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Harper-Scott, J Harper-Scott, J. P. E. "How We Got Out of Music History, and How We Can Get Back into It." Theories of History: History Read across the Humanities. By Michael J. Kelly and Arthur Rose. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 37–60. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 26 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781474271332.ch-003>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 26 September 2021, 12:05 UTC. Copyright © Michael J. Kelly, Arthur Rose, and Contributors 2018. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 3 How We Got Out of Music History, and How We Can Get Back into It J. P. E. Harper- Scott Part I: Music history since the fall of the Berlin Wall The style dualism What kind of historical object is music? Is it a “work,” the product of creative labor, whose identity as a work can be fixed by its notation in a score; an autono- mous object because it exists for its own internal compositional logic? Or is it some species of a sonic “event” discernible only in performance, with or without the notated trace; its salient attribute not logic but expression (of an idea, an emotion, or the joy of bodily stirring)? If music is better understood as perform- ance, then its essence is found in the social functions it discharges and supports; if it is a “work,” then its disinterested and self- ruling inner workings are a form of cognition without representational concepts, which poses a potential danger to a social world it no longer flatters by imitation. Lurking behind the work/ event binary is a more abstract and pointed question: Is it possible to critique conven- tion, and thus become free from it, or should one find a comfortable accommo- dation with convention, and so remain bounden to it? The music historian Carl Dahlhaus claimed that a new possibility for musi- cal emancipation appeared quite suddenly around the time of the French Revolution in the form of “the emphatic concept of art, which Beethoven appro- priated for music in a downright usurping grab.”1 This “emphatic concept” allots music the capacity to voice autonomous thought, to speak as a critical observer of the world rather than purely to entertain. Music’s aptness to muse is dynamic- ally personified in Beethoven, whose “symphonies represent inviolable musical ‘texts’ whose meaning should be deciphered by means of interpretations which 38 Theories of History are to be understood as ‘exegeses’ [Auslegungen] .” 2 The claim is that Beethoven’s symphonies are, like religious or philosophical texts, competent to reveal truths about the world, and therefore demanding of their listeners as careful and medi- tative analysis as a proposition by Hegel. Dahlhaus’s conception of what, following Schleiermacher, he calls “art- religion” is denominationally specific. The “truths” inhabiting the “texts” of Beethoven echo protestant traditions of Christianity, which insist on the pri- macy of the biblical text and on the freedom of the individual to interpret it and so to attain (theoretically) unmediated access to the “truth,” that is, God; salva- tion comes through faith alone, through theory rather than praxis. The opposite focus, on the performance “event” (as typified for Dahlhaus by Rossini’s operas), parallels Catholicism’s insistence on the primacy of emotional experience— through the sacraments, particularly the Eucharist and confession, and regular church attendance— and on the authority of the Church, which alone may inter- pret the text; salvation comes through praxis, and access to salvation is granted through the mediation of the Church. Both sides of the musical split can be argued to represent a “democratization” of culture, the Beethoven-Protestant side because it offers the individual listener a direct and unmediated commu- nion with the truth embosomed in the music, although its high intellectual demands might exclude much of the population; the Rossini-Catholic side because it implies the need for no special intellectual training, though music is received only via the mediation of performers with privileged access to the text. This profound aesthetic and temperamental segregation concerned Dahlhaus for the same reason that it has concerned many musicologists: by clamping the intellectual, critical, and autonomous qualities of music to Germany’s most influential nineteenth- century composer, conventional music history, which holds a special place for Beethoven, encourages an aesthetic Germanophilia which seemingly condemns the rest of Europe—to say nothing of the rest of the world— to a marginal importance. Dahlhaus’s aim was to write a history that would show that the nineteenth century could not be understood as “the age of Beethoven” but only as “the age of Beethoven and Rossini,” which is to say that musical romanticism could not be reductively interpreted as following a single course but must be grasped as a “style dualism” (Stildualismus) in which those composers act as placeholders for instrumental and vocal styles in music. The test of his theory would be whether this