Don't get your knickers in a twist! I know little about Brahms, less about New Musicology and nothing about this particular New Musicologist or his agenda, and this state of my knowledge reflects the state of my interest in these respective subjects, but I came across the blurb and thought it might shed some interesting light on the discussion, and then someone who hasn't read it turns up and writes several hundred words attackintg the ideas supposedly contained in it, which I found mildly amusing. There is really no call for anyone to take the role of disciplinarian schoolmaster and suggest that young Barrett do "a bit more work". I am doing plenty of work thanks.

No, I never do that.

 Thank you all for one of the most interesting (and funniest) threads I have read on any music board in the last couple of years.
   As a non-musician, in fact technically a musical ignoramus, I hesitate to contribute here but I am very interested in the question of Berg's 'nationalism'. I do not have access to the Cambridge book on Berg and, knowing the price of the Cambridge series, never likely to but I do have their Berg Violin Concerto by Anthony Pople (yes, 96% of it goes right over my head)  in which I  can find  little reference to any sort of nationalism aside from the use (mis-use) of the Bach theme. Could someone enlighten me please?  I had always assumed that Berg, with his strange love life and his keeness for secret numbers, was a very self-absorbed composer. On the other hand Webern would not have been at first sight an obvious anti-Semite given his reverence for Schoenberg.
   Does any one have any thoughts about Thomas Mann's use of Schoenberg's 12-tone method as the 'Devils Music' in' Dr Faustus' when set against his(Mann's) conflict with the musical establisement over his anti-Wagner paper? The two positions seem contradictory.
     One last question. Is there any connection between the "Anti-German Music-School" attitudes and the fact that German music since Bach has been accepted as the lingua franca of serious music? Thanks for your time.

Just to add to what was said before, Mann's use of this musical method in his book was fundamentally informed by his friendship and correspondence with Adorno (who appears briefly in the book as one guise of the devil). This is detailed in the volume of Adorno-Mann Correspondence, recently published in English by Polity Press, also there are some mentions of it in Adorno's Letters to his Parents, also recently out in English from the same publisher (translated by our very own quartertone). Schoenberg was very sceptical about Adorno, however, and made this clear in some of his own correspondence, and was not at all happy by the way in which Adorno (who was a sceptic with respect to dodecaphony) had portrayed his method to Mann.

That's the ostensible argument that is sometimes put (and it sometimes comes from certain specialists in other musical traditions, notably Richard Taruskin, who is a specialist in Russian music), but there are a variety of other motivations, often explicit. Some (e.g. Susan McClary) attack Germany as part of a wider (generally rather ill-informed) anti-Europeanism, celebrating the music of North America in opposition to this (this resonates with a reasonably familiar trope within a certain brand of American liberalism, celebrating American supposed freedom and diversity against archaic and tradition-bound cultural practices in Europe - such sentiments can equally be found in the pronouncements and writings of John Cage and Morton Feldman, also amongst British 'experimentalists', especially in Michael Nyman's book, positing a very clear 'us and them' scenario). Others (for example Nadine Hubbs, in her book The Queer Composition of America's Music) try to set up a construction of Germany as 'masculine' as opposed to France which is supposedly 'feminine', arguing from this in favour of the more 'feminine' (and thus, according to the terms of her argument, gay-friendly) French-influenced composers in America (generally the more conservative neo-classicists) against supposedly 'masculine' Germanic-inspired modernism (which incorporates Carter, Babbitt, and even gay composers such as Cage, Cowell, Partch). Others such as James Hepokoski (who has written at length on Dahlhaus) scour such work for any traces of supposed Germanism, and are highly critical of any writing on music from a supposedly German/modernist perspective (this is even more pronounced, quite fanatically, in Taruskin). Various key German writers on music are regularly held up for disdain from a variety of quarters; these include in particular Eduard Hanslick, but also A.B. Marx, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Heinrich Schenker, and then Adorno and Dahlhaus (the number of Jewish figures in this list is a supreme irony). Others, in particular New Yorker critic Alex Ross, portray a dark netherland of post-war German music which supposedly 'yearns for Hitler's hate'. Any hints of anti-semitism from composers (which can certainly be found quite easily, but as much in anywhere else in Europe as in Germany in the 19th century) are regularly brought up as part of a case for the prosecution.

