This book begins with a simple question: Why haven’t historians and musicologists been talking to one another? Such a query will hopefully provoke some thought among both sets of scholars, especially when each group begins to realize that there are many important similarities between their two disciplines. Historians, for example, frequently look to all aspects of human activity, including music, in order to better understand the past. Musicologists inquire into the social, cultural, and historical contexts of musical works and musical practices to develop theories about the meanings of compositions and the significance of musical behavior. In other words, both disciplines examine the many changes in how people represent their experiences. So why has it been so hard for us to converse?
The simplest answer is that the study of music in its historical context has been plagued by significant obstacles. From the historian’s point of view, the serious examination of music has traditionally required a particular body of knowledge—the ability to read and to perform music—that many historians simply do not have (or do not have the time to acquire). Worrying that they lack sufficient musical knowledge or training, historians frequently leave music alone and choose to examine other subjects. This emphasis on the “musicality” of music has also been difficult for musicologists to overcome. Generations of musicologists were most interested in formalistic descriptions of how music evolved from one style to the next. Remaining fixed within a discussion of music for music’s sake, musicologists (although allowing historical events to shape some of their interpretations of music) have not always actively engaged in larger historical debates by using the music or the musical cultures that they study as evidence for trends in the world of which that music is a part. In other words, they have been content to talk about music at the expense of letting their knowledge inform the broader understanding of human experiences. This may be due, in part, to the fact that musicologists are not only historians of music. They are also often editors, theorists, and performers who engage with musical works as living aesthetic objects, not simply as historical documents. Furthermore, elevating the works of the Western classical traditions to canonical status—by definition, aesthetic objects that have transcended, or are believed to be independent of, their socio-cultural contexts—means that musicologists have often been less interested in music history-as-history than in music history-as-canon formation.
Differences in approach are, of course, also the result of particular educational traditions, methodological requirements, and specialized knowledge. But perhaps more than anything else, historians and musicologists have simply been asking different questions about the human experience. In the case of historians, for instance, many generations of scholars devoted themselves to the study of politics, diplomacy, and war—topics far removed from the concerns of students of music. Few academic historians in the first half of the twentieth century would have chosen to write a book about music because it was simply not accepted within the field. Only in the 1950s and 1960s did the insights of sociologists begin to re-orient historical inquiry away from elites. Social historians worked to include the stories of many forgotten historical actors: workers, peasants, women, slaves, and others traditionally left out of standard narratives of the past. In order to recover as much as possible of the lives of these underrepresented groups, some innovative scholars began to discuss music. Two of the best examples involve reconstructions of the lives of American slaves. Eugene Genovese’s classic Roll Jordon Roll: The World the Slaves Made weaves many discussions of African-American musical practice (courtship, funeral, and work songs, for instance) into his larger analysis to provide a more textured and nuanced understanding of life under slavery in the United States. Lawrence Levine’s Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom makes music an integral part of African-American history in the United States by showing how music helped to create and sustain a distinctive culture for black Americans.1 Levine’s work has been particularly important both because it has served as an inspiration to later scholars and because Levine himself has trained a number of historians who study music. We have included an essay by one of Levine’s influential students, Burton Peretti, in this collection.
Despite these important examples, most social historians still did not consider music because it remained outside their particular sphere of interest even when music might help to recover the lives of those lost to more traditional forms of history. In the end, social historians have usually been much more concerned with explaining larger social structures, such as changes in class status or the emergence of class consciousness. Influenced by Marxist economic and social theory and by the Annales School of French historians who examined the long-term geographic, economic, and social structures that they believed directed the course of human life, music was simply not brought fully in view.
Important changes began to take place in the 1970s with the advent of a new methodological approach: cultural history. Often controversial, cultural history has borrowed heavily from the fields of anthropology and literary theory to again change the focus of historical inquiry. For cultural historians, nearly all aspects of the human experience are proper subjects for investigation as they seek to reconstruct the mental universes and value systems of people at different moments in time.
Cultural historians interpret the changes in meanings behind events, practices, behaviors, and documents. They seek to discover how those meanings influenced the choices of historical actors. To do so, these historians “read” a wide variety of sources as symbols or “texts” that make sense within a larger cultural framework. They try to uncover the larger patterns of perception and comprehension from the past not only by investigating what people said and did but also what they believed and how those beliefs shaped actions. This emphasis on “reading” is important, the historian Lynn Hunt argues in her introduction to the book The New Cultural History (1989), because it connects the traditional historical practice of a close scrutiny of primary source documents with the newer influences of anthropological and literary theory to give the historian an interpretive method. And, she also points out, “Although there are many differences within and between anthropological and literary models, one central tendency in both seems currently to fascinate historians of culture: the use of language as metaphor.”2 In other words, language does not simply consist of words on a page: “Symbolic actions such as riots or cat massacres are framed as texts to be read or languages to be decoded.”3 One might also add a number of other subjects that historians have lately examined: fashion and hairstyles, sexual practices, the human body, or political ceremonies, to name but a few. Therefore, it is no great stretch to include a wide variety of musical performances and practices in such a list. In other words, as historians have stretched the boundaries of their discipline, those who employ the cultural approach are looking for any sign, symbol, or practice that they believe can provide some insight into a particular historical moment—including music.
