<br>Achei há pouco a resenha de Erich Leinsdorf, publicada no <i>New York Times</i> em 26 de maio de 1985, do livro de Joseph Kerman, <i>Contemplating Music</i>. Escrita há quase 30 anos, parece às vezes falar do aqui-agora.<br>
<br><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/26/books/culture-and-musical-thinking.html?pagewanted=print">http://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/26/books/culture-and-musical-thinking.html?pagewanted=print</a><br><h1>CULTURE AND MUSICAL THINKING</h1>
<div class="byline">By Erich Leinsdorf; Erich Leinsdorf is a conductor and the author of ''The Composer's Advocate.''</div>
<p>
CONTEMPLATING MUSIC Challenges to Musicology. By Joseph Kerman. 255
pp. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 5. IN 1942, the
centennial year of the New York Philharmonic, Virgil Thomson, then the
senior music critic of The New York Herald Tribune, complained in a
review that music had not become part of the city's intellectual life.
In ''Contemplating Music,'' published 43 years later, the musicologist
Joseph Kerman makes the point in stronger language: ''Critical thought
in music lags conceptually far behind that in the other arts. In fact
nearly all musical thinkers travel at a respectful distance behind the
latest chariots (or bandwagons) of intellectual life in general.'' </p>
<p>
That sentence, in the introduction, sets the tone and states the
author's major premise -music is surrounded by explicators and
commentators, scholarly specialists and complete dilettantes, but not by
a corps of writers whose critiques could match interpretive studies in
literature and the visual arts. Throughout the 200-odd pages of his
text, this is repeated in many variations. He complains: ''It is not
only that a virtual blackout was imposed on critical interpretation . . .
Even historical interpretation was scanted.'' And in the same
paragraph: ''Much less attention was paid to the interaction of music
history with political, social, and intellectual history. And less
attention yet was devoted to the attempt to understand music as an
aspect of and in relation to culture in the large.'' </p>
<p>
He objects to what he calls positivism in musicology. He borrows
the word from philosophy and uses it to indicate a piling up of data,
even contradictory data, by musicologists who make no critical appraisal
of it. And he says musicologists must take a critical stand if their
work is to have any real effect beyond increasing the mass of material
music librarians have to work on. It is a great satisfaction to find a
most distinguished musicologist objecting to the sterile positivism (an
unfortunate term in this context) that prompted me 55 years ago to quit
the department of Musikwissenschaft at the University of Vienna after
only three months. </p>
<p>
The middle chapters of Mr. Kerman's book are nothing less than a
Who's Who of musicology and a What's What of theory, analysis and
musical philosophy. For a nonspecialist, these sections represent
admirable summaries of books one does not need to read; for the
fraternity of musicologists, they are evenhanded short resumes, written
without malice. Mr. Kerman's distance from the low life of scholarly
competition is expressed in this sentence: ''Half of the academic
community writes when it has nothing to say, it seems, while the other
half conspires to get that writing published.'' </p>
<p>
With qualifying reservations, Mr. Kerman credits musicology for the
New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the New Bach Edition and
continued progress in the movement toward more historically accurate
performances. ''Over the course of that ten-year period [1970-80] ,
Grove imprinted itself more and more deeply on British and American
musicology,'' he writes. ''It may seem bizarre to assert that a
dictionary project, even a very elaborately conducted dictionary
project, should have had a major effect on an entire discipline in two
countries; yet such was the case.'' Of the N.B.E. he says that ''perhaps
the most brilliant achievement of positivistic musicology after the war
was attendant on this New Bach Edition.'' And a few lines later he
calls it ''an outstanding example of what positivistic musicology could
do - and what it has chosen not to do further.'' </p>
<p>
I can vouch for the reservation of the last nine words. For a
performer in search of better scores, the N.B.E. does not rank with the
Bach Gesellschaft, which was founded in 1850 and dissolved in 1900 after
issuing 60 volumes. ''Critical Edition'' is a misnomer, since it is an
uncritical massing of data, with many flagrant errors of copying.
