The New Musicology is a term applied to a wide body of work produced by many musicologists who consider themselves and their musicology neither new nor New. Often based on the work of Theodor Adorno (and Walter Benjamin) and feminist, gender studies, gay and lesbian studies, queer theory, or postcolonial hypotheses, the New Musicology is the cultural study, analysis, and criticism of music. As Susan McClary says: Musicology is reasoned discourse concerning music (Greek: μουσικη = music and λογος = word or reason). In other words: the whole body of systematized knowledge about music which results from the application of a scientific method of investigation or research, or of philosophical speculation and rational systematization to the facts, the processes and the... Max Horkheimer (front left), Theodor Adorno (front right), and Jürgen Habermas in the background, right, in 1965 at Heidelberg. ... Walter Benjamin (July 15, 1892 – September 27, 1940) was a German Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. ... Feminism is a social theory and political movement primarily informed and motivated by the experience of women. ... Gender studies is a theoretical work in the social sciences or humanities that focuses on issues of sex and gender in language and society, and often addresses related issues including racial and ethnic oppression, postcolonial societies, and globalization. ... This article or section is not written in the formal tone expected of an encyclopedia article. ... This article is in need of attention from an expert on the subject. ... Cultural studies is an academic discipline popular among a diverse group of Anglo-American scholars. ... Susan McClary (born 2 October 1946) is a musicologist considered to be a significant figure in the New Musicology. She is noted for her work combining musicology and feminism. ...

• "Musicology fastidiously declares issues of musical signification off-limits to those engaged in legitimate scholarship."

In contrast, McClary's 'new musicology' treats music: Signification is the act of signifying or being a sign or meaning. ...

• "as a medium that participates in social formation by influencing the ways we perceive our feelings, our bodies, our desires, our very subjectivities - even if it does so surreptitiously, without most of us knowning how. It is too important a cultural force to be shrouded by mystified notions of Romantic transcendence."

This may be interpreted as saying there is no absolute music, that all music has sexual, political, personal and emotional programs. Romantic love is a form of love that is often regarded as different from mere needs driven by sexual desire, or lust. ... Absolute music, less often abstract music, is a term used within the classical music field to describe music that is not explicitly about anything, non-representational or non-objective. ... Human sexuality is the expression of sexual feelings. ... Politics is the process by which decisions are made within groups. ... personal could refer to personal identity; a personal advertisement; an persons ego or self image, interests or goals; a personal problem; personal involvement; a trademark belonging to Sony. ... In psychology and common terminology, emotion is the language of a persons internal state of being, normally based in or tied to their internal (physical) and external (social) sensory feeling. ... Program music is music intended to evoke extra-musical ideas, images in the mind of the listener by musically representing a scene, image or mood [1]. By contrast, absolute music stands for itself and is intended to be appreciated without any particular reference to the outside world. ...

Thus, new musicology has much in common with ethnomusicology. In the words of Rose Rosengard Subotnik: Ethnomusicology (from the Greek ethnos = nation and mousike = music), formerly comparative musicology, is the study of music in its cultural context, cultural musicology. ...

• "For me...the notion of an intimate relationship between music and society functions not as a distant goal but as a starting point of great immediacy, and not as an hypothesis but as an assumption. It functions as an idea about a relationship which in turn allows the examination of that relationship from many points of view and its exploration in many directions. It is an idea that generates studies; the goal of which (or at least one important goal of which) is to articulate something essential about why any particular music is the way it is in particular, that is, to achieve insight into the character of its identity."

She counts as her influences Arnold Schoenberg, Theodor Adorno, Immanuel Kant, Leonard Meyer, and others. "Like Schoenberg, though in a very different way, Meyer refused to undervalue the significance of music and, more generally, of aesthetic models for making sense of human knowledge and experience. Like Schoenberg's enterprise, though in very different ways, Meyer's criticism is responsible in a profoundly moral as well as intellectual way." (p.297n18) To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... Schoenberg redirects here. ... Max Horkheimer (front left), Theodor Adorno (front right), and Jürgen Habermas in the background, right, in 1965 at Heidelberg. ... Immanuel Kant (22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804), was a German philosopher from Königsberg in East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). ... Leonard B. Meyer (b. ...

