New musicology
This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these template messages)
|
New musicology is a wide body of
Definitions and history
New musicology seeks to question the research methods of traditional musicology by displacing
In 1980 Joseph Kerman published the article "How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out", calling for a change in musicology.[1] He asked for "a new breadth and flexibility in academic music criticism [musicology]",[2] that would extend to musical discourse, critical theory and analysis. In the words of Rose Rosengard Subotnik: "For me...the notion of an intimate relationship between music and society functions not as a distant goal but as a starting point of great immediacy...the goal of which is to articulate something essential about why any particular music is the way it is in particular, that is, to achieve insight into the character of its identity."[3]
Susan McClary suggests that new musicology defines music as "a medium that participates in social formation by influencing the ways we perceive our feelings, our bodies, our desires, our very subjectivities—even if it does so surreptitiously, without most of us knowing how".[4] For Lawrence Kramer, music has meanings "definite enough to support critical interpretations comparable in depth, exactness, and density of connection to interpretations of literary texts and cultural practices".[5]
New musicology combines cultural studies with the analysis and criticism of music, and it accords more weight to the sociology of musicians and institutions and to non-canonical genres of music, including
New musicologists question the processes of canonization. Gary Tomlinson suggests that meaning be searched out in a "series of interrelated historical narratives that surround the musical subject"[7] – a "web of culture"[8] For example, the work of Beethoven has been examined from new perspectives by studying his reception and influence in terms of hegemonic masculinity, the development of the modern concert, and the politics of his era, among other concerns. The traditional contrast between Beethoven and Schubert has been revised in the light of these studies, especially with reference to Schubert's possible homosexuality.[9][5][10]
Relationship to music sociology
New musicology is distinct from
A fundamental distinction has to do with attitudes towards
Criticism
Vincent Duckles writes, "As musicology has grown more pluralistic, its practitioners have increasingly adopted methods and theories deemed by observers to mark the academy as irrelevant, out of touch with 'mainstream values', unwelcoming of Western canonic traditions or simply incomprehensible. Paradoxically, such approaches have distanced music scholarship from a broad public at the very moment they have encouraged scholars to scrutinize the popular musics that form the backbone of modern mass musical culture."[14]
Critics of new musicology include Pieter van den Toorn and to a lesser extent Charles Rosen. In response to an early essay of McClary,[15] Rosen says that "she sets up, like so many of the 'new musicologists', a straw man to knock down, the dogma that music has no meaning, and no political or social significance. (I doubt that anyone, except perhaps the nineteenth-century critic Hanslick, has ever really believed that, although some musicians have been goaded into proclaiming it by the sillier interpretations of music with which we are often assailed.)"[16] For David Beard and Kenneth Gloag, however, writing at two later moments,[17] the methods of new musicology have been fully incorporated into mainstream musicological practice.
References
Citations
- ^ Kerman 1980.
- ^ Kerman 1994, p. 30.
- ^ Subotnik 1991, p. [page needed].
- ^ Brett, Wood & Thomas 1994.
- ^ a b Kramer 1990.
- ^ Beard & Gloag 2016, 38.
- ^ Beard & Gloag 2016, 123.
- ^ Tomlinson 1984.
- ^ McClary in Brett, Wood & Thomas 1994
- ^ Mathew 2012.
- ^ McClary 1990.
- ^ McClary 2000.
- ^ Fink 2005.
- ^ Duckles 2020.
- ^ McClary 1987.
- ^ Rosen 2000.
- ^ Beard & Gloag 2016.
Sources
- Beard, David; Gloag, Kenneth (2016) [2005]. Musicology: The Key Concepts (2nd ed.). Routledge.
- Duckles, Vincent; et al. (2020). "Musicology". ISBN 978-1-56159-263-0.
- Brett, Philip; Wood, Elizabeth; Thomas, Gary C., eds. (1994). Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology.
- Fink, Robert (2005). Repeating Ourselves: American Minimal Music as Cultural Practice. Berkley: JSTOR 10.1525/j.ctt1pntqm.
- JSTOR 1343130.
- ISBN 978-0-520-08355-4.
- Kramer, Lawrence (1990). Music as Cultural Practice, 1800-1900.
- McClary, Susan (1987). "The blasphemy of talking politics during Bach Year". In McClary; Leppert, Richard (eds.). Music and Society: The politics of composition, performance and reception. Cambridge University Press.
- McClary, Susan (1989). "Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music Composition". Cultural Critique (12): 57–81.
- McClary, Susan (2000). "Women and Music on the Verge of the New Millennium". Signs. 25 (4): 1283–1286.
- Mathew, Nicholas (2012). Political Beethoven. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1107005891.
- Rosen, Charles (2000). "The New Musicology". Critical Entertainments: Music Old and New. Harvard University Press. pp. 255–272.
- ISBN 0-8166-1873-9.
- JSTOR 746387.
Further reading
- Agawu, Kofi (2003). Representing African Music: Postcolonial Notes, Queries, Positions. Taylor & Francis.
- Carter, Tim (2002). "An American In", review-article of McClary Conventional Wisdom, in Music & Letters, vol. 83, no. 2, pp. 274–279.
- Cook, Nicholas and Everist, Mark, ed. (1999). Rethinking Music.
- Feldman, Morton; Earle Brown; and Heinz-Klaus Metzger (1972). "Morton Feldman, Earle Brown and Heinz-Klaus Metzger in Discussion", cnvill.net (Chris Villars)
- Fink, Robert. (1998) Elvis Everywhere: Musicology and Popular Music Studies at the Twilight of the Canon.
- Heile, Björn (2004). "Darmstadt as Other: British and American Responses to Musical Modernism" in twentieth-century music, vol. 1, issue 2, pp. 161–178.
- ISBN 0-521-64030-X.
- Kerman, Joseph (1985). Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology. UK edition: Musicology.
- McClary, Susan (2000). Conventional Wisdom.
- McClary, Susan (2006). "The World According to Taruskin", in Music & Letters, vol. 87, no. 3, pp. 408–415.
- O'Neill, Maggie, ed. (1999). Adorno, Culture and Feminism. Sage Publications.
- Ross, Alex (2003). 'Ghost Sonata: Adorno and German Music'
- Rycenga, Jennifer (2002). "Queerly Amiss: Sexuality and the Logic of Adorno's Dialectics", in Gibson, Nigel and Rubin, Andrew, eds. Adorno: A Critical Reader. Blackwell.
- Taruskin, Richard (2005). "Speed Bumps", in 19th-Century Music, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 185–207.
- Watson, Ben (1995). "McClary and Postmodernism" in Frank Zappa: The Negative Dialectics of Poodle Play. Quartet Books.
- Williams, Alistair (2001). Constructing Musicology. Ashgate.
External links
- Contemporary Music Theory and the New Musicology: An Introduction
- "Letters to the editor" by Lawrence Kramer et al., The New York Review of Books, re: " 'Music à La Mode', Lawrence Kramer, reply by Charles Rosen", vol. 41, no. 15, September 22, 1994
- GregSandow.com: Beethoven Howls, The Village Voice, December 17, 1985
- GregSandow.com The Secret of the Silver Ticket The Village Voice, April 1, 1986, see deconstruction
- The comeback of systematic musicology
- Original version of article for New Grove on "Lesbian and Gay Music", by Philip Brettand Elizabeth Wood