Music historiography is the writing of music history. Its study reveals the changing attitudes to music of the past as shown in writings about music (see also Musicology, §II, 1).
2. Music-historical thinking before ‘music history’.
3. Topics of music historiography since c1750.
GLENN STANLEY
Since its origins in the 18th century, the writing of formal music history has been shaped by the more venerable dynastic and national historiographies that established the historical approach as the ‘most universal and encompassing and the highest of all sciences’ (Schlegel). Thus music history, like the histories of all the arts, shares essential tasks and subject areas with general history, among them the critical examination of sources, chronological narrative, periodization, change and causality, and biography. Nevertheless, because works of art are their central subject matter, the histories of the arts differ crucially from other historical disciplines. Apart from philological topics such as dating, transmission, attributions and editions, the approach to general historiographical problems is inevitably conditioned by the aesthetic views of the art historian. Moreover, critical judgments about works have even more weight in the areas specific to the arts: the elucidation of style (whether that of an individual artist or of a school or a period) and structure, and, when the problem is broached, meaning. The very definition of such categories as style (without which periodization and change cannot be conceptualized) and structure is conditioned by aesthetic priorities. Even philology, especially in the absence of (seemingly) incontrovertible source evidence, relies on aesthetics when judgments about the artistic properties of works must fill that gap.
A highly significant consequence of the work-orientation of art histories has been the question of autonomy, which extends from general historiographical areas to those specific to the arts. Because musical works, for example, possess uniquely musical material, does it follow that music (1) develops according to its own laws and (2) is understood phenomenologically, or is it so highly conditioned by the greater cultural processes to which it undeniably belongs that (1) explanations of its development should not emphasize its autonomy and (2) formal explication is incomplete and insufficient? In all its phases music historiography has encompassed both approaches, supported by the often competing philosophies of history to which every music historian consciously or unconsciously subscribes.
Centuries before antiquarian and historical perspectives began to motivate an interest in early music for its own sake, medieval and Renaissance writing on music was informed by a view of the musical past. That view depended in large part on an uncritical acceptance of ancient legend and chronicle, biblical authority and theological doctrine; thus it was not a historical view in any modern sense of the word. Nevertheless, in speculative and practical theory and in aesthetic polemics, the foundations for music historiography were already being laid. The past – transmitted by classical and Christian theorists – was used both to defend current practice and to legitimize innovation. Less frequently the past, notably the recent past, was found wanting. The declaration of an ‘ars nove musice’ by Jehan des Murs in 1321 and the attack on it by Jacobus de Liège (Speculum musice, before 1330) anticipated not only the early 17th-century controversy about the ‘seconda pratica’ but also the general historiographical problem of periodization and the definition and critical evaluation of music perceived to be new. In Tinctoris's pronouncement that ‘there does not exist a single piece of music, composed within the last 40 years, that is regarded by the learned as worth hearing’ (Liber de arte contrapuncti, 1477), the distinction between older and newer music is purely evaluative; technical and stylistic criteria are not part of his argument. Tinctoris's implied rejection of antique and Christian scholastic theory, and his explicit projection of individual composers – Ockeghem, Regis, Busnoys and others – into the story of music's development, represent an early stage of a gradual change in perspective that established music as a subject for humanistic study and biography as fundamental for the development of music historiography (see Biography). The composers Tinctoris favoured were Franco-Flemish; in his Proportionale musices (c1472–5) he preferred French ‘singing’ to English ‘shouting’ while conceding the English their status as the ‘fount and origin’ of a ‘new art’. This perception of national styles goes back to Plato's Republic and Athenaeus's Deipnosophistae, and looks forward to 18th-century theories of national styles, Herder's and Rousseau's philosophies of history (the national-linguistic basis for individual paths of development) and the writing of national music histories.
Tinctoris, like later proponents of the new, was not entirely dismissive of the old, especially the very old; his introduction to Proportionale musices celebrates the distant and recent past in music and music theory. Other humanist theorists increasingly relied on antique thought rather than on Christian doctrine. Both the advocates of the great stylistic innovations of the second half of the 16th century (e.g. Vicentino, L'antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica, 1555; Galilei, Dialogo della musica antica et della moderna, 1581) and the defenders of ancient music and the more recent polyphonic music that was already considered to constitute (without the term being used) a ‘classic’ style (L'Artusi, overo Delle imperfettioni della moderna musica, 1600) drew on Greek theory to suppport their positions. But the Christian theory of the divine origin of music maintained itself into the early 18th century and posed a problem for authors who emphasized musical development: how could something God-given be made better by man? Calvisius maintained a balance implicit in the title of the historical section of his Exercitationes musicae duae (1600), ‘De origine et progressu musices’: he acknowledged the divine perfection of the original music, song; credited a man, Jubal, with the invention of a less perfect vocal music; and, like Tinctoris, associated the progress of the previous century with great composers, among them Josquin and Lassus. Calvisius's notion of progress was, however, a pre-Enlightenment one; it was theologically grounded in the Platonic-Christian tradition that viewed musica humana as an inferior anticipation of the perfection of the music of the spheres to be revealed upon human salvation.
Both Calvisius, who criticized Pope John XXII for his campaign against elaborate polyphonic liturgical music, and Praetorius, who wrote a ‘Historische Beschreibung der alten politischen und weltlichen Musik’ in Syntagma musicum (1614–18), were Protestants, and their focus on progress and secular national tradition reflected broader Protestant attempts to legitimize the Reformation through the idea of historical development. Catholic writers on music, notably Mersenne (Harmonie universelle, 1636–7), clung to established orthodoxy; the sensual aspect of music was minimized, its divine character emphasized, and ancient music was discussed in greater detail than that of the recent past. For Mersenne the history of music was still ‘divine history’. Yet not long after the publication of the Harmonie another Catholic writer, the German Kircher, took a more comprehensive view, anticipating the universal-historical approach of the 18th century: within the musical curiosities and legends in the Musurgia universalis (1650) are discussions of music in Old Testament times, folk music and the secular music of the Mediterranean world.
The music-historical literature of the century after 1650 displays the same kinds of internal contradictions that arose in the late 15th century. Printz (Historische Beschreibung der edelen Sing- und Kling-Kunst, 1690) did not disavow divine origin, but also stressed the sounds of nature and the role of human reason and passion in the development of music. His influential chapter on ‘the most famous musicians’ contains biographical sketches in chronological order in which the cultural functions of music are also discussed. The chronology begins with the mythical Jubal, but the emphasis rests on contemporary musicians. Bontempi (Historia musica, 1695) perpetuated the scholastic approach to music as a mathematical discipline in his comparative discussion of ancient and modern music. The Bonnet-Bourdelot Histoire de la musique (1715) combines elements of scholasticism with a nationalist perspective that, in the context of the ‘querelle des anciens et des modernes’, argues for the superiority of contemporary French music over Italian. The end of the century witnessed the gradual disappearance of the belief in divine origins, an increasing acceptance of the validity of secular music, and a strengthening interest in source studies (especially historical treatises on early music and theory, which were cited at length). Chronological narratives were often based on excerpts from earlier literature that, like Printz's, discussed individual composers and the role of music in daily life (e.g. Walther, Musicalisches Lexicon, 1732). Mattheson's negative review of Bontempi's Historia and his admonition that the accuracy of secondary sources should not be taken for granted (Der vollkommene Capellmeister, 1739, chap.22) reveal the influence of a nascent critical empiricism and positivism fostered by the burgeoning natural sciences, all of which were crucial to the development of modern historiography.
(ii) Formalism, autonomy and racialism.
Historiography, §3: Topics of music historiography since c1750
The strongest impetus to music historiography was, however, the old question of progress in music, which became more acute in the intellectual climate of the Enlightenment and as an offshoot of the ‘querelle’. This controversy, which began in France in the late 17th century, centred on a debate about the superiority of classical over contemporary literature but was soon extended to the other arts. In music it helped trigger the ‘querelle des Bouffons,’ the long-running 18th-century argument about the relative merits of contemporary Italian and French music. As late as 1780, when La Borde's Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne (the most important French music history of its time) was published, the dispute shaped historical thinking in France. The ancient-modern dispute was the primary context for the development of an enlightened ‘philosophy of history’ (a term coined by Voltaire) which ushered in the age of true historical thinking and was in large part defined by the notion of progress.
Because the idea of progress depends on the more basic idea of change, theories of progress were developed in conjunction with theories of historical process, the motor of change. The advocates of recent and contemporary culture grounded their arguments for progress on evolutionary development according to natural law. This view – abstract and metaphysical – shares the mechanism of the ‘divine plan’ of history, but is not based on theology and allows for human activity and perfectibility. The process of history – the advancement of reason through the different phases of civilization – is universal, embracing all humankind. An understanding and appreciation of the present and any earlier period can be obtained only through a consideration of the human race's entire progress. This notion promoted the encyclopedic approach and universal history, and, in the literature on music, strengthened the century-old tradition of locating music's origins and tracing its earlier phases (see §3(iv) below). A crucial difference can be discerned, however, in the rising interest in the music of the past for its own sake, and not only for the ways in which it led to the present state. This shift in perception, which spawned historicism, arose virtually simultaneously with the idea of progress and became its strongest competitor in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The belief in progress underlies several of the most important late 18th-century music histories, yet their authors – Burney (A General History of Music, 1776–89), Hawkins (A General History of the Science and Practice of Music, 1776) and Forkel (Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik, 1788–1801) – all celebrated past achievements and the significance of music in earlier cultures, and recognized that progress had limitations and was not inevitable. Hawkins took a progressive stance in his critique of William Temple, who saw in Greek music (and poetry and visual arts) an absolute standard of beauty that could never be surpassed. How were such views possible, asked Hawkins, in an age that gave birth to a Byrd, a Palestrina or a Shakespeare? Yet on the basis of his retrospective aesthetic preferences Hawkins championed stile antico church music and opposed post-1600 instrumental music and Italian opera, while acknowledging the merits of Corelli and Handel. Moreover, in his attack on Addison's relativistic argument that English opera should exclude Italian-style recitative because it was foreign to English culture, Hawkins embraced the absolutist, ahistorical aesthetic categories that he rejected in Temple's work. Burney, whose three volumes on ‘the present state of music’ in continental Europe (1771–3) are the most detailed (and valorizing) discussion of contemporary music culture before the 19th century, de-emphasized the liturgical tradition in favour of secular genres, notably Italian opera. He rejected the idealization of classical cultures and (like Mattheson) criticized the authority enjoyed by ancient and medieval music theorists and, by implication, the practice of heavy citation of older literature. But Burney, whose popularizing history is full of the value judgments more usually found in music journalism, did find fault with the state of his preferred genre after 1760.
