New research objects emerge, such as the twentieth-century audiosphere or soundscape, transcending the scope of the discipline hitherto responsible for ← 9 | 10 → their analysis (musicology), becoming the topic of debate between cultural studies scholars, idea historians, geographers, anthropologists, and cultural sociologists. The revolution in means of social communication and an increased non-specialist interest in modern music history as well as a new focus on interdisciplinary research do present new challenges unknown, on this scale, to historians of earlier music. Increased readership is only an illusionary comfort. This state of affairs presents the historian of twentieth-century music with a number of challenges. The paradigm of a weak past and strong present in music history has never been as relevant as today. 1 We can’t help thinking that from the position not only of modernist but even cognitively reasonable historiography, such treatment of past historical epochs is simply a distortion of reality, serving as it does to petrify the mechanism of “repression of history” in favour of what is contemporary or recent. Separated from the Classical tradition from which it originated, the nineteenth century keeps an unmotivated singularity ( The Nineteenth Century), while music history of the twentieth century is presented in two separate volumes ( Music in the Early Twentieth Century and Music in the Late Twentieth Century). If the latest edition of The Oxford History of Western Music, edited by Richard Taruskin, illustrates this evolution of approach to history, especially in the typical post-modern shortening of its time perspective, we might not be surprised to discover that the “history of Western music” as a historical narrative starts only in the seventeenth century, earliest history having been squeezed into a single volume with a focus on palaeography ( The Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century), while later epochs have been merged into one, despite being very different in character ( The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries). Today, such editorial initiatives have been thoroughly remodelled. Heinrich Besseler’s Musik des Mittelalters und der Renaissance (1931) provided a balance for its chronological opposite, Hans Mersmann’s Die Moderne Musik seit der Romantik (1931). The first major historiographical initiative of Classical German musicology, Ernst Bücken’s Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, was characterised by a proportional presentation of all epochs of music history in separate synthetic books, written by leading scholars in each field. To the modern historian, the history of music appears in a shortened time perspective, making modern music historiography very different from that practised by the previous generations of musicologists. In the Treasury of Traditional Musical Cultures Modernism Looks for Boundaries of Musicalityġ.The Pluralism of Modernist Approaches at the Turn of the Twentieth and Twenty-First CenturyĤ.
Survival Strategies: Stylistic and Folkloristic RetrospectivesĬhapter 5. Adaptation Strategies: the Pompous Panegyric Styleĥ. The Death Knell of Normative Aesthetics (On the Example of the People’s Republic of Poland)Ĥ. The Third Reich: Durch deutsches Land marschieren wir!ģ. Relations Between Modernism and Nineteenth-Century Aestheticsġ. Transformations of the Musical Languageġ.
Three Layers of Musical Culture at the Turn of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuryģ.