Babette E. Babich: "Postmodern Musicology" in:

V. E. Taylor and C. Winquist, eds., Encyclopedia of Postmodernism, (New York: Routledge, 2001).

The discipline of musicology, like the word itself which the Oxford English Dictionary dates only back to 1909 (or even 1915), is a twentieth-century, specifically Anglo-American, institution echoing the tradition of French musicologie and with analogies to German Musikwissenschaft. As a modern and ineluctably postmodern project, musicology derives from a predominantly Austro-German generation of scholars who translated a continentally European tradition of analysis (Heinrich Schenker and, in London, Donald Francis Tovey and Hans Keller) and formal music theory (routinely articulated by then-contemporary new composers: Arnold Schoenberg, Rudolf Réti, and Theodor Adorno, as well as Karl-Heinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez) into English language university contexts.

More than a knowledge of music history, acoustics and aesthetics, harmony and counterpoint, modern musicology ambitions a specifically, even positivistically epistemological project. Its methods range from the formal, structuralist schemes of analysis (such as Schenker's hierarchy of levels [Stufen] or lines [Ursatz/Urlinie], culminating in precise and mathematically parsed expressions of high theoretical modernism), to Schoenberg's encompassing retrieve of traditional music theory culminating in his own modernist twelve-tone compositional theory. The difference between modern and postmodern musicology is rooted in the same method Friedrich Nietzsche had charged with a painless triumph over science in our own times. Instead of a comprehensive, absolute understanding of music, postmodern musicology reflects not only the proliferation of smaller or local narratives and points of view Jean-François Lyotard analysed as the postmodern epistemic condition in the wake of the demise of "grand narratives" and a monotonic (Western) Enlightenment perspective, but the inherent skepticism or ironic sensibility of a sophisticated era characterized by Umberto Eco as the "age of lost innocence." Music is not made for music's sake but is keyed to commissions, recording and concert fees, and above all: record charts. For Derek Scott, "classical music is as involved in the marketplace as pop and jazz..." (134).

If the formalism and high theory of modern musicology arguably reflect frustrations endemic to émigré scholars in an American context, postmodern musicology's disciplinary fortunes inherently mirror post-structuralist and deconstructive movements in the wake of postmodern theory on every level, inevitably challenging the whiggish convictions of a discipline devoted to high art or traditional Western concert music. Thus the new historicism reflects radical changes in the larger discipline of history. Debates on early music may be conducted not only from ancient or modern but also postmodern perspectives (See "Symposium: The Early Music Debate: Ancients, Moderns, Postmoderns" in The Journal of Musicology [1992] X/1: 113-130). Postmodern history of music goes beyond philological or autographical study to include heretofore new sources, transforming archival work with archaeological, sociological, anthropological even engineering and materials science, etc. The traditional focus on Western music is called into question and all musicology, in a postmodern echo of Walter Pater's originally formalist and ur-modern musing, might now be said to aspire to the condition of ethnomusicology. Bruno Nettl, in "The Institutionalization of Musicology," observes that Waldo Selden Pratt's claim that "musicology must include every conceivable discussion of musical topics" (293) includes the creative consequences entailed by Charles Seeger's seminal transformation of ethnomusicology. Further transformations resulted from what Ellen Koskoff names "a rebellious lot of postmodernists with their individual readings, deconstructions and non-centered, non-theories" (546). Withal, the ideal (and value) of art music come under attack as betraying the values of a particular (i.e., bourgeois or upper/middle) class.

Kerman's provocative study, Contemplating Music, with its plea for a more responsibly or rigorously historical and interpretive understanding of music, including the variety of necessary aspects of musicology: "paleography, transcription, repertory studies, archival work, biography, bibliography, sociology, Aufführungspraxis, schools and influences, style analysis, individual analysis ..." (123), elicited a predictably reactionary, positivistic response from conservative musicologists who rightly heard in this the challenges of the genealogical theory of Michel Foucault together with a panoply of perspectives drawn from such divergent (and variously) received scholarly arenas as queer theory, as well as cultural and race studies, feminism, deconstruction and structuralism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, semiotics, and film studies. Such challenges, like the modishly "rebellious" (to use Koskoff's term) efforts of Lawrence Kramer's postmodernism, reflect the explicitly heteronomous project of postmodern musicology as what is now envisioned as "conveying the connectedness of all musical thinking" (Cook/Everist, xii).

