Berlin Walls: Dahlhaus Knepler, and Ideologies of Music History Author(s): Anne C. Shreffler Source: The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 20, No. 4 (Fall 2003), pp. 498-525 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jm.2003.20.4.498 . Accessed: 07/05/2013 15:33 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Musicology. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 140.247.0.106 on Tue, 7 May 2013 15:33:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions Berlin Walls: Dahlhaus, Knepler, and Ideologies of Music History AN N E C . SH R E F F L E R H 498 ow to write history—how to collect, organize, and interpret the infinite amount of available information and how to shape it into intelligible form—is a subject that has received more than ample attention from general historians but far less from North American musicologists, despite the efforts of Leo Treitler, Richard Crawford, and a few others.1 It is symptomatic of this state of affairs that Carl Dahlhaus’s Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte ( hereafter Grundlagen) was not reviewed in any North American journal, even af- A shorter version of this paper was presented at the joint session that I chaired and organized, “Local Histories, Global Contexts; Writing the History of 20th-Century Music,” at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society and other societies, Toronto 2000. I am very grateful to Reinhold Brinkmann and Peter Gülke, who read the draft and offered keen insights into the academic and political worlds of Dahlhaus and Knepler; I am also indebted to Lydia Goehr, Simon Obert, and Marcello Sorce Keller for their valuable comments and suggestions. After the draft was completed, I sent it to Georg Knepler, with whom I subsequently entered into a correspondence. Knepler’s remarks, insofar as they had an impact on the text, are documented in the footnotes. 1 See Leo Treitler, Music and the Historical Imagination ( Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989) . Other important contributions to historiography have been made by Richard Taruskin ( “Some Thoughts on the History and Historiography of Russian Music,” Journal of Musicology 3 [ 1984] : 321–39) , and by Richard Crawford in his book The American Musical Landscape ( Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1993) . The Journal of Musicology 2 0/ 4 ( 2003) : 498–525. ISSN 0277-9269, electron ic ISSN 1533-8347s © 2003 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to: Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center Street, Suite 303, Berkeley, CA 94704-1223. This content downloaded from 140.247.0.106 on Tue, 7 May 2013 15:33:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SH REFFLER ter it was published in an excellent English translation.2 This book, still the most important contribution to music historiography in our field, began to be discussed in the U.S. only after the appearance of the author’s Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts, the volume to which it had been the metholodological prelude.3 This reluctance to discuss methods of historiography may be viewed as consistent with a typically American pragmatism, but it does seem puzzling, given the predominantly historical orientation of American musicology ( at least until the 1990s) and the sustained interest in Dahlhaus’s other work. Today, as our field is paying increased attention to the social contexts and functions of music and as questions are raised about the status of the musical object ( both issues with enormous historiographical implications) , we need this discussion more than ever. It is worthwhile in this context to investigate and reassess a debate about music historiography that took place, although not always openly, in East and West Germany in the 1960s and 70s and whose central questions are uncannily current. Since Carl Dahlhaus is one of the protagonists in this discussion, these remarks are also intended to contribute to what James Hepokoski rather optimistically called “the Dahlhaus debate-to-come.” Hepokoski pointed out that a central thread in Dahlhaus’s life work aimed to provide a viable alternative to Marxist theory, which he viewed as a palpable threat to the integrity of the discipline; in particular, Grundlagen, in Hepokoski’s words, “at times reads like an anti-Marxist polemic.”4 In investigating the intellectual context for Dahlhaus’s ideas, Hepokoski focused primarily on his Western influences ( including Adorno) . I would like to focus here on what Dahlhaus 2 Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte ( Cologne: Hans Gerig, 1977) was translated by J. Bradford Robinson as Foundations of Music History ( Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983) . The only immediate U.S. response, as far as I can tell, was by Leo Treitler, who discussed the book in detail in his article “What Kind of a Story is History?” NineteenthCentury Music 7( 1983–1984) : 363–73 ( reprinted in Music and the Historical Imagination, 157–75) . The book was reviewed twice in Britain: by Keith Falconer, in the Journal of the Royal Musical Association 112 ( 1986–87) : 141–55; and by Henry Raynor, in Music Review 45 ( May 1984) : 147–49. 