We should point out that our understanding of history comes from the perspective of those trained in the current mainstream of the discipline. But we must also acknowledge that many other scholars with substantial training in history may approach the subject from a slightly different point of view. In particular, some who perform historical inquiry have come from American Studies or other interdisciplinary programs where historical views are linked with the methods and approaches of other fields of study, including literary scholarship, art history, and cultural studies. They have often built bridges between disciplines when others have not been able do so and have often been more successful than scholars from history programs in incorporating music into their work.
But what about musicology? In his insightful book, Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (1985), Joseph Kerman traced the development of musicology as a discipline, especially in America. Kerman wrote at a time when musicology in the U.S. was undergoing a serious transformation in focus and methodology. Although in some respects his essay is now dated, Kerman’s insights about the limitations of traditional musicology are helpful in understanding some of the past (and possibly present and future) impediments to a collaborative spirit among historians and musicologists.4 He suggested that musicologists have traditionally been musical conservatives driven to their field not only by their love of music but also by their dislike of modernism.5 This attitude fueled the disciplinary-wide retreat into the preparation of texts (scores) of older musics, especially of the Renaissance. At least until the 1960s, it also contributed to the focus on style analysis in order to construct an accurate style history. And even in their capacity as historians, Kerman argued that previous generations of musicologists failed to discuss, as he put it, “the interaction of music history with political, social, and intellectual history.”6
According to Kerman, an important transformation within musicol-ogy began because of a variety of new influences at mid-century. The development of the long-play record made possible a browsable library of music. Listeners and scholars now had access to a wide range of music, including old and forgotten classical music, new modernist works, popular music, and music from around the world.7 Never before had so much music been available to so many people. This vast collection of musical material inspired a proliferation in musical scholarship and musical criticism. New sonic experiences led to new forms of music scholarship. Furthermore, musicologists such as Susan McClary and others have argued that the modernist classical music of the post-war era alienated a listening public that now had access to and control over many kinds of music, including the popular. For McClary and other young scholars and composers in the 1970s and 1980s, the apparent marginalization of both traditional and modernist classical music in American culture required a radical shift in compositional technique, aesthetic theory, and ultimately of scholarly approaches to the study of music.8 Musicologists were called upon to move away from description, cataloging, and structural analysis toward new forms of musical criticism.
These changes took time to achieve. The shifting attention of musicologists from the 1960s through the 1980s was not necessarily moving in the same directions as historians with their development of social and cultural history. At the same time that social historians were beginning to reshape the historical profession, traditional musicology in American universities remained focused almost exclusively on the music of the Western classical tradition, not on the musics of the lost voices of the Western world. Even ethnomusicology, which has a history of engaging primarily with non-Western music, has only more recently begun to deal with both Western and non-Western popular music. Indeed, both ethnomusicology and historical musicology are still in flux. Nevertheless, since the mid-1980s, a “New Musicology” has emerged to apply the insights of cultural studies, anthropology, and cultural and literary criticism to the study of music. Ethnomusicology, long influenced by anthropology and musicology, has also begun to produce a greater influence on historical musicology, as some in that field have begun to adopt an ethnomusicologically informed approach to essentially historical musics. In the process, the number of ways in which one can legitimately talk about music within the academy has expanded rapidly. Among the most important trends for “bridging the disciplines” has been the shift away from focus on the sound object within ethnomusicology and away from a focus on the musical work in historical musicology toward a greater interest in “music in culture.”9
Only within the last few years, therefore, have historians and musicologists begun to use similar approaches in order to ask critical questions about a particular aspect of the human experience: the creation, performance, and consumption of music. Born out of a similar set of questions that have challenged positivist claims about the nature of “history” and “music” as absolute things-in-themselves, historians and musicologists now approach a common ground. As historians wonder about what is “history”—in other words, what are the subjects of the historian’s investigation that best help us to uncover the past—musicologists likewise wonder about what “music” is in ways that open up new lines of inquiry.
