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Current Trends in Historical Musicology
Author(s): Claude V. Palisca
Source: The World of Music, Vol. 19, No. 3/4, in honour of Alain Danilou's 70th birthday
/ mlanges offerts Alain Danilou l'occasion de son 70me anniversaire (1977), pp. 134143
Published by: VWB - Verlag fr Wissenschaft und Bildung
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/43560497
Accessed: 26-10-2016 12:25 UTC
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Claude V. Palisca
ter V, Aesthetics and the Science of Art .in Main Trends of Research in the Social
and Human Sciences, Part II, prepared for arid scheduled to be published by UNESCO
in 1977, wiht permission of the Publishing Division, the UNESCO Press. I am grateful to Professor Jacques Havet, editor of the volume, for obtaining this permission
and for his wise and sympathetic administration of the project.
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135
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They rightfully ask what is the relevance, indeed, of music history, the-
focuses on fleeting cultures whose music will soon be melted down in the
acculturation pot. Theory can be defended as necessary to the training
of composers and to the analysis of music that must be understood to be
properly performed. Simple, incomplete and naive as these answers are,
there is no parallel pragmatic answer for history of music.
Arthur Mendel in the first public address to the New York Congress
of the International Musicological Society in 1961 asked why we inquire
into the history of music. It is suggested, he said, that we do so to learn
from the past how to act in the future. He rejected this utilitarian explanation as note consistent with practice, since very few readers of history deal with the future; for example, composer make little use of
our knowledge of the music of the remote past. Mendel concluded that we
study history of music primarily "because we have a passion for understanding things, for being puzzled and solving our puzzles; because we are curious and will not be satisfied until our curiosity rest." '.
This answer will not satisfy everyone, since it could he objected that
there are too many things to understand, too many puzzles to solve; curiosity is insatiable. Must we transcribe and analyze every last extant motet of the 16th century? Must we know the provenance, scribes, history,
concordances, and attributions of every chanson manuscript? Is every
ers and conductors and through them their public. The rediscovery of
Bach in the early 19th century and since then of hundreds of other composers both earlier and later has revolutionized the repertory of concert
and recorded music. It has also created problems for performers who must
relive a practice buried in the past. At first it seemed that having cri-
tical editions that present the music in the state in which it left the composer's pen would provide the basis for the restoration of the authentic
sound of music. By now editions are common, but it has become evident
in the meantime that composers before the 19th century, at least, left
much to the taste and elaboration of the player.2 The past twenty years
have witnessed intense controversies about the proper performance stan-
the early 18th century written in equal values but intended to be played unequally), the proper way to play and sing embellishments, instrumental
accompaniment in sacred and secular vocal composition from the 14th to
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the 16th centuries, the appropriate chordal realization of bass lines in the
baroque period, and many other similar questions. The simple answers
once accepted have given way to multiple answers, as instruction books
and other literary and musical documents have been read more carefully
and exhaustively. It is obvious now that several alternate solutions may
be equally authentic. To pass on to the performer these options in a way
that he can understand them and use them artfully remains a challenge
to musicology.3
Another obvious priority is to make available to the musical public the
means for understanding significant music of all traditions and cultures.
Being a relatively young field of university study, music has had to
guard its identity as a scholarly discipline jealously; so in most countries
it has failed to establish close ties with the public on lower levels of
education. The music scholar tends to operate in the hermetic atmos-
tried to carry out Willibald Gurlits aim of a synthetic Stilgeschichtesschreibung. As expounded in 1918, this synthesis united two directions:
1) Ausdrucksgeschichte , the intellectual history behind music, the interpretation of its content, and the clarification of cultural concepts; and
2) Problemgeschichte , the study of formal, artistic and stylistic concepts.
It led not to the synthesis Gurlitt envisioned but to unrestrained subjective reactions, the constructions of artistics style-types like Gesamtgotik,
a Formenlehre of stereotyped categories, and a general dilution of methodological rigor. Korte believed that this method reached a crisis in the
1930-50 period, and the reaction to it produced a resurgence of the factoriented research that Gurlitt tried to replace. There resulted the present
trend toward formal technical analysis on the one hand and philological,
document-oriented research on the other.
