“Anti-Intellectualism and the Rhetoric of ‘National Character’ in Music: The Vulgarity of Over-Refinement.” In British Music Criticism and Intellectual Thought, 1850-1950, edited by Jeremy Dibble and Julian Horton. 199-234. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2018. (original) (raw)
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This chapter examines the continuities between the categories of the ‘national’ and the ‘universal’ in the nineteenth century. It construes these categories as interrelated efforts to create a ‘world’ on various scales and explores the perceived role of music as a world-making medium within these discourses. It argues that the increased exposure to cultural difference and the interpretation of that cultural difference as distant in time as well as in space shaped a conception of ‘humanity’ in terms of a universal history of world cultures. The chapter re-examines those early-nineteenth-century thinkers whose work became inextricably linked with the rise of exclusivist notions of nationalism in the late nineteenth century, such as Johann Gottfried Herder and John Stuart Mill. It draws from their respective treatment of music to highlight their early commitment to universalizable principles and their view that the ‘world’ is something that must be actively created—through collection, anthologizing, traveling, the writing of universal histories, participating in public debate and music-making—rather than passively observed or described.
Wider Still and Wider: British Music Criticism since the Second World War
The Cambridge History of Music Criticism, 2019
The story of British music criticism since the Second World War is straightforward and disheartening. At least, it is straightforward to the various fellow academics, critics, musicians, promoters and assorted music cognoscenti who have kindly (and sometimes not so kindly) shared their views on the matter over the past decade. It is a story of a long golden age, in which venerable figures were given unlimited acres of space to espouse their great wisdom, followed by a precipitous decline in both quantity and quality. It is a perception that echoes a generally nuanced 2001 editorial by Marc Bridle for Seen & Heard: 'Since then [the 1980s], critics have lost their influence as movers and shakers, in part due to philistinism amongst arts editors and decreased critical coverage in newspapers. Moreover, the decline of classical music is irrevocably linked to the rise of popular musicand the nefarious (and probably incorrect) belief that this is what readers want.' 2 As will become apparent, this widely-and sincerely-held perception of postwar music criticism in Britain is, at the very least, questionable, if not demonstrably flawed in key respects. It is not that this view is necessarily entirely wrong, but it is certainly simplistic and usually based purely on anecdotal evidence. Throughout the period in question, and especially the decades at each end, the
Finding Musicology in nineteenth-century Britain: contexts and conflicts
2018
Music has long been a degree subject in British universities. Yet its academic form and status changed dramatically during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This chapter examines the introduction of history and analysis within music programs, the development of ‘musical science’ outside the university and ongoing debates about the ways in which academic musical studies should relate to musical practice, between the early nineteenth century and the middle of the twentieth. These changes are related to concerns about the status of musicians, as well as the perceived paucity of talent within British composition. It is clear that, while music long held a place at many university institutions, the position of musicology as a core discipline was not settled until the mid-twentieth century.
Journal of the Royal Musical Association 138.1 (May 2013)
The spectre of music as a transcendent artistic ideal figures prominently in the literary criticism of Victorian aestheticism, though the extent to which aestheticism of the movement actually influenced the thinking of British composers has received only marginal scholarly attention. By the first decades of the twentieth century, aestheticism had become decidedly unfashionable even in literary circles, so it is unsurprising that composers of the time would choose to distance themselves from its rhetoric. The prevalence of a certain type of metaphysical conception of the creative act of the artist and intuitive act of the critic, however, may suggest an important remnant of aesthetic influence. Drawing from new critical trends which themselves mirror those of aestheticism, this article posits a revised conception of aesthetic discourse as an activity of self-cultivation, and examines its role in shaping the lives of selected British composer-critics from the early part of the twentieth century. By casting the aesthetic ethos not as a doctrine but as a set of internal practices that inform the creation and subversion of doctrine, the article demonstrates how a ‘relational musicology’ can act as a tool for historical inquiry.