One of the key anti-German arguments concentrates on the idea of 'Absolute Music', in a broad sense (distinct concepts of the value of abstract instrumental music, aesthetic autonomy, 'Absolute Music', and others, are generally conflated), and the notion of compositional autonomy, as conceived in a post-Beethovenian sense (the composer writing in essence according to their own will and desires rather than merely fulfilling the wishes of their patron - of course this ideal had already been looked at critically (not least by Adorno) in terms of how such autonomy was a fiction, as the composer remained subject to the laws of the marketplace). This sort of ideal took off rather more slowly outside of the German-speaking world in the 19th century (though probably it was more influential in other lands than some would like us to believe). From this results a rather bizarre argument which somehow marries together old-style feudal servitude with the language of American consumer capitalism, decrying composers who write for themselves rather than responding to the wishes of consumers, who are allotted the role that the feudal patrons had in the (generally promoted positively in comparison to the Beethovenian ideal) earlier mode of compositional production. This sort of argument can be (and regularly is) used to bash modernism of all varieties, itself seen as a rather extreme manifestation of German romanticism (Gary Tomlinson has argued this, even attacking constructions of supposed autonomy in bebop jazz as being a fiction only possible from such a Germanic point of view). Overall, Germany represents the 'other' of this school of criticism, that which both fascinates and repels at the same time, and against which such musicology and criticism can define itself. That German music might be considerably less homogenous in terms of its ethos and ideals, or that non-German music might not stand in such a binary opposition towards it, are possibilities that do not suit this sort of didactic argument.

In terms of the German school since Bach as lingua franca - that sort of school was not really accepted in such a way outside of German-speaking lands until about the mid-19th century. The primary target of attack in terms of this school has been Beethoven, very prominently in such writings as Tia DeNora's Beethoven and the Construction of Genius, which argues (with no reference to the work itself) that Beethoven's reputation, and the influence his ideals had upon subsequent composition, represented little more than the particular will of a certain group of aristocrats in the Vienna of his time, and given other circumstances various now-forgotten composers from the same period (e.g. Johannes Wölffl), could have come to assume the same position (see here for an exchange between DeNora and Charles Rosen on the subject). Otherwise Beethoven has been attacked (by writers including McClary, Lawrence Kramer, Marcia Citron, Sanda Pederson, Philip Brett, and various others, and with more subtlety by Scott Burnham) variously for representing an ideal of hyper-masculinity, elitism, militarism, nationalism, and so on (I'm not saying that all these charges are without foundation, but they are obsessive).

Many German scholars came to teach in American universities from the first half of the 20th century onwards; also certain schools of analysis (in particular of Schenker) became institutionalised there, much more so than in contemporary Germany and Austria, leading perhaps to a false notion of what 'Germanic criticism' consists of (there's next to nothing of much substance in writing in English dealing with either music or musicology as practised by musicians and scholars who came of age after 1945) - what is thought to be typically 'German' might actually be much more typical of the US. But this all needs to be seen from the perspective of a US where very little is known of Germany other than of the period 1933-1945 (and not a lot of any real consequence about then either, considering that sensationalistic books of spurious scholarship such as the early history of the Third Reich by William Shirer and more recently Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, which portrays all Germans as having been fanatical eliminationist anti-semites ever since the time of Martin Luther, have been runaway bestsellers in the US, much more so than more considered and intelligent writings on the same subjects). In conservative and some liberal political discourse in the US, the instant equation of 'German' with 'Nazi' appears all too easily (very easy to blame lukewarm German support for American ventures in the Middle East on this, for example, presuming some Palestinian sympathies, say, to be nothing more than the product of a residual anti-semitism).

If Richard would prefer his rendition not to be considered 'superficial and groundless', I'm interested to know on the basis of which readings of this considerable body of criticism he derives his opinions?