evenhandedness could suck the poison out of what appears to be an aesthetic division between meaningfulness (Beethoven) and empty pleasure (Rossini). How We Got Out of Music History 39 Strategies of gauging work and performance To put it mildly, views differ as to whether Dahlhaus’s goals were achieved. The trouble is of course that Dahlhaus loaded the dice, by cinching the brains to the Beethoven side. In the past quarter of a century, musicologists have put them- selves to increasingly weird contortions in the attempt to show either that musi- cal intelligence is more copiously distributed across the style dualism or else—in a forlorn gesture of scholarly self- abnegation— that enjoyment is more import- ant than thought. Dahlhaus’s bequest to musicology, the work/performance binary, has been put to disciplinary use in the form of what James Hepokoski describes as four “methodological strategies” for wrestling with the opposition.3 These strategies, which I see as more ideologically marked than Hepokoski does, shape (almost) the entire field of musicology as it is currently practiced, at least apropos of music (“high” and “low”) since 1789. Strategy 1 can be summarized as the performance of a critique of “the pre- sumed canon of Western European artworks, along with the ideologies that have supported and sustained them.”4 This strategy, in common with all four of Hepokoski’s set, is openly postmodern, viewing claims to “truth,” in art or any- thing else, with skepticism. To the initiates of Strategy 1, truth, its locus in the “work,” and its interpreters, must be ambushed wherever they lurk. Instead of “sacramental treatment,” musical works are denied their autonomy and thrown back into their “material- historical entanglements,” so that “Beethoven’s music becomes an event, too, replanted back in the rich, untidy soil of history.”5 Methodologically, Strategy 1 is empirical, “scouring relevant books, periodi- cals, newspaper articles, concert or opera programs, academic regimens, and the like in order to draw forth potentially incriminating discourses and ignored subtexts, nationalist and otherwise, surrounding canonical composers and their works.”6 In almost all cases it solemnly abjures music analysis (which, it fancies, reinforces claims to truth and authority) in preference for a broadly conceived “criticism,” particularly reception history and the population of a “thick present” in which specifics that other historians regard as signal facts of music history— the appearance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, say—are cast into a welter of relativizing data. Strategy 2 replaces the canon of masterworks, which it sees as elitist, antidem- ocratic, and German- centered, with “exemplars from the ‘event’ [i.e., the Rossini] side of Dahlhaus’s binary as texts to explicate in their own right: Mediterranean opera, for instance, or performer- centered compositions and virtuosity, or 40 Theories of History nationalist potboilers, or genres of popular or commercial music.”7 Uniquely, Strategy 2 follows “traditional” musicology such as Dahlhaus’s by performing music analysis. Not only a mechanism for arraying this “peripheral” music’s attractive features, analysis is a tool for ideology critique, since Others from within the art- music tradition, from a non- Western country, or from Western popular traditions, can be extolled as sites of resistance to the supremacy of the “conservative” cultural products of the musical canon. Hence, music analysis retains its epistemic role, but the knowledge it validates is wrested free from ideology so that the subaltern may speak. Together, Strategies 1 and 2 comprise the liberal- postmodern core of musico- logical scholarship in the West where the focus sharpens on music as “text.” The two remaining of Hepokoski’s four methodological strategies, likewise post- modern, describe scholarship whose focus is on performance. Ostensibly, interest for scholars in Strategy 3 lies “not so much in ‘Una voce poco fa’ [from] Il barbiere di Siviglia as relatively stable works somehow captured permanently in notation … but rather in the individualized perfor- mances of ‘Una voce poco fa’ and Il barbiere as the actual texts under examin- ation.”8 In the context of early twenty-first- century ideology, it privileges the commodity form of music, the recorded object, which the last century demon- strated to be more profitable than concert tickets. But it does more than this. The really existing human subjects who perform music are subtracted from the concept of music altogether: by centering music’s ontology on recorded sound rather than embodied performer, such scholarship dissimulates the market focus, music’s “sale- ability” as sonic object, as a specious interest in real people. Strategy 4’s most striking expression is a much-cited article by Carolyn Abbate, which contrasts thinking about music (“gnostic”) with an in-the- moment enjoy- ment of it (“drastic”).9 She reverses (what she takes to be) Dahlhaus’s value-laden polarity, so that work/ gnostic is bad, and performance/ drastic is good.
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