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music in relation to other fields, and many useful analytical observations.
Although positivism may have done as much harm as good, it helps us to
distinguish between what is either true or false (if often trivial) and what
may be suggestive, or profound, but speculative.
Autonomism is a dead horse. Even Milton Babbitt a strong propo–
nent of positivism, insists that "you can't possibly regard a piece of music
as having nothing to do with anything but itsel(" What then is the
context required to understand it? The context of the individual piece,
like that of a stone thrown into a pond, weakens as you move outwards
from the specific event into space and time; perhaps it gets stronger
as
you approach the origin of the stone or the nature of the thrower.
Absolutism in one sense is almost incontestable: no one, I hope,
would want to replace Mozart's G minor symphony with an analysis of
it, a poetic or programmatic account of it, or a decoding of its political
position. Yet Babbitt's dismissal of autonomism could be directed at ab–
solutism as well. Music means something, but no single attempt to ac–
count for that meaning can expect to encompass it in its entirety.
Opposition to 'formalism' in the discussion of music, however, is
directly related to the opposition of postmodernism to the organic,
complete, and nonrepresentational work of art. The current polemics
against 'formalism' should not blind us to the fact that we must be able
to make use of the analytic techniques developed by 'formalist' views of
music. Flawed and incomplete as they are, they are the best tools we
have for musical analysis. However, the interest of most socially con–
cerned writers about music is not how their disciplines can inform the
study of music, but how music can be brought into line with their par–
ticular social and political agendas. In this emphasis on context, rather
than on the individual work, they are aided by the tendency of musicol–
ogy to concern itself with either establishing a reliable text or placing
the text in a historical framework, bypassing criticism. The musicological
terror of confronting individual pieces unless heavily armed is typified by
the title of a recent scholarly book,
Mozart's Symphonies: Context, Per–
formance Practise, Reception .
To a bystander (though, as a composer and academic, not an inno–
cent one), it seems odd that Marxist approaches are so prominent in re–
cent writing about music; for Marxism is hardly flourishing in the politi–
cal arena. Does the value of such criticism depend on one's politics? Or
does it flow from Marxism's ability to bring a unified perspective to
all
human concerns? Is Marxist cultural criticism meant to create a culture
which will pave the way for a Marxist society? Or does the deflection of
Marxist thought from politics to art represent Marxism's degeneration
into an academic commodity?
The postmodern attempt to decode the social and political content