Postmodern musicology thus offers a radicalized continuation of modern musicology by consummately modern means. Resisting the progress ideal of totalising knowledge, it includes aspects formerly (formally) excluded as irrelevant to music as aspects forming the broad basis of the culture of music in all its dimensions. Emblematically, José A. Bowen's "Finding the Music in Musicology: Performance History and Musical Works" cites Nelson Goodman and footnotes Ludwig Wittgenstein along with Lydia Goehrs' The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, but Bowen concentrates less on philosophy than audiophile discography. Hence, in its most general expression, postmodern musicology responds to what Fredric Jameson calls the "cultural logic of late capitalism" reflected in the same culture industry transforming radio and television media into comprehensive agents of unidimensional influence. Although most contemporary music hearers are no longer likely to know the amateur's condition of musical practice so important for Roland Barthes' reflections, more people seemingly hear more music of more kinds than ever before -- not only by attending concert performances or listening to the radio but also in the multifarious contexts made possible by recorded music: music video, web audio files, music broadcasts in office buildings, restaurants and malls, elevators, airplanes, etc.-- and television and radio commercials have always had distinguishable "soundtracks." Following the exactly "background" conventionality of film music (a focal subject of postmodern musicology), music is the ambient atmosphere of postmodern culture and postmodern musicology reflects the popular diffusion and scholarly, theoretically exemplary influence of electronically recorded music, particularly in its digitalized, i.e., not record and not taped (i.e.: analogue) format. If musicology typically focuses on the notational tradition of Western art music, it also has an affinity for the study of recorded music (this runs from the early records to digitalized compact disc recordings and beyond and is the reason most guides to musical style and language include lists of appropriate recordings: fixing not only the work but also the performer/performance and the conditions of production as exemplary).

The transformation of hobby hifi into the culture of high end audio sensibilities informing every decision to purchase an automobile or computer, metamorphosing the corner record store into a host of different, monstrously huge department theme stores (FNAC, Virgin, Tower, etc.) dedicated to retailing recorded music in every major city of the world, illustrates the late capitalist exponential proliferation of market ventures beyond suburban-mall developments to the Internet. In the virtual marketplace, consumers are imagined as expressing an infinity of different musical needs/moods.

Postmodern musicologies do not question the imperatives of late capitalism. But they do move away from encompassing accounts or critiques toward ironic or playful, pluralized and conscientiously diverse perspectives, changing the musicological canon in theory -- without altering the standard repertoire of music on offer in high culture (cf. Randel). Yet the variety of perspectives can be overstated. Thus Kramer's Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, could appropriate the "canon" of multifarious attention to interdisciplinary perspectives and the broad cultural context that belongs to (if it also transgresses) the persistently romantic and nineteenth century ideal of music. Yet, although a composer, Kramer does not write as one and his critical categories are surprisingly limited to deconstructivist/post-structuralist literary theory.

Newer musicologies seek to rethink the "disappointments" of such literally literary allies in favor not only of new musical histories and performance studies but also the broader theoretical range of ethnomusicology. One review of style codes as social conventions is compellingly detailed with the observation that although "the interval of the tritone ... conveyed emotional anguish to seventeenth century Venetians" it lacked the same meaning for contemporary "Scottish Highlanders. There is an old Piobairachad of uncertain date bearing the title Praise of Marion ('Guileagag Moraig') which, in one variation alone, contains 24 tritones within 32 bars" (141). In this way, ethnomusicology necessarily includes context, musical and otherwise, articulated along a shifting border between the musical and the non-musical. The voices of critical musicology include not only ethnomusicologists per se, such as Nettl, Koskoff, Philip Bohlman, along with students of nationalism in music, like Richard Taruskin and Pamela Potter, but also analysts and theorists such as Arnold Whittal, Robert Fink, Nicholas Cook, Mark Everist, Leo Treitler, students of film music and musical semiotics, music psychology, and theorists of musical style, such as Rose Rosengard Subotnik as well as Carolyn Abbate and historians of gender in music, such as Ruth Solie, the historian Gary Tomlinson and the historian of music, Katherine Bergeron, as well as philosophers like Goehr, Daniel Charles, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Catherine Clèment, and Stanley Cavell representing some of the other "voices" claiming a hearing along the byways of the musicological mainstream.

Modernism in music begins with the invention of recording -- a necessary coincidence from Adorno's perspective, as Michael Chanan's study further documents -- and was perhaps hardly accidentally simultaneously entombed in the age of electronic reproduction. Postmodern musicology's attention to performance practice continues modernist attention to the importance of historical performance practices (including "authentic" or period instruments) to the technically "prepared" shock of presentation increasingly routine in the performative context ranging from John Cage's 4'33" to George Crumb's Makrokosmos, installing the fetishized piano laid bare in time and as performance (object).

Although postmodern music is as unwieldy a term as any in the postmodern nomenclature, it is better defined than in the other arts just because (continuing an ancient parallel) modern music is as distinct a phenomenon as modern (or postmodern) architecture. Postmodern architecture does not alter the ethos of modern design but flattens it out: absorbing the demands of critique with unmistakably, calculatedly, superficial detail. Form still follows function but function reflected in formal design elements (quoted columns echoing the new canon of the toy block writ large, and not, say, pretending to quote a Doric order, except and this is the idea, in the consumer's/reviewer's mind, and so on). If modern music is characterised by its atonality and dissonance (à la Schoenberg) and hence in terms of its revolutionary disposition with regard to the canons of both classical and romantic musical styles, the fascination with the idea (not the sounding) of silences in (discourse on) postmodern music (via modernist minimalists like Anton Webern, John Cage, Morton Feldman, etc.) characterizes the impossible opposition (a music that cannot be heard, a music that is "not music") that is the inevitable legacy of modern music as Adorno describes it.

