a continuing belief in
progress. Kiesewetter, whose absorption of late 18th-century ideas of progress –
contemporary music was cause for ‘great happiness’ – is felt throughout his
influential Geschichte der europäisch-abendländischen oder unsrer heutigen Musik
(1834), devoted an entire book to secular music before 1600 (Schicksale und
Beschaffenheit des weltlichen Gesanges … bis zur … den Anfängen der Oper, 1841),
in which he rebuked those historians who denigrated secular music while asserting
that the Italian madrigal was superior to Renaissance liturgical genres with respect to
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expression and harmonic practice. This was, for its time, a radical reinterpretation of
16th-century music and a critique of a historicism so extreme that it rejected
relativism and assumed an absolutist pre-1600 religious aesthetic. (The validity of
sacred music with elaborate instrumental accompaniment was a subject of much
debate.) Winterfeld was not the probable target, because his book was published in
the same year as Kiesewetter's, but Kiesewetter certainly knew Gerbert's and
Martini's books as well as more recent work along the same lines, such as Thibaut's
Über Reinheit der Tonkunst (1825). Nevertheless, Kiesewetter was certainly one of
the founders of music historicism; his aesthetic relativism (which, like Winterfeld's,
began with Christian Europe – both viewed Greek music as incapable of
development) allowed him to achieve a synthesis between perspectives that were
often mutually exclusive.
Fétis, the leading 19th-century French-speaking music historian, followed in the
18th-century tradition of a belief in progress with limits. Influenced by the liberal
universal-historical approach of Jules Michelet, he relinquished Enlightenment ideas
about natural law and abstract reason but also avoided the metaphysics of German
idealism. Fétis did not dismiss the importance of human reason, but his emphasis on
sentiment, imagination and inspiration, as well as mystical and religious motivations,
all bespeak the Romantic historical view originating in the late 18th century with
thinkers like Rousseau and Herder. Fétis stressed the particularity and validity of
each phase in the historical process, yet, like his 18th-century counterparts, he had
reservations about the most progressive music of his own time and suggested a return
to 18th-century artistic values. On the other hand, Fétis did not entirely abandon the
mechanistic conception of progress, while acknowledging that it was neither
continuous nor inevitable. Unlike the universal schemes of the Enlightenment,
however, process seemed to operate through ‘music creating itself, developing itself,
and changing itself by virtue of various principles which are unfolded … and
discovered periodically, by men of genius’ (Biographie universelle, 1873 edn). Thus
Fétis was one of the first proponents of the idea of autonomy, in sharp contrast to the
universal thinking of his predecessors. The idea of autonomous development also
underlies Parry's The Evolution of the Art of Music (first published as The Art of
Music, 1893), which was conceived in a British intellectual climate dominated by
Darwin and Spencer. A strong evolutionary view led him to assert the ‘primitiveness’
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of medieval chant (a characterization Fétis had reserved for some music prior to
classical Greece); predicated on natural-scientific theory, his philosophy of history
and personal aesthetics were immune to the arguments of historicism and the weight
of evidence brought forward in editions and performances of historical music.
In Germany, Hegel was the thinker we most closely associate with the idea of
progress in the 19th century: the metaphysical idealism, the dialectical method, the
belief that human history is primarily that of the advance of human consciousness
and the human spirit, and the liberal nationalism underlying his philosophy of history
had an enormous impact on German intellectual life as a whole, and on German
historiography in particular. Marx and Brendel are the music historians most often
linked to Hegelianism; Brendel explicitly identified himself with the philosopher.
Both historians were idealists, stressing the potential of music to present
philosophical ideas (the ‘Idee’) and the role of critical (self-)consciousness on the
part of composers and listeners. On the basis of their teleological perspectives, both
emphasized the music of the present and recent past as the highest embodiment of
the great advances of the human spirit; the year 1600 was not the end of a great age
but the first foreshadowing of later greatness. Both viewed the music of the past
before Viennese Classicism with a critical eye; Handel and Bach were notable
exceptions – Marx distinguished between Handel's oratorios and the St Matthew
Passion on the one hand, and Graun's Tod Jesu on the other: the higher aesthetic and
spiritual values embodied in the music of the former composers ensured its relevance
for a spiritually more advanced age that favoured a philosophical ‘Kunstreligion’
over religion itself.
Yet the paths that Marx and Brendel staked out for further progress diverged.
Brendel pinned his hopes for the music of the future on Wagner; Marx rejected the
music drama (as did Schumann, whose criticism was also motivated by a theory of
progress that is less self-consciously derived from a philosophy of history) and,
despite his interest in German opera and church music, viewed Beethovenian
instrumental music as holding the greatest promise. (Hegel himself admired Rossini's
operas and Bach's St Matthew Passion, and, retaining a Kantian hierarchy of the arts,
criticized the increasing emphasis on instrumental music that, in his view, could not
embody the ideas claimed for it by Marx.) Ambros has also been linked to Hegel on
the basis of his references to the Hegelian art historian Karl Schnasse and his critique
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of Kiesewetter's linear evolutionary thinking. Ambros detected an irreconcilable
contradiction between Kiesewetter's perception that Handel and Bach represented a
culmination, and his conclusion that the present day was the highest point in musical
development. It has been suggested that Ambros subscribed to a dialectical
perspective (which could easily accommodate Kiesewetter's conclusions), but the
greatest single influence on Ambros was undoubtedly Jakob Burkhardt's culturalhistorical approach, which rejected idealism while drawing on Herderian-Hegelian
propositions about the unified nature of all cultural phenomena in a particular
‘Zeitgeist’.
(ii) Formalism, autonomy and racialism.
Neither Ambros, nor Marx, nor Brendel rigorously applied the dialectical method
(Brendel came closest), nor did they make use of Hegel's division (in his published
lectures on aesthetics) of the entire history of the arts into three great periods: preantique ‘symbolic’, antique ‘classic’ and Christian ‘romantic’. The theory of
dialectical progress, in Marxist reinterpretations, had its greatest impact on the music
historiography of the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe after World War II.
Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist historians replaced Hegelian idealism with a materialist
perspective in which socio-economic conditions, defined primarily by class divisions
and the ownership of the means of production, constitute a ‘structure’ that supports
and to a large degree determines a cultural ‘superstructure’. Human consciousness
and its cultural products develop in relation to dialectical process in the structure (see
§3(iv) below); hence the art of any particular historical period embodies those
conditions and, as a result of the nature of its relation to them, has a distinct class
character. In its most reductive form Marxist historiography denies the possibility of
autonomous development in the arts and formalist interpretations of art works; after
the official rejection of Stalinism some historians (in musicology, Lissa in Poland,
Knepler in East Germany) accepted the idea of ‘semi-autonomy’. This concept
retains the paradigms of dialectics and structure–superstructure, yet is less rigid in its
view of the inevitability and character of progress, and grants more independence
and self-determination to the superstructure. (For a post-1989 Marxist critique of
Marxist musicology see Knepler's article ‘Geschichtsschreibung’ in MGG2). The
East
German
musicologist
Brockhaus,
in
his
foreword
to
Europäische
Musikgeschichte (1983), proposed a series of laws (‘Gesetzmässigkeiten’ – the term
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predates Marxism and is still used by non-Marxist historians) consisting of
‘dialectical unities’ that embrace ‘continuity and discontinuity in music history’,
‘evolutionary and revolutionary change’ in the historical process, ‘necessity and
coincidence’. He also posited a second group of laws that govern the internal process
of music history within general history: ‘relativity, causality, conditionality, and
determinism’. Brockhaus broadened the theory of Wiederspiegelung (reflection) first
developed as ‘intonation’ by Soviet scholars (B. Asaf'yev, Muzikal'naya forma kak
protsess and Intonatsiya, 1930–47); it is no longer limited to ‘the occasionally
possible case of a direct relationship between things social and things musical’, but
also reflects composers' feeling and thinking, including their ideas about immanent
musical processes. This shift made possible a more refined discussion of formal
elements in the arts and their semi-autonomous development, and allowed for a more
balanced view of such historical factors as ‘pure’ aesthetics and religion. (A clear
measure of the increasing sophistication of Marxist musicology – some might see it
as an erosion – emerges through a comparison of the judicious treatment of Bach's
religious music and the religious culture of his time in the GDR in 1985 with their
neglect in 1950. It is striking that not only East German musicologists but also
Blume de-emphasized Bach's liturgical music and projected him as a child of the
Enlightenment.)
As post-Stalinist Marxist musicology refined its methods, it moved in the direction
taken by the handful of Western European musicologists (e.g. Boehmer, who often
criticized the formalism of ‘bourgeois musicology’) in a less deterministic MarxistHegelian tradition identified with the critical social theory and hermeneutics of the
Frankfurt School. Their leading representative, Adorno, wrote no formal music
history, but his music criticism and sociology were historically orientated, based on
the dialectical method and permeated by his preoccupation with the problem and
possibility of progress in the music of the 19th and 20th centuries. Adorno's
materialism is predicated on the raw materials of music itself: in this respect music
was fully autonomous. However, in Adorno's dialectical take on Geistesgeschichte,
music, whether through a composer's conscious stance towards the musical material
or seemingly by its very nature, it embodies the tendencies and processes of its time.
From this perspective Adorno polemicized against Stravinsky and championed
Schoenberg, despite the latter's political conservatism, as the progressive composer
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par excellence in the 20th century (‘Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik’, 1932).
For most of its history Marxist musicology, in line with the conservatism of Marxist
aesthetics, regarded the musical avant garde in its diverse forms as symptomatic of
the decadence and decay of late capitalist societies (Schneerson, 1952, Ger. trans. of
Russ. orig.; Meyer, 1952). This reactionary, formalistic and elitist music did not
advance the cause of socialism; socially ‘useful’ contemporary music must preserve
the progressive aspects of the ‘bourgeois heritage’ in music and reinterpret them to
achieve a new synthesis. (In the Soviet Union a re-evaluation of Stravinsky that
stressed his Russianness and use of folk material did follow his visit to Moscow in
1962; Schoenberg was partially rehabilitated in East Germany after a series of
concerts and lectures in 1977, the centennial of his birth.)
German National Socialist musicology shared the aesthetic conservatism and
opposition to the avant garde of its Marxist counterpart; unlike Marxism's emphasis
on class, the Nazi critique was predicated on the association of such music with
Jewishness (Schoenberg) or some other racial or cultural form of non-Germanness,
including the cultural bolshevism that was often linked with Jewishness. All these
‘decadent’ and ‘diseased’ tendencies were seen to be undermining Aryan culture;
progress in contemporary music depended on the purification of German music from
within and the spread of its influence abroad (cultural imperialism went hand in hand
with military aggression). The thesis of a foreign and Semitic threat to the undeniable
superiority of German music was not a Nazi invention; it went back to Wagner and
had gained considerable strength in ultra-nationalistic circles well before 1932.
Along the way it had been bolstered by the development of pseudo-scientific racial
and ‘Volk’ theories (the latter a perversion of a tradition extending back to Herder),
of which Moser was a leading advocate. Influenced by Houston Stewart
Chamberlain, Moser (Die Entstehung des Dur-Gedankens: ein kulturgeschichtliches
Problem’, SIMG, xv, 1913–14) argued for a Germanic origin of the modern scales
that he contrasted favourably with the ‘Latinic’ church modes he associated with
Italy and France. In his Geschichte der deutschen Musik (1920) the declaration that
only German music, with its Nordic roots, could produce simple and ‘healthy’ fourbar phrases and strong rhythms demonstrates a pre-Nazi confluence of racial and
‘volkstümlich’ perspectives.
