New approaches to music history

Abstract

How to write the history of music? This basic question has exercised many of the best intellects over several generations since the discipline of musicology was born towards the end of the 19th century. The intended readership of music histories has probably changed relatively little: students (and their teachers) and those performers and musical aficionados with the curiosity and desire to learn more, even without the aid of a teacher. Yet music histories surely go beyond their primary didactic role: inevitably they provide a snapshot not only of the state of knowledge in a particular field at a given moment, and inevitably they must respond to the new technologies and the new attitudes to the accessing of information that they create. In addition, as Richard Taruskin has argued so forcibly, they inevitably also reflect the concerns, prejudices, trends and philosophies of the age in which they are written. We cannot...