Introduction to the History of Western Music _______________________________________________________________ Dan Grimley Welcome to the course! This document is intended to give you a survey of the material we shall be covering in lectures and in class. It includes a schedule, a list of lecture titles and topics, a list of general readings, and details about resources intended to support your study. DON’T TRY AND READ EVERYTHING! The important thing is to get a flavour of the debates, and an idea of the ground covered. You can be selective. Course Description Music history has always been much more than a chronology of musical works and events. Historians offer interpretations of the past in the way they choose their objects of study and by the relationships they construct between things. For this reason, history is always a contemporary activity through which our understanding of music changes. In these lectures we will consider different ideas of music history and how interpretations of the past are contested. A central question is whether music history is primarily the study of musical language (embodied in individual works) or the study of musical practices (embodied in musical lives, genres, and institutions). The course will examine how approaches to music history are focused on different kinds of materials and how contemporary arguments about music are based on conflicting readings of the past. Aims and objectives To challenge and add to the idea of musical history as simple chronology or the reporting of ‘facts’; To consider what might be the proper objects of historical study and how theoretical subdisciplines have developed around these; To examine how different stories of the musical past embody different ideas of music, its value, and its social function. Schedule 8 x 75 min lectures with Dan Grimley (DAH), HT Weeks 1-8, Fridays@10.00 Group Classes (1 hour) weeks 3, 5 and 7, with Christopher May and Adam Harper: see local timetables on faculty noticeboard. Resources A box of readings will be kept in the Music Library for consultation. Please do not remove readings from the Library. Powerpoint lecture slides will be loaded onto WEBLEARN after each class. If you experience any problems with these, let me know. Sample Essay Titles 1. How might the notion of a canon of musical masterpieces be challenged by changes in the way history is conceived and taught? 2. Is Classical Music necessary? 3. With reference to specific historical studies, discuss the usefulness of ideas of ‘progress’ and ‘development’ in music history. 4. To what extent is music history defined by radical discontinuities? 5. Demonstrate, using specific examples, how the writing of music history OR actual musical composition might validate a particular aesthetic or political viewpoint. Course Outline Lecture 1. Canons, centres, and peripheries. Repertoires and musical value Philip Bohlman, ‘Music and Culture: Historiographies of Disjuncture’, in The Cultural Study of Music, 45-56 Katherine Bergeron and Philip Bohlman (eds.), Disciplining Musicology, ‘Prologue: Disciplining Music’ (Bergeron); ‘Epilogue: Musics and Canons’ (Bohlman) Nicholas Cook, Music: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998), esp. Chapter 1 (‘Musical Values’) Susan McClary, ‘The World According to Taruskin’, Music & Letters 87/3 (November 2006), 408-15 Richard Taruskin, Oxford History of History Western Music, Introduction, ‘The History of What?’, xiii-xxii Lecture 2. Defining the musical ‘work’. Objects of study. Philosophical definitions and musical practice Roman Ingarden, The Work of Music and the Problem of its Identity, 1-7 Philip Bohlman, ‘Ontologies of music’, in Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist, eds, Rethinking Music (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999), 17-34 Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, Introduction (pp. 1-8), ch. 8 (‘After 1800: The Beethoven Paradigm’), 205-242 Jim Samson, ‘The musical work and nineteenth-century history’, in Samson (ed.) The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music, 1-28 Albin J Zak III, ‘Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix: Juxtaposition and Transformation, “All Along the Watchtower”’, Journal of the American Musicological Society 57/3 (Autumn 2004), 599-644 Lecture 3. Identities. Gender, sexuality, and the musical canon. Cults of genius and desire Maynard Solomon, ‘Franz Schubert and the Peacocks of Benvenuto Cellini’, 19th-Century Music 12/3 (Spring, 1989), 193-206 (see also Rita Steblin’s response) Philip Brett, ‘Piano Four-Hands: Franz Schubert and the Performance of Gay Male Desire’, 19th-Century Music 21/2 (Autumn 1997), 149-176 Byron Adams, ‘The “Dark Saying” of the Enigma: Homoeroticism and the Elgarian Paradox’, 19th-Century Music 23/3 (Spring 2000), 218-235 Gary C Thomas “Was Georg Frideric Handel Gay?” on Closet Questions and Cultural Politics’, Queering the Pitch, ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C Thomas (Routledge, 1994), 155-204 Suzanne Cusick, ‘Gender, Musicology and Feminism’, Rethinking Music, 471-498 Lecture 4. Narratives and Stories. Ways of