Are we having another 'bash musicology' bout?

Musicology seems to have suffered from a bad conscience in the UK - being often somewhat apologetic in its scholarship, aspiring more to the status of journalism. But I think it didn't exist as a university subject in the UK until after 1945; similarly with the tradition of the amateur critic, the values of which seem to have remained for some time after it became a professional occupation. But things have got better in recent years overall. Still, there wasn't a serious musicological journal to do with new music in the UK until very recently (Tempo, The Musical Times and Contemporary Music Review don't count, at least as far as the RAE are concerned). Interestingly, a much more high-powered level of musicology seems to be normal in the US, but there there was a strong influence of German traditions (from where musicology essentially emerges). The nineteenth-century is a very under-represented area, overall, in British scholarship, other than in terms of British music from that period.

I know the type of writing you are referring to of course, and there is plenty of it, but wouldn't accept that this accounts for the whole of the profession. Problems come from the very structure of the profession, with the pressure to publish at all costs and gain RAE points that way, regardless of the value or otherwise of the subject. And jargon itself entails a certain 'cultural capital' within the profession; ironically it is especially prevalent amongst the New Musicology, one of whose professed aims is to take music outside of the narrow confines of the academy. There is, I believe, much of value to be discerned through bringing the ideas and methods of Adorno, Bourdieu, Jameson, and numerous others into the study of the music; the problem is that many do so just by citing their jargon in a tokenistic manner, and from a cursory reading of these figures and their work (sometimes just based upon secondary literature). At this point time for a plug for a forthcoming book on 'Music and Critical Theory' which I'm co-editing (but that'll be a while in the making)...

But in terms of the relevance of the work, this is a subject I've been debating a bit with the editor of another book in which I have an article relating in part to this subject. He points out, and reasonably, that ultimately people get their information on music from somewhere, a book on a composer, or so on - and conservatory teachers and quite a few performers and composers do learn this way. And at least indirectly, detailed musicological work does feed into this process. With areas of study such as performance practice or preparation of editions, the applications of the work to wider musical life should be self-evident. But other musicological work can be valuable as well to both composers and performers wishing to understand the music they play or learn from better, sometimes in terms of its cultural context and wider meanings (a major area of study for musicologists today).  Even if someone simply reads a quite general biography of study of the music of a composer, if it is a sound work it will hopefully have drawn upon detailed musicological scholarship. And in terms of institutional decisions on what music is commissioned, performed, taught (including taught at universities), the ongoing debates on such subjects that are conducted in musicological circles can impact upon these things. As I said before, the articles in musicological journals are frequently very specialised and as such less accessible to those who don't already have a high degree of knowledge of the subject. But there are real standards of scholarly truth and argumentative rigour that exist in musicology that certainly don't in the more journalistic style of writing on music. And increasingly a demand that one should do more than simply write fawning hagiographies of composers, of which there are far too many unedifying examples, but rather try and examine a composer and their work in some wider context rather than just uncritically adopting the composer's own assumptions upon things. I tend to steer clear of much of the more journalistic writings nowadays, because I find them so shallow in this respect. In terms of my own areas - 19th and 20th century music, performance practice, music and society and aesthetic issues - there has been very important work in several languages in recent years. And as far as new music is concerned, now that I'm more able to read some of the German writings on the composers concerned (and not just on German composers - for example there is a range of very interesting work on Nono in German, and next to nothing of any consequence in English), I feel a much deeper understanding of the music and its context than before, which is of benefit in playing it or simply if one is interested in it as cultural documents as well as simply autonomous 'works of art'. If we believe that the study of history is important (and scholarly work on that is often very specialised and inaccessible to non-historians), then surely cultural history (which at the conference I've just been at, was certainly all the rage) is important as well?

Time to invest in a set of electric cattle-prods methinks.  (this is, of course, what abstracts and introductions *should* do).

I've rarely had any real trouble reading what few musicological articles in journals I do look at myself (or: at least from getting *something* from most things I read, which is all I really ask for).  They tend to be pretty strict, old-fashioned formal analyses though, so.

Yeah.  Have to say I got turned off science journalism for the same reason   I think seeing journalists invade any specialist field that on is familiar with is likely to produce such an effect though.


Well that's because people can make money with (a lot of) rocket science and (some) quantum physics.  Maybe what we *need* to see are more "music-biz"-focused journals, that would contain theorizings about purely about profitable music.  Such a publication would doubtlessly attract substantial funding, both from the industry and the government, hopefully to the detriment of all these other less marketable products of musical academia.

Provided they were highly focused at increasing the economic efficiency and share-value-stability of our beloved publishing houses, as opposed to this  obsolete notion of sentimentality (insofar as it is not conductive to profit-increasing) that so enburdens many of the more outmoded of our current music journals.

(Hmm...not necessarily Ian: there probably are such things in the heady world of business/music academia overlap though.   http://www.thembj.com/ maybe, only it's not quite as explicitly exploitative as I might like in it's treatment of music as a means of accumulating wealth ).

Indeed they do! - and as far as "musicology bashing" is concerned, I have no desire to indulge in it myself for the sake of it; where I stand on this is that musicology, when it throws useful light on a topic in which one is interested and increases understanding of it, that's fine, but where I tend to part company with it is when it appears to be elevated to an art-form in its own right (of which there is a sufficient plenitude of illustrative examples that have already been mentioned hereabouts that there's no real need to identify any here), as though it is either more important than and/or independent of the music whose interests it is supposed to serve.

Best,

Alistair

Saying this is a problem with composition doesn't make it any less of a problem with musicology!

If musicology really isn't intended to "serve" music but exists in its own parallel world then for me that's another pretty convincing reason to ignore it.

But over and above those things, I think the comparisons you're making between making music and doing musicology are comparing two things that can't really be compared. Look at the comments that people on this messageboard make about concerts they've heard. "I loved every minute", says Milly about last night's Prom. Has anyone ever thought anything like that about any musicological article ever written anywhere?