Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History

Shaping Modern Musical Thought in Late Nineteenth Century Vienna

Kevin Karnes

AMS Studies in Music

Challenges prevailing views of modern musicology's birth, institutionalization, and early development
Offers new and fascinating portraits of well-known figures (Hanslick, Schenker, and Adler)

Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History

Shaping Modern Musical Thought in Late Nineteenth Century Vienna

Kevin Karnes

Description

More than a century after Guido Adler's appointment to the first chair in musicology at the University of Vienna, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History provides a first look at the discipline in this earliest period, and at the ideological dilemmas and methodological anxieties that characterized it upon its institutionalization. Author Kevin Karnes contends that some of the most vital questions surrounding musicology's disciplinary identities today-the relationship between musicology and criticism, the role of the subject in analysis and the narration of history, and the responsibilities of the scholar to the listening public-originate in these conflicted and largely forgotten beginnings.

Karnes lays bare the nature of music study in the late nineteenth century through insightful readings of long-overlooked contributions by three of musicology's foremost pioneers-Adler, Eduard Hanslick, and Heinrich Schenker. Shaped as much by the skeptical pronouncements of the likes of Nietzsche and Wagner as it was by progressivist ideologies of scientific positivism, the new discipline comprised an array of oft-contested and intensely personal visions of music study, its value, and its future. Karnes introduces readers to a Hanslick who rejected the call of positivist scholarship and dedicated himself to penning an avowedly subjective history of Viennese musical life. He argues that Schenker's analytical experiments had roots in a Wagner-inspired search for a critical alternative to Adler's style-obsessed scholarship. And he illuminates Adler's determined response to Nietzsche's warnings about the vitality of artistic and cultural life in an increasingly scientific age. Through sophisticated and meticulous presentation, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History demonstrates that the new discipline of musicology was inextricably tied in with the cultural discourse of its time.

Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History

Shaping Modern Musical Thought in Late Nineteenth Century Vienna

Kevin Karnes

AMS Studies in Music

Author Information

Kevin C. Karnes is Assistant Professor of Music History at Emory University. He is co-editor of the revised and expanded edition of Brahms and His World (2009) and author of articles on a variety of nineteenth-century topics published in 19th-Century Music, the Journal of the Royal Musical Association, and other periodicals.

Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History

Shaping Modern Musical Thought in Late Nineteenth Century Vienna

Kevin Karnes

AMS Studies in Music

Reviews and Awards

"Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History makes a superb contribution in that it complicates and nuances the often monolithic view of a crucial formative period in the history of musicology. The result is a fascinating portrayal of musical thinkers pulled between the conflicting tidal forces of aesthetics and the natural laws of science, of Musikwissenschaft and Criticism, of empiricism and intuition. Karnes's book demands to be reckoned with, and it will invite useful critical engagement in the new terms of its refurbished field of inquiry."--Scott Burnham, Princeton University

"Kevin Karnes's Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History is a considerable achievement, offering at once a probing account of the philosophical underpinnings of the emerging field of Musikwissenschaft and a novel point of entry into intellectual currents in Vienna at the turn of the twentieth century. Especially welcome is the appreciative reevaluation of the entire body of writings by Hanslick, a figure who has often been misunderstood because the different types of writing have been read in isolation. Throughout his book Karnes shows the ways in which the positivism that motivated early musicologists was complicated by their reception of other philosophical trends and by their realization of the inevitable subjectivity of musical experience."--Margaret Notley, Author of Lateness and Brahms: Music and Culture in the Twilight of Viennese Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2006)

"In this thoughtful, imaginative and carefully researched study, Kevin C. Karnes reevaluates a key moment in the institutionalization of musicology as a modern academic discipline. Karnes's deep knowledge of this period is evident on every page, and his patient sifting of sources enables him to find connections that others have overlooked. For readers whose ideas about Hanslick derive primarily from his essay Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, for example, this book will be full of surprises, and Karnes also revises the conventional wisdom about Adler."--Kevin Korsyn, author of Decentering Music: A Critique of Contemporary Musical Research (Oxford University Press, 2003)

"An impressive achievement, offering a provocative and useful reappraisal of a key phase in the history of musicology. Its clear organization, as well as pithy and unpretentious prose, make it accessible to advanced students as well as scholars, and I have no doubt that it will continue to stimulate further work in this field for years to come." --Music & Letters