Still, both sets of scholars ask these questions from different perspectives and for different reasons, and we want to make clear from the outset of this book that our goal is by no means to collapse the two disciplines into one. Historians and musicologists will never be identical. Although they have begun to use similar tools and ask similar questions, they have different ends. This is especially true given the breath of approaches and goals in the study of music that are contained within musicology itself. The musicologist who moves more in the direction of cultural critique, no matter how historically informed that critique is, may be less interested in engaging in a dialogue with the historian than is the musicologist who is more historically oriented in his or her choice of methods and research topics. Similarly, the historical musicologist who has been influenced by ethnomusicological thought may be wary of historical narrative as a potentially alien ideological intrusion into past Western or contemporary non-Western cultures. Nevertheless, both historians and musicologists have something to contribute to the larger understanding of the ways in which people create and represent their lives through music.
What, then, can each side learn from the other? Historians can learn something about music as a particular kind of text with its own special concerns. If cultural historians “read” a wide variety of historical facts as texts to be interpreted, each of those texts comes with its own set of problems and issues. Musicologists can help to guide historians through the particular concerns about music as a text because of their intimate knowledge of it. They can tell historians about how musical styles have changed and why those changes in style are historically important.
Musicologists can learn from historians about a deep engagement with historical context and the ways in which particular musical texts and practices can help to illustrate broader historical issues.10 Furthermore, in a recent essay, the musicologist Leon Botstein notes that the methods of musical analysis have not been drawn into the other humanities and social sciences, even though musical scholarship has, since the 1980s, drawn heavily from those other fields. Botstein suggests that this appropriation by musicology may not be healthy for the field. Instead, he offers an alternative goal: find ways to make musicology lead the way out of the current fad for methodological skepticism for the humanities and social sciences generally by drawing music out of the margins and positioning it as a central component to life. Botstein argues that music must come to be “treated as a species of fundamental social action.”11 If that were to happen, then musicologists might find ways to use music and music history as a means to recast other points of view, such as social change or culture more generally. Music could become a “primary source” that can “test and perhaps even profoundly revise our sense of the past.”12 But first, musicologists must enter the wider academic community, asserting that theirs is not marginal material but rather that music is central to the human condition.
The chapters that follow this introduction are original contributions to the project of bridging the disciplines of music and history. Some essays are by scholars who have been exploring the middle ground between the two areas for some time. But most are by younger scholars working through the questions that continue to face such interdisciplinary efforts. We begin with a set of personal reflections by noted historian Lawrence Levine that began as an address to the American Musicological Society. Considering how music has shaped his development as a scholar, Levine writes about the “gaps” in historical studies: gaps between the historian and his or her subject, between cultures, between the historian and the performing arts. The last of those gaps is, of course, the central concern of this book. Furthermore, as he did in Black Culture and Black Consciousness, Levine addresses the use of music as a means of recovering lost voices and personal experiences within the flow of history. This is certainly a challenge for the historian to develop strategies for the use of music as part of his or her professional toolbox. And Levine’s comments about the lateral influences among the musics of different cultures is an important point that should spur musicologists to continue to explore the ways in which different kinds of folk, classical, and popular music influence each other. In other words, musicologists may need to develop a richer sense of “culture” and its mechanisms.
Following Levine’s essay are six chapters that address widely different aspects of musical culture and history. They are arranged in roughly chronological order, and while each of the essays reflects elements of the methods of the home disciplines of the individual historians and musicologists who wrote them, each also offers ways of bridging the disciplines of history and musicology.
In her essay, Helen Marsh Jeffries considers ways in which the role of the musician in society was changing in the early modern period, but she also critiques the all-too-common emphasis that is placed on change at the expense of continuity within both historical and musicological studies. At the same time, she demonstrates the continuing value that careful archival research can play in the exploration of musico-social phenomena at a time when interpretive strategies are far more central to the New Musicology than is archival research.
In a similar way, in her study of women and popular music in the French Revolution, Laura Mason discusses how the canons of western classical music have negatively influenced the study and aesthetic perception of Revolutionary era music. She also considers ways that the study of representations of music-making, especially among women in the French Revolution, offers another means through which Revolutionary politics and gender relationships can be understood. Finally, she raises important points about popular song as a tool of historical inquiry. On one hand, she implicitly responds to concerns about the supposed lack of musical training among historian. On the other, she also raises some of the concerns about the standards of evidence in musical scholarship that we discuss in the closing essay of the collection.
Dorothy Potter’s essay on Mozart’s music in America demonstrates the close relationship that often exists between classical repertories and the popular musical market. Thus her essay, like Levine’s, brings into relief the potential problem with the entire popular-classical model on which so much musical scholarship and musical education exists.
