Klarinet Archive - Posting 000353.txt from 1999/10

From: "Dr. Laroy Borchert" <lborcher@-----.Edu>
Subj: Re: [kl] Humanities Education (was My Defective Education)
Date: Tue, 12 Oct 1999 15:08:28 -0400

One of my favorite sources for comparisons is:

Grun, Berhard. "The Timetables of History." Touchstone (Simon and
Schuster). 1975. Paperback. (Newer editions may be available)

Following a timetable, you can look in the categories of: History and
Politics, Literature/Theatre, Religion/Philosophy/Learning, Visual Arts,
Music, Science/Technology/Growth, and Daily Life. The presentation is in
table form and it is great fun to see what was happening in other fields at
the same time.

Laroy

Dr. Laroy Borchert
NMSU

----- Original Message -----
From: Steven J. Goldman <sjgoldman@-----.com>
Subject: RE: [kl] My Defective Education

> 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]
> Sent: Monday, October 11, 1999 2123
> To: KLARINET
> 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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