The (pre)history of canons

Abstract

This chapter deals with how the idea of canon has developed within the performing arts of music, dance and theatre. Building primarily on literary studies, musicology was first evolved in canon theories around the early 1980s. Gladsø sketches the main points of several scholars involved in further development of canon theory in various directions and the relationship between canon and repertory, and between professional, academic, critical and commercial agents in the fields of music, dance and theatre. Some theoretical aspects have become common among scholars in all three fields; however, the peculiarities of each field have stimulated different approaches. Canon has been an important musicological topic, as is revealed by Gladsø’s analysis of its use in more recent publications of musicologists who offer different, but partly opposing, views. Dance research has been less engaged with canon theories, but Gladsø shows how some dance scholars focus on networks as important in the formation of canon, together with education, training and performative practices. Networking and the role of training in canonisation processes are aspects shared across the fields. In theatre research, the concept of canon is rarely used with reference to specific theories, but perspectives of canon are often included in matters like periodisation, nationalism, ideology and genre development. Looking at the European theatre around 1800, Gladsø points to the importance of Aristotelian poetics for establishing the norm of ‘classics’ in early modernity, especially regarding genre hierarchies and aesthetic rules. He describes the different developments of French and German theatre reforms in the eighteenth century and concludes that a theatre canon hardly existed around 1800. However, national theatre cultures and aesthetic programmes were preconditions for national European canons that developed later.