Finally, some of the essays seek to place music pieces or styles into a larger socio-political context by reflecting on ways in which musical pieces or musical practices mirror aspects of the broader culture. Stanley Pelkey considers ways in which pieces, styles, or repertories that are made national, often through their celebration in literary contexts, are sometimes not only artificially nationalized but are also manifestations of a musical cosmopolitanism that undermines simple identification with the nation. His argument unfolds in part by exploring practices found in both literary and musical periodicals from Britain in the early nineteenth century. Similarly, Charles Freeman discusses several early twentieth-century American operas with plots about immigration. Through close study of their librettos, Freeman reads these operas as cultural documents that mirror ideas that were prevalent in the Progressive Era. In his essay, Burton W. Peretti traces relationships among jazz funding, jazz styles, and political neoconservativism during the late twentieth century. Peretti’s essay is particularly rich in that the biographies of individual jazz musicians—especially in terms of their known political sympathies—jazz aesthetics, and jazz styles all become forms of evidence for historical inquiry.
In the section that follows these six chapters, two essays by scholars outside of musicology and history represent a different kind of disciplinary “bridging” between history and music. Michael Antonucci and Sandra Lyne write from within traditions of literary criticism and cultural studies. Antonucci’s essay on blues music and American history seeks both to “historicize the blues” (in part by placing blues texts into their historical contexts) and to create “blues history” (by bringing a minority musical tradition into contact with mainstream American history as a witness to another side of the story of American racism). In her essay on nineteenth-century operas with exotic(ized) characters, Lyne addresses how such operas enact nineteenth-century European ideas about race, sexuality, and gender. She discusses these works as both scholar and performer and evaluates the positive and negative attempts at diffusing the racial subtexts of these operas in contemporary performance. We have placed these two essays together not to emphasize that they come from outside musicology and history but rather to highlight an issue to which we will return in the conclusion: the potential evidentiary barriers created by the different methods and epistemologies of historians and musicologists may preclude the bridging which we advocate. In that case, alternative methods may be called for, and these may already be readily available within the tradition of cultural studies. At the very least, that field may provide another kind of common ground from which further attempts at bridging may be accomplished.
Finally, in the last section of the book three essays offer models for bridging the disciplines: through collaborative, multidisciplinary research (Burrows and Weber); through the use of musical materials within humanities courses (Davis); and through the careful plotting of a multi-disciplinary approach to the study of popular music that values the exploration of both sonic and contextual aspects of popular music-making (Kramer). The book closes, as indicated earlier, with an epilogue in which we offer some further reflections on the problems of evidence that may create barriers to the successful bridging of history and music.
Does a historian have to learn music to discuss it? Does a musicologist have to learn the entire history of a period in order to analyze the music of that era? We don’t believe so. But the issues and problems raised by this book suggest some of the reasons why we should collaborate, read each other’s work, or at least talk more openly to one another about the scholarly interests that we have in common.
1. Eugene D. Genovese, Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1976); Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
2. Lynn Hunt ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 16.
3. Hunt, The New Cultural History, 16. Here, Hunt is making references to the work of two important scholars, Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975) and Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
4. For an anthology of essays that responds to many of the issues that Kerman raises, see Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist, eds., Rethinking Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
5. Joseph Kerman, Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 37–39.
6. Kerman, Contemplating Music, 43.
7. Kerman, Contemplating Music, 25.
8. Susan McClary, “Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music Composition,” Cultural Critique 12 (1989).
9. See “Ethnomusicology and ‘Cultural Musicology,’” in Contemplating Music for an excellent discussion of the relationship between historical musicology and ethnomusicology. For discussion of historical changes within ethnomusicology, see Gregory F. Barz and Timothy J. Cooley, eds., Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology (Oxford: Oxford, 1997).
10. See, for example, Robert Morgan, “Rethinking Musical Culture: Canonic Reformulations in a Post-Tonal Age,” in Disciplining Music, ed. Katherine Bergeron and Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 44–63. Morgan traces the history of the musical canon, its relationship to the development of style in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the breakdown of a style consensus in the later twentieth century. Morgan further argues that the diversity and eclecticism of later twentieth-century classical music could be understood as a manifestation of “our fragmented and dissociated manner of life.” (58) Thus the essay presents a history of a musical phenomenon—canon formation—but places it within a larger historical context.
11. Leon Botstein, “Cinderella; or Music and the Human Sciences: Unfootnoted Musings from the Margins,” Current Musicology 53 (1993): 128.
12. Botstein, “Cinderella; or Music and the Human Sciences,” 131.