Neither Hawkins nor Burney appears to have thought deeply about the conceptual bases for their views, but Forkel, whose position as music director at Göttingen University brought him into the sphere of the so-called Göttingen Historical School, was very conscious of the aesthetic and historical problems surrounding the question of artistic progress and undecided about his own stance (see ‘Versuch einer Metaphysik der Tonkunst’ in volume i of his Geschichte). He shared Hawkins's and Burney's interest in the contemporary situation (but devoted hundreds of pages to ancient Greece); his primary concern was Lutheran church music and its decline after J.S. Bach, the first ‘classic’ composer. Bach's sacred and secular music represented the culmination of a long historical process; Forkel's recommendations for church music reform foreshadowed the general concern for contemporary music on the part of such 19th-century German historians as Marx and Brendel, and Spitta's more narrowly focussed effort to rejuvenate Protestant music (‘Die Wiederbelebung protestantischer Kirchenmusik auf geschichtlicher Grundlage’, 1892). Similar efforts were made on behalf of Catholic church music in the German-speaking lands, France and Italy.
Forkel was less confident about the evaluation of earlier music. In his commentary on Hawkins's critique of the aesthetic absolutism of Temple (Musikalisch-kritische Bibliothek, 1778–9), he sided with Hawkins, conceding that the primitive cultures preceding ancient Greece and Rome had their own sense of beauty and order, and acknowledging that ‘not just a few believe that there could be a music that is very different from ours, but still not less beautiful, perhaps even more beautiful and perfect’. Yet he stressed the difficulty in judging the music of the very distant past because the ‘entirely differing intervallic relationships between the older and more recent scales [Tonleiter]’ prevented adequate aesthetic evaluation and, hence, secure conclusions about progress. Faced with this problem, Forkel resorted to enlightened absolutist thinking, universal history and the traditional glorification of antiquity: preclassical cultures do not derive their values from the ‘natural law of artistic beauty and order’ which links Greek ‘high culture’ with that of the present day. Antique music must be ‘perfect’ on the same basis as other antique arts – poetry and drama, architecture and sculpture – which are not as difficult to decipher and comprehend.
The progress of European music history was, then, the unfolding of new manifestations of the already perfect. Yet Forkel did not endorse the idea of continuous necessary evolutionary progress, which would have contradicted his pessimism about the contemporary situation. The ‘fall’ of music after Bach was the last phase of a tripartite process of origin, development and decay posited by numerous historical theories developed in the 18th century (Vico, Bacon, Rousseau, Herder) and modified in the 19th and 20th centuries. These theories are described in historiographical literature variously as organic or biological, or in terms of life-cycles (youth, maturity, old age). Progress depends on the beginning of a new cycle. Although Hawkins maintained little hope for a new beginning, he incorporated this scheme into his writing and may have influenced Forkel, who approved of Hawkins's work. Another influence has been seen in Winckelmann's four-part theory set forth in his epoch-making Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (1764), in which a period of differentiation (Veränderung) precedes the fall. Forkel's discussion of the many forms of perfection in music since classial antiquity reflects this perspective. But Winckelmann viewed development as autonomous; his concern, foreshadowing style history, was with the ‘essence of art’, which can always regenerate itself. Forkel's pessimism stemmed from his critique of the totality of contemporary culture in light of his absolutist aesthetic ideal. In an age of decline he found little to look forward to: his organic historical view was irreconcilable with his cautious belief in progress.
In the wake of the French Revolution and Restoration, 18th-century historical thinking was challenged by a rise in scepticism about progress per se and an increasing reverence for an idealized past that was often stimulated by religious and nationalistic perspectives. These tendencies strengthened the appeal of historicism, an important aspect of which is a view of the past as equal or superior to the present. Historicism developed as an alternative to Enlightenment teleology as the basis for a philosophy of history. In the histories of the arts it promoted the abandonment of an absolute standard of beauty and a consciousness of the validity of sharply divergent artistic forms and styles over the course of history. Thus aesthetic relativism developed concurrently with historicism, and both tendencies supported the growing positivistic-empirical emphases of music historiography that coincided with the gradual establishment of music history as an academic discipline. Although the length of the discussion of progress and process in this article might suggest the contrary, historicism (which requires less explication and did not take as many different forms) was the single most important impetus to the development of music historiography in the 19th century. Apart from biographers, who devoted roughly equal attention to recent and distant composers, most music historians concentrated on the music of the past, which was generally understood to have concluded with Bach. (This view conflicts somewhat with the widespread idea that ‘new’ music began in 1600; see §3(iv) below.) This emphasis fostered the development of research techniques that are the basis for the positivistic-empirical aspects of modern historical musicology, and also motivated the introduction of monographic studies and articles on narrowly focussed topics (notation, sources, genres, styles etc.) in a limited time span along with traditional universal histories. Both developments allowed for more thorough and rigorous treatment of subject matter than had been imaginable earlier.
A preference for religious music often accompanied the historicist rejection of continual progress and its frequent de-emphasis of universal history, historical process and contemporary music. Martini championed Palestrina, while Gerbert was primarily concerned with the historical relationship between the Roman Catholic liturgy and music. Winterfeld adopted their idea of a ‘holy music’ in Christian Europe before 1600. A clear indication of Winterfeld's historicism is his appreciation of the modes, which differed both from Forkel's admitted lack of understanding (as well as his view of the development of modern scale systems) and from his contemporary Kiesewetter's view that the modes represented a preliminary stage in the development of the tonal system.
Nationalistic historicism treated folk and religious music, and recent secular art music, especially opera, as equally valid elements of national tradition, while some countries, notably Austria and Germany, in line with German Romantic musical aesthetics, attributed their cultural superiority to their recent instrumental music. Such thinking underlay the writing of national music histories all over Europe. It had acute political implications in Germany and Italy – which until well after 1850 were unified cultures (despite Catholic-Protestant divisions and tensions in Germany) but not unified states – and in countries such as Russia, where a native ‘art’ music tradition was in its formative stages in the early 19th century. It was also important in those central European areas (Hungary, Poland and the future Czechoslovakia) which could claim a longer tradition but whose ‘high’ culture and political life had been dominated by their German, Austrian and Russian neighbours.
Nationalism, universal-historical views and support for the legitimacy of secular music of the present and the past went hand in hand with a continuing belief in progress. Kiesewetter, whose absorption of late 18th-century ideas of progress – contemporary music was cause for ‘great happiness’ – is felt throughout his influential Geschichte der europäisch-abendländischen oder unsrer heutigen Musik (1834), devoted an entire book to secular music before 1600 (Schicksale und Beschaffenheit des weltlichen Gesanges … bis zur … den Anfängen der Oper, 1841), in which he rebuked those historians who denigrated secular music while asserting that the Italian madrigal was superior to Renaissance liturgical genres with respect to expression and harmonic practice. This was, for its time, a radical reinterpretation of 16th-century music and a critique of a historicism so extreme that it rejected relativism and assumed an absolutist pre-1600 religious aesthetic. (The validity of sacred music with elaborate instrumental accompaniment was a subject of much debate.) Winterfeld was not the probable target, because his book was published in the same year as Kiesewetter's, but Kiesewetter certainly knew Gerbert's and Martini's books as well as more recent work along the same lines, such as Thibaut's Über Reinheit der Tonkunst (1825). Nevertheless, Kiesewetter was certainly one of the founders of music historicism; his aesthetic relativism (which, like Winterfeld's, began with Christian Europe – both viewed Greek music as incapable of development) allowed him to achieve a synthesis between perspectives that were often mutually exclusive.
Fétis, the leading 19th-century French-speaking music historian, followed in the 18th-century tradition of a belief in progress with limits. Influenced by the liberal universal-historical approach of Jules Michelet, he relinquished Enlightenment ideas about natural law and abstract reason but also avoided the metaphysics of German idealism. Fétis did not dismiss the importance of human reason, but his emphasis on sentiment, imagination and inspiration, as well as mystical and religious motivations, all bespeak the Romantic historical view originating in the late 18th century with thinkers like Rousseau and Herder. Fétis stressed the particularity and validity of each phase in the historical process, yet, like his 18th-century counterparts, he had reservations about the most progressive music of his own time and suggested a return to 18th-century artistic values. On the other hand, Fétis did not entirely abandon the mechanistic conception of progress, while acknowledging that it was neither continuous nor inevitable. Unlike the universal schemes of the Enlightenment, however, process seemed to operate through ‘music creating itself, developing itself, and changing itself by virtue of various principles which are unfolded … and discovered periodically, by men of genius’ (Biographie universelle, 1873 edn). Thus Fétis was one of the first proponents of the idea of autonomy, in sharp contrast to the universal thinking of his predecessors. The idea of autonomous development also underlies Parry's The Evolution of the Art of Music (first published as The Art of Music, 1893), which was conceived in a British intellectual climate dominated by Darwin and Spencer. A strong evolutionary view led him to assert the ‘primitiveness’ of medieval chant (a characterization Fétis had reserved for some music prior to classical Greece); predicated on natural-scientific theory, his philosophy of history and personal aesthetics were immune to the arguments of historicism and the weight of evidence brought forward in editions and performances of historical music.
In Germany, Hegel was the thinker we most closely associate with the idea of progress in the 19th century: the metaphysical idealism, the dialectical method, the belief that human history is primarily that of the advance of human consciousness and the human spirit, and the liberal nationalism underlying his philosophy of history had an enormous impact on German intellectual life as a whole, and on German historiography in particular. Marx and Brendel are the music historians most often linked to Hegelianism; Brendel explicitly identified himself with the philosopher. Both historians were idealists, stressing the potential of music to present philosophical ideas (the ‘Idee’) and the role of critical (self-)consciousness on the part of composers and listeners. On the basis of their teleological perspectives, both emphasized the music of the present and recent past as the highest embodiment of the great advances of the human spirit; the year 1600 was not the end of a great age but the first foreshadowing of later greatness. Both viewed the music of the past before Viennese Classicism with a critical eye; Handel and Bach were notable exceptions – Marx distinguished between Handel's oratorios and the St Matthew Passion on the one hand, and Graun's Tod Jesu on the other: the higher aesthetic and spiritual values embodied in the music of the former composers ensured its relevance for a spiritually more advanced age that favoured a philosophical ‘Kunstreligion’ over religion itself.
