Memory and Nostalgia as Music-Historical Categories

One of the daunting challenges that face those who work in the fields not only of music analysis and history but also of social and cultural history is the question of how the study of music (not only musical culture) can expand our understanding of history. We continue to develop claims and generalizations about the past whose sources are literature and painting as well as film and videotape media. When it comes to theater with music, opera, and musical theater, such sources are used usually with an emphasis on text and plot. Both the run-of-the-mill textbook and the more sophisticated scholarly paper will use the evidence of the musical, if at all, in a supplemental manner to buttress or justify a perception or general assertion whose essential origin derives from linguistic and/or visual sources. Our understanding of the culture and mores of societies in the past as represented by the results of scholarly narration and selection is rarely influenced by the use of music as a primary source. This is perfectly understandable. In the first instance, there is the long-standing prejudice that a firm distinction is to be made between the so-called musical and the extramusical. In this view, there is a musical logic in all systems of music making, whether notated or not, whose proper description and understanding requires a command of essential self-referential characteristics and the presumed autonomous logic of the way sound passes through time. This is particularly acute for long-form, purely instrumental events of composed music. To understand music as history, one needs to command some plausible knowledge of musical logic and then struggle with describing it in language. Even armed with such skill, the observer may find the realm of correspondences between linguistically expressed musical variables and extramusical meanings suddenly tenuous if not arbitrary except in rare historical moments, such as the late eighteenth century, when one might appeal to a normative system of correspondences between musical rhetoric and sentiments. In the second instance, in historical terms one clearly needs to distinguish between the script or map of music (e.g., a printable text) and the performed occasion, the actual sound journey. In the age of sound

Aesthetics · Art · Literature · Diverse Musicological Studies · Music History and Culture · Musicology and Musical Analysis · History

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