The Pursuit of High Culture

As a literary genre, biography has always been immensely popular. As Jolanta Pekacz says, it ‘satisfies the readers’ curiosity about other people's lives and in the case of artistic lives it is supposed to provide a framework within which the creative output can somehow be related to the artistic life’ (Jolanta T. Pekacz (ed.), Musical Biography: Towards New Paradigms (Aldershot, 2006), 1). As a musicological genre, however, biography has had its ups and downs. Recognized as a convenient vehicle for contextualizing the work of a particular composer, it nonetheless plays havoc with that work's philosophical autonomy. Pekacz reflects this concern when she suggests that today the music biographer should view the work of art ‘as the product of interaction between the composer and the institutions and practices of society’ (Jolanta T. Pekacz, ‘Memory, History and Meaning: Musical Biography and Its Discontents’, Journal of Musicological Research, 23 (2004), 80). While Pekacz is right to illuminate theoretical misgivings over the genre of music biography, there is nevertheless an underlying assumption in her work (and perhaps the work of musicology more generally) that music biography pertains largely to composers. Pekacz expresses this orientation by disproportionately overloading Musical Biography with essays on composers (good though those essays are), as do David Beard and Kenneth Gloag when they essentialize music biography as ‘a literary genre based around the ordering of facts relating to the life of the composer and the relationship to context in terms of other people and specific places’ (Musicology: The Key Concepts (London and New York, 2005), 26).

Art · Art history · Biography · Context (archaeology) · Literature · Musical · Musicology · History · Musicology and Musical Analysis