Transcript What is Musicology? - Bath Spa University

What is Musicology?
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1. Part of Rethinking Music
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2. Lecture series
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3. Assignments
Cook’s Very Short
Introduction to Musicology
A book about thinking about music.
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A search for a common all embracing way of thinking and talking about music.
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Most musicology writing reflects the way music was in 19th century Europe.
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Credibility gap between music and how we think about it.
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Quote: Music isn't just something nice to listen to. On the contrary its deeply embedded
in human culture ... Music somehow seems to be natural, to exist as something apart and yet it is suffused with human values, with our sense of what is good or bad, right or
wrong. Music doesn't just happen, it is what we make it, and what we make of it.
People think through music, decide whom they are through it, express themselves
thought it.
Musical Values 1
Prudential Ad. c.1992. Cook deconstructs the ad to analyse the part
(meaning) that music gives to it. Experiment in musical meaning.
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Rock stands for youth, freedom, being true to your self - authenticity.
Classical music stands for maturity and responsibilities.
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Bond of youth created by 60s music.
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Bond is still there today, but much more subtle.
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Gulf between those in and out.
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Deciding which music to listen to is significant in deciding who
you are.
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Musical Values 2
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Authenticity:
Blues seen as expression of an
oppressed race, a music from the heart
of soul - in contrast to the starched
formality of classical art music imported from Europe.
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Analogy with Jean-Jaques
Rousseau.
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The Ghost of Faffner Hall - Ry
Cooder and virtuoso violinist Piginini.
 Importance of 50s and 60s
commercialisation of black music for
white audiences.
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Something dishonest in playing
cover versions - exploitation of black
originals - never got royalties.
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The Monkeys an example - hated
as inauthentic.
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This attitude has changed with 90s – Example
of The Pet Shop Boys.
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Rock musicians play live, create own
music - control own destinies - Pop musicians
puppets of music industry - lack authenticity.
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Authors placed above those who
reproduce only. 1990s Pop re-issues look for
masterwork status - critical writing looked for
bands with new vision- genuine voice.
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Classical musicians - looked for great
musician with personal vision - charismatic
performer - great interpreters as `authors'
judged with same value of authenticity.
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Books on music concentrate on
composers- performers are largely absent role of servants in Victorian society.
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Music must be authentic for otherwise
it is hardly music at all.
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Words and Music:
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We have inherited from the past a way of thinking about music that cannot do
justice to the diversity of practices and experiences which that small word `music'
signifies in today's world.
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100 years ago music meant European art music - all the Bs – an approved corpus of
musical works, specific to time and place.
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Comparison with 19th-century production of goods, musical culture a process of
creating, distributing, and consuming works of music - concept of aesthetic capital.
Parallel with GCSE music - composing, performing and appraising.
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Quote: the language of music assumes that musicianship is the preserve of specialists:
that innovation is central; that the key players are composers; that performers are
middlemen, apart from the exceptionally innovative, and listeners are consumers and
passive. All these assumptions are unnatural constructs of culture and vary from time to
time and place to place.
Back to Beethoven
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19th-century saw the capitalist model of society in full swing - a construct of bourgeois
society.
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Artistic movements were dedicated to personal expression. Privileged role of music
within Romanticism. Carl Dahlhouse.
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Finding your voice as a composer was defining yourself in relation to Beethoven.
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The role model – Bee. refused to take a salaried position, and wrote music he wanted to
write – his music is experienced as speaking directly to listener as an individual.
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His deafness - acknowledged in his day as the greatest living composer.
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Critical commentary sought to explain Bee.'s music as demonstrating some kind of heroic
plot - a self-portrait in music - to overcome the blow of his deafness.
Romain Rolland book La vie de Beethoven 1907- held up Bee as a model for less heroic
age. Joy through suffering
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The Beethoven Myth 1
The Beethoven cult - ideas embedded in thinking about music came
out of ferment of ideas that surrounded reception of Bee's music.
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Ideas of authenticity - power of music to transcend time and
space.
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Centrality of composer - performer and listener given a minor
role.
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Appreciation of music - something taught as the basis of class
teaching in music at school level - strong in American liberal arts
courses.
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How to listen - attentively, respectful detached manner, informed
with knowledge. Today listening is linked back into composing and
performing.
The Beethoven Myth 2
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His deafness - misunderstood
genius whose music was not valued
in day.
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Music as `aesthetic capital’ role of his music after death.
Concept of the `Musical museum’
in which works of past to displayed
as an imaginary permanent
collection.
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Great music to be played long
after death.
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Bee’s music has always been
performed - hence classical like
Greek and Roman art - a universal
standard of truth.
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Spirit Realm – Heinrich Schenker
(teacher in Vienna 1900-30) music an
incursion into a world of some higher
form of reality.
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The composer speaks with voice
of nature, and ultimately of God.
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Music is a window on an esoteric
world beyond ordinary knowledge –
back to pythagoras - resulting in acts of
revelation.
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Concert halls were cathedrals for
music cult with all its own rites - dress
and etiquette, memorisation - possessed
with spirit music.
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Provided an alternative route to
spiritual consolation - art-religion. The
word was banished - symphony wins
over opera.
State of Crisis by the end of the 20th century
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Musical culture of early 20th cent had moved on - but our ways of thinking about
music had not.
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Music now a Global resource - internet.
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19th century piano and sheet music were still central.
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Difference between 19 and 20th century mindsets.
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High and low art.
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According to 19th century mind-set high equals all the Bs and low everything else.
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Most music history books tell story of Western art music with possibly a chapter
or two on popular music (Jazz?), and non-western music gets a mention at beginning.
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Old thinking thought that Western music equals progress.
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But a sea change since 1980s
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Death and Transfiguration.