Friedrich Blume5 called the movement toward documentary and archival study Neo-Positivism and blamed it for the present isolation of schola
by specialization and location, the decline of international cooperation,
and the alienation of lay music lovers and general historians. While not
underestimating the importance of identifying watermarks and copyist
and their role in establishing a reliable chronology of Bach's works in t
past twenty-five years, he was fearful that this kind of research migh
become a fashion. If kept up, he warned, in the year 2000 we might hav
a history not of composers and theorists, but of copyists and scribes, n
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The way out of this impasse is seen by many today in a return to the
individual work of art as the starting point of research and explanation.
The beginning and end of musicological studies lie in sympathetic and
sky said 6. By this is not meant simply explication du texte, but, as Blume
described it, Geschichtliches Denken, which, he explained, means to
understand the meaning of the things that we encounter in history.7
What the nature of such explanation should be has been the subject
of some discussion recently. Joseph Kerman suggested that the ultimate
function of musicology is criticism. He saw criticism as the top rung of
a ladder to which the component disciplines of musicology lead. Each of
the things we (historical musicologists) do - paleography, transcription,
repertory studies, archival work, biography, bibliography, sociology, Auffhrungspraxis, schools and influences, theory, style analysis, individual
analysis - each of these things, which some scholar treats as an end in
itself, is treated as a step on a ladder.
position, then the more the two are separated, the worse it will be for
either. *
humanization of the research and reporting process has perhaps been more
world.
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Along with the tendencies deplored by Blume and Korte must be counted the blind pursuit of the banner of style criticism. Manfred Bukofzer
had said : Style criticism must be recognized as the core of modern
musicology ... The description of the origin and development of styles,
their interrelationship, their transfer from one medium to another, is the
central task of musicology . 10
Whereas Bukofzer conceived of style contextually as related to the
world of ideas and he subordinated description to understanding, those
who followed the slorgan of style criticism sacrificed both context and ideas
for descriptive, often statistical, statements of what occurs in the
music of certain composers, genres, or periods. Excessive application
of statistical analysis has been criticized by Paul Henry Lang : To im-
by the closeness with which they approximate their models, and whose
necessities are imposed from without .
Historians of music have relied since at least the 19th century, o
Donald Grout (1960)" and Richard Crocker (1966). 16 In Germany the history of genres (Kleine Handbcher der Musikgeschichte nach Gattungen)
1905-22)'7 were also representative of this trend. By comparison French
and Italian authors have been more aware of the role of social and intel-
lectual forces (for example, Nanie Bridgman, 1964). 18 The changing att
tudes are dramatically evident in comparing The New Oxford History (1954)lu
with the old one. The New , to which a number of French and German
authors have contributed, particularly in the volumes on the middle ages and
side of music.
139
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rists and to explain music in term of the composer's own concepts in his
book Music in the Baroque Era (1947) 21 and I chose to apply this method
even more rigorously in my book on the same period."
Another effective palliative to the earlier tendency to create evolutionary schemes has been a concentration upon the individual work. Multidimensional examination of individual artworks could lead not only
to better understanding of them but also to more solid grounds for generalization. Treitler (1966) 23 called for musical analysis in historical context . He viewed the process as containing a number of overlapping approaches: 1) a search for the significant form of a work, 2) a search for
values and schemata that condition apprehension of a work, 3) explanation, particularly causal, of the work in terms of past and contemporary practices and events outside the work, 4) investigation of the music's
function and environmental relations.
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nal in confifding theory teaching in the universities mainly to musicologists. Nevertheless it is safe to say that the major contributions to
music theory in the twentieth century have been made by persons not
trained as musicologists and who did or do not consider themselves
such. Among these are Heinrich Schenker, Georg Capellen, Bernhard
Ziehn, Arnold Schnberg, Paul Hindemith, Milton Babbitt, and Allen Forte.
On the other hand, several prominent music theorists, particularly among
those educated in Germany, were musicologically trained, for example
Ernest Kurth, Alfred Lorenz, and Felix Salzer. As long as a theorist limits
himself to explaining the music he knows exhaustively, as Schenker and
Lorenz did, or contemporary music, as with Babbitt, the problem of historical context is not raised. But when theorists apply categories tested and
found valid in one repertory to music distant in time from it, the often
introduce concepts and explanations quite alien to the mode of thinking
of the composer being analyzed. There are signs that this problem is being
recognized, and with the availability of treatises of the 16th, 17th, and 18th
centuries improving through photographic reprints, there in less excuse
now for historical naivet. Also universities are training professional theorists who have a solid grounding in history.