Yet the paths that Marx and Brendel staked out for further progress diverged. Brendel pinned his hopes for the music of the future on Wagner; Marx rejected the music drama (as did Schumann, whose criticism was also motivated by a theory of progress that is less self-consciously derived from a philosophy of history) and, despite his interest in German opera and church music, viewed Beethovenian instrumental music as holding the greatest promise. (Hegel himself admired Rossini's operas and Bach's St Matthew Passion, and, retaining a Kantian hierarchy of the arts, criticized the increasing emphasis on instrumental music that, in his view, could not embody the ideas claimed for it by Marx.) Ambros has also been linked to Hegel on the basis of his references to the Hegelian art historian Karl Schnasse and his critique of Kiesewetter's linear evolutionary thinking. Ambros detected an irreconcilable contradiction between Kiesewetter's perception that Handel and Bach represented a culmination, and his conclusion that the present day was the highest point in musical development. It has been suggested that Ambros subscribed to a dialectical perspective (which could easily accommodate Kiesewetter's conclusions), but the greatest single influence on Ambros was undoubtedly Jakob Burkhardt's cultural-historical approach, which rejected idealism while drawing on Herderian-Hegelian propositions about the unified nature of all cultural phenomena in a particular ‘Zeitgeist’.
Historiography, §3: Topics of music historiography since c1750
Neither Ambros, nor Marx, nor Brendel rigorously applied the dialectical method (Brendel came closest), nor did they make use of Hegel's division (in his published lectures on aesthetics) of the entire history of the arts into three great periods: pre-antique ‘symbolic’, antique ‘classic’ and Christian ‘romantic’. The theory of dialectical progress, in Marxist reinterpretations, had its greatest impact on the music historiography of the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe after World War II. Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist historians replaced Hegelian idealism with a materialist perspective in which socio-economic conditions, defined primarily by class divisions and the ownership of the means of production, constitute a ‘structure’ that supports and to a large degree determines a cultural ‘superstructure’. Human consciousness and its cultural products develop in relation to dialectical process in the structure (see §3(iv) below); hence the art of any particular historical period embodies those conditions and, as a result of the nature of its relation to them, has a distinct class character. In its most reductive form Marxist historiography denies the possibility of autonomous development in the arts and formalist interpretations of art works; after the official rejection of Stalinism some historians (in musicology, Lissa in Poland, Knepler in East Germany) accepted the idea of ‘semi-autonomy’. This concept retains the paradigms of dialectics and structure–superstructure, yet is less rigid in its view of the inevitability and character of progress, and grants more independence and self-determination to the superstructure. (For a post-1989 Marxist critique of Marxist musicology see Knepler's article ‘Geschichtsschreibung’ in MGG2). The East German musicologist Brockhaus, in his foreword to Europäische Musikgeschichte (1983), proposed a series of laws (‘Gesetzmässigkeiten’ – the term predates Marxism and is still used by non-Marxist historians) consisting of ‘dialectical unities’ that embrace ‘continuity and discontinuity in music history’, ‘evolutionary and revolutionary change’ in the historical process, ‘necessity and coincidence’. He also posited a second group of laws that govern the internal process of music history within general history: ‘relativity, causality, conditionality, and determinism’. Brockhaus broadened the theory of Wiederspiegelung (reflection) first developed as ‘intonation’ by Soviet scholars (B. Asaf'yev, Muzikal'naya forma kak protsess and Intonatsiya, 1930–47); it is no longer limited to ‘the occasionally possible case of a direct relationship between things social and things musical’, but also reflects composers' feeling and thinking, including their ideas about immanent musical processes. This shift made possible a more refined discussion of formal elements in the arts and their semi-autonomous development, and allowed for a more balanced view of such historical factors as ‘pure’ aesthetics and religion. (A clear measure of the increasing sophistication of Marxist musicology – some might see it as an erosion – emerges through a comparison of the judicious treatment of Bach's religious music and the religious culture of his time in the GDR in 1985 with their neglect in 1950. It is striking that not only East German musicologists but also Blume de-emphasized Bach's liturgical music and projected him as a child of the Enlightenment.)
As post-Stalinist Marxist musicology refined its methods, it moved in the direction taken by the handful of Western European musicologists (e.g. Boehmer, who often criticized the formalism of ‘bourgeois musicology’) in a less deterministic Marxist-Hegelian tradition identified with the critical social theory and hermeneutics of the Frankfurt School. Their leading representative, Adorno, wrote no formal music history, but his music criticism and sociology were historically orientated, based on the dialectical method and permeated by his preoccupation with the problem and possibility of progress in the music of the 19th and 20th centuries. Adorno's materialism is predicated on the raw materials of music itself: in this respect music was fully autonomous. However, in Adorno's dialectical take on Geistesgeschichte, music, whether through a composer's conscious stance towards the musical material or seemingly by its very nature, it embodies the tendencies and processes of its time. From this perspective Adorno polemicized against Stravinsky and championed Schoenberg, despite the latter's political conservatism, as the progressive composer par excellence in the 20th century (‘Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik’, 1932). For most of its history Marxist musicology, in line with the conservatism of Marxist aesthetics, regarded the musical avant garde in its diverse forms as symptomatic of the decadence and decay of late capitalist societies (Schneerson, 1952, Ger. trans. of Russ. orig.; Meyer, 1952). This reactionary, formalistic and elitist music did not advance the cause of socialism; socially ‘useful’ contemporary music must preserve the progressive aspects of the ‘bourgeois heritage’ in music and reinterpret them to achieve a new synthesis. (In the Soviet Union a re-evaluation of Stravinsky that stressed his Russianness and use of folk material did follow his visit to Moscow in 1962; Schoenberg was partially rehabilitated in East Germany after a series of concerts and lectures in 1977, the centennial of his birth.)
German National Socialist musicology shared the aesthetic conservatism and opposition to the avant garde of its Marxist counterpart; unlike Marxism's emphasis on class, the Nazi critique was predicated on the association of such music with Jewishness (Schoenberg) or some other racial or cultural form of non-Germanness, including the cultural bolshevism that was often linked with Jewishness. All these ‘decadent’ and ‘diseased’ tendencies were seen to be undermining Aryan culture; progress in contemporary music depended on the purification of German music from within and the spread of its influence abroad (cultural imperialism went hand in hand with military aggression). The thesis of a foreign and Semitic threat to the undeniable superiority of German music was not a Nazi invention; it went back to Wagner and had gained considerable strength in ultra-nationalistic circles well before 1932. Along the way it had been bolstered by the development of pseudo-scientific racial and ‘Volk’ theories (the latter a perversion of a tradition extending back to Herder), of which Moser was a leading advocate. Influenced by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Moser (Die Entstehung des Dur-Gedankens: ein kulturgeschichtliches Problem’, SIMG, xv, 1913–14) argued for a Germanic origin of the modern scales that he contrasted favourably with the ‘Latinic’ church modes he associated with Italy and France. In his Geschichte der deutschen Musik (1920) the declaration that only German music, with its Nordic roots, could produce simple and ‘healthy’ four-bar phrases and strong rhythms demonstrates a pre-Nazi confluence of racial and ‘volkstümlich’ perspectives.
Race, ‘Volk’ and anti-Semitism were the driving forces of the National Socialist music historiography. In 1932 the newly created Staatliches Institut für deutsche Musikforschung became the centre for musicological ‘Gleichschaltung’; some music histories published before 1932 were revised to accommodate new ideological imperatives, and Nazi music historians not only emphasized the greatness of German national tradition (this was neither new nor extraordinary) but also asserted the pre-Christian Teutonic basis of this tradition, thereby minimizing the significance of sacred music and foreign influence, notably from France and Italy. (Mersmann's Eine deutsche Musikgeschichte (1934) was criticized for its discussion of non-German contributions to German music.) In books on German music and in comparative studies such as Bücken's Musik der Nationen (1937), Nazi musicologists argued for German superiority and took pains to distinguish between German and Jewish music, devoting many studies to Jewish music itself. Blume's Das Rasseproblem in der Musik (1939) stands out for its critique of the crudest forms of racialist music historiography and its systematic attempt to legitimize National Socialist musicology scientifically.
Historiography, §3: Topics of music historiography since c1750
Apart from those instances in which 20th-century ideologies dictated a belief in progress, music historiography of the later 19th century and after was less interested in broad problems of causality and process than before; when it engaged such questions, it was less inclined to consider them from a teleological perspective. Historical development, the term implying change with some kind of continuity and causality about which theories can be built, was not discounted, but historicism and positivism discouraged the academic scholar (a scientist) from culturally based or idealistic philosophies of history, and from making broad value judgments about aesthetic issues – notably about the music of the past – that underlie theories of progress. (On the other hand, the strength of historicism and the conservative aesthetics associated with it fostered the widespread antagonism in historical musicology to avant-garde 20th-century music.) In their place various kinds of cyclic theories were advanced, some of which were stimulated by Heinrich Wölffin's art-historical study Renaissance und Barock (1888). Wölfflin, whose emphasis on technical discussion of formal elements provided an influential model for the concept of style in music historiography, argued for the spiritual and stylistic unity of Renaissance and antique art. Thus cyclic development unfolds on the basis of periodically surfacing historical continuities rather than continual progressive change. In each period the different cultural spheres (the arts, philosophy, religion) display ‘parallel’ paths of non-autonomous development (see §3(iv) below). In this vein, Schering proposed a cyclicism based on two different forms of musical symbolism – conceptual and emotional – that succeeded each other in line with broader cultural patterns (e.g. the conceptual symbolism of Bach's age giving way to the emotional symbolism of Romanticism). The concept of symbol was favoured in the early 20th century by non-formalist aestheticians and some historians (such as Erwin Panofsky in the visual arts) subscribing to a hermeneutic and intellectual-cultural-historical approach (‘Geistesgeschichte’), as championed by Wilhelm Dilthey, in opposition to positivism and theories of autonomous development.
Schering's symbol is a broadly conceived category that accommodates the full range of musical elements and techniques, styles and genres developed through musical history, and also constitutes an aesthetic theory that is the basis for a discussion of work content. Other prominent cyclical theories are more ‘scientific’; they advance narrow, ‘objective’ categories derived from the style-critical approach to periodization, such as melodic unity or diversity as described by Mersmann (1921, pp.67–78), and polyphonic texture as proposed by Moser (1938) and Lorenz (1928); the latter's work reflects the influence of his father's general historical theory of generations (O. Lorenz, 1886). Such criteria are more precise than Schering's symbol, but they are far too limited to accomplish their task and, as Gurlitt argued (1918–19, pp.571–87), should not be applied to humanistic studies. Gurlitt made a detailed critique of the life-cycle theory, which could support both optimistic and pessimistic forecasts. In Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes (1918–22) this theory received an influential and pessimistic reworking. Gurlitt argued that determinations of growth and decay in the histories of the arts can be based only on aesthetic judgments and are therefore incommensurable with the scientific claims of the theory. In order to avoid this problem, and also to offer an alternative to positivism, Gurlitt proposed a non-evolutionary division of music history into six epochs on the basis of rhythmic practices; he chose rhythm because it is the ‘most primal’ musical element, preceding even sonority. In and of itself, this choice is also very narrowly focussed, as is Schering's less systematically worked-out view of musical development on the basis of sonority – the primary material for musical symbolism. Both authors' emphasis on immanent musical material is at first suggestive of autonomous stylistic development (see §3(v) below) as advanced by Riemann (1904–13 and 1908) and Adler, whose theoretical writings criticize autonomy but whose practical method applies it (1911 and 1919). However, Gurlitt and his teacher, Schering, opposed autonomy on the grounds that it was positivistic; they interpreted style changes as expressions of artistic preferences (Gurlitt's ‘Kunstwollen’) that arose within general culture and were conditioned by individual and social psychology. Schering suggested that ‘style history’, which was rapidly becoming entrenched as the leading method, should be replaced by ‘symbol history’ in order to reinforce the linkage between formal and cultural historical elements.
Thus despite the widespread disavowal of progress in mainstream musicology, the question of process, while less burning than before, remained controversial. The tensions between scientific positivism and humanistic cultural theory that framed the debate also defined the parameters of the discussion of periodization, the problem which about 1900 replaced (while subsuming) that of development and progress as central to music historiography.
Historiography, §3: Topics of music historiography since c1750
Ambros saw a necessary and decisive step towards a rigorous music historiography in Kiesewetter's division of music history into epochs. He had reservations about Kiesewetter's criteria – epochs were named after the composers whose innovations and influence were definitive for their period – yet the very presence of a periodization based on a single theory about historical process provided an ‘order and coherence’ that he found lacking in Forkel's chronology. In fact, Forkel did propose in his essay on metaphysics a tripartite universal-historical scheme in which the development of verbal language is connected to progress from primitive ur musics consisting of mere sonority and rhythm to differentiated forms based on the development of scales and counterpoint in antiquity and the modern world. But the conceptual and chronological looseness and broadness of this partitioning limit its usefulness, and it hardly figures in Forkel's narrative, while the pluralistic approach to periodization (different criteria for different historical periods) only exacerbates these problems. Hawkins did not even attempt to impose order: his chapters are simply numbered, and the two volumes lack descriptive subtitles; the decision to begin the second one about 1600 does, however, reflect his sense of large-scale historical division that was often adopted.
Periodization runs counter to a philosophy of history like Forkel's, which is based on a theory of progress driven by the continuity of natural law and is coupled with an absolutist aesthetic. On the other hand, the historicist emphasis on the particularity of different phases in historical development – which does not necessarily exclude progress – as well as the pragmatic need for ‘comprehensibility’ (Ambros), helps explain the increasing preoccupation with periodization. But periodization could replace process as the primary concern only after theories of development had been consolidated, for the criteria for the historical divisions had been derived from such theories or, in the earlier phases of music historiography, were relics of medieval thinking. The latter, represented by such authors as Calvisius, Printz, Marpurg and Martini, who combine divine and biblical history with periods based on dynastic and great historical figures (often not musicians), may be glimpsed in Bonnet's seven divisions: (1) Divine Origin to the Flood, (2) Flood to David and Solomon, (3) Solomon to Pythagoras, (4) Socrates to Christ, (5) Christ to Gregory, (6) Gregory to St Dunstan, (7) 1000–1600. Burney retained elements of this approach, but in the first volume of his General History eliminated biblical chronology and introduced immanent-musical criteria (e.g. the ‘Invention of Counterpoint and the State of Music, from the Time of Guido’) that figure even more prominently in vol.ii (which includes a chapter on genres), that begins in the middle of the 16th century with a chapter tracing the ‘progress of music in England’ from the reign of Henry VIII to the death of Queen Elizabeth. Burney also devoted chapters organized by century to the music of France, Germany and Italy (the Netherlands School awaited its 19th-century discovery), thus achieving a synthesis reflective of his universal-historical approach.
Periodization theories fall into three groups: those based on immanent-musical criteria, those based on general history and those based on cultural history and the histories of literature, the visual arts and architecture. 18th-century schemes made some use of the first and depended heavily on the second; the influence of the third, which has proven to be the strongest, was first felt in the later 19th century. The term ‘Renaissance’ (Michelet, 1855, and Burckhardt, 1860) was introduced into music historiography in the 1880s, followed shortly thereafter by the adoption of such terms as ‘Baroque’ (Wöllflin, 1888) and ‘Romantic’ and ‘Classical’. The last two had been used by critics and aestheticians in music and the other arts since the late 18th century: in his music history Köstlin (1875) had designated composers of the 18th and 19th centuries as ‘Classiker’ and ‘Romantiker’, but he did not apply the term to epochs. Wöllflin's work was especially influential because it combined a cultural-historical approach with an emphasis on style-critical analysis, thus fulfilling the imperatives of the strongest historiographical currents of the time. The attractiveness of cultural-historical designations gave rise to terminology for smaller temporal and geographical sub-periods, such as 16th-century ‘mannerism’ and ‘Empfindsamkeit’. Terms applied to very recent and contemporary music, such as ‘Impressionism’ and ‘verismo’ were often taken over from criticism, just as ‘classicism’ and ‘romanticism’ had been earlier.
The broadest general-historical divisions have had the greatest influence: since the advent of humanism the ternary division – antiquity, a middle age and a new or modern time – has permeated Western historical thinking in all areas. The chronological determination of the beginning of the third period has been a long-standing problem that has also been felt in music historiography. In Schering's explicit application of the division – ‘Altertum’, ‘Mittelalter’ and ‘Neue Zeit’ (1914) – the ‘new time’ is placed within the general-historical ‘Early Modern Europe’, that orignates within the confessional and national Reformation and the style-historical Renaissance. Yet since the 18th century historians subscribing to diverse historical theories have favoured the year 1600 as the watershed. Even Ambros, who celebrated the new impulses of Renaissance culture, viewed its music as the final stage of a historical development beginning with liturgical chant.
The conceptual problem of the ‘new’ and the ‘modern’ is heightened by the fact that these terms were used in reference to time spans of considerably different length. Schering subdivided his third period into a ‘newer’ and then a ‘newest’ time beginning in 1790, the advent of Romanticism. (Moser replaced this in the fifth edition of his Geschichte der deutschen Musik with a single third period containing subsections.) This represents a late stage in a series of adjustments that usually pushed the beginning of the ‘new’ forwards, and reflects not only broad historical thinking but a view of the changing contemporary scene. The ‘new music’ (Bekker, 1919; Einstein, 1926) of the 20th century replaces that of the early 19th century (and that of earlier ones, such as the Nuove musiche of the 17th). Another problem in the concept of the new is especially acute in its application to 20th-century music: some historians have conflated the term with a post-Romantic modern period (Adler); others have differentiated between a ‘modern’ period lasting from 1890 to 1914 and the ‘new’ music thereafter (Danuser, 1984, on the basis of compositional technique). ‘New’ has been used in the purely chronological sense that encompasses all the music of the new century, or has been reserved for music with progressive or avant-garde tendencies (Morgan, 1991). The recent plethora of ‘neos-’ and ‘posts’ and combinations thereof applied to cultural-historical epochal names (e.g. ‘Neo-Post-Romanticism’) – which are themselves anything but fixed in their meaning – demonstrates the continuing dependence on such terminology but promises no clarification of the problems inherent in its use.
Music historiography has also drawn on general-historical periodizations based on centuries and the particular phases of national histories that are often coupled with dynastic and religious histories and social and political movements. The impact of the latter is strongest in non-autonomous historiographical literature and in monographs devoted to the music of a particular nation. The former, reflected in chapters of general histories and textbooks and in single volumes, is convenient but as mechanistic as the theories of generations or cycles with which it is sometimes combined (Lorenz). And if undertaken seriously it requires subdivision based on fundamental style changes (e.g. the 18th century), or clarifications such as Dahlhaus's discourse (Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts, 1980) on the beginning (1814) and conclusion (1914) of this century and his justification of the title. For good reason there have been few attempts to establish a periodization primarily on the basis of the century, although the standard Italian history of the mid-20th century, Storia della musica (1936) by Andrea Della Corte and Guido Pannain, and Jules Combarieu's Histoire de la musique des origines au début du XXe siècle (1946–60) make extensive use of such divisions. Handschin (1948) pleaded for the objectivity of the ‘century’ (he explicitly opposed both the subjective nature of the genius and the cultural-historical paradigms), which he arbitrarily associated with autonomous development, and for its ‘economy of view’. Neither argument is convincing. Marxist musicology derives its musical periodization from its own theory of general-historical development; immanent-musical titles are acceptable for subsections, but the larger periods are still based on the structure-giving socio-economic phases (Margraf, 1984). Wiora's history (1961) represents a 20th-century (non-Marxist) reworking of the universal-historical approach that avoids the notion of continual progress: the music cultures of the first three divisions have not been replaced or decayed; they survive, albeit in altered forms due to cultural assimilation. Wiora defined four ‘World-Periods’: (1) primeval and prehistoric, (2) the high cultures of classical antiquity and the Orient, (3) that of Western music, with its ‘special nature’ (the development of notation, the idea of the autonomous work, greater diversity and change – not aesthetic superiority) and (4) that of global culture in an industrial-technological age. Wiora's work was influenced by ethnomusicological perspectives, including a critique of the Eurocentrism of historical musicology.
Immanent-musical designations for historical periods were used extensively by Fétis and Ambros (indeed, although the latter was associated with cultural history, Renaissance is his only cultural-historical volume title). Even the great-men epochs of Kiesewetter imply autonomy, as he recognized, for such divisions emphasize the genius's transformation of musical material rather than the cultural-historical spirit of the time imprinting itself on him. In the style-critical histories of Adler and Riemann, genre, style and compositional-technical procedures are the dominant criteria for periodization. Riemann named some chapters within larger divisions by composer, although, in light of such period designations as ‘Epoch of the Figured Bass’, he is often regarded as the leading exponent of ‘music history without names’. Not a single composer's name appears in Adler's table of contents, nor does a cultural-historical designation; this absence implies policy set by him for the various authors who contributed material. Composers are named in the body of the text and their achievements are duly noted, yet the sense that they found themselves in a particular period and in a phase of historical development that had their own dynamic emerges again and again, as in this summary about the lied in the 19th century: ‘Thus the Lied takes a course of development in the nineteenth century from Schubert over Mendelssohn [and], finds in Schumann a new design, enriches itself from the contemporary operas of a Wagner’.