14
Race, ‘Volk’ and anti-Semitism were the driving forces of the National Socialist
music historiography. In 1932 the newly created Staatliches Institut für deutsche
Musikforschung became the centre for musicological ‘Gleichschaltung’; some music
histories published before 1932 were revised to accommodate new ideological
imperatives, and Nazi music historians not only emphasized the greatness of German
national tradition (this was neither new nor extraordinary) but also asserted the preChristian Teutonic basis of this tradition, thereby minimizing the significance of
sacred music and foreign influence, notably from France and Italy. (Mersmann's Eine
deutsche Musikgeschichte (1934) was criticized for its discussion of non-German
contributions to German music.) In books on German music and in comparative
studies such as Bücken's Musik der Nationen (1937), Nazi musicologists argued for
German superiority and took pains to distinguish between German and Jewish music,
devoting many studies to Jewish music itself. Blume's Das Rasseproblem in der
Musik (1939) stands out for its critique of the crudest forms of racialist music
historiography and its systematic attempt to legitimize National Socialist musicology
scientifically.
(iii) Process and causality.
Apart from those instances in which 20th-century ideologies dictated a belief in
progress, music historiography of the later 19th century and after was less interested
in broad problems of causality and process than before; when it engaged such
questions, it was less inclined to consider them from a teleological perspective.
Historical development, the term implying change with some kind of continuity and
causality about which theories can be built, was not discounted, but historicism and
positivism discouraged the academic scholar (a scientist) from culturally based or
idealistic philosophies of history, and from making broad value judgments about
aesthetic issues – notably about the music of the past – that underlie theories of
progress. (On the other hand, the strength of historicism and the conservative
aesthetics associated with it fostered the widespread antagonism in historical
musicology to avant-garde 20th-century music.) In their place various kinds of cyclic
theories were advanced, some of which were stimulated by Heinrich Wölffin's arthistorical study Renaissance und Barock (1888). Wölfflin, whose emphasis on
technical discussion of formal elements provided an influential model for the concept
of style in music historiography, argued for the spiritual and stylistic unity of
15
Renaissance and antique art. Thus cyclic development unfolds on the basis of
periodically surfacing historical continuities rather than continual progressive
change. In each period the different cultural spheres (the arts, philosophy, religion)
display ‘parallel’ paths of non-autonomous development (see §3(iv) below). In this
vein, Schering proposed a cyclicism based on two different forms of musical
symbolism – conceptual and emotional – that succeeded each other in line with
broader cultural patterns (e.g. the conceptual symbolism of Bach's age giving way to
the emotional symbolism of Romanticism). The concept of symbol was favoured in
the early 20th century by non-formalist aestheticians and some historians (such as
Erwin Panofsky in the visual arts) subscribing to a hermeneutic and intellectualcultural-historical approach (‘Geistesgeschichte’), as championed by Wilhelm
Dilthey, in opposition to positivism and theories of autonomous development.
Schering's symbol is a broadly conceived category that accommodates the full range
of musical elements and techniques, styles and genres developed through musical
history, and also constitutes an aesthetic theory that is the basis for a discussion of
work content. Other prominent cyclical theories are more ‘scientific’; they advance
narrow, ‘objective’ categories derived from the style-critical approach to
periodization, such as melodic unity or diversity as described by Mersmann (1921,
pp.67–78), and polyphonic texture as proposed by Moser (1938) and Lorenz (1928);
the latter's work reflects the influence of his father's general historical theory of
generations (O. Lorenz, 1886). Such criteria are more precise than Schering's
symbol, but they are far too limited to accomplish their task and, as Gurlitt argued
(1918–19, pp.571–87), should not be applied to humanistic studies. Gurlitt made a
detailed critique of the life-cycle theory, which could support both optimistic and
pessimistic forecasts. In Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1918–22) this
theory received an influential and pessimistic reworking. Gurlitt argued that
determinations of growth and decay in the histories of the arts can be based only on
aesthetic judgments and are therefore incommensurable with the scientific claims of
the theory. In order to avoid this problem, and also to offer an alternative to
positivism, Gurlitt proposed a non-evolutionary division of music history into six
epochs on the basis of rhythmic practices; he chose rhythm because it is the ‘most
primal’ musical element, preceding even sonority. In and of itself, this choice is also
very narrowly focussed, as is Schering's less systematically worked-out view of
16
musical development on the basis of sonority – the primary material for musical
symbolism. Both authors' emphasis on immanent musical material is at first
suggestive of autonomous stylistic development (see §3(v) below) as advanced by
Riemann (1904–13 and 1908) and Adler, whose theoretical writings criticize
autonomy but whose practical method applies it (1911 and 1919). However, Gurlitt
and his teacher, Schering, opposed autonomy on the grounds that it was positivistic;
they interpreted style changes as expressions of artistic preferences (Gurlitt's
‘Kunstwollen’) that arose within general culture and were conditioned by individual
and social psychology. Schering suggested that ‘style history’, which was rapidly
becoming entrenched as the leading method, should be replaced by ‘symbol history’
in order to reinforce the linkage between formal and cultural historical elements.
Thus despite the widespread disavowal of progress in mainstream musicology, the
question of process, while less burning than before, remained controversial. The
tensions between scientific positivism and humanistic cultural theory that framed the
debate also defined the parameters of the discussion of periodization, the problem
which about 1900 replaced (while subsuming) that of development and progress as
central to music historiography.
(iv) Periodization.
Ambros saw a necessary and decisive step towards a rigorous music historiography
in Kiesewetter's division of music history into epochs. He had reservations about
Kiesewetter's criteria – epochs were named after the composers whose innovations
and influence were definitive for their period – yet the very presence of a
periodization based on a single theory about historical process provided an ‘order
and coherence’ that he found lacking in Forkel's chronology. In fact, Forkel did
propose in his essay on metaphysics a tripartite universal-historical scheme in which
the development of verbal language is connected to progress from primitive ur
musics consisting of mere sonority and rhythm to differentiated forms based on the
development of scales and counterpoint in antiquity and the modern world. But the
conceptual and chronological looseness and broadness of this partitioning limit its
usefulness, and it hardly figures in Forkel's narrative, while the pluralistic approach
to periodization (different criteria for different historical periods) only exacerbates
these problems. Hawkins did not even attempt to impose order: his chapters are
simply numbered, and the two volumes lack descriptive subtitles; the decision to
17
begin the second one about 1600 does, however, reflect his sense of large-scale
historical division that was often adopted.
