Music from the Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century

adduce what I consider to be an example of each (and leave it to the reader to decide which, if any, is the
honorable blunder and which the propaganda). The first comes from Pieter C. Van den Toorn’s Music,
Politics, and the Academy, a rebuttal of the so-called New Musicology of the 1980 s.

The question    of  an  engaging    context is  an  aesthetic   as  well    as  an  historical  and analytic-theoretical    one.    And once

individual  works   begin   to  prevail for what    they    are in  and of  themselves  and not for what    they    represent,  then    context

itself, as  a   reflection  of  this    transcendence,  becomes less    dependent   on  matters of  historical  placement.  A   great   variety of

contexts    can suggest themselves  as  attention   is  focused on  the works,  on  the nature  of  both    their   immediacy   and the

relationship    that    is  struck  with    the contemporary    listener.^5

The second is from the most recent narrative history of music published in America as of this writing,
Mark Evan Bonds’s A History of Music in Western Culture.

By  the early   16th    century,    the rondeau,    the last    of  the surviving   formes  fixes   from    the medieval    era,    had largely

disappeared,    replaced    by  more    freely  structured  chansons    based   on  the principle   of  pervading   imitation.  What    emerged

during  the 1520s   and 1530s   were    new approaches  to  setting vernacular  texts:  the Parisian    chanson in  France  and the

madrigal    in  Italy.

During the 1520s, a new genre of song, now known as the Parisian chanson
emerged in the French capital. Among its most notable composers were Claudin de
Sermisy (ca. 1490–1562) and Clément Jannequin (ca. 1485–ca. 1560), whose works
were widely disseminated by the Parisian music publisher Pierre Attaingnant.
Reflecting the influence of the Italian frottola, the Parisian chanson is lighter and
more chordally oriented than earlier chansons.^6
This sort of writing gives everybody an alibi. All the active verbs have ideas or inanimate objects as
subjects, and all human acts are described in the passive voice. Nobody is seen as doing (or deciding)
anything. Even the composers in the second extract are not described in the act, but only as an impersonal
medium or passive vehicle of “emergence.” Because nobody is doing anything, the authors never have to
deal with motives or values, with choices or responsibilities, and that is their alibi. The second extract is
a kind of shorthand historiography that inevitably devolves into inert survey, since it does nothing more
than describe objects, thinking, perhaps, that is how one safeguards “objectivity.” The first extract
commits a far more serious transgression, for it is ideologically committed to its impersonality. Its
elimination of human agency is calculated to protect the autonomy of the work-object and actually prevent
historical thinking, which the author evidently regards as a threat to the universality (in his thinking, the
validity) of the values he upholds. It is an attempt, caught as it were in the act, to enforce what I call the
Great Either/Or, the great bane of contemporary musicology.

The Great Either/Or is the seemingly in escapable debate, familiar to all academically trained
musicologists (who have had to endure it in their fledgling proseminars), epitomized in the question made
famous by Carl Dahlhaus (1928–89), the most prestigious German music scholar of his generation: Is art
history the history of art, or is it the history of art? What a senseless distinction! What seemed to make it
necessary was the pseudo-dialectical “method” that cast all thought in rigidly—and artificially—
binarized terms: “Does music mirror the reality surrounding a composer, OR does it propose an
alternative reality? Does it have common roots with political events and philosophical ideas; OR is music
written simply because music has always been written and not, or only incidentally, because a composer
is seeking to respond with music to the world he lives in?” These questions all come from the second
chapter of Dahlhaus’s Foundations of Music History, the title of which—“The significance of art:
historical or aesthetic?”—is yet another forced dichotomy. The whole chapter, which has achieved in its
way the status of a classic, consists, throughout, of a veritable salad of empty binarisms.^7