Music, Structure, Thought: Selected Essays

James Hepokoski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780754628521
• eBook ISBN: 9781351556989
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Among the most original and provocative musicological writers of his generation, James Hepokoski has elaborated new paradigms of inquiry for both music history and music theory. Advocating fundamental shifts of methodological reorientation within the quest for potential musical meanings, his work spans both disciplines and offers substantial challenges for each. At its core is the conviction that a close study of musical genres, procedures, and structures those qualities of a composition that are specifically musical is essential to any responsible hermeneutic enterprise. Selected from writings from 1984 to 2008, this collection of essays provides a generous introduction to the author's most innovative and influential work on a wide variety of topics: musicological methodology, issues of staging and performance, Italian opera, program music, and exemplary studies of individual pieces.

Part One
Historiography, History, Methodology

Chapter 1
The Dahlhaus Project and Its Extra-musicological Sources

It is probably no overstatement to say that Carl Dahlhaus’s Nineteenth-Century Music¹ could alter the horizon of English-language musicology. Whether we wish to take issue with it or to build upon it, the book provides a needed focus for discussion, and it seems likely to remain for some time the single broad argument about the century that professionals will be expected to have confronted. Yet the book is not self-explanatory, particularly for American readers. Much of its raison d’être lies beneath the surface of its compact, often oblique prose, and it presumes a readership involved in methodological disputes taken for granted in West Germany in the 1960s and 70s. Not surprisingly, the American response to date has been to sidestep the contextual engagement of its arguments in favor of noting the disturbing contrast between the brilliance of Dahlhaus’s intellectualist approach to the history of music and the vexing reality of his apparent unwillingness to consider non-Germanic music on its own terms, his rigorously judgemental pronouncements, and his occasional errors of factual detail. Thus Philip Gossett, Dahlhaus’s sharpest American critic to date, recently concluded that “the errors [of Nineteenth-Century Music] reveal a systemic failure. Dahlhaus’s central vision is so pervasive that it tends to misrepresent or demean the music it treats.”²

These are serious charges, and they will take some time to assess. To be sure, “central vision” is the dominating factor of the Dahlhaus Project,³ and it merits our closest attention. Here, too, Gossett has provided an initial step with his recent critique, “Carl Dahlhaus and the ‘Ideal Type’,” which traces an important strand of Dahlhausian methodology to its source in Max Weber.⁴ But his “central vision” comprises many other such strands, none of which has been adequately developed in the secondary literature on Dahlhaus. In English-language discussions, they are often alluded to—with a shiver—as features that are forbiddingly Germanic. It is common to encounter, for instance, unelaborated references to an approach “rooted in an intellectual tradition of idealist philosophy quite foreign to the mainstream of Anglo-American analytic empiricism,” along with a remark to the effect that many aspects of this approach are fated to “receive little resonance in this country.”⁵ Other commentaries refer briefly, but ominously, to “the dialectical ruminations of one nourished at the intellectual bosom of Th. W. Adorno”;⁶ to the Russian-Formalist literary critics; to the Annales School; to Schoenbergianism; and so on. Gossett has provided an exemplary beginning, but other sources underpinning Dahl-haus’s work remain insufficiently identified, explored, and contextually coordinated.

This essay attempts a rudimentary mapping of the geography of Dahlhaus’s “extra-musicological” concerns. By identifying certain modes of thought as extra-musicological, I mean only that either they arose outside the academic profession of Musikwissenschaft or that in the 1960s, when Dahlhaus was beginning to consolidate his system, they were considered outside the normal concerns of the professional discussion. This would include Adorno as extra-musicological, for instance, since his music-critical methods were often considered unphilologisch, more related to philosophy and sociology than to musicology.⁷ Schoenberg, as a prominent composer, however, would always have been considered central to the profession’s interest. An examination of Dahlhaus’s musicological or music-theoretical sources, most of which were written before 1960, would lead us further afield than is practical here. My references focus, so far as possible, on two of the most central works: Foundations of Music History (FMH) of 1977,⁸ which elaborates his fully unfurled methodology; and Nineteenth-Century Music (NCM) of 1980, intended to be, among other things, a practical demonstration of that methodology. (A review of the most fundamental features of Dahlhaus’s thought, particularly as presented in these two works, is provided in the Appendix to this essay.]

