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  • Musikwissenschaft als Kulturwissenschaft damals und heute. Internationales Symposion (1998) zum Jubiläum der Institutsgründung an der Universität Wien vor 100 Jahren
  • Tomi Mäkelä
Musikwissenschaft als Kulturwissenschaft damals und heute. Internationales Symposion (1998) zum Jubiläum der Institutsgründung an der Universität Wien vor 100 Jahren. Ed. by Theophil Antonicek und Gernot Gruber. pp. 253. Wiener Veröffentlichungen zur Musikwissenschaft, 40. (Tutzing, Schneider, 2005, €48. ISBN 3-7952-1166-2.)

'It is the honourable duty for us descendants to commemorate the establishing of the department of musicology at the University of Vienna in the year 1898.' This congratulatory sentence (p. 7) opens the preface to a collection of essays by prominent Continental authors, based on an international symposium of 1998. Its title suggests that musicology is, or at least can be, 'Kulturwissenschaft'—it is, interestingly enough, not quite clear whether this is to be understood as a postulate or an option—and that this notion is as valid today as it was a century ago. To propose that Viennese musicology more than other distinguished 'schools' was an important forerunner of the 'new' and 'critical' tendencies of the 1980s onwards may provoke nit-picking comments particularly the River Spree and among those, including this reviewer, who would prefer to give Carl Dahlhaus and his Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte (1977) the credit for opening up musicology to a modern, culturally supported pluralist enquiry. The editors of the present volume stress that this emphasis is typical of musicology in Vienna in the 1990s rather than earlier—with the important exception of its very beginning. According to Theophil Antonicek and Gernot Gruber, the reason for the celebration [End Page 642] of the department with reference to 'culture' is less the tradition of Viennese musicology as such but the importance of its second professor, Guido Adler.

Adler followed Eduard Hanslick as the chairman of 'Theorie und Geschichte der Musik' in 1898. The greatest father figure of Austrian musicology, Adler doubtless deserves everyone's respect, ranking even higher perhaps than another another classic figure of the imperial era in Vienna, Sigmund Freud, does among the community of professional psychologists today. Adler began with studies of historic development in the Western world with reference to folk music (Studien zur Geschichte der Harmonie, 1881), and soon proceeded to programmatic essays like 'Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft' (1885). His role in establishing the series Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich (DTÖ) can hardly be overestimated. One of his most successful books was Der Stil in der Musik (1911), and his edited Handbuch der Musikgeschichte (1924, 2nd edn. 1930) is a classic of pre-war Continental humanism. Beyond the limits of the old Austrian empire he was instrumental in founding the International Musicological Society in 1927. Close personal contacts with Mahler and the Second Viennese School as well as administrative activities in Viennese musical life made him a modern representative of 'open' musicology. He provided an account of his manifold activities in Wollen und Wirken: Aus dem Leben eines Musikhistorikers (1935), celebrating an era that, in Stefan Zweig's word, had already become 'yesterday's world'.

Adler's singular presence as a musicologist in pre-1938 Austria also guarantees him a symbolic status with regard to the difficult present-day situation of the discipline in Vienna. Even though the idea of musicology as a scholarship of culture may not be more typical of the Viennese tradition than of any other (to a certain degree, musicologists can hardly avoid being cultural historians), Adler's multilayered conception of musicology as a university discipline has indeed been preserved in Vienna better than in most other institutions in the world. To turn again to page 7 of the present volume, his 'heirs' in Austrian musicology play with the question of what 'he' might actually have thought about the 'crisis of the humanities' today and about the problem of legitimizing musicology in a society confronted with higher energy prices and decreasing academic salaries. Even though 'culture' might not be the first category to come to one's mind when Guido Adler is mentioned (rather, style and tradition), he established a broad concept of music research that embraced the history of...

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