I know for sure that that is extremely true in your case, as well as your being aware of how difficult an issue it is to address as a composer. But I do think you are quite exceptional in that respect compared to others - I couldn't imagine an Ades even thinking the very question was worth bothering with, nor imagining that what those much-maligned 'common people' (or indeed anyone outside of a rareified circle of self-satisfied snobbish aesthetes) would think of his work matters an iota other than in terms of enabling him to make yet more money. And that sort of attitude is not uncommon (I'm sure you know what I mean when I say it was absolutely true of one particular former festival director, for example).

There is an argument (which was articulated best by Adorno) by which a type of aesthetic autonomy is presented not as wilful disengagement but precisely as the most meaningful form of social engagement on the part of an artist: an autonomy that has to be striven for rather than being taken for granted, however, part of the process of trying through one's art to exceed the boundaries of dominant ideologies and ossified consciousness (so that some explicitly 'political' art, for example, inevitably becomes subsumed within such things). That's a position I have some sympathy for, though I certainly don't for a moment see Ades et al coming near to achieving such ends.

Good point, I and R, about the many forms public subsidy can take. I think one of the things I meant though, was that university composers are in a position to advocate and explain, not just their own work of course, but the work of others through their teaching. I don't mean to imply for a moment that what I call 'culturally meaningful and valuable' equates with 'accessible', at least in the lazy way that term is usually used. Rather the opposite. One of the major arguments for the efficacy of having composers on music faculties is that they can, surely (?!), bring rather different insights than others to the study of music, per se. But for me it follows that being in a position to do so within academe, and to have acquired the necessary skills (with luck), should mean an increased engagement with broader cultural discourse, not a circumscribed one.

And there was I thinking there were infinitely many odd numbers!

Not necessarily; this may be something of an inherent problem in cross-disciplinary fertilisation. Derrida wrote over 50 books, for example, many of which are long and involved, whereas many non-philosophers who cite his work tend to rely upon only a small few early essays, not necessarily representative of the broad sweep of his work as a whole, or, worse, upon a cursory glance at a big of secondary or even tertiary literature on Derrida. But on the other hand, it would hardly be fair (or much of indictment of Derrida's work) if the only people capable or allowed to make use of it are highly specialised Derrida scholars with an intimate knowledge of his complete oeuvre. And when something akin to the latter point of view is upheld, it becomes far too easy to indulge in academic point-scoring simply by an allusion to lesser-known texts, which do not necessarily significantly alter the basic points that are being argued.

I've recently been reading various books looking at post-war music and especially post-war German music, most of which, even if not explicitly, end up raising the very questions that blight cross-disciplinary work. One is written by a document-focused historian and shows a commanding ability to uncover a wide range of information from a diffuse range of archives; simply to visit and spend the required time at each of these is a major endeavour (a little alleviated by highly refined skills at archival research, so that one can locate the salient information more quickly). Yet when it comes to exploring the aesthetic implications of all this information that has been uncovered (to do with the administration of the cultural sphere in the various zones of immediate post-war Germany, the formation of institutions, the pitched battles that occurred between those in the East and West, etc.) the analysis is much more thin; when it comes to relating any of this to the specific details of works (or performances) that went on, the analysis is practically non-existent, and one might even get the impression that this is not perceived as important. Now, it would be so easy for a musicologist to sneer at a historian for lacking some of the analytical tools and insights necessary for examining the very details of music; it can equally be claimed that various writings on the same period by musicologists demonstrate only the most superficial understanding of the history of the time (relying on a small and possibly unrepresentative range of texts that few historians would accept so uncritically) and are apt to over-privilege the importance of immanent musical development. But this can simply degenerate into fruitless turf wars; there may be some people who can demonstrate an equally impressive command of music, history, philosophical issues such as aesthetics, and more, but it would be over-prescriptive to dismiss the work of anyone who falls short of such exalted ideals. Maybe simply a greater degree of humility from academics delving outside of their own discipline would do no harm?

