Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History: Shaping Modern Musical Thought in Late-Nineteenth-Century Vienna (review)

The fourth volume in the American Musicological Society’s Studies in Music series appropriately explores issues and tensions central to the definition of musicology as a discipline. As Kevin Karnes shows throughout his thought-provoking study, these same issues surfaced again in the late twentieth century, as American musicologists reexamined the assumptions and concerns that underlay the methods that had formed the core of musical scholarship for most of the modern age. As the author suggests, the challenge of history that vexed early musicological pioneers continues to drive innovations in our field as the AMS approaches its landmark seventy-fifth year with a celebratory meeting in Philadelphia planned for November 2009.

Karnes begins with a discussion of positivism and the promise it seemed to hold for academic institutions at the end of the nineteenth century. At that time musicians and music scholars, like their colleagues in art history and the other humanist disciplines, were attempting to raise the visibility and viability of their art in an increasingly science-oriented educational system. By establishing an empiricist research paradigm, art historians argued that their subject was just as advanced as the natural sciences with their scientific method and experimental process. But at the same time, as Karnes demonstrates, the field’s founding fathers felt a deep-seated distrust of the scientific impetus in studying music and other arts, and their published works are rife with the tensions between rational and irrational modes of discourse, between criticism and history.

The main body of Karnes’s book investigates the writings of three important figures in the early history of musicology: Eduard Hanslick, Heinrich Schenker, and Guido Adler. Each author anchors a two-chapter section of the book so that the reader receives an in-depth discussion of the writings under consideration in one chapter and a historical and philosophical context for those writings in the other. In his examinations of each author, Karnes presents the scholar as he has traditionally been portrayed through his best-known works, and then problematizes that portrait by introducing less familiar writings that contradict the neat picture of unflinching radical positivists handed down to modern musicology through the twentieth century. Along the way, Karnes continually reminds the reader that the tensions and contradictions present in these scholars’ works are the same tensions that have more recently led to major upheavals in musicology and her sister disciplines.

Part 1 deals with the legacy of Hanslick’s writings, including his most influential work Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (On the Musically Beautiful [Leipzig: R. Weigel, 1854]) and his more voluminous and less well known works published in the second half of the nineteenth century. Contrary to many modern understandings of Hanslick’s musical scholarship based solely on On the Musically Beautiful, his output as a whole presents at least three contrasting approaches to music historical writing. In his initial treatise, Hanslick proposed a new system of musical aesthetics that would investigate the true nature of beauty and find it in music’s forms and compositional elements, rather than in the unquantifiable feelings of the listener. After 1861, however, he found himself doubting the validity of this position. Turning to a theory of musical beauty based on cultural history, Hanslick compiled a positivist historical account of Viennese concert life (Geschichte des Concert-wesens in Wien [Vienna: W. Braumüller, 1869–1870). In the course of researching this work, though, Hanslick had an epiphany. The “objective,” “empirical” evidence used to research a cultural history of music or art (first-hand accounts from diaries, letters, newspapers, and music journals) consists primarily of the same writings that he created as a critic for the Neue freie Presse. The only difference between the two is time, which creates today’s “historical evidence” out of yesterday’s “subjective interpretations.” The remainder...