Home | Archive | Summer 2001 | Guest editorial

Sister acts

Peter Williams considers the state of modern musicology

Not being one who goes to conferences, I find several things puzzling about them. Firstly, how do people find the time? Secondly, is this really a way to get to know music? Thirdly, are things said worth saying, and does anyone actually learn anything they otherwise could not? Fourthly, are they a good use of resources in these days of instant communicability?

Of course, I know why they are popular, especially when ‘faculty development funds’ (generous if you’re American) enable you to go, meet your friends, get seen, catch the trends, press your ambitions on those in statu magistrali, have a holiday afterwards and get into the eventual publication. But even the last is less than wonderful if you bear in mind George Eliot’s complaint: ‘the well-taught, an increasing number, are almost all able to write essays on given themes, which demand new periodicals to save them from lying in cold obscurity’. A remark to pull my fellow musicologists up, I hope!

And what would she think now, a century and a half later, about all the papers read at meetings of musical associations, about school exams and music degrees with less and less music in them, about our pathetic Research Assessments, run and acquiesced in (Gadarene-swine like) by the very people who ought to know better? Is there not some connection between these dreadful developments?

Hard though it is to believe, I can remember the time when one actually looked forward to receiving the next quarter’s journals, even read them through. No longer. I wonder if anyone but speakers will read through Musicology and sister disciplines: past, present, future: proceedings of the sixteenth International Congress of the International Musicological Society, London 1997, which takes twenty-two pages just to list events, few of them immediately enthralling. This is no reflection on the book’s expert production and editing, of course, and I hope Oxford University Press had a good subsidy. But imagine all the resources consumed by a major conference – the air-miles, the phoning, e-mailing, xeroxing, faxing, the hosting, the paper-consumption (trees!), the logistics!

Two keynote lectures, seven Round Tables, forty-nine study sessions, thirty-six sessions of ‘free papers’ and four ‘poster sessions’ (? – only members of the particular scout troop understand these terms) obviously cover a great deal, though curiously – to take an arbitrary example – none of my own current interests receives more than a glance, including real philosophy of music (distinct from the localised aesthetics of Round Table 6). Is this a common experience? Am I the only one to ask, ‘Where’s the beef?’?

Judging from the nearly 700 pages, the profession is amazingly free of deeply critical stances, towards either itself or its ways of thinking. I don’t see anyone radically evaluating the various strands of American musicology that have been allowed to dominate, though I realise that to do this would give a peculiar problem. For while I appreciated very much Christopher Butler’s paper on ‘narrative theory’, because he shows how one trendy emperor has no clothes, he has to cite names, and this necessarily gives credence to what would better lie in cold obscurity. Most trendies are fairly safe from me, and I imagine others, for this very reason.

The usual suspects are all here in the citations: the mystifyingly still-fashionable gurus (Adorno, Schenker, Barthes et al.), the incestuous reference to other conferees, the ‘booking’ of future acknowledgment for oneself (as in calls for ‘new approaches’ to rhetoric), the compulsory turn to modern obsessions that might be no more than gossipy deadends – e.g. the invocation of same-gender sex as if it were Mr Casaubon’s Key To All Mythologies, in this instance attributing the fine critical mind of EJ Dent to his apparently preferring boys to girls. (Imagine what one could make of Tovey if he had too!) I had two particular reactions to what is cited and what is not.

The first is typified by one postmodern approach to Berlioz’s Ophelia, which draws on Ms X’s interpretation but not on Sternfeld’s Shakespeare, on Ms Y’s book on ‘feminity and death’ but not on the legends of St Cecilia and St Agnes. It is as if ideas had no history and only the new needed discussing: a really weird assumption. Then, secondly, it seems to be in the nature of conference papers for a huge amount to be said that is simply not worth saying. One of my favourites is, ‘let me repeat once again [?] that music does not exist of its own accord but is brought into being, experienced and artistically recognized by people’ (p.305). There are many others, some dolled up in litcritspeak, as in ‘Wagner’s exposition of music-text relations is inscribed within the discourse of nineteenth-century gender politics’ (p.554, my italics). Or there is the commonplace: ‘Speaker X went on to support Speaker Y’s claim that textless pieces are not necessarily an indication of instrumental usage’ (p.503 – he means ‘use’), to which one can only say, ‘But who ever thought they were?’.

Papers reporting where we are in current thinking seem to me potentially useful the closer they are to being positivisitic, i.e. supplying some concrete, musical information on which one can then build. Examples are notated chant, certain under-documented cultures, many of the individual topics (orientalism in Borodin, Purcell- survival in 1800), several sessions on instruments or particular institutions, many of the foreign-language papers, and (very much the purview of international congresses) developments in data-gathering. In some cases, such as the practical session on conductus, there is only a tantalisingly brief report, and, clearly, some interesting items were being worked up for presentation elsewhere.

As a non-participant, I can imagine using the book just now and then for stimulating introductions to knotty problems – for example, the major/ minor difference (Penrose), or how to measure emotional response (Krumhansl), or what is dissonance (Huron). No doubt most people would have comparable lists, and I would have no problem in there being an interesting survey of Milton Keynes (which there is) if there were also a properly thought-out account of Beethoven’s ‘ironies’ (which there is not). Even then, however, I recall Nikolaus Pevsner’s warning that you say something is ‘interesting’ when you would not mind never seeing it again.

Well, this is all rather spoil-sporty, and I genuinely hope that everyone had a good time. But I fear for the young in the profession, betrayed by my generation. If they read the Republic, they would find that Plato mocks those who dash around from one Dionysiac Festival to another. But consider, dear Colleagues: they were at least dashing around after music, not to talking about it in the ways so many have been made to think one should talk about it.

Peter Williams holds professorships at Edinburgh (honorary), Duke, North Carolina (emeritus) and Cardiff (John Bird Professor)