A term applied both to the history of social responses to art, and to an aesthetic that privileges those responses.
JIM SAMSON
Well before the term ‘reception’ came into general use in art histories, musicologists attempted to generalize about people’s awareness of, and attitudes towards, particular repertories. Such generalizations have long played a key role in social histories of music, where the objective is above all to illuminate music’s functions within society. Occasionally this has involved repertories that are remote historically or geographically, as in the reception of Bach and Palestrina by 19th-century composers, or the reception of East Asian traditions by contemporary European composers. In such cases the investigation approaches a familiar terrain of the ethnomusicologist, who is frequently concerned with the reception of repertories by alien cultures, for example, Indian classical traditions in Britain, Central Asian maqam traditions in Israel, or western popular music in the Middle East. And this in turn highlights a feature common to almost all reception histories. They are concerned less with individual responses, which are properly the subject of a cognitive psychology of music, than with collective, intersubjective responses based on determinate groups of listeners, whether these are defined by nationality, social class, cultural milieu or profession (composers, for instance). The premise, then, is that there exist certain stabilizing factors (mentalités) which influence the responses of particular cultural communities, establishing the frameworks within which individual acts of perception take place.
One reason for a growing interest in questions of reception has been a gradual change in our perception of familiar Classical and Romantic repertories, as musicology, like other disciplines, reacted to the caesura of modernism by allowing those repertories to acquire a certain historical distance, and thus an ‘afterlife’. In its afterlife a work threads its way through many different social and cultural formations, attaching itself to them in different ways, adapting its own appearance and in the process changing theirs. The work remains at least notionally the same object – at any rate it is the product of a singular creative act – but its manner of occupying the social landscape changes constantly. In locating and describing these changes, a reception study can light up the ideology concealed in the corners of music history. And it can expose in the process some of the vested interests at work in the promotion, dissemination, influence and evaluation of musical works. In the course of such a study, the historian may collect and examine multiple data – concert programmes and advertisements, critical notices, musicological and other writings, editions, recordings, and even musical works by later composers. However, the more astute scholars are careful to focus the examination of this data in clearly defined ways. Reception histories should be more than just supposedly neutral opinion-collecting.
A further motivation for reception studies was the model provided by German literary scholarship, where the term ‘Rezeptionsästhetik’ was first used and an accompanying methodology developed. The seminal text here was Hans Robert Jauss’s lecture Literaturgeschichte als Provokation of 1967 (see Jauss, 1982). But Jauss’s was by no means an isolated voice. German reception aesthetics contributed to a much more widespread tendency in literary criticism since the war to demote authorial intentions, embracing, among others, American New Criticism (Wimsatt and Beardsley, 1946), French post-structuralism (Barthes, 1977), and so-called Reader-Response criticism (Suleiman and Crosman, 1980). In their very different ways, these approaches challenged an assumption that had often been implicit in earlier criticism, namely that authors might hold a monopoly over the signification of their work, or at least that they might own a privileged reading of it. Barthes put the counter-argument stridently. By stressing that the text is a ‘tissue of quotations’ from innumerable centres of culture, he released it from a single ‘theological’ meaning. At the same time he argued that its multiple origins and connotative values are focussed in one place only, and that place is the reader. As he put it, ‘the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author’.
This shift in perspective was registered by musicology from the late 1960s onwards, above all in response to the German literary movement. Specialized reception histories began to appear with increasing frequency in the work of scholars with a leaning towards the sociology of music, notably Hans Eggebrecht, Zofia Lissa and Tibor Kneif. Eggebrecht’s classic study of Beethoven reception provided one model for an approach which sets out to demonstrate the social construction of musical meanings, and to uncover the ideology that informs them. Yet where Eggebrecht focussed synchronically on certain unchanging themes (e.g. notions of suffering, the will and overcoming), implicitly reinforcing a characteristic identity for the music, Lissa, in her account of Chopin reception, adopted a rather different approach. By pointing out that the music was heard ‘with a different ear’ in particular countries and particular periods, she highlighted just how susceptible music can be to appropriation, and how easily its identity can slip away from us. Lissa set out to firm up some of the preconceptions and prejudices that condition response, and in doing so offered us an insight into what she called the ‘socially formative’ qualities of musical works. More recent German scholarship has tended to seek a middle road between Eggebrecht’s work-centred approach and Lissa’s sociology. The key figures have been Hermann Danuser and Friedhelm Krummacher, and their symposium Rezeptionsästhetik und Rezeptionsgeschichte in der Musikwissenschaft, held in Hanover in 1988 (published as Danuser and Krummacher, 1991, with an opening chapter by Jauss), was an event of seminal importance for reception studies in music.
