[ANPPOM-Lista] culture and musical thinking

[Carlos Palombini]

Achei há pouco a resenha de Erich Leinsdorf, publicada no *New York
Times*em 26 de maio de 1985, do livro de Joseph Kerman,
*Contemplating Music*. Escrita há quase 30 anos, parece às vezes falar do
aqui-agora.

http://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/26/books/culture-and-musical-thinking.html?pagewanted=print
CULTURE AND MUSICAL THINKING
By Erich Leinsdorf; Erich Leinsdorf is a conductor and the author of ''The
Composer's Advocate.''

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.''

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.''

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.

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.''

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.''

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.''

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.''

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.

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.

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.

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.''
-- 
carlos palombini
www.researcherid.com/rid/F-7345-2011
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