Immanent-musical section titles have the advantage of precision, but this narrow specificity limits their usefulness. For instance, Riemann's ‘Epoch of the Figured Bass’ hardly does justice to the variety of techniques and styles it is supposed to encompass. A cultural-historical period name like ‘Baroque’ is broad and rich with associations, but it is vague and not inherently linked to a particular style or genre. Thus it is understandable that the questions of its origin, maturity and passing (ternary thinking is often applied to the subdivision of style-periods), and its applicability to all the national, functional and generic styles of any given time span, have been vigorously debated throughout the 20th century. A locus classicus is ‘Das Renaissanceproblem in der Musik’ (Besseler, 1966), which addresses the question of the 14th- or 15th-century origins of the Renaissance, in view of the earlier century's status as the fount of the literary and artistic rebirth on the one hand and, on the other, the influential idea of the ‘Ars Nova’ (Wolf, Riemann) as a separate style-period distinct from both the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Both Besseler and Fischer argued for the earlier date. (An immanent-musical periodization in which the entire span of polyphonic music until 1600 is viewed as a large-scale unity can deal with the problem at the more detailed level of the subsection.)
The style-critical arguments advanced for such determinations hinge in part on a more general historiographical question: does a new period begin when distinctly new stylistic features first appear (Schering, 1914), or only when they have become predominant (Blume, 1974). Historians have also debated which aspects of style are crucial in bringing about changes sufficiently broad and deep to necessitate the determination of a new period, and whether they represent evolutionary developments or revolutionary transformations (Reese and Lowinsky respectively on the Renaissance; see Owens, 1990–1). Opinions on the latter question may be conditioned by broader historiographical perspectives (and aesthetic prejudices), as for example in the treatment of Greek music. The first of Adler's three style-periods begins with four liturgical chant traditions – Western, Byzantine, Russian and Jewish; it is followed by two timespans, c1000–1600 and 1600–1880, and a fourth section, ‘Die Moderne’, is organized by country, not styles. Directly preceding the first section is a brief discussion of the principles underlying the periodization of ‘Western’ music; before that are chapters on the music of primitive (‘Natur’) and oriental peoples and antiquity. Adler, like some other historians, excluded the music of classical Greece from his history of Western music but included eastern Mediterranean and Russian religious music; the Judeo-Christian heritage apparently had greater meaning for him than the pagan Greek one. Schering recognized the continuities between eastern and western Mediterranean liturgical chant; his first period ends about 500; the systematization of monastic hours, and the rationalization and institutionalization of ‘Gregorian chant’ mark the beginning of the second period. Ambros criticized the disparagement and neglect of Greek music in earlier music histories (Kiesewetter omitted it altogether) and, although the divisions of his narrative do not emphasize explicit temporal-stylistic continuities, the very length of his discussion – made possible by the advances in empirical knowledge – underscores his view that ‘no period of Western music has been able to avoid the influence of the ancient world’, that is of the Greeks.
Despite the problems connected with all these approaches, periodization has always been an axiom of music historiography. We might expect that the establishment of style-criticism as the prevailing methodology would have led to a predominant use of immanent-musical terms, but the resonance of cultural-historical designations has proved stronger (albeit in conjunction with the others), notably in their application to large historical spans. Even Riemann, the fervent opponent of Geistesgeschichte, could not resist the suggestiveness of ‘Renaissance’ in his history, and it is difficult to imagine any alternatives that could supplant such cultural-epochal designations. Fortified by their style-critical underpinnings, they possess too much historical meaning.
Historiography, §3: Topics of music historiography since c1750
Burney explained why he abandoned his original intention of writing an autonomous music history: ‘I found ancient Music so intimately connected with Poetry, Mythology, Government, Manners, and Science in general, that wholly to separate it from them, seemed to me like taking a single figure out of a group, in an historical picture; or a single character out of a drama, of which the propriety depends upon the dialoge and the incidents’ (introduction to A General History of Music, i). Universal-historical and encyclopedic perspectives underlie the holistic approach of great general histories of the mid-18th century. The urge to share the fruits of empirical research and provide a picture of music history in its entirety – ancient theory and notation, instruments, institutions, composers' lives and their music – may have forced Hawkins and Forkel to leave their histories incomplete. The discussion of music largely concentrated on style, although the term is used relatively infrequently; specific compositions were considered more as embodiments of style – a paradox in that the works are seen as historical facts from which style can be constructed – than as individual works with unique structural and expressive contents; early music was described in more technical detail than the (supposedly) more familiar contemporary music which is discussed primarily in evaluative terms. In either case the commentary was very brief. More attention was given to explanation of the origins of individual works – institutional contexts such as the church or theatre, service to an aristocratic employer, commissions, personal entrepreneurship. This emphasis, which recurs in the 19th and 20th centuries, rested on the historicist assumption that the essence of something can be explained by its origins.
A century later both Ambros and Fétis were unable to finish their histories (Ambros's was completed by colleagues). The material to cover had swollen enormously and both historians, like most of their contemporaries, wrote considerably more about style than their predecessors had done, while retaining their commitment to the totality of music history. On the other hand, they wrote less about cultural and intellectual history, which is hard to reconcile with Ambros's identification in the literature on music historiography as a practioner of Geistesgeschichte. Ambros wrote evocative romanticizing introductory chapters to the large-scale divisions of his volumes, but when he discussed the music of the various ‘schools’ he emphasized immanent-musical considerations, with an occasional passing reference to a ‘Geist der Zeit’ that can be glimpsed in the stylistic properties of a particular composition. Although, in 19th-century histories, individual works are often discussed in greater detail than before (the influence of long discussions of new works in music journals may be felt here; see Criticism, §II, 1), the focus is still on the style of a composer or a school, not on the individual work.
Thus 20th-century style-critical approaches may be viewed as a formalization of a well-established orientation. The term ‘style’ now found its way into book titles, period designations and journal articles; cultural history receded even further in style-orientated general histories of music, although it remained strong in biography and figured prominently in studies devoted to religious music and opera, and in national, regional and municipal music histories. As a consequence of the mass of material that had been accumulated and the development of academic specializations, the one-author encyclopedic approach that survived into the 19th century gave way to multi-author histories and histories of specific topics such as aesthetics, theory and organology. The focus on style in general music histories may have been motivated by pragmatic as well as conceptual considerations: there was simply too much data, and choices had to be made.
‘Style’ was extremely useful. It was (or claimed to be) objective and scientific; it provided the language for a discussion of individual works in inherently musical terms, yet still differed crucially from non-historical ‘theoretical’ analysis; it made possible a comparative critical approach. Moreover, it was equally applicable to all historical periods and genres; it could support either a teleological view of historical development or a relativistic one; it could even buttress a ‘Zeitgeist’ approach or the hermeneutic explication of an individual work. Although ‘style’ was conceived as a value-free idea, it served National Socialist musicology in determining the racial and folk basis of national and ethnic styles and their relative merits. The emergence of historical musicology as a mature discipline and the development of the concept of style are inextricable. ‘Style’ was the basis for the multi-volume histories (Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, (New) Oxford History of Music), single-volume period histories (Reese, Bukofzer), genre studies and the works part of life-and-works biographies that have, until recently, defined the field. And ‘style’ has also been the basis for articles and books devoted to single works.
Yet ‘style’ has been criticized. Despite its flexibility, the major impact of its tendency towards autonomy has been to dissociate musical historiography from general historiography, and with that music from culture, while its formalism has de-emphasized questions of meaning and function. As discussed earlier, in German musicology before the Nazi period historians in the hermeneutic tradition acknowledged this danger; Schering (1936), while recognizing its achievements, perceived that the concept of style fails to explain adequately the phenomenon of style change and also argued that a critical method designed to determine stylistic common denominators cannot do justice to the unique structures and meanings of individual masterworks. His alternative, the symbol criticism that related music designs to emotional and conceptual mental images, was fruitful, although reductive, with respect to Bach's vocal music, but untenable in its primary application, Beethoven's instrumental music, for which he discovered hidden verbal programmes that Beethoven supposedly suppressed. The derisive reception of Schering's work in the 1930s and the race and style focus of National Socialist musicology discouraged the development of this young tradition of hermeneutic historical theories and work criticism.
In postwar West Germany and Austria this situation did not change; autonomous style history provided a safe alternative to National Socialist musicology and to the Marxist methodologies of East Germany and the socialist bloc that made any kind of cultural theory and hermeneutics suspect. In this intellectual context the grandly conceived philological-positivistic projects of the postwar years were launched (and in some cases revived) throughout Western Europe: new critical editions of the ‘great’ composers and historical repertories; thematic catalogues, RISM and RILM, and manuscript studies that made important advances in method and technique and significant contributions and corrections to matters of chronology and transmission, authenticity and compositional process. In the USA and Canada, where émigré musicologists shared the perspectives of their European colleagues, philology helped support the rapid growth of the discipline, presenting virtually unlimited possibilities for dissertations and publications. It also provided a haven to non-Marxist Soviet-bloc musicologists who concentrated on such areas rather than pursuing politically sensitive topics such as meaning and historical causality.
But from the very beginning the limitations of these emphases were recognized, and the field did not entirely lose its breadth: even autonomous style-criticism is less purely positivistic than source studies and editions; Blume's important style-period articles in MGG and, to a greater extent, Lang's Music in Western Civilization (1941) retained cultural-historical approaches; and traditional ‘bourgeois’ topics such as philosophy and aesthetics or historical music theory (the latter also favoured by non-Marxist scholars in the socialist countries) retained their appeal. The problems of periodization and style change were also actively pursued – not so much in terms of broad historical causalities but rather with respect to questions of narrowly defined chronological and regional stylistic transmission and influence. And at round-tables and special sessions of musicological conferences (e.g. ‘Musicology Today’, IMSCR XI: Copenhagen 1972) Western musicologists regularly engaged in polemical debates with their neighbours to the East about historical causality and determinism, progress, formalism, and the social character and content of music.
One of the principal Western participants in the disputes of the 1960s and 70s was Dahlhaus, who developed his own historical method – the most self-consciously articulated one in the post-war era (Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte, 1977) – in significant degree as a response to Marxist (including Adornoesque) critiques of autonomous historical process and formal work analysis. Influenced by the post-Diltheyian hermeneutics of Hans Gadamer and H.R. Jauss, Dahlhaus also rejected style criticism and history in their pure forms, but dismissed the results of sociological criticism as ‘verbal analogy’ that disregards aesthetic and immanent-musical essences. Consequently, music history – if, as Dahlhaus believed, music history should be principally a history of works – is ‘hardly realizable’ as social history (in both Marxist and non-Marxist versions); Dahlhaus was especially critical of the reductive ‘totality’ and teleology of the Marxist view. On the other hand, he conceded that traditional Geistesgeschichte, the only established alternative to both Marxism and autonomy, with its assumptions about parallel cross-cultural development and its very claim to be able to understand the unified spirit of past epochs, was no longer tenable.
