GEORGE EDWARDS
Music and Postmodernism
Many of the current controversies in literary criticism have finally begun
to invade the study of music as well. Recent books such as
Music and the
Politics oj Culture, Music and Sodety,
and Jacques Attali's
Noise
have found
new ways to account for the extramusical significance of music. Instead
of understanding music in terms of the human body, dance, myth, reli–
gion, narrative, poetry, drama, pictorial imagery, mathematics,
philosophy, psychology, or the natural sciences, they relate it to its social
and cultural context, emphasizing class, race, and gender. The most
powerful tools of such approaches are Marxism and deconstruction.
Among the traditional academic fields of music, the ascendancy of
the study of music in its social and cultural context might be interpreted
as the penetration of historical musicology by ethnomusicology. The
ethnomusicologist Dieter Christensen, for instance, defines his field as
"the study of music as a cultural phenomenon (in contrast to that of
music as an 'art')." Yet most socially informed writing on music is by
non-musicians whose primary loyalties lie elsewhere. Their colonization
of music reflects the marginal position of music in our society, the popu–
lar assumption that music is esoteric and occult, the abysmal condition of
music criticism (especially in the United States), and the slowness with
which musical scholars notice and take into account developments in
other fields.
Academic interlopers who lack any identifiable expertise in music
are quick to point out the insularity of most musical scholarship, and to
find explanations for it. These writers believe that there are three related
attitudes typical of the academic study of music: l)what is scientifically
verifiable is legitimate (positivism); 2)individual works of art, in isolation,
provide all the information needed for understanding them
(autonomism); and 3)musical meaning is expressible only by music
(absolutism). Using the term 'formalism' to cover all three of these inde–
pendent positions, Christopher Norris, who wrote the introduction to
Music and the Politics oj Culture,
claims that "it is a doctrine mostly sub–
scribed to by conservative thinkers who want to drive a wedge between
musical understanding and the wider context of worldly and
sociopolitical concerns."
But how effective are these wedges of the "formalists"? Positivism
would rule out of court what cannot be disproven, which includes most
ways of formulating value judgments, many but not all statements about