Periodization runs counter to a philosophy of history like Forkel's, which is based on
a theory of progress driven by the continuity of natural law and is coupled with an
absolutist aesthetic. On the other hand, the historicist emphasis on the particularity of
different phases in historical development – which does not necessarily exclude
progress – as well as the pragmatic need for ‘comprehensibility’ (Ambros), helps
explain the increasing preoccupation with periodization. But periodization could
replace process as the primary concern only after theories of development had been
consolidated, for the criteria for the historical divisions had been derived from such
theories or, in the earlier phases of music historiography, were relics of medieval
thinking. The latter, represented by such authors as Calvisius, Printz, Marpurg and
Martini, who combine divine and biblical history with periods based on dynastic and
great historical figures (often not musicians), may be glimpsed in Bonnet's seven
divisions: (1) Divine Origin to the Flood, (2) Flood to David and Solomon, (3)
Solomon to Pythagoras, (4) Socrates to Christ, (5) Christ to Gregory, (6) Gregory to
St Dunstan, (7) 1000–1600. Burney retained elements of this approach, but in the
first volume of his General History eliminated biblical chronology and introduced
immanent-musical criteria (e.g. the ‘Invention of Counterpoint and the State of
Music, from the Time of Guido’) that figure even more prominently in vol.ii (which
includes a chapter on genres), that begins in the middle of the 16th century with a
chapter tracing the ‘progress of music in England’ from the reign of Henry VIII to
the death of Queen Elizabeth. Burney also devoted chapters organized by century to
the music of France, Germany and Italy (the Netherlands School awaited its 19thcentury discovery), thus achieving a synthesis reflective of his universal-historical
approach.
Periodization theories fall into three groups: those based on immanent-musical
criteria, those based on general history and those based on cultural history and the
histories of literature, the visual arts and architecture. 18th-century schemes made
some use of the first and depended heavily on the second; the influence of the third,
which has proven to be the strongest, was first felt in the later 19th century. The term
‘Renaissance’ (Michelet, 1855, and Burckhardt, 1860) was introduced into music
historiography in the 1880s, followed shortly thereafter by the adoption of such terms
18
as ‘Baroque’ (Wöllflin, 1888) and ‘Romantic’ and ‘Classical’. The last two had been
used by critics and aestheticians in music and the other arts since the late 18th
century: in his music history Köstlin (1875) had designated composers of the 18th
and 19th centuries as ‘Classiker’ and ‘Romantiker’, but he did not apply the term to
epochs. Wöllflin's work was especially influential because it combined a culturalhistorical approach with an emphasis on style-critical analysis, thus fulfilling the
imperatives of the strongest historiographical currents of the time. The attractiveness
of cultural-historical designations gave rise to terminology for smaller temporal and
geographical sub-periods, such as 16th-century ‘mannerism’ and ‘Empfindsamkeit’.
Terms applied to very recent and contemporary music, such as ‘Impressionism’ and
‘verismo’ were often taken over from criticism, just as ‘classicism’ and
‘romanticism’ had been earlier.
The broadest general-historical divisions have had the greatest influence: since the
advent of humanism the ternary division – antiquity, a middle age and a new or
modern time – has permeated Western historical thinking in all areas. The
chronological determination of the beginning of the third period has been a longstanding problem that has also been felt in music historiography. In Schering's
explicit application of the division – ‘Altertum’, ‘Mittelalter’ and ‘Neue Zeit’ (1914)
– the ‘new time’ is placed within the general-historical ‘Early Modern Europe’, that
orignates within the confessional and national Reformation and the style-historical
Renaissance. Yet since the 18th century historians subscribing to diverse historical
theories have favoured the year 1600 as the watershed. Even Ambros, who
celebrated the new impulses of Renaissance culture, viewed its music as the final
stage of a historical development beginning with liturgical chant.
The conceptual problem of the ‘new’ and the ‘modern’ is heightened by the fact that
these terms were used in reference to time spans of considerably different length.
Schering subdivided his third period into a ‘newer’ and then a ‘newest’ time
beginning in 1790, the advent of Romanticism. (Moser replaced this in the fifth
edition of his Geschichte der deutschen Musik with a single third period containing
subsections.) This represents a late stage in a series of adjustments that usually
pushed the beginning of the ‘new’ forwards, and reflects not only broad historical
thinking but a view of the changing contemporary scene. The ‘new music’ (Bekker,
1919; Einstein, 1926) of the 20th century replaces that of the early 19th century (and
19
that of earlier ones, such as the Nuove musiche of the 17th). Another problem in the
concept of the new is especially acute in its application to 20th-century music: some
historians have conflated the term with a post-Romantic modern period (Adler);
others have differentiated between a ‘modern’ period lasting from 1890 to 1914 and
the ‘new’ music thereafter (Danuser, 1984, on the basis of compositional technique).
‘New’ has been used in the purely chronological sense that encompasses all the
music of the new century, or has been reserved for music with progressive or avantgarde tendencies (Morgan, 1991). The recent plethora of ‘neos-’ and ‘posts’ and
combinations thereof applied to cultural-historical epochal names (e.g. ‘Neo-PostRomanticism’) – which are themselves anything but fixed in their meaning –
demonstrates the continuing dependence on such terminology but promises no
clarification of the problems inherent in its use.