This is the old new music at the end of the twentieth century now received with a striking absence of concert-hall outrage or even reviewer's pique (thus, as one critic yawns, Philip Glass stretches opera's limits less and less with each new premiere), incorporating minimalism and atonality with melody but also the higher ambitions of precisely pre-classical, quasi-baroque, pseudo-liturgical musical pieces or else, not always alternatively, cosmic celebrations of scientific images, worldviews, and transformations.

The jaded trajectory of new music bears numerous analyses. Jost Hermand assesses the vanishing of an authentic avant-garde in music as coordinate with the "alibi" motivation of a postwar interest in musicians formerly denigrated as decadent. The musical avant-garde had failed to effect not only critique but change for a host of reasons -- including access to concert and opera halls, recording studios and a sufficient mass of listener or consumer support but most perniciously because it ran awry of the National Socialist music aesthetic. For Hermand, the return to the atonal in Germany as revived at the Darmstadt festivals, and the serialism and minimalism celebrated in mid-century at Harvard, preserves the vain ideal of absolute music in the absence of political/social reference. Beyond modernist sensibilities, postmodern music is music that seeks to work as new after the eager hope of shocking one's listeners has been sacrificed to the reality of the jaded ear and the continuing saga of disinterest, lack of access to concert and opera halls, recording studios or contracts and so on. The focus on jazz as progressively, impeccably playful postmodern music retains this politically corrective aura or phantasm. Thus Scott declares "12-bar blues" more important "to twentieth century music than the 12-note row" (139).

Perhaps more than anything else, the postmodern condition of music corresponds to the recurrence of the religious in the absence of belief. This has many expressions from Henryk Górecki (b. 1933) and Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) to the runaway commercial success of Chant, recorded by the Benedictine monks of Santo Domingo de Silos, and even "new age" compositions. Although the same musicological canon that excludes popular music likewise dismisses "new age" music, "serious" or art musical compositions of the late twentieth century share many spiritual overtones with new age music, just as Stockhausen's atonal music recalls religious Tibetan tone poems.

Aligning the modern in music with the avant-garde, the noise/music of Cage remains closer to what the composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century with their generous enthusiasm for "New Music" (Gustav Mahler [1860-1911] and Claude Debussy [1862-1918]) could praise as then-contemporaneous externs (particularly the music of Schoenberg [1874-1951] and the Second Viennese School, e.g., Alan Berg [1885-1935], Ferruccio Busoni [1866-1924], Anton Webern [1883-1945]). Such a fondness for the avant-garde, such an optimistic sense of the liberating qualities of music as pure sound has markedly diminished in composers of the late twentieth century. Postmodern musicology reflects the disappearing difference between art and popular culture in a postcritical world culture in the wake of the late twentieth century de-construction of geographical, political/social, but above all economic walls and borders. Thus, the Kronos Quartet or Hilliard Ensemble offer the quintessentially postmodern proof that recording new old music (Carlo Gesualdo [1560-1613] or Thomas Tallis [1505/6-1585]) is as profitable as new new music (George Crumb [b. 1929] or Arvo Pärt [b. 1935]).

Bibliography and Further Reading

Bergeron, K. and Bohlman, P. V. (eds) (1992) Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Bowen, J. A. (1999) 'Finding the Music in Musicology: Performance History and Musical Works', in Cook/Everist.

Chanan, M. (1999) From Handel to Hendrix: The Composer in the Public Sphere, London: Verso.

Chanan. (1994) Musica Practica: The Social Practice of Western Music from Gregorian Chant to Postmodernism, London: Verso.

Cook, N. and Everist, M. (eds) (1999) Rethinking Music, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hermand, J. (1991) 'Avant-Garde, Modern, Postmodern: The Music (almost) Nobody Wants to Hear', I. Hoesterey (ed.) Zeitgeist in Babel: The Post-Modernist Controversy, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Kerman, J. (1985) Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology, Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Koskoff, E. (1999) 'What Do We Want to Teach When We Teach Music', in Cook/Everist.

Kramer, L. (1995) Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Krims, A. (1998) Music/Ideology: Resisting the Aesthetic, Amsterdam: G+B Arts.

Nettl, B. (1999) 'The Institutionalization of Musicology: Perspectives of a North American Ethnomusicologist', in Cook/Everist.

Randel, D. M. (1992) 'The Canons in the Musicological Toolbox', in Bergeron/Bohlman.

Scott, D. (1999) 'Postmodernism and Music', in S. Sim, (ed) The Routledge Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought. New York: Routledge.

Solie, R., (ed.) (1993) Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Musical Scholarship, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Taruskin, R. (1997) Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Tomlinson, G. (1993) 'Musical Pasts and Postmodern Musicologies', Current Musicology, 53: 18-24.

Treitler, L. (1999) 'The Historiography of Music: Issues of Past and Present', in Cook/Everist.

Williams, Alastair (1997) New Music and the Claims of Modernity, Aldershot: Ashgate.