The Dahlhaus Project and Its Extra-Musicological Sources
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The Dahlhaus Project and Its Extra-musicological Sources JAMES HEPOKOSKI It is probably no overstatement to say that Carl the surface of its compact, often oblique prose, Dahlhaus's Nineteenth-Century Music' could and it presumes a readership involved in meth- alter the horizon of English-language musi- odological disputes taken for granted in West cology. Whether we wish to take issue with it Germany in the 1960s and 70s. Not surpris- or to build upon it, the book provides a needed ingly, the American response to date has been focus for discussion, and it seems likely to re- to sidestep the contextual engagement of its ar- main for some time the single broad argument guments in favor of noting the disturbing con- about the century that professionals will be ex- trast between the brilliance of Dahlhaus's pected to have confronted. Yet the book is not intellectualist approach to the history of music self-explanatory, particularly for American and the vexing reality of his apparent unwill- readers. Much of its raison d'etre lies beneath ingness to consider non-Germanic music on its own terms, his rigorously judgemental pro- nouncements, and his occasional errors of fac- 19th-Century Music XIV/3 (Spring 1991). ? by the Regents tual detail. Thus Philip Gossett, Dahlhaus's of the University of California. sharpest American critic to date, recently con- For responses to an early version of this paper, as wellcluded as that "the errors [of Nineteenth-Century for corrections and suggestions, I am grateful to Manuela Music] reveal a systemic failure. Dahlhaus's Jahrmirker, Andrew Jones, Sanna Pederson, Ruth Solie, and Richard Wattenbarger. This paper continues a conver- central vision is so pervasive that it tends to sation that was begun with the students of my Spring misrepresent 1990 or demean the music it treats."2 graduate musicology seminar on Carl Dahlhaus at the Uni-These are serious charges, and they will take versity of Minnesota. To those students, each of whom has left an imprint on the argumentation presented here, someI also time to assess. To be sure, "central vi- owe a debt of thanks. Notes begin on p. 238. sion" is the dominating factor of the Dahlhaus 221 This content downloaded from 128.36.7.70 on Sat, 23 Feb 2019 20:30:41 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 19TH Project,3 and it merits our closest attention. CENTURY which elaborates his fully unfurled method- MUSIC Here, too, Gossett has provided an initial ology; step and Nineteenth-Century Music (NCM) with his recent critique, "Carl Dahlhaus of 1980, and intended to be, among other things, a the 'Ideal Type'," which traces an important practical demonstration of that methodology. strand of Dahlhausian methodology (A to review its of the most fundamental features of source in Max Weber.4 But his "central vision" Dahlhaus's thought, particularly as presented comprises many other such strands, none of in these two works, is provided in the Appen- which has been adequately developed in the dix to this essay.) secondary literature on Dahlhaus. In English- As the briefest of introductions, we may say language discussions, they are often alluded that at the heart of the Dahlhaus Project was an to -with a shiver- as features that are forbid- effort to keep the Austro-Germanic canon from dingly Germanic. It is common to encounter, Beethoven to Schoenberg free from aggressively for instance, unelaborated references to an ap- sociopolitical interpretations. His principal proach "rooted in an intellectual tradition of strategy was, first, to insist that as concrete art- idealist philosophy quite foreign to the main- works they were conceived primarily under the stream of Anglo-American analytic empiri- category of aesthetic autonomy (Appendix, no. cism," along with a remark to the effect that 6), and, second, to argue that historians should many aspects of this approach are fated to "re- generally stress primary, not secondary catego- ceive little resonance in this country."5 Other ries. This permitted "great music" to continue commentaries refer briefly, but ominously, to to be considered principally within the realm of "the dialectical ruminations of one nourished aesthetics, as a type of socially functionless, at the intellectual bosom of Th. W. Adorno";6 nonauthoritarian discourse. These views were to the Russian-Formalist literary critics; to the profoundly traditional, and in the West Ger- Annales School; to Schoenbergianism; and somany of the 1960s and 70s, their acceptability on. Gossett has provided an exemplary begin- was coming increasingly under attack. Dahl- ning, but other sources underpinning Dahl- haus's concerns, therefore, may be understood haus's work remain insufficiently identified, as essentially defensive. They were undertaken explored, and contextually coordinated. in a world growing skeptical both of the appeal This essay attempts a rudimentary mapping to tradition and of the utility and claims of pos- of the geography of Dahlhaus's "extra-musi- itivistic