Music, politics, and the academy

Abstract

Music, and Academy. By Pieter C. van den Toorn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. [x, 229 p. ISBN 0-520-20115-9. $40.00.] Whatever else 1990s are remembered for in American academic music circles, they will surely be remembered for conflict between New Musicology and Music (or between New Musicology and Old Musicology) over proprietary rights to music of Western canon. The first (and thus far only) explicitly political book to take on issues comes from music-theoretical side: Music, Politic, and Academy, by Pieter van den Toorn, a theorist who has already established himself as a key player in dispute with a controversial and much discussed essay, Politics, and Contemporary Music Theory (Journal of Musicology 9 [1991]: 275-99); a revised and expanded version appeals in book as chapter 1, Feminism, and Ninth. The book is, first and foremost, a broad rebuttal to attacks on contemporary music theory in general, and music analysis in particular. Van den Toorn directs his most extensive and hardest hitting counterattacks at work of Susan McClary and Leo Treitler, but he also singles out for criticism that of Joseph Kerman, Lawrence Kramer, Maynard Solomon, and Richard Taruskin. a positive vein, he also endeavors to demonstrate by example how music theory avid analysis can provide a foil that makes it possible for us to move productively back and forth between communal and contextual: between constraints of system and style on one hand, and individual work on other. The book divides neatly into four chapters of polemical rebuttal and three of analytical demonstration and exemplification. brief, first chapter launches an attack upon recent interpretations of Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony by McClary and Treitler, and upon points of view that underlie those interpretations. The second chapter, In Defense of Music Theory, places New-Musicological critique of music theory in its social and institutional context: for van den Toorn, Trader's call for a personally involved and humanistic scholarship rubs uncomfortably against value system of universities, whose publish-or-perish syndrome has tended to encourage very sort of objectifiable, positivistic approach that Treitler scorns. Van den Toorn himself recognizes need for personal, individual, and spiritual in musical scholarship, but he claims that Treitler, in harshly dismissing formalist and positivist approaches such as contemporary music theory, refuses to come to terms with social and academic forces that encouraged and empowered them in first place. At same time, while acknowledging that music theory and analysis at their worst can lead to sterile exercises of little worth, he maintains that it is [subjective] sensation but [objective] knowledge that separates and distinguishes scholar (p. 50). so doing, van den Toorn must take a philosophical position that argues for a degree of autonomy for musical work--an autonomy that is essential if systematic theory and analysis are to be viable tools for discovering musical meaning and significance. Conversely, he argues against what he calls the new subjectivity (p. 53) of postmodern and feminist musicology, which he sees as making musical structures not but less free, as drawing them more and into uses of world, into forms of ideological and personal-political manipulation, and as valuing them solely as sociopolitical comment (p. 61). The third chapter, Politics, Ho! is a short essay that attempts to connect academic politics of New Musicology with American politics of late 1960s. Here van den Toorn takes Treitler's drawing of a parallel between academic and national political life (in Music and Historical Imagination [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989]) as basis for an undisciplined foray into national issues of past twenty-five years or so (the Vietnam War, civil rights movement, and liberal egalitarian causes [p. …