Music historiography has also drawn on general-historical periodizations based on
centuries and the particular phases of national histories that are often coupled with
dynastic and religious histories and social and political movements. The impact of
the latter is strongest in non-autonomous historiographical literature and in
monographs devoted to the music of a particular nation. The former, reflected in
chapters of general histories and textbooks and in single volumes, is convenient but
as mechanistic as the theories of generations or cycles with which it is sometimes
combined (Lorenz). And if undertaken seriously it requires subdivision based on
fundamental style changes (e.g. the 18th century), or clarifications such as
Dahlhaus's discourse (Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts, 1980) on the beginning
(1814) and conclusion (1914) of this century and his justification of the title. For
good reason there have been few attempts to establish a periodization primarily on
the basis of the century, although the standard Italian history of the mid-20th century,
Storia della musica (1936) by Andrea Della Corte and Guido Pannain, and Jules
Combarieu's Histoire de la musique des origines au début du XXe siècle (1946–60)
make extensive use of such divisions. Handschin (1948) pleaded for the objectivity
of the ‘century’ (he explicitly opposed both the subjective nature of the genius and
the cultural-historical paradigms), which he arbitrarily associated with autonomous
development, and for its ‘economy of view’. Neither argument is convincing.
Marxist musicology derives its musical periodization from its own theory of generalhistorical development; immanent-musical titles are acceptable for subsections, but
20
the larger periods are still based on the structure-giving socio-economic phases
(Margraf, 1984). Wiora's history (1961) represents a 20th-century (non-Marxist)
reworking of the universal-historical approach that avoids the notion of continual
progress: the music cultures of the first three divisions have not been replaced or
decayed; they survive, albeit in altered forms due to cultural assimilation. Wiora
defined four ‘World-Periods’: (1) primeval and prehistoric, (2) the high cultures of
classical antiquity and the Orient, (3) that of Western music, with its ‘special nature’
(the development of notation, the idea of the autonomous work, greater diversity and
change – not aesthetic superiority) and (4) that of global culture in an industrialtechnological age. Wiora's work was influenced by ethnomusicological perspectives,
including a critique of the Eurocentrism of historical musicology.
Immanent-musical designations for historical periods were used extensively by Fétis
and Ambros (indeed, although the latter was associated with cultural history,
Renaissance is his only cultural-historical volume title). Even the great-men epochs
of Kiesewetter imply autonomy, as he recognized, for such divisions emphasize the
genius's transformation of musical material rather than the cultural-historical spirit of
the time imprinting itself on him. In the style-critical histories of Adler and Riemann,
genre, style and compositional-technical procedures are the dominant criteria for
periodization. Riemann named some chapters within larger divisions by composer,
although, in light of such period designations as ‘Epoch of the Figured Bass’, he is
often regarded as the leading exponent of ‘music history without names’. Not a
single composer's name appears in Adler's table of contents, nor does a culturalhistorical designation; this absence implies policy set by him for the various authors
who contributed material. Composers are named in the body of the text and their
achievements are duly noted, yet the sense that they found themselves in a particular
period and in a phase of historical development that had their own dynamic emerges
again and again, as in this summary about the lied in the 19th century: ‘Thus the Lied
takes a course of development in the nineteenth century from Schubert over
Mendelssohn [and], finds in Schumann a new design, enriches itself from the
contemporary operas of a Wagner’.
Immanent-musical section titles have the advantage of precision, but this narrow
specificity limits their usefulness. For instance, Riemann's ‘Epoch of the Figured
Bass’ hardly does justice to the variety of techniques and styles it is supposed to
21
encompass. A cultural-historical period name like ‘Baroque’ is broad and rich with
associations, but it is vague and not inherently linked to a particular style or genre.
Thus it is understandable that the questions of its origin, maturity and passing
(ternary thinking is often applied to the subdivision of style-periods), and its
applicability to all the national, functional and generic styles of any given time span,
have been vigorously debated throughout the 20th century. A locus classicus is ‘Das
Renaissanceproblem in der Musik’ (Besseler, 1966), which addresses the question of
the 14th- or 15th-century origins of the Renaissance, in view of the earlier century's
status as the fount of the literary and artistic rebirth on the one hand and, on the
other, the influential idea of the ‘Ars Nova’ (Wolf, Riemann) as a separate styleperiod distinct from both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Both Besseler and
Fischer argued for the earlier date. (An immanent-musical periodization in which the
entire span of polyphonic music until 1600 is viewed as a large-scale unity can deal
with the problem at the more detailed level of the subsection.)
The style-critical arguments advanced for such determinations hinge in part on a
more general historiographical question: does a new period begin when distinctly
new stylistic features first appear (Schering, 1914), or only when they have become
predominant (Blume, 1974). Historians have also debated which aspects of style are
crucial in bringing about changes sufficiently broad and deep to necessitate the
determination of a new period, and whether they represent evolutionary
developments or revolutionary transformations (Reese and Lowinsky respectively on
the Renaissance; see Owens, 1990–1). Opinions on the latter question may be
conditioned by broader historiographical perspectives (and aesthetic prejudices), as
for example in the treatment of Greek music. The first of Adler's three style-periods
begins with four liturgical chant traditions – Western, Byzantine, Russian and
Jewish; it is followed by two timespans, c1000–1600 and 1600–1880, and a fourth
section, ‘Die Moderne’, is organized by country, not styles. Directly preceding the
first section is a brief discussion of the principles underlying the periodization of
‘Western’ music; before that are chapters on the music of primitive (‘Natur’) and
oriental peoples and antiquity. Adler, like some other historians, excluded the music
of classical Greece from his history of Western music but included eastern
Mediterranean and Russian religious music; the Judeo-Christian heritage apparently
had greater meaning for him than the pagan Greek one. Schering recognized the
22
continuities between eastern and western Mediterranean liturgical chant; his first
period ends about 500; the systematization of monastic hours, and the rationalization
and institutionalization of ‘Gregorian chant’ mark the beginning of the second
period. Ambros criticized the disparagement and neglect of Greek music in earlier
music histories (Kiesewetter omitted it altogether) and, although the divisions of his
narrative do not emphasize explicit temporal-stylistic continuities, the very length of
his discussion – made possible by the advances in empirical knowledge –
underscores his view that ‘no period of Western music has been able to avoid the
influence of the ancient world’, that is of the Greeks.