research. cological" concerns. By identifying certain In his search for alternatives to an unreflec- modes of thought as extra-musicological, Itive positivism, alternatives that would still mean only that either they arose outside the ac-preserve traditional musical values, Dahlhaus ademic profession of Musikwissenschaft or was in dialogue with two extra-musicological that in the 1960s, when Dahlhaus was begin- constellations of thought. The first, or ning to consolidate his system, they were con- "materialist-sociological [Marxist]," constella- sidered outside the normal concerns of the tion, a network of ways of thinking of which he professional discussion. This would include was profoundly suspicious, is the subject of Adorno as extra-musicological, for instance, section III below. The second, and for Dahlhaus since his music-critical methods were often the more positive, the "empirical-hermeneutic- considered unphilologisch, more related to phi- phenemenological" constellation, will be losophy and sociology than to musicology.7 treated in the concluding section IV. (It should Schoenberg, as a prominent composer, how- be added at once that in actual practice these ever, would always have been considered constellations intersected in complex, unpre- central to the profession's interest. An exami- dictable ways. The well-known Marxism/ nation of Dahlhaus's musicological or music- phenomenology mix of Sartre, for example, theoretical sources, most of which were written may serve as an illustration of this outside of before 1960, would lead us further afield than is Germany. While by no means wishing to min- practical here. My references focus, so far as imize the intricacy of the issues at stake, the possible, on two of the most central works: more practical point here is that Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History (FMH) of 1977,8 whose thought was shaped during a period of 222 This content downloaded from 128.36.7.70 on Sat, 23 Feb 2019 20:30:41 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method JAMES extraordinary political and methodological ten- HEPOKOSKI sion, seems to have experienced these constel- [Wahrheit und Methode] appeared in 1960: see The Dahlhaus lations as generally contrasting.) Before en- section IV below, where it will be discussed as Project tering this discussion, however, it is necessary one of Dahlhaus's central sources.") And the to ground Dahlhaus's concerns within the epis- crumbling of faith in objectivity and in the temological crisis that engulfed West German possibility of what Weber had called "value- universities in the 1960s and 70s. It is only freedom" was spurred onward in the much- within this context, which included some po- vaunted "positivist dispute" (Positivismus- tent sociopolitical ramifications, that the full streit) from 1961 to about 1971, pitting Popper impact of his system may be grasped. And it is and Hans Albert as "critical rationalists" on on this broader, contextual ground that our con- the more traditional (or "conservative") side sideration of Dahlhaus in the upcoming years is against Adorno and Jiurgen Habermas as propo- likely to unfold. nents of a dialectical vision of critical theory and "societal totality" on the other.12 II By the mid-1960s, a new factor had electrify- On the most fundamental level, Dahlhaus's ingly politicized all of this: the rise of the stu- writings may be read as a response to the com- dent movement and the New Left, which plex of controversies that arose within West peaked in the upheavals of 1968 but continued German universities from 1960 to about 1980.9 with considerable strength until about 1974.13 In brief, these disputes were touched off by a (As is widely known, the New Left insisted that collapse of faith in positivistic inquiry, a col- the axioms tacitly undergirding traditional, lapse attributable to the continued (but by now "value-free" research were little more than widely acknowledged) decline of the notion of conservative - sometimes repressive - political objectively attainable truth. Although the prob- positions.) By the later 1970s, however, the lems involved had been raised earlier in the cen- New Left had become politically ineffectual, as tury, this crisis became particularly evident in a result of the ascendancy of pragmatism, neo- the late 1950s and early 1960s in the philosophy conservatism, and occasionally outright gov- of science advanced by such figures as Karl ernmental legislation. This Tendenzwende, or Popper (whose work of the 1930s was now be- change in the climate of opinion, had become coming more widely known), Peter Winch, particularly noticeable by 1977, a date referred Michael Polanyi, Imre Lakatos, and Thomas to by German leftists as the "German Au- Kuhn.10 tumn."14 At issue was the increasing suspicion that Still, the late 1960s and 70s saw the rise in the pursuit of truth was little more than the the West German universities of sociological ever-clearer articulation of covert premises (for and Marxist proponents of varying degrees of example, Kuhn's "paradigms") which them- orthodoxy, confrontation, and activism.