Biography and the New Musicology
نویسنده
چکیده
While modern musicology has seen the frequent exploration of issues of historiography and canonicity, biography itself has largely eluded critical investigation until much more recently. The discipline has lately challenged the aesthetic of musical canon, for many decades a largely uncontested phenomenon, as well as that of the Great Composer. Recent scholarship has similarly addressed the matter of the writing of music history from a critical standpoint, and examined the relationship between canonicity and other important literary modes such as music criticism. Nonetheless, current musicological discourse has seldom engaged with a literary genre so rich for its documentary significance as musical biography, which provided an ideal means by which to debate the claims of specific composers and their works to the available cultural ground as well as yielding firm foundations on which to construct modern music history. Conversely, the present trend within the so-called “New Musicology” towards the exploration of musical contexts, prompted by Joseph Kerman’s renowned critique of the discipline and the anti-formalist stance cultivated thereafter, has actively encouraged its practitioners to take into account issues of biography in relation to studies of music. But the ideologies of musical biography themselves remained largely unexplored, and in consequence, musicology may have unwittingly absorbed wholesale many of the tendencies and preoccupations that have accumulated within the genre in the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
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