Culture Wars, Canonicity, and A Basic Music Library

Abstract

Since emergence phrase in print and other media in 1991, canonicity has become a key issue among academics and teachers. What should canonicity mean to music librarians? This question is pertinent to library acquisitions and to acquisitions guide A Basic Music Library (BML). (1) Although politicians and pundits may be unlikely to speak out on a particular matter like canonicity in music libraries, it may be timely for music librarians to become aware notion culture wars and its impact on musicological understandings canonicity, and to anticipate its relevance to principles basic music collection development. This essay will explore role canonicity in recent wars, and its appearances in scholarly music literature. It will then look at music acquisitions processes and guides including BML. The conclusion will be based on whether canonical and basic mean same, or if they are different. CANON AND CANONICITY Canonicity has had a long history marked with changes in meaning. The base Greek word kanon literally means or measure, and its derivative kanonizou means to measure or judge rule, hence taking on a specific regulative function authority. (2) The ancient Latin retained same meanings. But ecclesiastical Latin referred to a catalogue sacred writings, and canonicus for clergyman who was of rule. (3) A decisive alteration word canon occurred in 1768 when David Ruhnken applied term to writings or secular literary authors (4)--improperly, for secular was not sacred, and while literary writers may have moralized secularly to their readers, they did not intend to regulate spiritually according to a specific theology. Wendell Harris explains Ruhnken's need for term canon, and succinctly describes consequences through centuries: A more nearly precise word than selection was so much needed that quickly became almost indispensable, despite its entanglement with concepts authority and rule not necessarily relevant to literary canons. Not surprisingly, normative sense term has clung alongside its elective sense: selections suggest norms, and norms suggest an appeal to some sort authority. However, criteria for selecting literary texts are derived not from authority but from chosen functions. (5) What Harris implies should be stated here explicitly, that many people often forget middle step, and they leap to conclusion that canonic selections suggest an appeal to some sort authority--a leap that leads to misunderstandings and debates over canonicity. CULTURE WARS: A SUMMARY James Davison Hunter's Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America was a flashpoint. (6) Before exploring book's impact, it may be instructive for us to note premise Allan Bloom's The Closing American Mind published four years previously. (7) In his Introduction: Our Virtue, Bloom mourned passing teaching in schools Enlightenment's ideals behind founding United States, that is, by recognizing and accepting man's natural rights, men found a fundamental basis unity and sameness. Taking place now was the education openness, which pays no attention to natural rights or historical origins our regime, which are now thought to have been essentially flawed and regressive.... It is open to all kinds men, all kinds life-styles, all ideologies. (8) Bloom presented a paradox, in that where most people saw open-mindedness to diversity, he saw a closed-mindedness to European origins American political ideals and concepts. His solution was through education, specifically in a return to reading and discussing primary-source Western Great Books that inform those ideals and concepts. (9) Here, Bloom prescribed a strict canonicity towards a cure for what he thought was ailing America. …