3 Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts ( Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1980) was translated by J. Bradford Robinson as Music in the Nineteenth Century ( Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1989) . The book originally appeared as the first published volume of the series Neues Handbuch der Musikwissenschaft ( vol. 6) . Later discussions of Grundlagen include Philip Gossett, “Carl Dahlhaus and the ‘Ideal Type,’ ” Nineteenth-Century Music 13 ( 1989) : 49–56; James Hepokoski, “The Dahlhaus Project and Its Extra-Musicological Sources,” Nineteenth-Century Music 14 ( 1991) : 221–46; Matti Huttunen, “The ‘Canon’ of Music History: Historical and Critical Aspects,” Irish Musical Studies 5 ( 1996) : 110–18 ( = Selected Proceedings of the Maynooth International Musicological Conference 1995) ; and Gianfranco Vinay, “Historiographie musicale et herméneutique: Une relecture des ‘Fondaments de l’historiographie musicale’ de Carl Dahlhaus,” Revue de Musicologie 84 ( 1998) : 123–38. 4 Hepokoski, “The Dahlhaus Project,” 227. This content downloaded from 140.247.0.106 on Tue, 7 May 2013 15:33:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 499 T H E JO U RN AL O F M U SI CO LO G Y 500 was writing against: the prolific and increasingly sophisticated Marxist musicology emanating from the other side of the divided city, East Berlin, only a mile or two away. At a time when traditional epistemologies were being increasingly attacked in the West ( above all in historical studies) ,5 Marxist approaches were attractive in that they offered an explicit alternative to positivism. In rejecting the notion of artistic autonomy and theorizing music as social discourse, East German Marxist musicology of the 1960s and 70s moreover anticipates some of the main tenets of the “new” ( or critical) musicology. Even though today we cannot accept the particular master narrative of Marxist historiography— the belief in a coherent, universal set of laws that govern society and history—we can still learn much, I believe, from the efforts of a school whose primary aim was to understand music as a social practice. Far more interesting than “the often dogmatic answers offered by Marxists,” as the historical theorist George Iggers put it, are “the questions they asked.”6 A comparison between two books published in 1977—Dahlhaus’s Grundlagen and Geschichte als Weg zum Musikverständnis ( History as a Means of Understanding Music) by the Austrian scholar Georg Knepler ( 1906–2003) , who lived after 1949 in East Berlin—is instructive not only as a measure of the two poles of the Methodenstreit, the one centered around music as autonomous work, the other around music as a human activity.7 The comparison is all the more telling because of the similarities between the two scholars: Most at home in Germanic 18thand 19th-century music, both were practical musicians who in their youth worked in opera houses, and both ( each in his own way) were brilliant prose stylists. For both Knepler and Dahlhaus, 19th-century music, historiography, and aesthetics were major research areas, and their work was indelibly marked by the political realities of living in divided Berlin during the Cold War.8 Although the two scholars knew and evidently respected each other, there was little public interaction between them. Knepler kept up with Western publications, including English and American ones. His Ibid., 223–24. George G. Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century: From Scientific Objectivity to the Postmodern Challenge ( Hanover: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1997) , 85. 7 Georg Knepler, Geschichte als Weg zum Musikverständnis: Zur Theorie, Methode und Geschichte der Musikgeschichtsschreibung ( Leipzig: Reclam, 1977, 2nd ed. 1982) ; cited hereafter as Geschichte. ( All quotations are from the1982 edition.) Both Geschichte and Grundlagen were preceded by articles that presented some of the material in preliminary form. 8 Hepokoski writes: “[ Dahlhaus’s] physical location in an ideologically split Berlin from 1967 until his death in 1989 is something of a life-metaphor for the tensions that one finds gathered, but not resolved, in his work.” See “The Dahlhaus Project,” 227. 5 6 This content downloaded from 140.247.0.106 on Tue, 7 May 2013 15:33:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SH REFFLER Geschichte contains lengthy responses to contemporary writings by Dahlhaus, Treitler, Walter Wiora, Leonard Meyer, and others. He regularly reviewed Dahlhaus’s books. The courtesy was not generally reciprocated. Dahlhaus did not review Knepler’s books, or any books by Knepler’s East German colleagues Harry Goldschmidt or Frank Schneider;9 evidently Dahlhaus did not engage in debates with Marxist musicologists —openly, that is: One does not even have to read between the lines of Dahlhaus’s Grundlagen to encounter reactions to Marxist musicology on practically every page. In some cases Knepler’s writings seem to be specifically addressed, although he is never named.10 The fact that East German scholars’ work was based on Marxist political theory apparently made it possible for many Western scholars to reject that work with a clear conscience, since they did not accept its basic premises. In fact, it proved impossible to ignore completely, especially since it had fierce proponents in the West as well.11 The conflicts between ignoring, opposing, and feeling threatened by the Communist neighbor—a tension that was produced and reinforced by the particular geography of West Berlin—was typical of many aspects of life in the city before 1989. The dualism enforced by