New musicology

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The New Musicology is a term applied to a wide body of work produced by many musicologists who consider themselves and their musicology neither new nor New. Deriving from feminism, gender studies, gay and lesbian studies, queer theory, postcolonial studies, the work of some French structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers, and to a lesser extent the critical theory of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin), the New Musicology constitutes an increased focus upon the cultural study, analysis, and criticism of music.

1 Definitions and History
2 Fields of Work
3 New Musicologists
4 Criticisms of the New Musicology
5 Changes in traditional musicology in response to the New Musicology
6 References
7 Further reading
8 External links

[edit] Definitions and History

Susan McClary defined the New Musicology in relationship to traditional musicology, which she stated:

"fastidiously declares issues of musical signification off-limits to those engaged in legitimate scholarship."

In contrast, McClary's 'new musicology' treats 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. It is too important a cultural force to be shrouded by mystified notions of Romantic transcendence."

This may be interpreted as saying there is no absolute music, that all music has sexual, political, personal and emotional programs.

Thus, new musicology has much in common with ethnomusicology, the study of music (usually non-Western) in its culture and as a human activity. 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, and not as an hypothesis but as an assumption. It functions as an idea about a relationship which in turn allows the examination of that relationship from many points of view and its exploration in many directions. It is an idea that generates studies; the goal of which (or at least one important 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."

She counts as her influences Arnold Schoenberg, Theodor Adorno, Immanuel Kant, Leonard Meyer, and others. "Like Schoenberg, though in a very different way, Meyer refused to undervalue the significance of music and, more generally, of aesthetic models for making sense of human knowledge and experience. Like Schoenberg's enterprise, though in very different ways, Meyer's criticism is responsible in a profoundly moral as well as intellectual way." (p.297n18)

[edit] Fields of Work

A recurrent concern for New Musicologists has been the work and canonisation of Beethoven, studying the relationship of his work, its reception (especially in terms of his 'heroic style', investigated in depth by Scott Burnham in his book Beethoven Hero, though Burnham perhaps should not be considered as part of the movement), and its influence in terms of masculine hegemony. New Musicologists dealing with this subject include Kramer, McClary, Brett, as well as Tia DeNora and Sanna Pederson. The dichotomy between the constructions of subjectivity to be found in Beethoven and Schubert (especially with reference to the latter's supposed homosexuality) have also generated much debate; as well as the aforementioned figures, the work of Maynard Solomon is especially important in this context.

[edit] New Musicologists

In addition to McClary and Subotnik, prominent New Musicologists include Lawrence Kramer, Richard Leppert, and Robert Walser. Ellie Hisama adds the following names: Lori Burns, Marion Guck, Marianne Kielian-Gilbert, David Lewin, Judy Lochhead, Fred Maus, Joseph Straus, and Suzanne Cusick (Hisama 2001, p. 181), although Lewin and Straus are generally considered music theorists. Other figures who might be included are Philip Brett, the most prominent musicologist studying gay and lesbian issues, feminist musicologist Marcia Citron, and musical anthropologist Georgina Born. The fields of music and exoticism and orientalism have received a good deal of attention, especially in the work of Jonathan Bellman and Ralph P. Locke. Ethnomusicology has been influenced by the New Musicology in various ways; this is particularly clear in the work of Kofi Agawu.

[edit] Criticisms of the New Musicology

New Musicology is fundamentally an Anglo-American phenomenon and has had little impact in continental Europe and elsewhere. Whilst some of the figures involved in the discipline claim some allegiance to Theodor Adorno, their work has little in common with the wider field of Adorno studies, especially in Germany. Adorno's own radical comments on gender, ethnicity and sexuality are rarely taken into account. New Musicology might essentially be considered as a distinct phenomenon from the field of German music sociology bequeathed by the work of Adorno and before him that of Max Weber and Ernst Bloch (later figures in this tradition would include Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Hans G. Helms). New Musicologists frequently exhibit strongly anti-German tendencies (with a particular focus upon nineteenth-century German music theorists including Adolf Bernhard Marx and Eduard Hanslick, also the twentieth-century figures Heinrich Schenker and Carl Dahlhaus); this is especially pronounced in the work of Richard Taruskin (see Taruskin 2005 and also throughout his Oxford History of Western Music (see below)). A particularly fundamental distinction has to do with attitudes towards modernism and popular culture; German music sociologists tend to favour (though by no means uncritically, for example in Adorno's essay 'The Ageing of the New Music') the former and severely criticise the latter, seeing it as inextricably tied to the aesthetics of distraction as demanded by the culture industry. New Musicologists frequently take a diametrically opposed view: implacably hostile and dismissive of most modernist music (as for example in McClary 1989), though rarely engaging with actual works in any detail, they look very favourably upon popular music and often argue that it would be better to teach the latter than the former in institutions of higher education.