Dahlhaus advocated a ‘pluralistic’ structural history which attempts to come to terms with the totality of a historical period without succumbing to the errors of cultural history or reductive causal theories. Such structures, which are grafted onto traditional periods (e.g. the Renaissance or the 19th century), possess an inner stability and coherence – Dahlhaus referred to Burckhardt's ‘conditions’ upon which the idea of the Renaissance could be advanced – that allow for divergence and opposition, and for the ‘non-contemporaneity of the contemporaneous’ within the period. (The idea of non-contemporaneity acknowledges stylistic diversity and makes possible the structuralist de-emphasis of historical process within a fixed time frame.) Comprising the structures are ‘systems of systems’ based on the ‘ideal types’ that the historian, who cannot in fact write a total history, chooses as most representative of the period under investigation. These types consist of a ‘framework of categories’ that are grouped around works representing ideal types. Dahlhaus chose 19th-century Central European instrumental music to exemplify a structure. It may be condensed into three fields in which correlations and overlaps are evident: (1) general cultural orientation and aesthetics – the principles of cultural education (Bildung), aesthetic autonomy and genius; (2) institutions – the dialectics of the concert: aesthetic autonomy and Bildung as opposed to market and commodity; and (3) style and repertory – the emancipation of instrumental music, the weakening of genre traditions, musical poetics versus virtuosity, the formation of a canonic repertory and the problems of progress and originality.
Dahlhaus stressed that the principle of aesthetic autonomy represents a historical circumstance (and thus should not be mistaken for an – or his own – idealistic historical approach), and this explains the striking omission of any general-historical categories, including ideological ones such as nationalism or republicanism before 1848, which are, after all, intellectual movements that had an impact on musical thought. Dahlhaus was well aware of this omission, and his discussions of the German cultural middle class, music criticism and historiography do not exclude such considerations. Nevertheless, they are tertiary categories that do not qualify as ideal types; they partially determine the secondary ones represented in the structure and relate, if at all, only by verbal analogy to the primary one. Dahlhaus's comments on aesthetic autonomy have an ironic twist, because his work-orientated history and his hermeneutic method have been generally regarded as idealist. His choice of period to illustrate the method is revealing in this regard; the autonomous works of the core (Austro-Germanic) instrumental repertories of this time and place may be seen as his meta-ideal type for all music. Critics of his book on the 19th century have objected to the ideal-type method, claiming that his overly narrow focus on this repertory makes it impossible to present a balanced picture of the total structure and reflects a priori aesthetic views that have nationalistic underpinnings. Dahlhaus believed that the ‘aesthetic presence’ (or future influence) of historical works must be considered in selecting ideal types; a history of 18th-century music predicated on the immediate stylistic and functional (e.g. performance, publication) significance of a particular repertory could legitimately omit a discussion of J.S. Bach's cantatas. Their essence as autonomous works, a status that they did not gain for more than a century, has guaranteed their survival and their legitimacy as a subject of music history. Work-autonomy does not imply, however, pure analytical formalism; historical understanding is incomplete without a consideration of those elements of the structure that impinge on the work. Apart from strictly musical categories such as genre and form, they are, nonetheless, for the most part limited to aesthetic and philosophical issues, whereby a piece of music may embody aesthetic principles that function in other areas of the arts, but parallels between individual works in different media are scrupulously avoided. The role of the composer is a difficult problem for Dahlhaus, as the twists and turns of his two-part discussion of the Eroica Symphony (Ludwig van Beethoven und seine Zeit, 1987) demonstrate: on the one hand, the symphony cannot be understood without an awareness of Beethoven's political views, his attitude towards Napoleon and his own self-image; on the other hand, the discussion of its contents omits any consideration of their embodiment in its style, structure and aesthetic essence.
Historiography, §3: Topics of music historiography since c1750
In the late 1970s some prominent American scholars began to call for new initiatives to counter (or balance) positivism and formalism; Kerman's historically informed criticism and Treitler's critically inclined historiography paved the way for the ‘new musicology’ of the 90s (see Musicology, §IV, 8). Kerman's is a work-orientated style-critical approach in which abstract aesthetic questions and cultural factors play a subordinate role; his influence lies less in his development of new critical strategies than in the alternative he provided to purely structural analysis. Treitler's opposition to ‘a history in which aesthetics and hermeneutics play no significant part’ (Music and the Historical Imagination, 1989) echoes that of Dahlhaus, and his reflections on methodology – among the most fully developed in English-language musicology – cover much the same ground. However, Treitler criticizes Dahlhaus's assumption that the musical work, as an ‘abstract text’ and ‘ideal type’ with a ‘real’ and ‘precise meaning’, is the basis for music history. In his arguments that the work is (1) not fixed and determinate in an ideal state and (2) only one thread in a complex cultural pattern, Treitler anticipated the direction of the most recent major developments in largely American historical musicology, which have established paradigms of international significance: the introduction of ‘structural’ and ‘post-structural’ critical perspectives from linguistics and the literary disciplines and their combination with a hermeneutics variously derived from Adornoesque social theory, gender studies and criticism, and reception theory and history (which has been established in German musicology since the 1960s). Social history and anthropological and ethnomusicological methodologies have also been influential.
As this array suggests, the historiography of the ‘new musicology’ is not monolithic; if any unifying factors may be discerned, they are the critique of autonomous history, purely formal analysis and aesthetic idealism. Cultural-historical approaches range from fairly traditional ones that reflect German Geistesgeschichte in its Dahlhausian reworking to ‘post-objective historical approaches’ of a post-Diltheyian hermeneutics that underlies what Tomlinson calls a ‘Historiography of Others’. Works – particularly great canonic works – are still the primary focus in much of this literature; reception history represents a cautious approach that studies criticism rather than practising it, while operating within a cultural-historical context; determinations of immanent-musical manifestations of gender identity and social consciousness, or of specific parallels between musical and literary works, have been criticized for being as ‘essentializing’ as the findings of traditional style criticism or ‘hard’ analysis.
Some of the most influential criticism (Abbate, Newcombe) emphasizes formal (narrative) and phenomenological aspects of music; its hermeneutic basis is not a historical one. This work is historiographical only in the limited sense that it begins with the premise that musical works are the subject of music history. A work orientation also underlies the establishment since the 1970s of historical performing practice as an important sub-discipline. Performing practice is not intrinsically ‘new-musicological’ in the sense that it operates with critical methodologies, yet it has been applied to reception history (performance as a category of reception). Although performing practice research, especially in its earlier stages, often sought to determine an authentic performance style that alone can render compositional intent, more refined work has, in line with performance as reception history, recognized the historically determined authenticity (within limits) of varied and opposing interpretative traditions. Both forms of reception history have been applied to a critique of the idealistic work concept; the hermeneutic argument that our understanding of a work is dependent on verbal and performance interpretations that have become part of that work's history is a powerful and influential one.
Despite its methodological prominence, the focus on the work, and on the related but hardly identical idea of the musical canon, has also been under attack in recent thinking on historiography. In addition to the objections discussed above, critics of the work approach (see de Brito, 1997) object that the concept legitimately may be applied only to a very limited span in Western music history and, moreover, only to the Western tradition. Furthermore, the narrow focus on the work de-emphasizes the complex of cultural processes in which music is conceived and performed – ‘the work-concept is not a necessary category within musical production’ (Goehr, 1992, p.114). This critique has been countered (Strohm, 1997) with the argument that it is a misleading, inaccurate ‘theory reduction’ to brand traditional music historiography as only a history of works; music historians still address the topics which they are now criticized for ignoring. Resembling primarily American academic opposition to the literary canon (in part motivated by curricular concerns), the critique of the canon of works by predominantly male, Caucasian European and American composers that has been established by predominantly male, Caucasian European and American performers, scholars and critics rejects the aesthetic and social (e.g. ethnic, class and gender) biases inherent in it, and even questions the very validity of the idea of a Western ‘art’ music. While the acceptance by historical musicology of repertories such as jazz and rock has significantly extended the range of musics deemed worthy of scholarly investigation (and thereby of becoming a part of formal music history), and the strength of feminist studies has forced the re-evaluation of known music and the discovery of forgotten repertories by women composers, the canon as a structure remains firmly anchored.
As early as the 1970s Dahlhaus voiced concerns about the disappearance of the historical method from musicology and its replacement by purely systematic approaches and non-historical critical methodologies. Similar concerns underlay the often bitter controversies of the 1990s about methodology, in which the various parties (including theorists) sometimes overlooked – at least when engaged in polemic – the fact that many different kinds of scholarship are valid and necessary to sustain the vitality of the discipline. There is no doubt that the ‘new musicology’ has enriched the field, and although its methodology and vocabulary might seem unrecognizable to a previous generation of scholars, it still makes use of traditional concepts such as style, historical periodization and formal analysis. These research areas have retained their vigour independent of any association with the recent trends, as have source studies and edition-making, and their future does not seem to be in jeopardy.
It has legitimately been asked if the ‘new musicology’ is really so new. In one respect music historiography since the last decades of the 20th century has been remarkably innovative in the questions it has posed and the kind of answers it has sought. But music historiography has always relied on its neighbouring disciplines, and in this regard, indeed, nothing has changed. Historical musicology has always been only a semi-autonomous discipline: (1) by its very nature as a sub-field of history, (2) because the materials of music are non-semantic and its forms and images are less tied to representations of material reality than those of the visual arts before the 20th century, and (3) because music – its composition, performance and reception – is undeniably a part of general culture. As a consequence of the second circumstance, non-formalist historians concerned with the problem of musical meaning have little choice but to borrow from critical methods in the visual arts and letters. The third circumstance represents the challenge that has stimulated traditional cultural-historical approaches as well as the most innovative work of recent decades. A discipline that does not renew itself stagnates; this most recent renewal promises to maintain the continuing vigour of music history, while preserving and strengthening the humanistic basis of its historiography.