New musicologists include:

• Lawrence Kramer
• Susan McClary
• Rose Rosengard Subotnik
• Richard Leppert
• Robert Walser

Ellie Hisama (2001, p. 181) adds the following names: Susan McClary (born 2 October 1946) is a musicologist considered to be a significant figure in the New Musicology. She is noted for her work combining musicology and feminism. ... Robert Walser is a musicologist associated with the new musicology. He is author of Running With the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music, ISBN 0819562602. ...

• Lori Burns, Marion Guck, Marianne Kielian-Gilbert, David Lewin, Judy Lochhead, Fred Maus, Joseph Straus, and Suzanne Cusick

Other figures who might be included are the gay musicologist Philip Brett, feminist musicologist Marcia Citron and musical anthropologist Georgina Born. The fields of music and exoticism and orientalism have received a good deal of attention, especially in the work of Jonathan Bellman and Ralph P. Locke. Ethnomusicology has been influenced by the New Musicology in various ways; this is particularly clear in the work of Kofi Agawu. A recurrent concern for New Musicologists has been the work and canonisation of Beethoven, studying the relationship of his work, its reception (especially in terms of his 'heroic style', investigated in depth by Scott Burnham in his book Beethoven Hero, though Burnham perhaps should not be considered as part of the movement), and its influence in terms of masculine hegemony. New Musicologists dealing with this subject include Kramer, McClary, Brett, as well as Tia DeNora and Sanna Pederson. The dichotomy between the constructions of subjectivity to be found in Beethoven and Schubert (especially with reference to the latter's supposed homosexuality) have also generated much debate; as well as the aforementioned figures, the work of Maynard Solomon is especially important in this context. David Lewin (July 2, 1933-May 5, 2003) was an American music theorist and composer. ... Georgina Born is a British academic, anthropologist and musician. ... Exoticism (from exotic) is a trend in art and design, influenced by some ethnic groups or civilizations since the late 19th-century. ... For Orientalist Architecture, see Moorish Revival. ... Ethnomusicology (from the Greek ethnos = nation and mousike = music), formerly comparative musicology, is the study of music in its cultural context, cultural musicology. ... Ludwig van Beethoven Ludwig van Beethoven (baptized December 17, 1770 – March 26, 1827) was a German composer of Classical music, the predominant musical figure in the transitional period between the Classical and Romantic eras. ... Hegemony (pronounced or ) (Greek: ) is the dominance of one group over other groups, with or without the threat of force, to the extent that, for instance, the dominant party can dictate the terms of trade to its advantage; more broadly, cultural perspectives become skewed to favor the dominant group. ... This article is in need of attention. ... For the crater on the moon, see Schubert (crater) Franz Schubert Franz Peter Schubert (January 31, 1797 – November 19, 1828), was an Austrian composer. ... Maynard Solomon is the author most recently of Mozart, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography, which won the Deems Taylor Award as did his biography, Beethoven, and his study of Charles Ives. ...