Many of the New Musicologists, especially McClary, argue for the superior value of music being left in the hands of the free market (as represented by the music industry), as opposed to the use of public funding ('the music industry, despite its many faults, more closely approaches a meritocracy and offers opportunities to a wider spectrum of artists than any other form of support' (McClary 2000)). In this sense she and others advocate the values of American high market capitalism as applied to music, as opposed to the social democratic model more common in Western Europe. In this respect in particular, as well as in the regular superior valorisation of the cultural products of North America over those from Europe or the rest of the world, it could be argued that McClary and some others occupy a position to the right of more mainstream musicology.

Critics of the New Musicology include Pieter van der Toorn and to a lesser extent Charles Rosen. In response to an early essay of McClary (McClary 1987), 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.)' (Rosen 2000).

[edit] Changes in traditional musicology in response to the New Musicology

It is a measure of the rate at which scholarship in music is changing, though, that many would no longer consider McClary's original statements to be valid. Many of the scholarly concerns that used to be associated with New Musicology have now become mainstream. Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music, published in 2005, is an indicator. A major work by an internationally recognized scholar, it reflects a wide knowledge of recent scholarship while simultaneously reflecting the broad humanistic concerns of Taruskin's mentor Paul Henry Lang, author of the 1941 classic Music in Western Civilization.

In light of such intergenerational connections, it is possible to argue that the distinction between an "old" and a "new" musicology is itself the product of a limited historical moment which has now passed.

[edit] References

Hisama, Ellie M. (2001). Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-64030-X.
McClary, Susan (1987). 'The blasphemy of talking politics during Bach Year', in McClary and Leppert, Richard, eds. Music and Society: The poltiics of composition, performance and reception. Cambridge University Press.
McClary, Susan (1989). "Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music Composition" in Cultural Critique 12 (1989), pp. 57-81.
McClary, Susan (2000). 'Women and Music on the Verge of the New Millenium', in Signs Vol. 25 No. 4, pp. 1283-1286.
Subotnik, Rose Rosengard (1991). Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0-8166-1873-9.
Rosen, Charles (2000). 'The New Musicology', in Critical Entertainments: Music Old and New, pp. 255-272. Harvard University Press.
Taruskin, Richard (2005). 'Speed Bumps', in 19th-Century Music, Vol. 29 No.2, pp. 185-207.

[edit] Further reading

McClary, Susan and Leppert, Richard, eds. (1987). Music and Society: The poltiics of composition, performance and reception.
Kramer, Lawrence (1990). Music as Cultural Practice, 1800-1900.
McClary, Susan (1991). Feminine Endings.
Subotnik, Rose Rosengard (1991). Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music.
Solie, Ruth, ed. (1993). Musicology and Difference.
Tomlinson, Gary (1993). Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others.
Citron, Marcia (1993). Gender and the Musical Canon.
Brett, Philip, Wood, Elizabeth and Thomas, Gary C., eds. (1994). Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology.
Kramer, Lawrence (1995). Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge.
Subotnik, Rose Rosengard (1996). Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society.
Van den Toorn, Pieter C. (1996). Music, Politics and the Academy.
Schwarz, David (1997). Listening Subjects: Music Psychoanalysis, Culture.
Bellman, Jonathan, ed. (1998). The Exotic in Western Music.
Fink, Robert. (1998) Elvis Everywhere: Musicology and Popular Music Studies at the Twilight of the Canon.
Cook, Nicholas and Everist, Mark, ed. (1999). Rethinking Music.
McClary, Susan (2000). Conventional Wisdom.
Born, Georgina and Hesmondhalgh, David (2000). Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music.
Taruskin, Richard (2005). The Oxford History of Western Music (six volumes).
Newell, Derek. (2006) Juxtapositions of the Canonical World in Modern Day Pakistani Cultural Music.