The myth of empirical historiography: A response to Joseph N. Straus

Musical Quarterly

Volumn 84, Issue 1, 2000, Pages 30-39

  Shreffler, Anne C ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 61149140962     PISSN: 00274631     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/mq/84.1.30     Document Type: Letter

References (20)

1. I have presented some preliminary thoughts on this subject in my article "Ein 'neues Bild der Musik': Der Paradigmenwechsel nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg," in Klassizistische Moderne: Eine Begleitpublikation zur Konzertreihe im Rahmen der Veranstaltungen "10 Jahre Paul Sacher Stiftung," ed. Felix Meyer (Winterthur: Amadeus, 1996), 187-97, and in more developed form in my paper "Who Killed Neo-Classicism? The Paradigm Shift after 1945," read at the National Meeting of the American Musicological Society, Baltimore, 1996
2. Carl Dahlhaus has pointed out the difficulties involved in recognizing, selecting, and defining a music-historical fact ("musikhistorische Tatsache"): see his Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte (Cologne: Hans Gerig, 1977), 58-59
3. reprinted in Elliott Schwartz and Barney Childs, eds., Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music (New York: Da Capo, 1978), 243-50 (Babbitt's original title was "The Composer as Specialist")
4. Gianmario Borio and Hermann Danuser, eds., Im Zenit der Moderne: Die Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt 1946-66, 4 vols. (Freiburg im Br.: Rombach, 1997)
5. Pierre Boulez, John Cage, Correspondance et documents, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez et al. (Winterthur: Amadeus, 1990)
6. Amy Beal, "Negotiating Cultural Allies: American Music in Darmstadt, 1946-56," Journal of the American Musicological Society 53 (2000), forthcoming
7. also Peter Niklas Wilson, "Stockhausen, der Epigone? Karlheinz Stockhausen und die amerikanische Avantgarde," Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 149, no. 5 (1988): 6-11
8. John Holzaepfel, David Tudor and the Performance of American Experimental Music, 1950-1959 (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 1994)
9. Jonathan W. Bernard has made an excellent beginning; see his "The Legacy of the Second Viennese School," in Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern: A Companion to the Second Viennese School, ed. Bryan Simms (Westport, CT, and London: Greenwood Press, 1999), 315-83
10. Brody reveals how Milton Babbitt's ideas were strongly influenced by thinkers such as Clement Greenberg and Dwight Macdonald, who in the 1940s sought to protect high culture from the growing infatuation with Soviet-style mass culture; see his "'Music for the Masses': Milton Babbitt's Cold War Music Theory," Musical Quarterly 77 (1993): 161-92
11. Serge Guilbaut, in his book How New York Stole the Idea of Modem Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), similarly suggests that "avant-garde art succeeded because the work and the ideology that supported it, articulated in the painters' writings as well as conveyed in images, coincided fairly closely with the ideology that came to dominate American political life after the 1948 presidential elections. This was the 'new liberalism' . . . that, unlike the ideologies of the conservative right and the Communist left, not only made room for avant-garde dissidence but accorded to such dissidence a position of paramount importance" (p. 3)
12. The Congress of Cultural Freedom, headed by the composer Nicolas Nabokov, was one such organization; see his Bagágh: Memoires of a Russian Cosmopolitan (New York: Atheneum, 1975), 232-46
13. Jane Coppock, "A Conversation with Arthur Berger," Perspectives of New Music (fall-winter 1978): 49
14. Musical Quarterly 39 (1953): 513-27
15. The New York Times Book Review, 27 Nov. 1949
16. Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis, Copland: Since 1943 (London and New York: Marion Boyars, 1992), 149-52. A sketch page for the Piano Quartet showing twelve-tone rows and chords is reproduced on p. 150
17. Schoenberg and his School: The Contemporary Stage of the Language of Music, trans. Dika Newlin (New York: Da Capo, 1975), x. (First printing: New York, Philosophical Library, 1949)
18. See Sabine Meine, "'Schönberg ist Tot': Es Lebe Schönberg! René Leibowitz - Ein Pionier der 'Stunde Null' im Spannungsfeld von Fortschritt und Tradition," Das Orchester 2 (1996): 16-21
19. Leibowitz, "Two Composers: A Letter from Hollywood," Partisan Review 15 (1948): 364
20. Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (New York: Horizon Press, 1959)