New Musicology is fundamentally an Anglo-American phenomenon and has had little impact in continental Europe and elsewhere. Whilst some of the figures involved in the discipline claim some allegiance to Theodor Adorno, their work has little in common with the wider field of Adorno studies, especially in Germany. Adorno's own radical comments on gender, ethnicity and sexuality are rarely taken into account. New Musicology might essentially be considered as a distinct phenomenon from the field of German music sociology bequeathed by the work of Adorno and before him that of Max Weber and Ernst Bloch (later figures in this tradition would include Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Hans G. Helms). New Musicologists frequently exhibit strongly anti-German tendencies (with a particular focus upon nineteenth-century German music theorists including Adolf Bernhard Marx and Eduard Hanslick, also the twentieth-century figures Heinrich Schenker and Carl Dahlhaus); this is especially pronounced in the work of Richard Taruskin. A particularly fundamental distinction has to do with attitudes towards modernism and popular culture; German music sociologists tend to favour (though by no means uncritically, for example in Adorno's essay 'The Ageing of the New Music') the former and severely criticise the latter, seeing it as inextricably tied to the aesthetics of distraction as demanded by the culture industry. New Musicologists frequently take a diametrically opposed view: implacably hostile and dismissive of most modernist music (as for example in McClary's essay 'Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music Composition’ in Cultural Critique 12 (1989), pp. 57-81), though rarely engaging with actual works in any detail, they look very favourably upon popular music and often argue that it would be better to teach the latter than the former in institutions of higher education. Max Horkheimer (front left), Theodor Adorno (front right), and Jürgen Habermas in the background, right, in 1965 at Heidelberg. ... For other persons named Max Weber, see Max Weber (disambiguation). ... Ernst Simon Bloch (July 8, 1885 - August 4, 1977) was a German Marxist philosopher and atheist theologian. ... Heinz-Klaus Metzger (Born February 6, 1932 in Konstanz) is a German music critic and theoretician. ... Friedrich Heinrich Adolf Bernhard Marx (b. ... This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ... Heinrich Schenker Heinrich Schenker (June 19, 1868 - January 13, 1935) was a music theorist, best known for his approach to musical analysis, now usually called Schenkerian analysis. ... Carl Dahlhaus (June 10, 1928- May 1989), a musicologist from Berlin, has been one of the major contributors to the development of musicology as a scholarly discipline during the post-war era. ... Richard Taruskin is an American musicologist and music historian specializing in theory of performance, Russian music, twentieth-century music, nationalism, theory of modernism, and analysis. ... For Modernism in an American context, see American modernism. ... Popular culture, or pop culture, (literally: the culture of the people) consists of widespread cultural elements in any given society. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... The term culture industry was coined by Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) and Max Horkheimer (1895-1973). ...

Critics of the New Musicology include Pieter van der Toorn and to a lesser extent Charles Rosen. Charles Rosen (born May 5, 1927) is an American pianist and music theorist. ...

See also:

• Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin (July 15, 1892 – September 27, 1940) was a German Marxist literary critic, essayist, translator, and philosopher. ...

Response by and changes in traditional musicology

It is a measure of the rate at which scholarship in music is changing, though, that many would no longer consider McClary's original statements to be valid. Many of the scholarly concerns that used to be associated with New Musicology have now become mainstream. Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music, published in 2005, is an indicator. A major work by an internationally recognized scholar, it reflects a wide knowledge of recent scholarship while simultaneously reflecting the broad humanistic concerns of Taruskin's mentor Paul Henry Lang, author of the 1941 classic Music in Western Civilization.

In light of such intergenerational connections, it is possible to argue that the distinction between an "old" and a "new" musicology is itself the product of a limited historical moment which has now passed.

Source

• Hisama, Ellie M. (2001). Gendering Musical Modernism: The Music of Ruth Crawford, Marion Bauer, and Miriam Gideon. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-64030-X.
• Subotnik, Rose Rosengard (1991). Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0-8166-1873-9.

Further reading

• McClary, Susan (1991). Feminine Endings.
• Subotnik, Rose Rosengard (1991). Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music.
• Solie, Ruth, ed. (1993). Musicology and Difference.
• Tomlinson, Gary (1993). Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others.
• Citron, Marcia (1993). Gender and the Musical Canon.
• Brett, Philip, Wood, Elizabeth and Thomas, Gary C., eds. (1994). Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology.
• Kramer, Lawrence (1995). Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge.
• Subotnik, Rose Rosengard (1996). Deconstructive Variations: Music and Reason in Western Society.
• Schwarz, David (1997). Listening Subjects: Music Psychoanalysis, Culture.
• Bellman, Jonathan, ed. (1998). The Exotic in Western Music.
• Fink, Robert. (1998) Elvis Everywhere: Musicology and Popular Music Studies at the Twilight of the Canon.
• Cook, Nicholas and Everist, Mark, ed. (1999). Rethinking Music.
• McClary, Susan (2000). Conventional Wisdom.
• Born, Georgina and Hesmondhalgh, David (2000). Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music.
• Newell, Derek. (2006) Juxtapositions of the Canonical World in Modern Day Pakistani Cultural Music.

External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

New musicology

• Contemporary Music Theory and the New Musicology: An Introduction
• The New York Review of Books: MUSIC À LA MODE by Lawrence Kramer, reply by Charles Rosen, Volume 41, Number 15 · September 22, 1994
• GregSandow.com: Beethoven Howls Village Voice, December 17, 1985
• GregSandow.com The Secret of the Silver Ticket Village Voice, April 1, 1986, see deconstruction
• The comeback of systematic musicology