Within Anglo-American scholarship a growing interest in reception was very soon part and parcel of the so-called ‘new musicologies’ developed in the 1970s and 1980s. Part of the mission of these musicologies, after all, was to undermine any assumption of an autonomous character for the musical work, and reception studies offered one route to this objective. Beethoven has been the paradigmatic composer for scholars from all traditions (Wallace, 1986; Geck and Schleuning, 1989; Sipe, 1992; Burnham, 1995). Chopin has also been widely explored (Carew, 1992; Chechlińska, 1992; Ballstaedt, 1994; Samson, 1994), so too has Bach (Herz, 1985; McClary, 1987; Finscher, 1989; Nowak, 1991), and of course Wagner (Zuckerman, 1964; Beckett, 1979; Turbow, 1984; Millington, 1992). Indeed reception is now so much a part of the tool-kit of historical research that it finds a place routinely in series such as the Music Handbooks issued by Cambridge University Press. Characteristically, the term is understood fairly broadly here (embracing reception by critics, composers, editors, scholars and performers), and it is usually explored as one part of a larger narrative. But at least one of the handbooks (Cook, 1993) is tantamount to a reception study and little else. It should be added, moreover, that the subject matter of reception histories has now been extended well beyond canonic composers to include so-called Trivialmusik of the 19th century, as well as today’s popular music; and that it has been further extended methodologically through studies of taste-creating institutions such as journals, publishing-houses, broadcasting and recording companies and of course the academy. Implicit in these studies is the larger theme of canon formation, to which a reception aesthetics is fundamental (see Canon (iii)).
It was at the University of Konstanz in the late 1960s that a coherent body of literary criticism known as ‘reception theory’ or ‘reception aesthetics’ was first developed, principally by Jauss and Wolfgang Iser. Drawing partly on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s notion of a ‘horizon of expectations’, Jauss arrived at an understanding of literary history as a succession, and ultimately a ‘fusion’, of aesthetic horizons. In doing so his aim was above all to steer a course between objective historicism (which would deplete contemporary relevance) and ‘mere’ subjective interpretation. He went on to codify modes of interpretation, connotative categories and patterns of interaction, all of which serve to ‘make concrete’ the reader’s experience of a text. Iser, concerned with the phenomenology of literature rather more than its history, developed further this reader-orientated approach, examining for instance how the ‘implied reader’ engages in gap-filling and image-making strategies as he or she produces meaning from a necessarily indeterminate text, a text which includes, as Iser put it, ‘unwritten’ as well as written parts. It is not difficult to see from this how reception aesthetics issued a challenge to the authority of the text, and therefore to any notion of a stable canon of great works. That challenge, it need hardly be said, bears on the study of music as well as literature.
The relevance to musicology has been addressed above all by Krummacher. He recognizes the differences from literary studies, arguing that, unlike literature, music employs a code system accessible only to initiates, that the understanding of music ‘is bound to historical presuppositions and to that extent is also threatened by historical change’, and that such change needs historical or anthropological reflection by initiates to make it comprehensible. (Lissa had made a similar point by granting privilege to ‘expert listeners’, who explicate those ‘moments’ that form the matrix of reception.) Yet for all the differences between literary and musical reception, certain fundamentals are common to both, and Krummacher was quick to recognize the larger value to the music historian of measuring the ‘active present’ (our own judgments) against a ‘recovered past’ (the evaluations of history). In Krummacher’s work, as in the contributions of Danuser, Erik Fischer, Siegried Mauser and Susanna Grossmann-Vendrey to the Hanover symposium, reception studies hold out some promise for a productive fusion of history and criticism, where present-day and historical subjects might confront one another in such a way that ‘the understanding of the text is conditioned by the self-understanding of the interpretation’ (Hoy, 1978). Hoy’s formulation, incidentally, lays bare the larger critical framework of philosophical hermeneutics within which a reception aesthetics ideally functions.
The value of reception histories for musicology has not, however, been universally conceded. Carl Dahlhaus in particular argued that they tend either to a relativism which treats all phases of reception as of equal value, or to a dogmatism which seeks to reinstate normative criteria of judgment. He further argued that the general tendency of a reception history is to collapse the history of music into the history of society. And finally he rejected the progressivism that he regarded as implicit in reception histories in favour of a so-called kairos or point de la perfection – a privileged receptive moment, in which the qualities of the work are perfectly attuned to the mentalité of its reception. These are thoughtful and challenging critiques, not least because they raise discomforting questions about just who is in a position to decide between the competing verdicts of a reception history. But Dahlhaus’s critique has in its turn been countered by Krummacher, who argues that there can be a middle way between relativism and dogmatism, located in the relationship between the texts of musical works and the documents of their reception; the competing verdicts, in other words, ‘can constantly be checked against the works themselves’. Krummacher further challenges Dahlhaus’s theory of a kairos on grounds of retrospective and circular reasoning. As he put it, ‘one had to know already where such a kairos was to be applied’.
Perhaps the most problematical dimension of a reception aesthetics concerns the stability of the work as a text. Reception studies, of their very nature, imply unstable, even receding, or ‘vanishing’ meanings for the artwork. Stanley Fish speaks of a ‘disappearing text’ (1980). Because of its challenge to determinacy – its tendency to deconstruct the work, to allow its edges to blur and dissolve – a reception study raises in a particularly acute form the issue of identity, the identity of the musical work. And for that reason it also challenges more traditional modes of historical and analytical enquiry in musicology. The challenge to analysis is arguably the more contentious, in that it reaches through to the central premise of musical analysis – the determinate musical work. Admittedly most reception studies do in practice reveal some degree of determinacy, in that although fixed meanings recede in the face of social mediation, they do so only to certain boundaries. Fish refers to ‘the authority of interpretive communities’, while Jan Broeckx speaks of salvaging ‘residual layers of receptional insight’ – precisely what an historically aware analysis sets out to do. Yet it is difficult to deny that a reception aesthetics highlights the relativity – the perspectival quality – of our analytical knowledge. Through our encounter with other historical subjects, we are constantly made aware that we ourselves construct the object of our enquiry, and that we do so within the terms of a particular ‘horizon of expectation’.
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