Musicologists worry about things the rest of us dont have to (and probably dont want to). So Ive resisted until now facing up to Robert Finks excellent series at NewMusicBox, despite the siren call of this great opening quotation from Kyle Gann: One night in New York City after a concert I was having a drink with my fellow composer Larry Polansky. He was talking about the musicological and restorative work he was doing on music by Johanna Beyer and Harry Partch, I spoke of my analytical writings on the music of Conlon Nancarrow and Mikel Rouse. Finally, Larry said, ‘Composers are now doing the work that musicologists used to do, while the musicologists are all off doing gender studies.’ —Kyle Gann, Rey M. Longyear Lecture, University of Kentucky, 2008 Of course, had the Fink articles been written in this wonderfully conversational stye, I may have jumped in at the start . . . but then, I and people like me, are not the intended audience. Now, though, I have read all four articles, along with the comments, and they make a fascinating read. In the first article, this statement, in particular, caught my eye. I have read the volume in question, and what I thought at the time was that Taruskins ability to assess and write about classical music in this volume simply, well, collapsed. For the professional historian, schooled deeply in this collapse of the master narratives of modern art, perhaps even conscious of having played some small part in their deconstruction, it is a little late in the day for composers and their advocates to demand another chapter of the old familiar story: pre-classical, classical, mannerist; minimalist, postminimalist, maximalist; lather, rinse, repeat. The bafflement with which contemporary composers have read the final volume of the recent Oxford History of Western Music stems in part from this frustrated desire for more stories (about them); Richard Taruskin, like the equally prolix J.K. Rowling, has been adamant that the long narrative arc of his series is over, and there will be no sequels.
Posted on: Mon, 29 Sep 2014 19:12:10 +0000
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