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Audience statistics for many concerts are now very
low – especially for early 20th century music
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The new language of 12-tone music – the new tonality
– of modern music became ghettoized. Schoenberg
thought people would eventually learn to like it.
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Failure of modern music of early 20th century.
Plurality of subcultures that has replaced the monolithic.
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Modern music a niche product that flourishes on
fringes.
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Classical music also a niche but a much larger one.
E.g. Classic FM.
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If there is a crisis in classical music it is not in music
itself, but in ways of thinking about it.
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Old habits that are ingrained and
inform the way we think about music:
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to explain away time and think of music as
an imaginary object - something which is in time
but not of time.
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to think of language and other forms of
cultural representation, including music, as if they
depicted some kind of external reality.
Music as an imaginary
object.
You cannot grasp music.
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What are crotchet's and quavers for?
 1. conservation
 2. communication
 3. conception - the way composers, performers and all others imagine or
think about music.
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Egyptian example of wanting to preserve everything.
1. Old notation does not tell all.
2. Problems of nuematic notation.
3. Example of castrati recording.
If we don't know how music sounded at beginning of century, how can we
for much earlier music.
Notation conserves music but it conceals as music as it reveals.
Two ways of notating music:
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1. representing sounds
2. representing things performers do to get sounds
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is Western, but only if you know the conventions.
Many elements not included.
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is tablature. you don't have to understand you just do.
But limited to just one instrument. Problem of sheet music
for popular music - written by non-literate musicians. So
many musicians move effortlessly between pop and
classical traditions.
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Music between the notes
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Musical notations are highly selective in what they record - contrast with
DAT recorders and samplers.
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Ethnomusicologists using staff notation for non-western music.
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 Staff notation treats all music as though it was producing distinct separate
notes - it's not.
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But staff notation distorts all music - including western music - you have
to know the tradition and context for it to work.
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Notations have to simplify - melograph of Charles Seeger - not used.
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Tablature of chinese qin does not notate rhythm.
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It is in the realm of communication that western notation really scores
(pun) transmits a way of thinking about music.
Master of Smallest Link
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The pattern of what is determined by notation and what isn't
(performer's interpretation) helps to define musical culture - how various
individuals relate to one another.
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How people imagine music within a given culture and how composers
conceive their music.
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Notation is profoundly implicated in the act of composition.
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Mozart and Bee comparison - could see their music at a glance
(fundamental idea that was never lost sight of) - as complete entity.
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Pretended that notation was not integral to compositional process.
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But - this idealised process is a sham, as revealed in Bee’s sketch books this idea represents how 19th-century composers ought to have composed.
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Key role of piano in composition of 19th century.
The paradox of music
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Hermeneutics - developing illuminating metaphors to describe individual
compositions - implying it sought out meaning in music.
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When music moves (up or down on stave) what moves – nothing - thus an
imaginary object.
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We experience music in time, but to manipulate it or to understand it, we pull
it out of time and falsify it.
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The musical museum is built out of a confusion of imaginary objects and
temporal experiences.
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Musical works not the experiences but their surrogates
2. Dawkins idea of great musical works not as stepping stones but the conception
and perception of the works as the stepping stones - this is the historical process.
A matter for Representation
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Language constructs rather than represents the reality - hermeneutic criticism.
But music is a part of the social structure.
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An inclusive approach to Music is what is now needed.
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Political significance of Nkosi Sikelel Africa - takes into account performance
traditions.
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Western art music is not typical in trying to defy time, and create these
impossible objects - musical works.
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The artistic vision of classical aesthetics is exclusive - masterwork, intrinsic
and eternal – e.g. Hammerclavier – it expelled the amateur.
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But an approach based on the activity of music - composing, performing,
listening - is more inclusive.
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History books concentrate on production not reception. Need a balance of
both approaches.
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Music and the Academy
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Kerman's book of 1985 Contemplating Music - a
social history of musicology was an attack on
current state of musicology. He advocated a
critical approach to the discipline - not the
prevailingly unreflective or positivist approach.
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Difference between what musicology means in
Am and Brit/Aust. Problems of authority in music
the preserve of Academies - producing
authoritative versions - but did not go on to
critically engage with work.
Historical
contextualising needed to connect with the music
as music.
And how to get out of the crisis
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1. Historical performance movement - musicologist had a
real contribution. What authenticity meant to them. But
then historical performance referred to the approach you
brought to music - how composer intended it? But it put
performance at centre of activity.
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2. Contribution of ethnomusicologists was `to get real’ had to be self-critical - political situations of real
importance.
e.g.
Beta
Israel
communities
of
Africa/Ethiopia.
Music and Gender
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Part of the repositioning of Academies and critical
theory. Used to placing theory above practice.
Music education a battle ground. The key area in
the repositioning was gender studies. Study of
music (composer dominated) appeared to be
without wome. New ways of writing on music
had to be developed that recognize the activities of
women.
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Outing Music
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Work of Susan McClary - Bee as rape - first theme imposes its key on
the second.
 Schubert a composer of gay music?
 The myth of pure music passes off male heterosexual values as
universal while pretending that gender does not come into it.
 The `new' Musicology - central to this is rejection of music's claim
to be autonomous of the world around it and in particular to provide
direct, unmediated access to absolute values of truth and beauty.
 The new Musicology aims to expose ideology and demonstrate that
music is replete with social and political meaning - worldly.
 Example of Schuman's song cycle Frauenliebe und leben in the
context of a performance of the time - Performative meaning.
Conclusion
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Music not a phenomenon of the natural world but a human
construction - artifice disguised as nature.
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 End with Prudential ad. - so much of the message comes from the
music - makes it seem natural.
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 Music has unique powers as an agent of ideology.
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 We need to understand its workings, not just to hear music.
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 Read it for its significance as an intrinsic part of culture - of society
of you and me.