Without going that far, Mr. Kerman (perhaps because he has not been
confronted with specific gaffes in the N.B.E.) still has the right idea
when he says, ''According to Isaiah Berlin, historical explanation needs
to be 'thick' rather than 'thin' and thickness requires qualities of
insight and imagination over and above the methods of logical
application.'' </p>
<p>
The chapter titled ''The Historical Performance Movement'' should
be made into a textbook and established as compulsory study for all
musicians. It goes far beyond the historical and could become a
significant syllabus for that part of the educational fraternity that
wants to promote better performances. Again one reads with unreserved
pleasure Mr. Kerman's assessment of ''the restless world of 'early
music' '' as ''a world with its fair share, one is sometimes given to
feel, of enthusiasts and ideologues, gurus and groupies, dilettantes and
cranks.'' </p>
<p>
I must take exception to one paragraph in which Mr. Kerman
paraphrases the modernists' objections to reconstructing historical
performances. He says that ''for the strict 'modernist,' Beethoven
should be heard (if at all) only as rewritten by Stockhausen. . . . Even
Adorno, who . . . recommended the Bach transcriptions of Webern and
Schoenberg, did not go that far - though he might have, who knows, if
his ideological orbit had extended to ''Pulcinella'' and ''Le Baiser de
la Fee.' '' That is almost identical with a purist stance that asks,
unreasonably and unrealistically, for the original and only the
original. It ignores the fact that transcription and arrangement were
the lifeblood of music throughout the 18th and 19th centuries and have
produced in the 20th some of the most intriguing original compositions,
which may use themes from other composers or folklore. But then,
Shakespeare's plots are not necessarily of his invention either. It is
the treatment that shows creativity and not the pious avoidance of
musical themes invented by others. </p>
<p>
In one chapter, ''Ethnomusicology and 'Cultural Musicology,' '' Mr.
Kerman seems to anticipate what might be in store for us if his
challenge to musicologists to take a critical stand is not met: ''While
music may come from below or may be imposed from above, musicology
always comes from above.'' Mr. Kerman evidently wishes for musicology to
tackle 20th-century music. This most worthy objective needs the
collaboration of experts in the social sciences and psychology, since
the major crisis of music - hardly touched on in this book - is the
alienation of the public from the composer. I F music since Schoenberg
is to be understood, any investigation must take into account the
decline of instrumental music from its former status as a primary art
form to the rank of a subsidiary one. When symphonies and concertos
become ballet scores, ice-skating accompaniments and soundtracks, when
Bach is piped into hotel elevators and joggers' earphones and when, most
shamelessly, snatches from Beethoven's Ninth and Fifth Symphonies are
used in television commercials, the effect on living and writing
composers must have some bearing on their music and how they try to get
the attention of a public that has forgotten what it is to listen. </p>
<p>
Musicology, positivistic or critical, cannot find a cure for a
calamity caused by a fundamental change in our society. That society,
middle-class and ever ambitious to replace earlier aristocratic
patronage, determined the repertory, established musical organizations
for the regular presentation of concerts and created the economic
foundation for composers through the purchase of their music, just as it
made music at home and expected new compositions from the acknowledged
masters, the same way today's fans expect a new Woody Allen film. Mr.
Kerman's imperative to musicology could lead to a symposium under his
direction with the aim of illuminating what has happened between
composer and public. Such an endeavor would fulfill the author's dream
of musical sciences traveling ahead of the chariots and bandwagons in
the regions of intellectual life.Electronics and Music Obligatory, in
discussions of postwar music, is mention of the impact of electronic
technology for recording and generating music. </p>
<p>
Though the electronic studio equipment of the 1950s seems almost
unbelievably clumsy by today's standards, it produced the first and
still seminal monuments of electronic music. The Beatles were soon to
try their hand at a little electronic composition -and as for
performance, the whole rock phenomenon is certainly unthinkable without
electric guitars, Moogs, and those terrifying amplification systems
which made Woodstocks possible. . . . Now listeners could and did obtain
great masses of music of all kinds and were able to browse through it
on recordings, in something like the way they were used to browsing
through literature of all kinds in books. Previously only professional
musicians had been able to move around in music with such (actually
less) flexibility by reading scores. The range and sheer amount of music
known . . . went up exponentially; musical composition, musical
performance, and musical consumption were all affected by the electronic
revolution of the 1950s, but consumption was affected most. No wonder
the audience for music increased (and with the record audience, also the
audience for live music at concerts). No wonder the young Colin Davis
at postwar Oxford could remark that the cachet formerly reserved for
poetry now seemed to be accorded to opera. - From ''Contemplating
Music.'' </p>-- <br><div>carlos palombini<br></div><a href="http://www.researcherid.com/rid/F-7345-2011" target="_blank">www.researcherid.com/rid/F-7345-2011</a><br>