How do we know what notes a composer intended in a given piece? -- how those notes should be played and sung? -- the nature of musical life in Bach's Leipzig, Schubert's Vienna? -- how music related to literature and other arts and social currents in different times and places? -- what attitudes musicians and music lovers had toward the music that they heard and made?
We know all this from musical manuscripts and prints, opera libretti, composers' letters, reviews in newspapers and magazines, archival data, contemporary pedagogical writings, essays on aesthetics, and much else. Some of these categories of sources are the bedrock of music history and musicology. Others have begun to be examined only in recent years.
Furthermore, musicologists -- including biographers of famous composers -- now explore these various kinds of sources in a variety of ways, some of them richly traditional and others exciting and novel.
These seventeen essays, all newly written, use a wide array of source materials to probe issues pertaining to a cross section of musical works and musical life from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries.
The resulting, pluralistic profile of current musicology will prove welcome to anyone fascinated by the problems of reconstructing -- reimagining, sometimes -- the evanescent musical art of the past and pondering its implications for musical life today and in the future.
Roberta Montemorra Marvin is Director of Research and Development for International Programs, University of Iowa; Stephen A. Crist is associate professor and chair of the Music Department at Emory University.
Reviews
In this book some of the best minds in current musicology explore untrodden territory. They show that the classic source study and the traditional methods of musical analysis are not only alive and kicking, but generating new rich ideas -- some of them controversial, all of them stimulating. --Nicholas Temperley, professor emeritus of musicology, University of Illinois, and author of Bound for America: Three British ComposersStriding onto the stage of the 'New Musicology', the seventeen contributors to Historical Musicology proceed to kick in the footlights. Out of the broken glass, they manage to create an approach to the scholarly study of music that recognises that musical scholarship [whatever its methodological imperatives] remains rooted in the study of primary sources, and go on to demonstrate brilliantly how the benefits of the 'New' can be combined with the 'Old'. --Mark Everist, professor of music, University of Southampton