One other article I would recommend on a related subject is Bjorn Heile's 'Darmstadt as Other: British and American Responses to Musical Modernism' in twentieth-century music 1/2, pp. 161–178. Heile traces the particular construction of an imaginary idea of what 'Darmstadt' represents so as to present an 'other' from an anti-modernist viewpoint; whilst he doesn't look so much at the specifically German aspects of this construction, the principles and strategies he outlines in such a process are quite similar. Another article dealing with this subject (looking, for example, at the various erroneous points made about Darmstadt in Joseph Kerman's influential book on musicology), is Martin Iddon, 'Darmstadt Schools', Darmstadt, Du Stadt meiner Träume: The International Reception of Darmstadt as the Shangri-La of Musical Modernism, Musicological Colloquium at the Brno International Music Festival, October 2006. Conference proceedings: Colloquia musicologica Brunensia, vol. 41, eds. Mikulás Bek, Geoffrey Chew and Petr Macek (Prague: Koniasch Latin Press, forthcoming 2008).

Just for the record, I am, as I had hoped to make clear, completely uninterested in whether and how you consider my opinions.

Well, are Grétry, Méhul, then Berlioz played more frequently in France than Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Schumann, then? The German-dominated canon from the 19th century certainly continues to hold a degree of international acclaim that exceeds that of any other canon from another country (in terms of those other canons' international reputations). That is in no sense to advocate some nationalistic agenda with respect to the supposed superiority of German music or the like; just that because of a whole host of factors, musical, cultural, political, specific to the particular era in question, this particular canon proved especially fruitful, durable and influential. That in no sense excludes or needs to marginalise other work distinct from that tradition, nor deny that that very tradition itself incorporated many foreign influences; but the attacks on such a canon might carry more weight if some alternative canon could be proposed in its place. It's like where someone or other suggested that there might be many more Eroicas (in the sense of works of equal consequence), just the particular one that we know happens to have been historically ordained: but obscure works are forever being dug up and resurrected from that era and others, and could anyone plausibly claim to have found in the process another work that stands on a par with the Eroica?

Mendelssohn was Jewish in an ethnic sense, but baptised as a Lutheran, and remained in that faith through his life, writing many Christian works. It was Wagner and later anti-semites who made a big deal out of Mendelssohn's Jewishness.

Well, I would call Brahms (and Bruckner) 'highly emotional' as well. Just that they had different models for the expression of emotion (different from each other as well), less predicated upon instantaneous and transient passions (though that can be found in other Germanic composers, for example Schumann and of course Beethoven).

Then surely that fate would have become Sibelius, then, not Norwegian, but from Finland, another country without an widely recognised earlier classical music tradition? Bruckner's status surely has a lot to do with the fact that he was able to develop extensively a model of symphonic writing (deriving especially from the works of Schubert, with their long expansive melodies, very different to Brahms's use of a combination of Beethovenian models and techniques derived from study of early music) which then (and to a lesser extent now) was seen as one of the most important musical directions (it wasn't for nothing that Tchaikovsky agonised so much about his symphonies, and was acutely aware of the shadow of Beethoven looking over his shoulder, for all that he took a different path).

It's not impossible that Bruckner's reputation might have something to do with there being a sizeable number of people who actually like his music, also.

'What a peerage of great Italian singers London has enjoyed in the last decades. Pasta, Malibran, Grisi, Lablache, Rubini, Tamburini, and the others....In the summer of 1862 we were often hard put to it to choose between the excellent Italian opera in Covent Garden and its competitor in Her Majesty's Theatre. In the one house were Patti, Czillagh, Miolan-Carvalho, Mario, Tamburini, Fauré, Formes; in the other Tietjens, Trebelli, the Marchisio sisters, Giuglini, Zuchini, etc.
In recent years, however, the Italian opera has declined more and more rapidly and decisively; it has brought only disillusionment and bankruptcy in Paris, Vienna, and elsewhere. in Germany and France it was dispensable, but not so in England where, by tradition, it stamps the high season where there is no national opera to replace it.'

'When she [Marie-Louise Albani] appeared in Faust the big house was filled to capacity with an elegant audience'

'The Italian opera, favoured by high admission prices to begin with, has the further advantage of being fashionable, which means everything in London society. How could Carl Rosa pay fine singers as brilliant and demanding as the Italian, even if he could find them among the natives? It is difficult for an Englishman to commit himself to the theatre. [Edward] Lloyd, the tenor, and [Sir Charles] Santley, the baritone, earn three times as much from concerts and oratorio as Carl Rosa can offer them.'

Eduard Hanslick, 'Letter from London' (1886)