But to return to your point, what I'm criticising is less the fact that some of these practitioners may fall short of the highest level of expertise with respect to the intellectuals they invoke, rather the fact that they rely simply on a type of bullying appeal to consensus (without considering how fragile that consensus is by virtue of being true only within the confines of narrow sub-sections of academics) so as to shut out some more self-reflexive approaches. No academic can work entirely from first principles, or else they would never get anywhere - no historian working on the breadth of the Third Reich, say (just to give an example a know a bit about) could work entirely from documentary archives, avoiding making use of secondary literature by others who are experts on very specialised aspects, as the range of archives are simply far larger than any single individual could possibly begin to know comprehensively in a single lifetime (David Irving might claim to do everything from primary sources, but he is a fraud). So to some extent we all make use of others' findings, not all of which can be comprehensively checked against all their primary sources without getting bogged down in a never-ending task. At best, one can hope that if one person's findings are contentious, possibly as a result of questionable methodologies, a cavalier approach to sources, or simple incompetence, then some other academic will take them up on this. Then those alluding to secondary literature on the subject can try and absorb and incorporate both the original findings and the critiques and alternative perspectives that have followed on subsequently. In history this happens a great deal, perhaps because the stakes are so high, especially in such an emotionally charged context as the Third Reich. In musicology it seems rather a different matter, perhaps an unfortunate by-product of a sense that whatever one discovers is not really all that significant. Some measure of 'truth' is important in history (as Richard Evans points out in his In Defence of History - without this, we have no concrete basis for opposing the views of Holocaust deniers and other sinister revisionists other than simply emotional appeal) and if it is there, then mightn't it be meaningful in an inevitably more marginal field such as musicology as well? The work of Foucault and Said is very contentious and has prompted some very sustained and intelligent criticisms, including from those who are otherwise politically sympathetic, but it seems as if many of those invoking either figure in musicology have rarely even stopped to address some of these criticisms (which they are perfectly entitled to reject); they can be taken as representing unequivocal scholarly truth (in the latter case I have doubts about whether he should really be called a 'scholar' at all, as much of his work depends as much upon rhetoric as more rigorous argument) simply on account of their fashionability.


As I suggest above, I think that alas the simple fact that the discipline seems so irrelevant to many (including musicians) might be a reason why it is often not held up to higher standards. In recent times I've been looking at some of the use of sources in New Musicological work, which is massively cavalier and violates all the most fundamental principles of scholarship (such as what I maintain is still vital, that one should examine sources carefully and modify one's arguments around what they reveal, rather than distorting or ignoring those which don't correspond to a priori conclusions - what's the point of scholarship if you already know your conclusions before having investigated the subject?). Few historians would get away with this - they might even be hounded out of the profession for such an approach (there are some examples of this occurring). I'm not advocating that by any means in musicology, just that playing hard and loose with sources and data in order to assert simplistic arguments that mostly appeal on the basis of fashionability, consensus, or simply emotionally, should be considered rather more critically than often seems to be the case. There are, however, many exceptions, musicologists who do take such things very seriously, but I worry this may become increasingly a minority approach.

Perhaps the problem is that composers can be and mostly are as cavalier as they feel like with their "sources", whatever those might be considered to be (music of previous generations, "extra-musical" ideas, etc. - even musicology!), and wherever they might come from, while scholars' relationships to their material ought really to be a different matter; however, many commentators with both scholarly and "artistic" pretensions seem to want to blur the distinctions between academic and creative work to the point of making pronouncements as if they were scientists while treating their sources like so much raw material to be "composed" with.

Being fair to Mrs Thatcher... sorry, George, wherever my craw may be, that idea is immovably stuck in it.

... a distinction which some find it hard to make...
... but some or all of those claims for a given composition could be "exposed" as invalid or fallacious or whatever, and the composition could still be a valuable/attractive/profound piece of work (Stockhausen's Gruppen springs to mind), whereas the same probably couldn't be said about a scholarly essay - and if it could, the essay in question would have to renounce its claims to scholarliness, right?

Indeed.
For me it has something to do with creating links between music and its (potential) audience, in terms of explanation, analysis, background, further connections and so on. I think I might add that I'd consider "musicology" to be a discipline which uses the music (as text/sound/idea or whatever) as a point of departure, while beginning from a more general social/political phenomenon and looking at how it impacts on music and the listener I would tend to regard more as coming under another heading altogether, like "sociology of music". This is sometimes a question of emphasis and at other times a question of methodology, but the purpose ought in my view centre upon creating those links of understanding.

... although it could be viewed as an area of specialisation rather than a "canon", couldn't it, thus excluding arguments as to what should and shouldn't "belong" in it.It wasn't a definition of music sociology, just an example of some things which are more closely related to that discipline than they are to musicology as I understand the term. Putting it that way makes it look self-evident, doesn't it? I'm not saying there isn't anything interesting to be said or written about popular music of whatever sort, but "entertainment" by definition neither needs nor benefits from explication in the "musicological" sense I have in mind with that word, because it is by definition embedded in what's familiar to its audience for whatever reason. I suppose what I'm saying is that a lot of what you'd call "new musicology" is according to my way of looking at things not musicology at all.