As the briefest of introductions, we may say that at the heart of the Dahlhaus Project was an effort to keep the Austro-Germanic canon from Beethoven to Schoenberg free from aggressively sociopolitical interpretations. His principal strategy was, first, to insist that as concrete artworks they were conceived primarily under the category of aesthetic autonomy (Appendix, no. 6), and, second, to argue that historians should generally stress primary, not secondary categories. This permitted “great music” to continue to be considered principally within the realm of aesthetics, as a type of socially functionless, nonauthoritarian discourse. These views were profoundly traditional, and in the West Germany of the 1960s and 70s, their acceptability was coming increasingly under attack. Dahl-haus’s concerns, therefore, may be understood as essentially defensive. They were undertaken in a world growing skeptical both of the appeal to tradition and of the utility and claims of positivistic research.

In his search for alternatives to an unreflective positivism, alternatives that would still preserve traditional musical values, Dahlhaus was in dialogue with two extra-musicological constellations of thought. The first, or “materialist-sociological [Marxist],” constellation, a network of ways of thinking of which he was profoundly suspicious, is the subject of section III below. The second, and for Dahlhaus the more positive, the “empirical-hermeneutic-phenemenological” constellation, will be treated in the concluding section IV. (It should be added at once that in actual practice these constellations intersected in complex, unpredictable ways. The well-known Marxism/phenomenology mix of Sartre, for example, may serve as an illustration of this outside of Germany. While by no means wishing to minimize the intricacy of the issues at stake, the more practical point here is that Dahlhaus, whose thought was shaped during a period of extraordinary political and methodological tension, seems to have experienced these constellations as generally contrasting.) Before entering this discussion, however, it is necessary to ground Dahlhaus’s concerns within the epistemological crisis that engulfed West German universities in the 1960s and 70s. It is only within this context, which included some potent sociopolitical ramifications, that the full impact of his system may be grasped. And it is on this broader, contextual ground that our consideration of Dahlhaus in the upcoming years is likely to unfold.

II

On the most fundamental level, Dahlhaus’s writings may be read as a response to the complex of controversies that arose within West German universities from 1960 to about 1980.⁹ In brief, these disputes were touched off by a collapse of faith in positivistic inquiry, a collapse attributable to the continued (but by now widely acknowledged] decline of the notion of objectively attainable truth. Although the problems involved had been raised earlier in the century, this crisis became particularly evident in the late 1950s and early 1960s in the philosophy of science advanced by such figures as Karl Popper (whose work of the 1930s was now becoming more widely known), Peter Winch, Michael Polanyi, Imre Lakatos, and Thomas Kuhn.¹⁰

At issue was the increasing suspicion that the pursuit of truth was little more than the ever-clearer articulation of covert premises (for example, Kuhn’s “paradigms”) which themselves were rarely subjected to scrutiny. As such, “normal science”—for instance, concentrating on something external to ourselves and trying to produce an empirically true statement about its properties – began to look more and more like a network of legitimation-processes for unstated world-views. Hence the most vulnerable aspect of both the scientific enterprise and any historical work influenced by the methods of science was the claim that the individual researcher’s personal interests could be factored out of his or her research. The attack on objectivity continued in West Germany during the 1960s with the spectacular rise of Gadamerian hermeneutics. (The first edition of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method [Wahrheit und Methode] appeared in 1960: see section IV below, where it will be discussed as one of Dahlhaus’s central sources.¹¹) And the crumbling of faith in objectivity and in the possibility of what Weber had called “value-freedom” was spurred onward in the much-vaunted “positivist dispute” [Positivismus - streit) from 1961 to about 1971, pitting Popper and Hans Albert as “critical rationalists” on the more traditional (or “conservative”) side against Adorno and Jürgen Habermas as proponents of a dialectical vision of critical theory and “societal totality” on the other.¹²

By the mid-1960s, a new factor had electrifyingly politicized all of this: the rise of the student movement and the New Left, which peaked in the upheavals of 1968 but continued with considerable strength until about 1974.¹³ (As is widely known, the New Left insisted that the axioms tacitly undergirding traditional, “value-free” research were little more than conservative – sometimes repressive – political positions.) By the later 1970s, however, the New Left had become politically ineffectual, as a result of the ascendancy of pragmatism, neo-conservatism, and occasionally outright governmental legislation. This Tendenzwende, or change in the climate of opinion, had become particularly noticeable by 1977, a date referred to by German leftists as the “German Autumn.”¹⁴

