Paul Watt - The Oxford Handbook of Music and Intellectual Culture in the Nineteenth Century

What determines the way we talk, write, and think about music of the nineteenth century? In periods of intensified disciplinary self-reflection such as our own, these activities attract ethical and political imputations that lend the question a high degree of urgency. At other times, this question seems almost peripheral or incidental, and its history is at best a marginal concern. After all, many view music as primarily a sounding art, and therefore one that engages us first and foremost through the experience of listening or participation. When we analyze music, and begin to think about formal structure, style, and meaning, and when we consider these things with reference to contextual and historical factors and their broader social significance, we are typically taken to be reflecting on different facets of these ways of experiencing music. When, however, the activity of reflection itself becomes the object of study, we are conventionally held to be no longer dealing with music. The implication then is that the history of the idea of music is not a legitimate topic of musicological reflection when it is considered separately from specific musical works or musical experiences.

This prevailing view issues from a skepticism toward approaches that seem to abstract their object of investigation from social context and conditions of production. It is commonplace, for example, to look critically upon histories of music that cast it as if it were abstracted or autonomous in this way. It has often been argued that this type of history necessarily favors elite musics and Western (particularly European) cultures, promotes a linear view of music history in terms of progressive development, and fetishizes musical texts as embodying timeless truths. In one sense, the history of ideas about music is often viewed in a similar way. Creativity does not occur in a vacuum, we are told, and treating ideas as if they somehow float above social reality and interact only with other ideas along their own autonomous historical trajectory is perhaps an even worse scholarly crime than writing an autonomous history of musical style, because at least the latter deals with music itself.

A similar form of skepticism can be seen across the humanities over the last half a century at least, where it has been directed not only against formalist approaches but also against intellectual history. Intellectual history has often been criticized for focusing on the ways that ideas are presented (including discursive conventions, the use of language and rhetorical patterns), in preference to the practices and larger forces that shaped those forms of representation. This is not merely a question of text versus context, because discursive conventions are themselves a type of context, just as the idea of musical style is a contextual category. It is more a question of whether ideas are simply a reflection of other, putatively more real, thingslike forms of social organization, the movement of money, the division of labor, or the everyday activities of peopleor whether they are in fact indistinguishable from these things, or entirely separate from them. Intellectual history has sometimes been seen as assuming that ideas inhabit a separate realm from social life, and conversely social history often assumes that ideas are mere reflections of social life (McMahon and Moyn ).