There's the Babbittian 'ivory tower' complex too: removing 'difficult' music from the realms of the uninitiated and protecting the legacy within the cosy confines of academe.
Maybe the differing relationships of the universities themselves to the wider community, and how this differs from country to country, is also a factor? Very loosely, I do feel that British universities some slightly less aloof from the wider society than, say, their American counterparts (from what experience I have of them). It seems a mentality as much as anything, Maybe this is why you can have the crazy situation as you do in the US whereby on campus, using the word 'niggardly' or something can be perceived as a racial slur and lead to disciplinary action, whereas in the rest of the country a great many African-Americans languish on death row. The point being that those who ferociously defend the former attitudes seem relatively unconcerned about the latter. And in terms of artistic activity on campus in the US, other than in terms of composers thinking about their careers (plenty of that, of course), I get little impression that what the wider society makes of their music (or makes of musicological work), or whether it even could be meaningful in a wider context, remotely seems to matter to many of those in the ivory towers. Whilst of course there is plenty of that in British academia as well (and maybe increasingly so), somehow I just don't feel it's quite as stark. Universities don't seem total oases from the external world, except perhaps for Oxbridge.
Now that I've been involved in academia for about four years, I have mixed and slightly conflicting feelings about 'academic respectability', or for that matter 'intellectual respectability' as exists on campus. I'm surprised by Richard's comments, and reckon they probably reflect the unusuality of his particular institution, with only a minimal scholarly/musicological component to the faculty there. At best, amongst academic musicians, I do often find a much more searching and intellectual curious attitude to music, and its wider dimensions in terms of culture and society, than in the wider musical community. And, despite all my criticisms of the New Musicology, I do think it's important that such issues as music and gender, music and orientalism, and so on, are considered, those which are deliberately ignored by many of those in the compositional/performance world for whom it might not be in their interests to do so (my beef with the New Musicology is
how they frequently do so). But I'd also say that attitudes, especially to new music (including amongst quite a few of those for whom new music is an area of expertise) the attitudes in academic music are
radically different to those in the rest of the new music world. The idea that, say, American minimalism represents a more collective, decentered, less goal-oriented approach to composition than the supposedly macho, egocentric posturing of much that falls under the category of 'modernism' is highly developed in Anglo-American academia and not often challenged. It's not my view by any means (I would argue on the contrary that the former music satisfies the demands of passive listening and mass manipulation as engendered by the culture industry), but I would be hard pressed to say that in the critical dimensions of such an attitude, with respect to this 'modernism', not to mention its institutionalisation, there isn't a little truth in some such perspectives. If the cult of the 'great artist' (or its contemporary reappropriation in terms of celebrity culture) is at least set into relief a bit, I can't but see that is a good thing. But in the wider new music world, such cults seem to be intrinsic and hardly ever questioned at all. We meet laugh a bit at Stockhausen's crazy self-mythology, mostly because it looks so ridiculous at times, but do we really question the whole construction of the 'great composer' for which Stockhausen continues to be held up as a major example?
At worst, though, academia can be about a huge amount of mutual bottom-patting between colleagues who are interested primarily in saying whatever are the right things in order to ingratiate themselves with others and thus help their career chances. Or petty feuding and continual bitching over trivial matters, seemingly far more important to the academics concerned than the ostensibly serious things they are supposed to be investigating (of course there's plenty of all that in the wider musical world as well). The current institution with which I'm involved, in my experience so far, shows a lot of the much better possibilities in academia, whereas the last one I was that was the reverse in many ways. But I'm concerned not least that a lot of writing on new music these days falls into the latter category, combined with a lot of self-fashioning on the parts of the writers, knowing how to cynically navigate their positions so as to attract most attention (thus much higher on rhetoric than substance) in a rather narcissistic fashion, with little or no concern about how what they write might be meaningful and illuminating in any wider arena. With huge irony, the attempts of some musicologists supposedly to open up music to a wider arena of cultural debate (in itself a laudable aim), as away from a perceived excessive focus on what is claimed to be a 'formalist' approach, has resulted in a smug, jargon-ridden mode of discourse which if anything entails an even greater degree of mystification to what it supposedly replaces. I've just been reading the woefully disappointing new
Contemporary Music Review issue, on 'Other Darmstadts', which for the most part (save for one or two essays) exhibits most of the worst qualities I've been mentioning. I find it hard to see how it will contribute to any greater understanding of what the institution of Darmstadt and the music produced there in its heyday actually entailed, let alone what it might mean in contemporary terms, preferring instead to give some tabloid-style gossip about participants' private lives (as an alternative to a serious engagment with their work, whether in the form of music or writings), a fair amount of fashionable jargon about whether certain music was 'proto-post-modernist' or not, and also a bit of cynical playing-to-the-gallery through raising the usual prejudices about how terribly closed and dull all things European are, as compared to the glittering global supermarket represented by America. Of course there's no particular reason to take any notice of such an issue (and I wouldn't recommend anyone goes out of their way to do so); I only care because this sort of self-serving writing is the only stuff that seems to get published these days, precluding the possibility of the sort of musicology that might conceivably have some wider impact. There are of course exceptions - Robin Maconie's revised book on Stockhausen,
Other Planets, is one I would cite - but these seem very much the exception rather than the rule.
