Klarinet Archive - Posting 000351.txt from 1999/10

From: "Steven J. Goldman" <sjgoldman@-----.com>
Subj: RE: [kl] My Defective Education
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 15:08:26 -0400

A cautionary note.

While there has been great improvement over time, for reasons I do not
understand musicology has not kept up to the standards of other areas of
historiography until rather recently.

Until thirty or so years ago in scholarly overviews, and until this day in
popular ones, there is an overwhelming bias for the incorrect notion that
music moves in a "Darwinian", progressive fashion. How many times have I
read "in so and so a manner Mr. X prefigured Beethoven" i.e. Mr. X was ahead
of his time.

Unfortunately, there is no real forward or backward in music as there is in
technology (nor in biology for that matter - in this I am heavily influenced
by Stephen Jay Gould). There is simply change, change driven by mankind's
ceaseless drive for something new.

Thus, for example, the pre-classical was not, as is so often stated, the
embryonic and inferior precursor to Haydn, Mozart etc. It was a period where
aesthetics had changed from earlier times and composers used techniques, new
and old, to express them. They had no "direction" to them and the future of
music could have taken any number of paths.

I prefer to look at music in any particular time and place in relation to
what was happening at the time, and what the music either rejected or
accepted from other times and/or places. Only then can you avoid
anachronistic "it all is leading to US" views that are all too frequently
implied in musical histories (after all, we know what happened in the "last"
chapter, the composers did not).

Unfortunately, I do not know of any overview of the period you mention that
does this. You tend to find it in scholarly articles looking at a very small
piece of the pie.

If anyone does know of one, I would be as interested as Tim.

Steve Goldman
Glenview, IL

sjgoldman@-----.com

-----Original Message-----
From: David B. Niethamer [mailto:dnietham@-----.edu]
Subject: Re: [kl] My Defective Education

on 10/11/99 2:17 PM, Tim Roberts wrote:

>One of the defects in my musical education, one which I have often
>regretted,
>is in the area of music history. I would like to find a book or books
which
>could help me understand the "timeline" of music in the last five
>centuries or
>so -- which composers launched which great new trends, which composers were
>obviously influenced by the works of which others, when were the various
>classical forms we know and love first introduced, and so on.

Hunt for an out of print book called "The Continuity of Music - A History
of Influence" by Irving Kolodin. I think it's published by Knopf.
Probably some libraries would have it. It is a very readable history of
music from about the time of Bach to the "present", whose premise is that
the invention of the printing press, and its ultimate application to
printing music, changed the history of music in a major way. It's a very
interesting book, if not a scholarly one.

If you are having difficulty sleeping, read Grout! Encyclopedic, but Oh!
so dull!

David

David Niethamer
Principal Clarinet, Richmond Symphony
dnietham@-----.edu
http://members.aol.com/dbnclar1/

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