Despite historical attempts to construe the practices of musicology in terms of music criticism, there is still a marked reticence to include essays in music criticism in the history of the discipline, or to treat critical thought on music with the same seriousness and contemporary relevance with which, for example, literary studies treats historical literary criticism. Far from being mere ephemera, early twentieth-century discussions about the proper function of the music critic in evaluating modern music became a means by which writers explored and debated some of the most significant concerns of the day. Central to these discussions were questions about how to drive a middle way between tradition and innovation, and the possibility of genius and its relationship with processes of history and culture. By exploring the notion of ‘aesthetic democracy’ and drawing from contemporary aesthetic/anti-aesthetic debates in the humanities, this article provides a template for the exploration of the interaction between historical ideas about music criticism and these broader questions of historiography and aestheticism. It does so by examining the work of a collection of radical music critics published in the formative issues of the English music journal The Sackbut during 1920-1. The aim is to highlight ways in which the current ‘aesthetic turn’ and its attendant claims regarding autonomy, self-determination, history, and ideology were prefigured by inter-war discussions about the reform of music criticism in Britain.
The Art of Appreciation: Music and Middlebrow Culture in Modern Britain
From the BBC Proms to Bernstein's Young People's Concerts, initiatives to promote classical music were a pervasive feature of twentieth-century musical life. Their goal was rarely just to reach a larger and more diverse audience; many also sought to teach a particular way of listening designed to help the public "appreciate" music. This book examines for the first time why and how music appreciation had such a defining and long-lasting impact -well beyond its origins as a late-Victorian, liberal project in music education. Putting new archival research into dialogue with social, political and cultural histories, it traces the networks of musicians, composers, critics, philanthropists, policy-makers and music educators who sought to shape the new markets for classical music through the central decades of the twentieth century. Both optimistic and anxious about advances in sound reproduction technologies, they worked across diverse forums and media -from concert halls to universities, from radio to cinema -to share the values and methods of music appreciation with aspirational audiences. Far more than the history of a uniquely influential movement in music education, The Art of Appreciation recounts how listening became entangled in a nexus of modern problems around citizenship, leisure and education. In so doing, it reveals a twentieth-century musical culture shaped less by radical rupture than by gradual change. At its heart was a milieu that encapsulated Britain's experience of modernity: the middlebrow.
Listening to Reason: Culture, Subjectivity, and Nineteenth‐Century Music
The American Historical Review, 2005
The origins of this book," a colleague of mine once wrote, "are obscure even to myself, but the occasion of its conception I remember quite vividly." 1 In my own case, the occasion that launched this book is indeed clear to me, though at the time I had no clue of the eventual project's shape. In August 1990 I gave a short preconcert lecture on Brahms at the first Bard Music Festival. To an audience awaiting a performance of the D minor piano concerto, I argued that the urgency and debate in Brahms's musical texture engaged cultural issues and differences as well as musical ones, that Brahms's late nineteenth-century musical discourse had incorporated music's capacity to think, to argue, and to develop the position of a thinking, feeling subject in juxtaposition with a multiple and challenging cultural and political world. "Absolute" music, I argued, lived in the world and spoke to it. Here was the first kernel of this book's argument of the importance of nineteenth-century music as a language of subjectivity. I gave that lecture and ultimately wrote this book as a cultural historian committed to music not only as an object of study (or a vehicle of pleasure) but as a mode of cultural experience and understanding and, itself, as a potential language of cultural analysis. What we colloquially refer to as "classical" European music (a category looser than and distinct from that of the classical style or period) accrues through the nineteenth century as a mutually referential world of unusual coherence. The composers and works I engage in this book are generally well known to their peers and successors. In a process itself reflective of that coherence, this book's argument has evolved incrementally. Through the 1990s, the project was nurtured consistently by my lecture and essay assignments at the Bard Festival and its annual reconsideration of a single composer: Mendelssohn in 1991, Strauss in 1992, Dvořák in 1993, Schumann in 1994, Bartók in 1995. A volume of essays and documents on each year's composer "and his world" has appeared annually since 1990 from Princeton University Press; this book's chapter 4, on Mendelssohn and Schumann, contains arguments initially explored in essays I wrote for these collections. In the early 1990s I introduced aspects of the project into my cultural history courses at Cornell, and by the time of a sabbatical year in 1995-96 I had developed the conviction that there should be a book here, though there certainly wasn't one yet. A first draft was complete in 1998; its revisions continued to benefit from the