Before bowing out here, I just have one more anecdotal thing to say. A year or two back I tried to read a book by Michael Spitzer on late Beethoven because its premise looked interesting to me. Imagine my disappointment when I quickly realised I could not understand this book. It might as well have been in Sanskrit. Surely this is a problem...? I mean, I'm not a musicologist, but neither am I really a "lay reader", I mean I understand musical terminology quite well, I'm reasonably well acquainted with the works supposedly under discussion, I've read my share of political and cultural theory, particularly from a socialist perspective, but I couldn't make head or tail of this.

Good point well put - at least from the perspective of someone who presumably does not read Sanskrit. But what if the book had been written in - or translated into - Welsh?...

Best,

Alistair

Hullo - apologies, I've been busy 'doing musicology' in Zurich at another mega-conference this last week.

On the subject of what is the point of musicology, I usually never ask myself this more strongly than when I've been sat in one of these conferences, when the whole business seems at its most onanistic. But, this really hasn't been my experience in the last couple of weeks. Ian highlighted some aspects of the recent York 20C conference at which a number of issues about the various relationships of music and life were brought into the open; and at Zurich - to a lesser extent - I felt the same. This may of course be a consequence of the area in which I work - Central and East European music - in which we're trying to understand cultural experiences that are still as current as open wounds. But I do think there are reasons for musicology (I'd have to, otherwise I wouldn't get out of bed in the morning), and they are, broadly: 1) to attempt to understand what is going on when people write music, play music, listen to music, and 2) to share your discoveries with other people. And who on these boards can say that they don't spend some part of their time doing these things? Listening to music, trying to understand it, and sharing it with your friends, seems as natural as breathing to me; I'm just grateful there's some sort of professional framework in which I can do this for a living.

To these ends, although I recognise the need to talk and write in academese a lot of the time (and I do it myself), I believe fervently that musicologists have a responsibility - like all academics - to the wider community. Talking amongst ourselves will only get us so far. So that's why I blog, as one (small) way of bridging that gap; and it's why I review. Although neither of these things really have much impact at the moment, I do think it's essential for musicologists to be able to talk in two different languages, as it were, and to work towards ways of transferring their thoughts and discoveries in one realm back and forth with the other. Certainly, I personally feel that each half of my written work has benefitted from the other.

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And on the subject that started this all off - what would we like to see in a music periodical - obviously the requirements for serious journals are different from the more journalistic/newstand kind of things, but I picked up some back issues of the Swiss publication Dissonanz/Dissonance in Zurich, and was immediately impressed. Articles on Zoltan Jeney and Rebecca Saunders next to ones on Verdi and Berlioz, as well as some good-looking reviews on serious music and serious books. It seems to me that there's a huge gap in the British market for something like this, that fills the space between the Wire and, say, Gramophone. Online publications like La Folia and Vital Weekly fill a little bit of this gap, but only a little.

I spent some time in a large Borders recently comparing the range and imagination of writing and publications on literature, design, art, architecture, and their assorted intersections, with what was available on music. Even those publications that covered culture in a wider sense seemed to have musical horizons only a couple of steps broader than the NME's, and I can't describe how depressing that is. (Which is why I've resolved to do something about it once this PhD is of my desk.)

And also, when it comes to scholarly pursuits, even if a work isn't "important" in the sense that it not lead to any breakthroughs or best-sellers, that does not mean that it is necessarily bad; indeed, it might be fantastically written and actually quite interesting.  And, so long as it conforms to basic standards of scholarly investigation, it will constitute a valuable contribution to the knowledge of the field (even if it doesn't spawn its own industry).

To continue the parallel with composition, it wouldn't be hard to make a case that 95% of composition past and present is unlikely to make any lasting impression, either. But without the freedom to try things, and possibly fail, neither composition nor musicology would get anywhere.

I would like to ask the various people who are making wildly generalised comments about a whole discipline to come up with a range of diverse and representative examples of what they mean. In particular for Alistair in his crusade against the infiltration of gender studies into the massively white male-dominated field of music that he is so precious about.

The book I was talking about is called Music as Philosophy: Adorno and Beethoven's Late Style.


(a) My post makes no generalisations whatever and announces itself quite clearly as anecdotal.
(b) Somehow I've managed to live for 47 years, write eighty or so musical compositions and occupy a university chair in music without being "versed in advanced discourse", which leads me to suspect that personally it isn't much of a priority (although I dare say this statement is a damning indictment of British universities and musical culture). This was my main point I suppose.

I'm sure Alistair will be surprised to learn that he's on a crusade. He'll be needing that suit of armour by the sound of it.

Alistair reiterates, in a tedious fashion, kneejerk anti-intellectual and defensive reactionary positions on art and culture, fervently here and on other messageboards and websites, strongly opposing any arguments that suggest that class, gender, ethnicity, or other political matters might permeate music. Clearly they matter a lot to him. That sounds like a crusade to me - and a very right-wing one at that. A rather pathetic lament for a world of easy certainties which is no longer plausible. I find it all very tiresome.