Critical Music Historiography: Probing Canons, Ideologies and Institutions

by Vesa Kurkela, Markus Mantere

Overview

During the past two decades, there has emerged a growing need to reconsider the objects, axioms and perspectives of writing music history. A certain suspicion towards Francois Lyotard’s grand narratives, as a sign of what he diagnosed as our ’postmodern condition’, has become more or less an established and unquestioned point of departure among historians. This suspicion, at its most extreme, has led to a radical conclusion of the ’end of history’ in the work of postmodern scholars such as Jean Baudrillard and Francis Fukuyama. The contributors to Critical Music Historiography take a step back and argue that the radical view of the ’impossibility of history’, as well as the unavoidable ideology of any history, are counter-productive points of departure for historical scholarship. It is argued that metanarratives in history are still possible and welcome, even if their limitations are acknowledged. Foucault, Lyotard and others should be taken into account but systematized viewpoints and methods for a more critical and multi-faceted re-evaluation of the past through research are needed. As to the metanarratives of music history, they must avoid the pitfalls of evolutionism, hagiography, and teleology, all hallmarks of traditional historiography. In this volume the contributors put these methods and principles into practice. The chapters tackle under-researched and non-conventional domains of music history as well as rethinking older historiographical concepts such as orientalism and nationalism, and consequently introduce new concepts such as occidentalism and transnationalism. The volume is a challenging collection of work that stakes out a unique territory for itself among the growing body of work on critical music history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780367599393
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	06/30/2020
Pages:	332
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Markus Mantere graduated with a PhD in Music from Brown University, USA. His dissertation scrutinized the music philosophy of the late Canadian pianist Glenn Gould, as well as the impact that Gould’s exceptional musicianship has had on later generations of musicians in Canada and the Western musical world. More recently, Mantere’s research on the scholarly criticism of music has focused on the intellectual and social history of musicology in Finland. He has also worked as the editor of Musiikki, the only refereed musicological journal in Finland, since 2007. Vesa Kurkela is Professor of Music History at the Sibelius Academy, Helsinki, Finland. He has written extensively on various topics of music history in Finland and elsewhere: popular music, music publishing, nationalism and transnationalism, folk music and ideology, concert institution and orchestral repertoires, radio music, and recording industry.

Table of Contents

List of Figures and Tables vii

List of Examples ix

Notes on Contributors xi

Introduction 1

Part I Nationalism and Politics

1 The Racial and Colonial Implications of Music Ethnographies in the French Empire, 1860s-1930s Jann Pasler 17

2 Music for All? Justifying the Two-Track Ideology of Finnish Music Education Lauri Väkevä 45

3 Writing Out the Nation in Academia: Ilmari Krohn and the National Context of the Beginnings of Musicology in Finland Markus Mantere 57

4 Beyond the National Gaze: Opera in Late 1870s Helsinki Ulla-Britta Broman-Kananen 69

Part II Silenced and Sidetracked

5 Bohemian Composers Sidetracked in the Musical Historiography of 'Viennese Classicism' Veijo Murtomäki 81

6 Music Historiography as a Braided River: The Case of New Zealand Martin Lodge 95

7 Colonial, Silenced, Forgotten: Exploring the Musical Life of German-Speaking Sarajevo in December 1913 Risto Pekka Pennanen 107

8 Seriously Popular: Deconstructing Popular Orchestral Repertoire in Late Nineteenth-Century Helsinki Vesa Kurkela 123

Part III Updating the Historiographical Concepts

9 'I Changed My Olga for the Britney': Occidentalism, Auto-Orientalism and Global Fusion in Music Derek B. Scott 141

10 Historiographically Informed Performance? George Kennaway 159

11 The Roots of a National Music Canon and the Taboo of Composing Folk Tunes: The Case of Stevan Stojanovic Mokranjac's Garlands Srdan Atanasovski 173

12 How Musical Is the Devil? A Critical Reading of Thomas Mann's Novel Doctor Faustus and Its Meaning for Music and Music Education Alexandra Kertz-Welzel 187

13 Are We Still Evolutionists? The Reception of Max Weber's Theory of Music Development Ana Petrov 197

Part IV Probing Canons

14 How Critical Can a Critical Re-Evaluation of Music History Be? Historiographical Reflections from a Finland-Swedish Minority Perspective Johannes Brusila 213

15 'A Thing of the Past': Canon Formation and the Postmodern Condition Kenneth Gloag 227

16 Gesualdo: Composer of the Twentieth Century Joseph Knowles 239

17 Musical Biography and the Myth of the Muse Christopher Wiley 251

Bibliography 263

Index 295