telling. Organicism and historical development. The idea of ‘absolute music’ Janet M Levy, ‘Covert and Casual Values in Recent Writing on Music’, The Journal of Musicology 5/1 (Winter, 1987), 3-27 Susan McClary, ‘Narrative Agendas in “Absolute Music”: Identity and Difference in Brahms’s Third Symphony’, in Ruth A. Solie, ed., Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 326-44 David L Montgomery, ‘The Myth of Organicism: from Bad Science to Great Art’, The Musical Quarterly 76/1 (Spring, 1992), 17-66 Ruth Solie, ‘The Living Work: Organicism and Music Analysis’, 19th-Century Music 4/2 (Autumn, 1980), 147-156 Leo Treitler, ‘Historiographies of Music: Issues of Past and Present’, Rethinking Music, 356-377 Lecture 5. Music and Place. Institutions and sites of performance William Weber, Music and the Middle Class, Introduction (ch. 1) and ch. 2 William Weber, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008), chs. 3 & 8 Celia Applegate, ‘How German is it? Nationalism and the Idea of Serious Music in the Early Nineteenth-Century’, 19th-Century Music 21/3 (Spring 1998), Sanna Pederson, ‘A B Marx, Berlin Concert Life, and German Musical Identity’, 19thCentury Music 18/2 (Autumn 1994), 87-107 Christopher Small, Musicking (Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1998), chs. 1-2 Trevor Herbert, ‘Music History and Social History’, The Cultural Study of Music, 146-156 Lecture 6. Inventing the Folk. The ‘English Musical Renaissance’ and the Folk Music Revival Georgina Boyes, The Imagined Village: Culture. Ideology, and the English Folk Revival (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1993), chs. 1 & 2 Dave Harker, Fakesong: the Manufacture of British Folksong 1700 to the Present Day (Milton Keynes: Open UP, 1985) Dave Harker and C. J. Bearman, ‘Cecil Sharp in Somerset: some reflections on the work of David Harker’, Folklore, 113 (April 2002), 11-34 Robert Stradling and Meirion Hughes, The English Musical Renaissance 1840-1940: Constructing a National Music (2nd ed., Manchester: Manchester UP, 2001), chs. 1 & 5. Lecture 7. Ghosts in the Machine. Music and the Histories of Sound Recording Amanda Bayley, Recorded Music: Performance, Culture, and Technology (Cambridge UP. 2010) Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in Illuminations (Pimlico, 1998), 211-244 John Culshaw, Putting the Record Straight (Secker and Warburg, 1981) Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke UP, 2003) Robert Philip, Performing Music in the Age of Recording (Yale UP, 2004) Lecture 8. Afterlives: Classical Music Multimedia Nicholas Cook, Analysing Music Multimedia (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000) Peter Franklin, Seeing Through Music: Gender and Modernism in Classic Hollywood Film Scores (New York: Oxford UP, 2011), ch. 4 Lewis Lockwood, ‘Film Biography as Travesty: Immortal Beloved and Beethoven’, The Musical Quarterly, 81/2 (Summer 1997), 190-8 Some General Reading (consult selectively!) Amanda Bayley (ed.), Recorded Music: Performance, Culture, and Technology (Cambridge UP, 2010) Katherine Bergeron and Philip Bohlman, (eds), Disciplining Music: Musicology and its Canons (Chicago UP, 1992) Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas, (eds), Queering the Pitch: the New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (New York: Routledge, 1994) Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero (Princeton UP, 1996) John Butt, Playing with History (Cambridge UP, 2002) Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert, and Richard Middleton, (eds) The Cultural Study of Music: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2003) Nicholas Cook, Music—A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP, 1998) Nicholas Cook, and Mark Everist, (eds), Rethinking Music (Oxford UP, 1999) Carl Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History, trans. J. B. Robinson (Cambridge UP, 1983), esp. chs 1-4. Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Oxford UP, 1992; rev. ed. 2007) J. P. E. Harper-Scott, and Jim Samson (eds), An Introduction to Music Studies (Cambridge UP, 2009) Roman Ingarden, The Work of Music and the Problem of its Identity, trans. Adam Czerniawski (New York, 1986) Julian Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Values (Oxford UP, 2002) Richard Leppert and Susan McClary, Music and Society: the Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception (Cambridge UP, 1987) Susan McClary, Feminine Endings (Minneapolis, 1991) Alex Ross, The Rest is Noise (HarperCollins, 2007) Jim Samson, (ed.) The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music (Cambridge UP, 2002) Christopher Small, Musicking: the Meanings of Performing and Listening (Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1998) Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction (Duke UP, 2003) Richard Taruskin, Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (Oxford UP, 1996) Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music (Oxford UP, 2004, rev. 2009) Leo Treitler, Music and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard UP, 1989) Contact me: daniel.grimley@music.ox.ac.uk