MGG2 (‘Musikgeschichtsschreibung’; G. Knepler)
ReeseMMA
ReeseMR
J. de Muris: Notitia artis musicae (MS, 1321; ed. in CSM, xvii, 1972, pp.47–107)
Jacobus of Liège: Speculum musice (MS, before 1330; ed. in CSM, iii, 1955–73)
J. Tinctoris: Liber de arte contrapuncti (MS, 1477; ed. in CSM, xxii, 1975–8; Eng. trans. in MSD, v, 1961)
N. Vicentino: L'antica musica ridotta alla moderna prattica (Rome, 1555/R; Eng. trans., 1996)
G. Zarlino: L'istitutioni harmoniche (Venice, 1558/R)
V. Galilei: Dialogo della musica antica et della moderna (Florence, 1581/R)
S. Calvisius: Exercitationes musicae duae (Leipzig, 1600/R) [incl. ‘De origine et progressu musices’, 74–139]
G. Artusi: L'Artusi, ovvero Delle imperfezione della moderna musica (Venice, 1600–03/R)
M. Praetorius: Syntagma musicum (Wolfenbüttel, 1614–18/R)
M. Mersenne: Harmonie universelle (Paris, 1636–7/R)
A. Kircher: Musurgia universalis, sive Ars magna consoni et dissoni (Rome, 1650/R)
W.C. Printz: Historische Beschreibung der edlen Sing- und Klingkunst (Dresden, 1690/R1964 with introduction and index by O. Wessely)
G.A. Bontempi: Historia musica (Perugia, 1695/R)
P. Bonnet-Bourdelot: Histoire de la musique et de ses effets (Paris, 1715; 3/1725, ed. O. Wessely, Graz, 1966)
J.G. Walther: Musicalisches Lexicon (Leipzig, 1732/R)
J. Mattheson: Der vollkommene Capellmeister (Hamburg, 1739/R; Eng. trans., 1981)
F.W. Marpurg: Historisch-Kritische Beyträge zur Aufnahme der Musik (Berlin, 1754–78/R)
P.-J. Cassiaux: Histoire de la musique depuis l'antiquité jusq'en 1754 (MS, F-Pn, c1756)
G.B. Martini: Storia della musica (Bologna, 1757–81/R; ed. O. Wessely, Graz, 1967)
F.W. Marpurg: Kritische Einleitung in die Geschichte und Lehrsätze der alten und neuen Musik (Berlin, 1759)
J. Brown: Dissertation on the Rise, Union, and Power, the Progressions, Separations, and Corruptions, of Poetry and Music (London, 1763)
J. Winckelmann: Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (Dresden, 1764)
C.H. de Blainville: Histoire générale, critique et philologique de la musique (Paris, 1767/R)
C. Burney: The Present State of Music in France and Italy (London, 1771, 2/1773)
C. Burney: The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United Provinces (London, 1773, 2/1775)
M. Gerbert: De cantu et musica sacra a prima ecclesiae aetate usque ad praesens tempus (St Blaisen, 1774/R)
J. Hawkins: A General History of the Science and Practice of Music (London, 1776, 2/1853/R)
J.N. Forkel: Musikalisch-Kritische Bibliothek (Gotha, 1778–9/R)
C. Burney: A General History of Music from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period (London, 1776–89/R)
J.-B. La Borde: Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne (Paris, 1780/R)
J.N. Forkel: Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik (Leipzig, 1788–1801/R)
G. Jones: History of the Rise and Progress of Music, Theoretical and Practical (London, 1818)
F. Stoepel: Grundzüge der Geschichte der modernen Musik (Berlin, 1821)
A. Thibaut: Reinheit der Tonkunst (Heidelberg, 1825)
C. Winterfeld: Johannes Gabrieli und sein Zeitalter (Berlin, 1834)
R.G. Kiesewetter: Geschichte der europäisch-abendländischen oder unserer heutigen Musik (Leipzig, 1834; Eng. trans., 1848)
F.J. Fétis: ‘Résumé philosophique de l'histoire de la musique’: introduction to Biographie universelle des musiciens et bibliographie générale de la musique (Brussels, 1835–44)
R.G. Kiesewetter: Schicksal und Beschaffenheit des weltlichen Gesanges vom frühen Mittelalter bis zur Erfindung des dramatischen Styles und den Anfängen der Oper (Leipzig, 1841/R)
G. Schilling: Geschichte der heutigen oder modernen Musik (Karlsruhe, 1841)
A. de Lafage: Histoire général de la musique et de la dance (Paris, 1844)
A.L. Blondeau: Histoire de la musique moderne depuis le premier siècle de l'ère chrétienne jusqu'à nos jours (Paris, 1847)
K. Czerny: Umriss der ganzen Musik-Geschichte (Mainz, 1851)
K.F. Brendel: Geschichte der Musik in Italien, Deutschland und Frankreich (Leipzig, 1852, 8/1893)
A.B. Marx: Die Musik des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts und ihre Pflege (Leipzig and London, 1855)
A.W. Ambros: Geschichte der Musik (Breslau, 1862–8)
F.J. Fétis: Histoire générale de la musique (Paris, 1869–76/R) [inc.]
H.A. Köstlin: Geschichte der Musik im Umriss für gebildeten aller Stände (Tübingen, 1875)
G. Adler: ‘Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft’, VMw, i, (1885), 5–20
O. Lorenz: Die Geschichtswissenschaft im Hauptrichtungen und Aufgaben (Berlin, 1886)
H. Wölfflin: Renaissance und Barock: eine Untersuchung über Wesen und Entstehung des Barockstils in Italien (1888/R)
H. Riemann: Catechism of Music History (London, 1892)
P. Spitta: Zur Musik: Sechzehn Aufsätze (Berlin, 1892/R) [incl. ‘Kunstwissenschaft und Kunst’, 3–14; ‘Vom Mittlermate der Poesie’, 15–29; ‘Die Wiederbelebung protestantischer Kirchenmusik auf geschichtlicher Grundlage’, 29–58]
C.H.H. Parry: The Art of Music (London, 1893; enlarged as The Evolution of the Art of Music, London, 1896, 2/1934/R)
G. Adler: ‘Musik und Musikwissenschaft’, JbMP 1898, 27–39
H. Riemann: Handbuch der Musikgeschichte (Leipzig, 1903–13)
H. Kretzschmar: ‘Kurze Betrachtungen über den Zweck, die Entwicklung und die nächsten Zukunftsausgaben der Musikhistorie’, JbMP 1907, 83–96
J.K. Paine: The History of Music to the Death of Schubert (Boston, 1907/R)
W.S. Pratt: The History of Music: a Handbook and Guide for Students (New York, 1907–27)
J. Goddard: The Rise of Music, being a Careful Inquiry into the Development of the Art from its Primitive Puttings Forth in Egypt and Assyria to its Triumphant Consummation in Modern Effect (London and New York, 1908)
K. Grunsky: Musikgeschichte (seit 1800) (Leipzig, 1908)
H. Riemann: Kleines Handbuch der Musikgeschichte mit Periodisierung nach Stilprinzipien und Formen (Leipzig, 1908)
C.G. Hamilton: Outlines of Music History (Boston, 1908–24)
E. Wellesz: ‘Renaissance und Barock’, ZIMG, xi (1909–10), 37–45
G. Adler: Der Stil in der Musik (Leipzig, 1911)
A. Schering: ‘Experimentelle Musikgeschichte’, ZIMG, xiv (1912–13), 234–40
H.J. Moser: ‘Die Enstehung des Dur-Gedankens, ein kulturgeschichtliches Problem’, SIMG, xv (1913–14), 270–95
A. Schering: Tabellen zur Musikgeschichte (Leipzig, 1914, 5/1962)
A. Einstein: Geschichte der Musik (Leipzig, 1917, enlarged 6/1953; Eng. trans., 1937, 5/1948, as A Short History of Music)
W. Gurlitt: ‘Hugo Riemann und die Musikgeschichte’, ZMw, i (1918–19), 571–87; repr. in Musikgeschichte und Gegenwart, ed. H.H. Eggebrecht (Wiesbaden, 1966), 103–22
C. Sachs: ‘Kunstgeschichtliche Wege zur Musikwissenschaft’, AMw, i (1918–19), 451–61
E. Wellesz: ‘Die Grundlagen der musikgeschichtlichen Forschung’, AMw, i (1918–19), 437–50
O. Spengler: Der Untergang des Abendlandes (Vienna and Leipzig, 1918–22)
G. Adler: Methode der Musikgeschichte (Leipzig, 1919/R)
P. Bekker: Neue Musik (Berlin, 1919)
C. Sachs: ‘Barockmusik’, JbMP 1919, 7–15
H.J. Moser: ‘Zur Methodik der musikalischen Gesichtsschreibung’, Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, xiv (1919–20), 130–45
H.J. Moser: Geschichte der deutschen Musik (Stuttgart, 1920)
K. Nef: Einführung in die Musikgeschichte (Basel, 1920, 2/1930; Eng. trans., 1935, as An Outline of the History of Music)
A. Einstein: ‘Oswald Spengler und die Musikgeschichte’, ZMw, iii (1920–21), 30–32
H. Mersmann: ‘Zur Stilgeschichte der Musik’, JbMP 1921, 67–78
H. Riemann: Handbuch der Musikgeschichte (Leipzig, 1922)
E. Bücken and P. Mies: ‘Grundlagen, Methoden, und Aufgaben der musikalischen Stilkunde’, ZMw, v (1922–3), 219–25
H. Abert: ‘Kunst, Kunstwissenschaft und Kunstkritik’, Die Musik, xvi (1923–4), 1–10; repr. in Gesammelte Schriften und Vorträge, ed. F. Blume (Halle, 1929/R), 548–61
G. Adler: Handbuch der Musikgeschichte (Berlin, 1924, 2/1930)
C. Sachs: ‘Die Musik im Rahmen der allgemeinen Kunstgeschichte’, AMw, vi (1924), 255–61
E. Panofsky: ‘Über das Verhältnis der Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie’, Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft (1925)
A. Einstein: Das neue Musiklexicon (Berlin, 1926)
P. Bekker: Musikgeschichte als Geschichte der musikalischen Formandlungen (Stuttgart, 1926; Eng. trans., 1927)
E. Bücken: ‘Grundfragen der Musikgeschichte als Geisteswissenschaft’, JbMP 1927, 19–30
F. Blume: ‘Hermann Abert und die Musikwissenschaft’, Gedenkschrift für Hermann Abert (Halle, 1928/R), 18–30; repr. in Syntagma musicologicum: gesammelte Reden und Schriften (Kassel, 1963), 1
A.O. Lorenz: Abendländische Musikgeschichte im Rhythmus der Generationen (Berlin, 1928)
J. Wolf: Geschichte der Musik in allgemeinverständlicher Form (Leipzig, 1929–30, 2/1934)