If music history and theory are becoming more interdependent, the division of musical scholarship into Western historical on the one hand
and ethnic, non-Western and folk on the other may be acknowledged as a
fait accompli. Nevertheless theorists of both disciplines continue to ex-
been reproached for failing to take advantage of ethnomusicological methods and insights. Handschin already in 1949 complained that it is strange that after the appearance of musical psychology and ethnology the
historical branch of musicology should have continued its progress at first
as if nothing had happened. >>24 Frank LI. Harrison suggested one direction that historians of music might take in contributing to the recreation
of the music of the past: It becomes no less essential to re-create as
far as possible the function, social meaning, and manner of performance
of every type of musical work than to establish the notes of the musical
text that make the re-creation possible ... Looked at in this way, it is the
function of all musicology to be in fact ethnomusicology 25.
Charles Seeger has been the most eloquent pleader for a unified musicology and for the application of systematic method developed in the study of non-Western music to contemporary music of the West, not only
art music but the total musical scene in all levels of the culture. The soo-
Europophilism
and go to work
popular and folk
ethnomusicolo-
141
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professional as well as its popular and folk idioms - the better it will be
pean scholars, urging them to focus their studies not so much on music
as on musical man: What, then, is the true object of musicology? It is
nothing but man, who, standing in a certain location in space and time,
impresses his artistic striving in an appropriate music; thus man in his
musical activity, man artistically forming something that he leaves behind
to posterity "
Franois Lesure has reinforced this thought: The final goal would
be, evidently, to discover what the musical tells us about man that is
different from what language, religion, or law teaches us about him ."
Some worthwhile goals, we have seen, have been proposed. Each of them
is in a different way limited. Style criticism is essentially descriptive and
analytical and prone to generalization: it most often bypasses the important
question: why - why is the work in the form that it is described? Evaluative criticism is basically snobbish; it excludes, when we want entries
into the unknown. On the other hand, in the pursuit of sociological, anthropological knowledge, in seeking to know man, we lose sight of the quality
of the musical experience. Finally, the recretion of historical music through
performance offers up often engaging fresh music but without the context
that would render it meaningful.
') Arthur Mendel, Evidence and Explanation, Report, IMS Congress, II, New
York. 1961, p. 4.
pp. 19-24.
) Friedrich Blume. Historische Musikforschung in der Gegenwart, Acta Musicologica, XL, 1968, pp. 8-21.
142
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,4) Gustave Reese, Music in the Renaissance. New York: W. W Norton, 1954, rev.
ed., 1959.
,s) Donald J. Grout, A History of Western Music. New York: W. W. Norton, 1960.
,6) Richard L. Crocker, A History of Musical Style. New York: McGraw Hill, 1966.
,7) Kleine Handbcher der Musikgeschichte nach Gattungen. Ed. Hermann Kretzschmar, 14 vols. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hrtel, 1905-22.
I8) Nanie Bridgman, La vie musicale au quattrocento. Paris: Gallimard, 1964.
,9) The New Oxford History of Music. Ed. Dom Anselm Hughes and Gerald Abraham.
London: Oxford University Press, 1954M) Lawrence Gushee, New Sources for the Biography of Johannes de Mris , Journal of the Amer icon Musicological Society, XXII, 1969, pp 3-26.
2l) Manfred Bukofzer, Music in the Baroque Era. New York: W. W. Norton, 1947.
Claude V. Palisca, Baroque Music. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1968.
") Leo Treitler. Music Analysis in an Historical Context , College Music Symposium, VI, 1966, pp. 75-88.
stehend, sein knstlerisches Streben in einer ihm gemssen Musik ausprgt, also der
Mensch in seiner musikalischen Bettigung, der knstlerisch gestaltende Mensch, der
Nachwelt die Erzeugnisse seiner Gestaltung hinterlsst . Jacques Handschin, Der
Arbeitsbereich del Musikwissenschaft , Gedenkschrift J. Handschin. Bern, Stuttgart:
P. Haupt, 1957, p. 24. .
28) Le but suprme serait videmment de dcouvrir ce que le musical nous enseigne de l'homme, qui soit diffrent de ce que le langage, la religion ou le droit nous
apprend de lui . Francois Lesure, Musicologie >, in Encyclopdie de la musique. Paris: Fasquelle. 1961, III, pp. 268f.
143
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