Despite the problems connected with all these approaches, periodization has always
been an axiom of music historiography. We might expect that the establishment of
style-criticism as the prevailing methodology would have led to a predominant use of
immanent-musical terms, but the resonance of cultural-historical designations has
proved stronger (albeit in conjunction with the others), notably in their application to
large historical spans. Even Riemann, the fervent opponent of Geistesgeschichte,
could not resist the suggestiveness of ‘Renaissance’ in his history, and it is difficult
to imagine any alternatives that could supplant such cultural-epochal designations.
Fortified by their style-critical underpinnings, they possess too much historical
meaning.
(v) Culture, style and work.
Burney explained why he abandoned his original intention of writing an autonomous
music history: ‘I found ancient Music so intimately connected with Poetry,
Mythology, Government, Manners, and Science in general, that wholly to separate it
from them, seemed to me like taking a single figure out of a group, in an historical
picture; or a single character out of a drama, of which the propriety depends upon the
dialoge and the incidents’ (introduction to A General History of Music, i). Universalhistorical and encyclopedic perspectives underlie the holistic approach of great
general histories of the mid-18th century. The urge to share the fruits of empirical
research and provide a picture of music history in its entirety – ancient theory and
notation, instruments, institutions, composers' lives and their music – may have
forced Hawkins and Forkel to leave their histories incomplete. The discussion of
music largely concentrated on style, although the term is used relatively infrequently;
specific compositions were considered more as embodiments of style – a paradox in
23
that the works are seen as historical facts from which style can be constructed – than
as individual works with unique structural and expressive contents; early music was
described in more technical detail than the (supposedly) more familiar contemporary
music which is discussed primarily in evaluative terms. In either case the
commentary was very brief. More attention was given to explanation of the origins
of individual works – institutional contexts such as the church or theatre, service to
an aristocratic employer, commissions, personal entrepreneurship. This emphasis,
which recurs in the 19th and 20th centuries, rested on the historicist assumption that
the essence of something can be explained by its origins.
A century later both Ambros and Fétis were unable to finish their histories (Ambros's
was completed by colleagues). The material to cover had swollen enormously and
both historians, like most of their contemporaries, wrote considerably more about
style than their predecessors had done, while retaining their commitment to the
totality of music history. On the other hand, they wrote less about cultural and
intellectual history, which is hard to reconcile with Ambros's identification in the
literature on music historiography as a practioner of Geistesgeschichte. Ambros
wrote evocative romanticizing introductory chapters to the large-scale divisions of
his volumes, but when he discussed the music of the various ‘schools’ he emphasized
immanent-musical considerations, with an occasional passing reference to a ‘Geist
der Zeit’ that can be glimpsed in the stylistic properties of a particular composition.
Although, in 19th-century histories, individual works are often discussed in greater
detail than before journals (the influence of long discussions of new works in music
may be felt here; the focus is still on the style of a composer or a school, not on the
individual work.
Thus 20th-century style-critical approaches may be viewed as a formalization of a
well-established orientation. The term ‘style’ now found its way into book titles,
period designations and journal articles; cultural history receded even further in
style-orientated general histories of music, although it remained strong in biography
and figured prominently in studies devoted to religious music and opera, and in
national, regional and municipal music histories. As a consequence of the mass of
material that had been accumulated and the development of academic specializations,
the one-author encyclopedic approach that survived into the 19th century gave way
to multi-author histories and histories of specific topics such as aesthetics, theory and
24
organology. The focus on style in general music histories may have been motivated
by pragmatic as well as conceptual considerations: there was simply too much data,
and choices had to be made.
‘Style’ was extremely useful. It was (or claimed to be) objective and scientific; it
provided the language for a discussion of individual works in inherently musical
terms, yet still differed crucially from non-historical ‘theoretical’ analysis; it 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 the
hermeneutic explication of an individual work. Although ‘style’ was conceived as a
value-free idea, it 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, (New) Oxford History of Music), single-volume period histories
(Reese, Bukofzer), genre studies and the works part of life-and-works biographies
that have, until recently, defined the field. And ‘style’ has also been the basis for
articles and books devoted to single works.
Yet ‘style’ has been criticized. Despite its flexibility, the major impact of its
tendency towards autonomy has been to dissociate musical historiography from
general historiography, and with that music from culture, while its formalism has deemphasized questions of meaning and function. As discussed earlier, in German
musicology before the Nazi period historians in the hermeneutic tradition
acknowledged this danger; Schering (1936), while recognizing its achievements,
perceived that the concept of style fails to explain adequately the phenomenon of
style change and also argued that a critical method designed to determine stylistic
common denominators cannot do justice to the unique structures and meanings of
individual masterworks. His alternative, the symbol criticism that related music
designs to emotional and conceptual mental images, was fruitful, although reductive,
with respect to Bach's vocal music, but untenable in its primary application,
Beethoven's instrumental music, for which he discovered hidden verbal programmes
that Beethoven supposedly suppressed. The derisive reception of Schering's work in
the 1930s and the race and style focus of National Socialist musicology discouraged
25
the development of this young tradition of hermeneutic historical theories and work
criticism.
In postwar West Germany and Austria this situation did not change; autonomous
style history provided a safe alternative to National Socialist musicology and to the
Marxist methodologies of East Germany and the socialist bloc that made any kind of
cultural theory and hermeneutics suspect. In this intellectual context the grandly
conceived philological-positivistic projects of the postwar years were launched (and
in some cases revived) throughout Western Europe: new critical editions of the
‘great’ composers and historical repertories; thematic catalogues, RISM and RILM,
and manuscript studies that made important advances in method and technique and
significant contributions and corrections to matters of chronology and transmission,
authenticity and compositional process. In the USA and Canada, where émigré
musicologists shared the perspectives of their European colleagues, philology helped
support the rapid growth of the discipline, presenting virtually unlimited possibilities
for dissertations and publications. It also provided a haven to non-Marxist Sovietbloc musicologists who concentrated on such areas rather than pursuing politically
sensitive topics such as meaning and historical causality.
