New musicology

New musicology is a wide body of musicology since the 1980s with a focus upon the cultural study, aesthetics, criticism, and hermeneutics of music. It began in part a reaction against the traditional positivist musicology—focused on primary research—of the early 20th century and postwar era. Many of the procedures of new musicology are considered standard, although the name more often refers to the historical turn rather than to any single set of ideas or principles. Indeed, although it was notably influenced by feminism, gender studies, queer theory, postcolonial studies, and critical theory, new musicology has primarily been characterized by a wide-ranging eclecticism.

Quotes

• Most people have music in the center of their lives. I believe my work sheds light on how music affects us and why it is so influential." from http://web.archive.org/20030225083736/www.ucla.edu/spotlight/archive/html_2001_2002/fac0502_mcclalry.html

• Rather than protecting music as a sublimely meaningless activity that has managed to escape social signification, I insist on treating it as a medium that participates in social formation by influencing the ways we perceive our feelings, our bodies, our desires, our very subjectivities—even if it does so surreptitiously, without most of us knowning how. It is too important a cultural force to be shrouded by mystified notions of Romantic transcendence.
  • Susan McClary (1994). "Constructions of Subjectivity in Schubert's Music", Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology. ISBN 0415907527.

• It is important to remember that there really is very little resembling criticism of any sort in musicology.
  • Susan McClary in Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality(1991), p. 19-20. ISBN 0816618984

• Tonality itself—with its process of instilling expectations and subsequently withholding promised fulfillment until climax—is the principal musical means during the period from 1600 to 1900 for arousing and channeling desire."
  • McClary, Susan (1991). Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0816618984.

• The point of recapitulation in the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony unleashes one of the most horrifyingly violent episodes in the history of music.... The point is not to hold up Beethoven as exceptionally monstrous. The Ninth Symphony is probably our most compelling articulation in music of the contradictory impulses that have organized patriarchal culture since the Enlightenment. Moreover, within the parameters of his own musical compositions, he may be heard as enacting a critique of narrative obligations that is … devastating."
  • McClary, Susan (1991). Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality, p. 128-129. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0816618984.

• For me … the notion of an intimate relationship between music and society functions not as a distant goal but as a starting point of great immediacy, and not as an hypothesis but as an assumption. It functions as an idea about a relationship which in turn allows the examination of that relationship from many points of view and its exploration in many directions. It is an idea that generates studies the goal of which (or at least one important goal of which) is to articulate something essential about why any particular music is the way it is in particular, that is, to achieve insight into the character of its identity.
  • Rose Rosengard Subotnick (1987). "On grounding Chopin", Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance, and Reception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521379776.

• Considering how readily musicologists criticize one another — witness the merciless footnotes (and reviews) of so many books and articles — the innocent bystander must find it strange that they remain unwilling to venture judgments about the quality of the music around which they work... But it is hard to see what can be the purpose of musicology if not to advise people on what to hear and how to hear it. Separating out the good, the bad and the indifferent, and helping listeners enjoy the best, is surely the least we can offer society in return for our keep.
  • Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, in "The good, the bad and the boring" in Companion to Medieval & Renaissance Music (1997) ISBN 0198165404