Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History Shaping Modern Musical Thought in Late Nineteenth Century Vienna

by Karnes, Kevin

• ISBN13: 9780195368666
• ISBN10: 0195368665
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-08-22
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

More than a century after Guido Adler's appointment to the first chair in musicology at the University of Vienna, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History provides a first look at the discipline in this earliest period, and at the ideological dilemmas and methodological anxieties thatcharacterized it upon its institutionalization. Author Kevin Karnes contends that some of the most vital questions surrounding musicology's disciplinary identities today-the relationship between musicology and criticism, the role of the subject in analysis and the narration of history, and theresponsibilities of the scholar to the listening public-originate in these conflicted and largely forgotten beginnings. Karnes lays bare the nature of music study in the late nineteenth century through insightful readings of long-overlooked contributions by three of musicology's foremost pioneers-Adler, Eduard Hanslick, and Heinrich Schenker. Shaped as much by the skeptical pronouncements of the likes of Nietzscheand Wagner as it was by progressivist ideologies of scientific positivism, the new discipline comprised an array of oft-contested and intensely personal visions of music study, its value, and its future. Karnes introduces readers to a Hanslick who rejected the call of positivist scholarship anddedicated himself to penning an avowedly subjective history of Viennese musical life. He argues that Schenker's analytical experiments had roots in a Wagner-inspired search for a critical alternative to Adler's style-obsessed scholarship. And he illuminates Adler's determined response to Nietzsche'swarnings about the vitality of artistic and cultural life in an increasingly scientific age. Through sophisticated and meticulous presentation, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History demonstrates that the new discipline of musicology was inextricably tied in with the cultural discourse ofits time.

Author Biography

Kevin C. Karnes is Assistant Professor of Music History at Emory University. He is co-editor of the revised and expanded edition of Brahms and His World (2009) and author of articles on a variety of nineteenth-century topics published in 19th-Century Music, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and other periodicals.

Table of Contents

A Note on Translations	p. xi
Abbreviations Used in the Notes	p. xiii
Introduction: The Spirit of Positivism and the Search for Alternatives: Musicology and Criticism at the End of the Nineteenth Century	p. 3
Eduard Hanslick and the Challenge of Musikwissenschaft
Forgotten Histories and Uncertain Legacies	p. 21
Music Criticism as Living History	p. 48
Heinrich Schenker and the Challenge of Criticism
Music Analysis as Critical Method	p. 79
Composer, Critic, and the Problem of Creativity	p. 109
Guido Adler and the Problem of Science
A Science of Music for an Ambivalent Age	p. 133
German Music in an Age of Positivism	p. 159
Epilogue: Into the Twentieth Century	p. 188
Bibliography	p. 195
Index	p. 207
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