Volume 36, Number 16 · October 26, 1989
Up from Beethoven
By Philip Gossett
Nineteenth-Century Music
by Carl Dahlhaus, translated by J. Bradford Robinson
University of California Press, 417 pp., $35.00
When compared to current work in art history or literary studies, American musical scholarship must seem very old-fashioned indeed. Much of it is devoted to finding, editing, and analyzing a large number of major and minor musical compositions that have been lying dormant in archives, libraries, and private collections. Several generations of music historians have devoted themselves to discovering and reclaiming this European and American musical past, and the results of their efforts are apparent throughout today's musical life: in concert and recorded repertories, in performance styles, in the way we think about the music we hear. At the same time, it has become increasingly evident that such traditional kinds of research tend to isolate the study of music from the broader historical, aesthetic, and cultural issues that dominate humanistic scholarship today. Many musicologists are increasingly uneasy about this isolation.
Review, 4791 words
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