B.V. Asaf'yev: Russkaja muzyka ot na ala 19 stoletija [Russian music since the beginning of the 19th century] (Leningrad, 1930/R)
W. Gurlitt: ‘Franz-Joseph Fétis und seine Rolle in der Geschichte der Musikwissenschaft’, IMSCR I: Liège 1930, 35–54; repr. in Musikgeschichte und Gegenwart (Wiesbaden, 1966)
H.J. Moser: Die Epochen der Musikgeschichte im Überblick (Stuttgart, 1930)
H.J. Moser: ‘Zur Naturgeschichte der musikalischen Epochenbildung’, NZM, xcvii (1930), 992–5
L. Schrade: ‘Eine Einführung in die Musikgeschichtsschreibung älterer Zeit’, Die Musikerziehung, vii (1930), 3–13
B. Asaf'yev: Muzikal'naia forma kak protsess [Musical form as a process] (Moscow, 1930–45, rev. 2/1963 by Ye.M. Orlova); Eng. trans. in J.R. Tull (diss., Ohio State U., 1976)
T. Adorno: ‘Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik’ (1932), Gesammelte Schriften, xviii, ed. R. Tiedemann (Frankfurt, 1997), 729–77
R. Eichenauer: Musik und Rasse (Munich, 1932)
E. Hegar: Die Anfänge der neueren Musikgeschichtsschreibung um 1770 bei Gerbert, Burney und Hawkins (Strasbourg, 1932)
H. Osthoff: ‘Die Anfänge der Musikgeschichtsschreibung in Deutschland’, AcM, v (1933), 97–107
H. Mersmann: Eine deutsche Musikgeschichte (Potsdam, 1934)
A. della Corte and G. Pannain: Storia della musica (Turin, 1935)
K.G. Fellerer: ‘Zur Erforschung der antiken Musik im 16. bis 18. Jahrhundert’, JbMP 1935, 84–95
E. Schenk: ‘Über Begriff und Wesen des musikalischen Barock’, ZMw, xvii (1935), 377–92
H.J. Moser: Lehrbuch der Musikgeschichte (Berlin, 1936, 2/1937) [incl. ‘Die Epocheneinteilung der abendländischen Musik’, 1–6]
A. Schering: ‘Musikalische Symbolkunde’, JbMP 1936
E. Bücken: Die Musik der Nationen (Leipzig, 1937, 2/1951 as Geschichte der Musik)
G. Anschütz: ‘Das Verhältnis der Musik zu den bildenden Künsten im Lichte stilistischer Betrachtungen’, AMw, iii (1938), 3–14
H. Leichentritt: Music, History and Ideas (Cambridge, 1938)
H.J. Moser: Kleine Deutsche Musikgeschichte (Stuttgart, 1938)
W.D. Allen: Philosophies of Music History (New York, 1939, 2/1962)
F. Blume: Das Rassenproblem in der Musik, Entwurf zu einer Methodologie musikwissenschaftlicher Rassenforschung (Wolfenbüttel and Berlin, 1939)
H. Engel: ‘Periodisierung in der Musikgeschichte’, Geistige Arbeit 7, vi (1940), 5–7
P.H. Lang: Music in Western Civilization (New York, 1941)
R.I. Gruber: Istorija muzykal'noj kul'tury [History of Musical Culture] (Leningrad, 1941–59)
W. Gurlitt: ‘Der Musikhistoriker Philipp Spitta’, Musik und Kirche, xiv (1942), 27–36
C. Sachs: The Rise of Music in the Ancient World East and West (New York, 1943)
M.F. Bukofzer: ‘Historical Musicology’, Music Journal, iv/6 (1946), 21 only, 51–4
J.A. Westrup: The Meaning of Musical History (London, 1946)
J. Combarieu: Histoire de la musique des origines au début du XXe siècle (Paris, 1946–60)
M. Bukofzer: Music in the Baroque Era (New York, 1947)
W. Gurlitt: ‘Epochengliederung in der Musikgeschichte’, Universitas, [Stuttgart], iii (1948), 533–44; repr. in Musikgeschichte und Gegenwart (Wiesbaden, 1966)
J. Handschin: Musikgeschichte im Überblick (Lucerne, 1948/R)
M. Bukofzer: Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Music (New York, 1950)
H.H. Eggebrecht: ‘Aus der Werkstatt des terminologischen Handwörterbuchs’, IMSCR V: Utrecht 1952, 155–65
E.H. Meyer: Musik im Zeitgeschehen (Berlin, 1952)
G. Schneerson: Musik im Dienste der Reaktion (Halle, 1952)
T.G. Georgiades: ‘Musik als Geschichte’, Musik und Sprache: das Werden der abendländischen Musik dargestellt an der Vertonung der Messe (Berlin, 1954, 2/1974/R), 133–42; Eng. trans., 1982
J.A. Westrup: An Introduction to Musical History (London, 1955)
F.J. Van der Mueren: ‘L'histoire de la musique et la comparaison avec les autres arts’, Musikwissenschaftlicher Kongress: Vienna 1956, 653–6
W. Wiora: ‘Zur Grundlegung der allgemeinen Musikgeschichte’, DJbM, i (1956), 76–110
A. Einstein: Musikgeschichte als Geschichte von Fiktionen (Zürich, 1957)
B. Stockmann: Carl von Winterfeld: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Musikhistoriographie im 19. Jahrhundert (diss., U. of Kiel, 1957)
H.H. Eggebrecht: ‘Barock als musikgeschichtliche Epoche’, Aus der Welt des Barock (Stuttgart, 1958), 168–91
F.J. Van der Mueren: Is parallelvergelijkende muziekgeschiedenis mogelijk? (Brussels, 1958)
Z. Lissa: ‘Zur Periodisierung der Musikgeschichte’, BMw, ii/1 (1960), 2–15; ii/2 (1960), 22–31
K. von Fischer and H.H. Eggebrecht: ‘Der Begriff des “Neuen” in der Musik von der Ars Nova bis zur Gegenwart’, IMSCR VIII: New York 1961, i, 184–202; ii, 112–17
G. Knepler: ‘Zur Methode der Musikgeschichtsschreibung’, BMw, iii/2 (1961), 3–13
A. Mendel: ‘Evidence and Explanation’, IMSCR VIII: New York 1961, ii, 3–18
W. Wiora: ‘Musikgeschichte und Universalgeschichte’, AcM, xxxiii (1961), 84–104
W. Wiora: Die vier Weltalter der Musik (Stuttgart, 1961, 2/1988; Eng. trans., 1965)
W.D. Allen: Philosophies of Music History (New York, 1962)
J. Smits van Waesberghe: ‘Das gegenwärtige Geschichtsbild der mittelalterlichen Musik’, KJb, xlvi (1962), 61–82; xlvii (1963), 11–38; xlviii (1964), 1–26; xlix (1965), 9–33; l (1966), 1–26; li (1967), 1–28; lii (1968), 1–36; liii (1969), 1–26; liv (1970), 1–32; lvi (1972), 1–50; lviii–lix (1974–5), 1–45; ‘Register zu dem “Gegenwärtige Geschichtsbild der Mittelalterlichen Musik” (1957–1969)’, liii (1969), 27–60
T. Kneif: ‘Forkel und die Geschichtsphilosophie des ausgehenden 18. Jahrhunderts’, Mf, xvi (1963), 224–37
G. Knepler: ‘Musikgeschichte und Geschichte’, BMw, v (1963), 291–8
M.K. Černý: ‘Předmět hudební historiografie: příspěvek k problematice metodologie hudebně historické práce’ [The subject of musical historiography: a contribution to questions of the methodology of music-history research], HV, i (1964), 577–607
B. Szabolcsi: ‘Folk Music – Art Music – History of Music’, IFMC Conference: Budapest 1964 [SMH, vii (1965)], 171–9
W. Vetter: ‘Heinrich Wölfflin und die musikalische Stilforschung’, Festschrift Hans Engel, ed. H. Heussner (Kassel, 1964), 433–441
W. Wiora: ‘Ethnomusicology and the History of Music’, IFMC Conference: Budapest 1964 [SMH, vii (1965)], 187–93
J. Kerman: ‘A Profile for American Musicology’, JAMS, xviii (1965), 61–9
E. Lowinsky: ‘Character and Purposes of American Musicology: a Reply to Joseph Kerman’, JAMS, xviii (1965), 222–34; repr. in Music in the Culture of the Renaissance and Other Essays, ed. B.J. Blackburn (Chicago, 1989), 958–64
H. Besseler: ‘Das Renaissanceproblem in der Musik’, AMw, xxiii (1966), 1–10
F. Blume: ‘Historische Musikforschung in der Gegenwart’, IMSCR X: Ljubljana 1967, 13–25; repr. in AcM, xl (1968), 8–21; Eng. trans. in SMA, ii (1968), 1–14
H.A. Brockhaus: ‘Zur Problematik der Musikhistoriographie’, Hundert Jahre Reclams Universal-Bibliothek, ed. H. Marquardt (Leipzig, 1967), 306–46
E. Doflein: ‘Historismus und Historisierung in der Musik’, Festschrift für Walter Wiora, ed. L. Finscher and C.-H. Mahling (Kassel, 1967), 48–56
G. Knepler: ‘Musical Style Changes and General History’, IMSCR X: Ljubljana 1967, 251–70
W.F. Kümmel: ‘Die Anfänge der Musikgeschichte an den deutschsprachigen Universitäten’, Mf, xx (1967), 262–80
W.F. Kümmel: Geschichte und Musikgeschichte: die Musik der Neuzeit in Geschichtsschreibung und Gesichtsauffassung des deutschen Kulturbereichs von der Aufklärung bis zu J.H. Droysen und Jacob Burckhardt (Kassel and Marburg, 1967)
V. Duckles: ‘Johann Nicolaus Forkel: the Beginnings of Music Historiography’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, i (1967–8), 277–90
D.J. Grout: ‘Current Historiography and Music History’, Studies in Music History: Essays for Oliver Strunk, ed. H. Powers (Princeton, NJ, 1968/R), 23–40
R. Heinz: Geschichtsbegriff und Wissenschaftscharakter der Musikwissenschaft in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts (Regensburg, 1968)
H. Kier: Raphael Georg Kiesewetter (1773–1850), Wegbereiter des musikalischen Historismus (Regensburg, 1968)
A. Liess: ‘Aktuelle Probleme der Musikgeschichtsschreibung’, NZM, Jg.130 (1969), 139–41
J. Smits van Waesberghe: ‘Einleitung zu einer Kausalitätserklärung der Evolution der Kirchenmusik im Mittelalter (von etwa 800 bis 1400)’, AMw, xxvi (1969), 249–75
W. Wiora, ed.: Die Ausbreitung des Historismus über die Musik (Regensburg, 1969) [incl. E. Doflein: ‘Historismus in der Musik’, 9–39; B. Meier: ‘Zur Musikhistoriographie des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts’, 169–207; R. Heinz: ‘Guido Adlers Musikhistorik als historisches Dokument’, 209–19; C. Dahlhaus: ‘Klassizität, Romantik, Modernität’, 261–76]
V. Duckles: ‘Patterns in the Historiography of 19th-Century Music’, AcM, xlii (1970), 75–82
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