But from the very beginning the limitations of these emphases were recognized, and
the field did not entirely lose its breadth: even autonomous style-criticism is less
purely positivistic than source studies and editions; Blume's important style-period
articles in MGG and, to a greater extent, Lang's Music in Western Civilization (1941)
retained cultural-historical approaches; and traditional ‘bourgeois’ topics such as
philosophy and aesthetics or historical music theory (the latter also favoured by nonMarxist scholars in the socialist countries) retained their appeal. The problems of
periodization and style change were also actively pursued – not so much in terms of
broad historical causalities but rather with respect to questions of narrowly defined
chronological and regional stylistic transmission and influence. And at round-tables
and special sessions of musicological conferences (e.g. ‘Musicology Today’, IMSCR
XI: Copenhagen 1972) Western musicologists regularly engaged in polemical
debates with their neighbours to the East about historical causality and determinism,
progress, formalism, and the social character and content of music.
One of the principal Western participants in the disputes of the 1960s and 70s was
Dahlhaus, who developed his own historical method – the most self-consciously
26
articulated one in the post-war era (Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte, 1977) – in
significant degree as a response to Marxist (including Adornoesque) critiques of
autonomous historical process and formal work analysis. Influenced by the postDiltheyian hermeneutics of Hans Gadamer and H.R. Jauss, Dahlhaus also rejected
style criticism and history in their pure forms, but dismissed the results of
sociological criticism as ‘verbal analogy’ that disregards aesthetic and immanentmusical essences. Consequently, music history – if, as Dahlhaus believed, music
history should be principally a history of works – is ‘hardly realizable’ as social
history (in both Marxist and non-Marxist versions); Dahlhaus was especially critical
of the reductive ‘totality’ and teleology of the Marxist view. On the other hand, he
conceded that traditional Geistesgeschichte, the only established alternative to both
Marxism and autonomy, with its assumptions about parallel cross-cultural
development and its very claim to be able to understand the unified spirit of past
epochs, was no longer tenable.
Dahlhaus advocated a ‘pluralistic’ structural history which attempts to come to terms
with the totality of a historical period without succumbing to the errors of cultural
history or reductive causal theories. Such structures, which are grafted onto
traditional periods (e.g. the Renaissance or the 19th century), possess an inner
stability and coherence – Dahlhaus referred to Burckhardt's ‘conditions’ upon which
the idea of the Renaissance could be advanced – that allow for divergence and
opposition, and for the ‘non-contemporaneity of the contemporaneous’ within the
period. (The idea of non-contemporaneity acknowledges stylistic diversity and
makes possible the structuralist de-emphasis of historical process within a fixed time
frame.) Comprising the structures are ‘systems of systems’ based on the ‘ideal types’
that the historian, who cannot in fact write a total history, chooses as most
representative of the period under investigation. These types consist of a ‘framework
of categories’ that are grouped around works representing ideal types. Dahlhaus
chose 19th-century Central European instrumental music to exemplify a structure. It
may be condensed into three fields in which correlations and overlaps are evident:
(1) general cultural orientation and aesthetics – the principles of cultural education
(Bildung), aesthetic autonomy and genius; (2) institutions – the dialectics of the
concert: aesthetic autonomy and Bildung as opposed to market and commodity; and
(3) style and repertory – the emancipation of instrumental music, the weakening of
27
genre traditions, musical poetics versus virtuosity, the formation of a canonic
repertory and the problems of progress and originality.
Dahlhaus stressed that the principle of aesthetic autonomy represents a historical
circumstance (and thus should not be mistaken for an – or his own – idealistic
historical approach), and this explains the striking omission of any general-historical
categories, including ideological ones such as nationalism or republicanism before
1848, which are, after all, intellectual movements that had an impact on musical
thought. Dahlhaus was well aware of this omission, and his discussions of the
German cultural middle class, music criticism and historiography do not exclude
such considerations. Nevertheless, they are tertiary categories that do not qualify as
ideal types; they partially determine the secondary ones represented in the structure
and relate, if at all, only by verbal analogy to the primary one. Dahlhaus's comments
on aesthetic autonomy have an ironic twist, because his work-orientated history and
his hermeneutic method have been generally regarded as idealist. His choice of
period to illustrate the method is revealing in this regard; the autonomous works of
the core (Austro-Germanic) instrumental repertories of this time and place may be
seen as his meta-ideal type for all music. Critics of his book on the 19th century have
objected to the ideal-type method, claiming that his overly narrow focus on this
repertory makes it impossible to present a balanced picture of the total structure and
reflects a priori aesthetic views that have nationalistic underpinnings. Dahlhaus
believed that the ‘aesthetic presence’ (or future influence) of historical works must
be considered in selecting ideal types; a history of 18th-century music predicated on
the immediate stylistic and functional (e.g. performance, publication) significance of
a particular repertory could legitimately omit a discussion of J.S. Bach's cantatas.
Their essence as autonomous works, a status that they did not gain for more than a
century, has guaranteed their survival and their legitimacy as a subject of music
history. Work-autonomy does not imply, however, pure analytical formalism;
historical understanding is incomplete without a consideration of those elements of
the structure that impinge on the work. Apart from strictly musical categories such as
genre and form, they are, nonetheless, for the most part limited to aesthetic and
philosophical issues, whereby a piece of music may embody aesthetic principles that
function in other areas of the arts, but parallels between individual works in different
media are scrupulously avoided. The role of the composer is a difficult problem for
28
Dahlhaus, as the twists and turns of his two-part discussion of the Eroica Symphony
(Ludwig van Beethoven und seine Zeit, 1987) demonstrate: on the one hand, the
symphony cannot be understood without an awareness of Beethoven's political
views, his attitude towards Napoleon and his own self-image; on the other hand, the
discussion of its contents omits any consideration of their embodiment in its style,
structure and aesthetic essence.
(vi) The ‘new musicology’.
