Transcript Introduction to History of Western Music

Introduction to History of
Western Music
Dan Grimley
[email protected]
Lecture 1. Whose History?
• Introduction: threshold and teleology (beginning
middle, end)
• History: deterministic and reifying
(‘monumentalises’)
• Western: cultural/geographical relativism
(centre/periphery)
• Music: ontological problem (‘organised sound’?)
Philip Bohlman, ‘Music and Disjunction’, from Cultural
Study of Music, ed. Clayton, Herbert, and Middleton
Music and culture ... are not convenient discursive fits (p. 45)
4 moments of historical disjuncture:
1. Colonial Encounter [music as cartography]
– awareness of difference
– Missionary accounts: Jean de Léry, description of
Tupinamba song, dance, and ritual (1557-8)
reproduced by Montaigne, ‘Des cannibales’ (1580)
– New practices of inscription and transcription ... were
crucial to the acts of possession that transformed
colonial encounter into forms of domination. (p. 47)
Bohlman: Moments of Historical Disjunction
(contd.)
2. Music and Racism
– Hierarchies and natural order
– Search for origins
– Musical evolution
3. Music and nationalism
– Universalism
– Invention of tradition (Hobsbawm)
– Herder, Folkmusic and Volksgeist (1778-9)
Bohlman: Moments of Historical Disjunction
(concl.)
4. Music and Eschatology [‘the end of history’]
Anxiety of closure. Postmodernism.
– The eschatological power of music results from both
its cultural and musical sides. The former is evident in
the overt use of music to mark moments of death; for
example, in the concentration camps of the
Holocaust. The latter resides in the temporal
phenomena that shape the ontologies of music, in
other words, the power of music to calibrate and
shape—as well as negate—time. (p. 56)
Katherine Bergeron, ‘Disciplining Music’, Disciplining
Musicology, ed. Bergeron and Bohlman, 1-9
• Michel Foucault: discipline=ordering the body
• Scales and canons
– The tuned [measured, ruled] scale, or canon, is a locus
of the discipline, a collection of discrete values
produced out of a system that orders, segments,
divides...To play in tune, to uphold the canon, is
ultimately to interiorise those values that would
maintain, so to speak, social ‘harmony’. (pp. 2-3)
• Normative
• Exemplary
• Regulative
Richard Taruskin, ‘The History of What?’
Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 1, xiii-xxii
• History of literate genres
• Emergence of absolute music (art for art’s sake)
• History of elite genres: social history (Pierre
Bourdieu: history taste, style, and social class);
• Musical meaning: ‘social fact’ (Dahlhaus)
• Performative: ‘ensemble of agents and social
relations’
• Susan McClary (‘The World According to Taruskin’,
Music & Letters 87/3 (2006))
– Grand narrative
– Absence of African American Music
– Narrative of decline and fall
Louis Couperin, a neglected master?
• Born Normandy c. 1626, but earliest surviving
documentary record from 1639
• Plays harpsichord for Jacques Chambonnières, June
1650
• Arrives in Paris, 1651, appointed organist at St
Gervais, 1653
• Appears in court ballets from 1657, member of ‘petite
bande’, Louis XIV.
• 1650s, meets Johann Jacob Froberger? Renovation of
St Gervais organ, 1659; travels to Toulouse with court
• Dies, August 1661
Louis Couperin: Some Historical Problems
• Marginal figure (overshadowed by nephew
François Couperin)
• Better known as performer than composer
(relative historical weighting/value)?
• Source materials
– No autograph mss (copies of sonatas in Paris,
UC Berkeley)
– Chronology
– Instrumentation and performance venue
– Interpretation/Style
Louis Couperin: Prélude non mesuré
• Tempo?
• Realisation?
• Articulation and
Expression?
• Ornamentation?
• Performance venue?
• Dedication, influence, and
emulation (‘à l’imitation de
Mr. Froberger’)?
• Authorial Identity?
• Authority and Agency?
Interpreting the unmeasured prelude
• Mary Cyr:
– Improvisatory tradition
– Check tuning/warm-up fingers
– Musical discipline
• Davitt Moroney:
– Unmeasured preludes more precisely notated
than measured works
– All ornamentation notated in full
– Fluidity of tempo/duration
Louis Couperin: some conclusions?
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Historical significance? (LC: ‘beyond history’?)
Performance vs composition?
Text/Context/Authority?
Musical meaning?
Musical scholarship?
Music as exotic encounter/historical other [Bohlman]
Centres, Margins, and Peripheries