Reception Theories, Canonic Discourses, and Musical Value

Abstract

Abstract The study of music has always been rooted in the study of history, and music history balances precariously between an account of musical compositions and an account of musical cultures. In the 1970s and 1980s, an enthusiasm for histories based on musical compositions, coupled with a leaning towards formalist analytical procedures, had the effect of dissolving the history of music into a series of more or less unrelated critical readings. Despite this popularity, the hegemony of text-based, formalist criticism is now as much under threat from a study of history as were such procedures in literary scholarship in the late 1970s. An alternative to formalist criticism need not be an old-style literary or musical history that chronicles canonic genres and composers with household names. Nor need it trade in historiographical constructs and value-judgements based on criteria that are never made explicit. A return to history could be marked by a discourse in which canonic boundaries are transcended, in which musical cultures are seen as important as musical works, and in which the subjects of history could be allowed to speak a language that it is the historian’s task to translate.

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