Still, the late 1960s and 70s saw the rise in the West German universities of sociological and Marxist proponents of varying degrees of orthodoxy, confrontation, and activism. One faction stemmed from the critical-theory tradition of the Frankfurt School and centered around the work of the increasingly controversial Adorno¹⁵ and the influential writings on the theory of knowledge and society by Habermas. But other, more politically committed figures also played prominent roles in the ongoing tensions, as, for example, in the much-noted Kursbuch 15 proclamation in 1968 of the death of “bourgeois literary criticism” (including Adorno’s aesthetic system) by Walter Böhlich, Karl Markus Michel, Yaak Karsunke, and Hans Magnus Enzensberger.¹⁶ The rejection of Adorno by the committed left in the late 1960s on the grounds of artistic elitism, as well as because of his defense of aesthetic autonomy and work-immanence (probably the key terms of the aesthetic debate of the time) is a central factor here, one that will be revisited in section III. Because it concerned a musician and prolific writer on musical topics, the heated Adorno dispute around 1970 could scarcely be ignored by the institution of musicology – neither by radicalized students within the discipline nor by any Musikwissenschaftler, such as Dahlhaus, with a pronounced aesthetic and methodological bent.¹⁷

The human sciences [Geisteswissenschaften) felt these challenges with particular intensity. For example, Peter Uwe Hohendahl, writing in 1985 from the standpoint of the left, described the literary-critical crisis as follows:

The criticism of [literary] criticism desolated and thus laid bare the institutional foundations that everyone had blindly considered self-evident. If “bourgeois criticism” was abruptly declared dead, this did not mean—as the New Left had prophesied – the end of German literary criticism but was rather an incentive to interrogate the institution critically. The interrogation concentrated on the relationship between the function of criticism and the social structure of the Federal Republic of Germany.… The new perspective required by our object induces us to push traditional questions of the history of ideas into the background in order to foreground questions that were not traditionally posed.¹⁸

Several features of this account deserve comment before we move on to a more direct consideration of Dahlhaus. First, Hohendahl’s verb, “interrogate,” with its edgy, political connotations, conveys the ideological tension and accusatory atmosphere within the German human sciences in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Second, Hohendahl implies that the substance of the interrogation concerned something beyond mere “social structure” as abstractly formulated. What was really at stake was concrete praxis: West Germany’s confrontation with and assimilation of its National Socialist past (and of the history that had led up to that past], all considered within the current tensions sparked by the competing political agendas of the West German left, center, and right. Finally, Hohendahl touches on one of the most prominent features of the literary-critical revolution in the past two decades: what was said by the “traditionalist” literary critics was becoming ignored in favor of how it was said and, above all, why it was said. The actual results and claims made by established literary criticism (or, pari passu, by history, science – or musicology) receded in importance, indeed, seemed almost irrelevant, before the new, sociological interrogation. Debates were no longer to center on overt content; rather, the topic was the concealed motivation of the researcher, or better, of the literary-critical or historical institution as a whole.

The most extreme, publicized manifestations of these developments occurred outside German musicology, most of whose leading figures were remaining generally faithful to its traditional mix of positivistic empiricism and Geistesgeschichte. But that mix was now endangered through the rise of epistemological and hermeneutic models outside the discipline that mainstream musicologists seemed, thus far, to be resisting. Ominously, the idealistic self-containment of “great music” had been breached through Adorno’s sharp ideology critique of substantial portions of the musical canon. Adorno’s passionate assaults on Wagner, Strauss, Stravinsky, and others (which, as Albrecht Riethmüller has recently written, “brought political argumentation into apolitical musical circles” that would clearly have preferred to have their “quest for beautiful inwardness” remain undisturbed)¹⁹ encouraged others to make even more emphatically politicized invasions into the canon, as well as into the disciplines that were claiming to explicate it. (Riethmüller recalls, for example, “the feverish Adornitis, which so many students around and after 1968 seem to have caught, down to the linguistic mannerisms,” even though, in fact, this passing epidemic produced few lasting results within German musicology.²⁰) Moreover, by the early 1970s West German musicology was encountering vigorous challenges ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Complete Bibliography
• PART ONE HISTORIOGRAPHY, HISTORY, METHODOLOGY
• PART TWO ITALIAN OPERA
• PART THREE STRUCTURE AND CONTENT: SHORTER ESSAYS
• PART FOUR SYMPHONIC READINGS
• Index