In the late 1970s some prominent American scholars began to call for new initiatives
to counter (or balance) positivism and formalism; Kerman's historically informed
criticism and Treitler's critically inclined historiography paved the way for the ‘new
musicology’ of the 90s Kerman's is a work-orientated style-critical approach in
which abstract aesthetic questions and cultural factors play a subordinate role; his
influence lies less in his development of new critical strategies than in the alternative
he provided to purely structural analysis. Treitler's opposition to ‘a history in which
aesthetics and hermeneutics play no significant part’ (Music and the Historical
Imagination, 1989) echoes that of Dahlhaus, and his reflections on methodology –
among the most fully developed in English-language musicology – cover much the
same ground. However, Treitler criticizes Dahlhaus's assumption that the musical
work, as an ‘abstract text’ and ‘ideal type’ with a ‘real’ and ‘precise meaning’, is the
basis for music history. In his arguments that the work is (1) not fixed and
determinate in an ideal state and (2) only one thread in a complex cultural pattern,
Treitler anticipated the direction of the most recent major developments in largely
American historical musicology, which have established paradigms of international
significance: the introduction of ‘structural’ and ‘post-structural’ critical perspectives
from linguistics and the literary disciplines and their combination with a
hermeneutics variously derived from Adornoesque social theory, gender studies and
criticism, and reception theory and history (which has been established in German
musicology
since
the
1960s).
Social
history
and
anthropological
and
ethnomusicological methodologies have also been influential.
As this array suggests, the historiography of the ‘new musicology’ is not monolithic;
if any unifying factors may be discerned, they are the critique of autonomous history,
purely formal analysis and aesthetic idealism. Cultural-historical approaches range
from fairly traditional ones that reflect German Geistesgeschichte in its Dahlhausian
29
reworking
to
‘post-objective
historical
approaches’
of
a
post-Diltheyian
hermeneutics that underlies what Tomlinson calls a ‘Historiography of Others’.
Works – particularly great canonic works – are still the primary focus in much of this
literature; reception history represents a cautious approach that studies criticism
rather than practising it, while operating within a cultural-historical context;
determinations of immanent-musical manifestations of gender identity and social
consciousness, or of specific parallels between musical and literary works, have been
criticized for being as ‘essentializing’ as the findings of traditional style criticism or
‘hard’ analysis.
Some of the most influential criticism (Abbate, Newcombe) emphasizes formal
(narrative) and phenomenological aspects of music; its hermeneutic basis is not a
historical one. This work is historiographical only in the limited sense that it begins
with the premise that musical works are the subject of music history. A work
orientation also underlies the establishment since the 1970s of historical performing
practice as an important sub-discipline. Performing practice is not intrinsically ‘newmusicological’ in the sense that it operates with critical methodologies, yet it has
been applied to reception history (performance as a category of reception). Although
performing practice research, especially in its earlier stages, often sought to
determine an authentic performance style that alone can render compositional intent,
more refined work has, in line with performance as reception history, recognized the
historically determined authenticity (within limits) of varied and opposing
interpretative traditions. Both forms of reception history have been applied to a
critique of the idealistic work concept; the hermeneutic argument that our
understanding of a work is dependent on verbal and performance interpretations that
have become part of that work's history is a powerful and influential one.
Despite its methodological prominence, the focus on the work, and on the related but
hardly identical idea of the musical canon, has also been under attack in recent
thinking on historiography. In addition to the objections discussed above, critics of
the work approach (see de Brito, 1997) object that the concept legitimately may be
applied only to a very limited span in Western music history and, moreover, only to
the Western tradition. Furthermore, the narrow focus on the work de-emphasizes the
complex of cultural processes in which music is conceived and performed – ‘the
work-concept is not a necessary category within musical production’ (Goehr, 1992,
30
p.114). This critique has been countered (Strohm, 1997) with the argument that it is a
misleading, inaccurate ‘theory reduction’ to brand traditional music historiography as
only a history of works; music historians still address the topics which they are now
criticized for ignoring. Resembling primarily American academic opposition to the
literary canon (in part motivated by curricular concerns), the critique of the canon of
works by predominantly male, Caucasian European and American composers that
has been established by predominantly male, Caucasian European and American
performers, scholars and critics rejects the aesthetic and social (e.g. ethnic, class and
gender) biases inherent in it, and even questions the very validity of the idea of a
Western ‘art’ music. While the acceptance by historical musicology of repertories
such as jazz and rock has significantly extended the range of musics deemed worthy
of scholarly investigation (and thereby of becoming a part of formal music history),
and the strength of feminist studies has forced the re-evaluation of known music and
the discovery of forgotten repertories by women composers, the canon as a structure
remains firmly anchored.
As early as the 1970s Dahlhaus voiced concerns about the disappearance of the
historical method from musicology and its replacement by purely systematic
approaches and non-historical critical methodologies. Similar concerns underlay the
often bitter controversies of the 1990s about methodology, in which the various
parties (including theorists) sometimes overlooked – at least when engaged in
polemic – the fact that many different kinds of scholarship are valid and necessary to
sustain the vitality of the discipline. There is no doubt that the ‘new musicology’ has
enriched the field, and although its methodology and vocabulary might seem
unrecognizable to a previous generation of scholars, it still makes use of traditional
concepts such as style, historical periodization and formal analysis. These research
areas have retained their vigour independent of any association with the recent
trends, as have source studies and edition-making, and their future does not seem to
be in jeopardy.
It has legitimately been asked if the ‘new musicology’ is really so new. In one
respect music historiography since the last decades of the 20th century has been
remarkably innovative in the questions it has posed and the kind of answers it has
sought. But music historiography has always relied on its neighbouring disciplines,
and in this regard, indeed, nothing has changed. Historical musicology has always
31
been only a semi-autonomous discipline: (1) by its very nature as a sub-field of
history, (2) 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, and (3) because music – its composition, performance and
reception – is undeniably a part of general culture. As a consequence of the second
circumstance, non-formalist historians concerned with the problem of musical
meaning have little choice but to borrow from critical methods in the visual arts and
letters. The third circumstance represents the challenge that has stimulated traditional
cultural-historical approaches as well as the most innovative work of recent decades.
A discipline that does not renew itself stagnates; this most recent renewal promises to
maintain the continuing vigour of music history, while preserving and strengthening
the humanistic basis of its historiography.
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