the two political systems and physically inscribed on the city by the Wall extended implicitly to intellectual systems as well; the fact that certain ideas were associated with one side or the other made them a priori unacceptable to the other side. Like all dualisms, this one was asymmetrical. Dahlhaus fended off Marxist approaches because he sincerely viewed them as deeply flawed, yet his position in an ideologically superior, free West Berlin did not allow him to do so openly, since that would have involved treating his counterpart as an equal. Knepler kept trying to engage in debate with the West, always aware of the futility of the exercise. One of the many ironies of the situation lies in the contrast between Knepler’s attempts to open the discussion with the West on the one hand and the extremely limited possibilities for open debate within the East German scholarly establishment on the other. 9 Hermann Danuser and Burkhard Meischein, editors of the Dahlhaus Gesammelte Schriften, confirm this ( e-mail from Mr. Meischein to the author, Jan. 8, 2001) . 10 Chapter 8 of Grundlagen ( “Über die ‘relative Autonomie’ der Musikgeschichte”) focuses on Marxist theory. The discussion on pages 188–94 seems to me to be specifically directed against Knepler’s Geschichte. Dahlhaus’s failure to cite authors and texts in the conventional scholarly fashion must not be read as a slight against his Marxist colleagues, however; this was simply his standard practice. 11 Marxist scholars in the West included Konrad Boehmer, who attacked Stockhausen and other avant-garde composers as unwitting instruments of the capitalist imperialist world, and the circle around the DDR-friendly West Berlin periodical Das Argument led by Hanns-Werner Heister. This content downloaded from 140.247.0.106 on Tue, 7 May 2013 15:33:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 501 T H E JO U RN AL O F M U SI CO LO G Y Georg Knepler and the Aims of Marxist Musicology 502 Georg Knepler was one of the most prominent representatives of Marxist musicology.12 Born in Vienna in 1906, he was closely connected with the Schoenberg circle: He studied piano with Eduard Steuermann, musicology with Guido Adler ( with whom Anton Webern, Egon Wellesz, and Karl Weigl had also studied) , and composition and conducting with Hans Gál. After getting his doctorate in 1930, Knepler worked as an opera coach and accompanist, most notably accompanying Karl Kraus in his famous Offenbach per formances. Knepler emigrated to England in 1934 after having been imprisoned for several weeks for Communist activities.13 After the war he first returned to Vienna and then moved to Berlin in 1949 to head the newly founded Hochschule für Musik. From 1959 to 1969 he was professor and chairman of the Musikwissenschaftliches Institut at the Humboldt University in East Berlin, from which he retired in 1971. He was Editor-in-Chief of Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft, the official organ of the Association of Composers and Musicologists, from 1959 until 1990. Because he was allowed to keep his Austrian passport, he was free to travel in the West, which in the former East Germany was by no means a given.14 Knepler’s status and reputation in the East were therefore comparable to Dahlhaus’s in the West. Knepler belonged to the founding generation of the fledgling German Democratic Republic. Although East Germany would develop into one of the most repressive states in the Soviet block, in its early years of statehood it had at its disposal the creative energies of thousands of gifted and idealistic people, many of whom had been forced to emigrate from Nazi Germany because of their Communist sympathies, only in some cases to suffer further persecution in the West. Those who returned, including Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler, as well as those who chose to emigrate to the newly founded Republic brought with them not 12 The following biographical information is drawn from David Blake, “Knepler, Georg,” Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (accessed 10 Oct. 2003), www.grovemusic.com; Peter Gülke, “Zum Gedenken an Georg Knepler ( 1906–2003) ,” Die Musikforschung 56 ( 2003) : 119–20; Peter Gülke, “Knepler, Georg,” Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 2nd rev. ed., Personenteil vol. 10 ( 2003) , cols. 337–39; Gerhard Müller, “Ein Voltairianer: Georg Knepler zum Gedenken, MusikTexte 96 ( Feb. 2003) : 78; and from Internet obituaries including www.kpoenet.at/ lpd/ 2047.html ( the website of the Kommunistische Partei Österreich) , www.jungewelt.de/ 2003/ 01-16/ 020.php, and www.hu-berlin.de/ presse/ zeitung/ 02_03/ num_5/ personalia/ ( the Humboldt Universitätszeitung) . 13 On Knepler’s years in England, see Brigitte Kruse: “ ‘. . . Die Ferne wird nah, und die Nähe bleibt fern . . .’: Exil in Großbritannien im Spannungsfeld von englischer und deutscher Kultur—Ein Annäherungsversuch,” in Verfemte Musik: Komponisten in den Diktaturen unseres Jahrhunderts, ed. Joachim Braun, Heidi Tamar Hoffmann, and Vladimír Karbusick´y ( Frankfurt: Peter Lang; 2nd ed., 1997) , 321–32. 14 Personal communication from Reinhold Brinkmann ( e-mail from 21 Sept. 2000) . This content downloaded from 140.247.0.106 on Tue, 7 May 2013 15:33:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SH REFFLER only political conviction but also profound gratitude.15 This seemed like the per fect chance to realize an earthly Utopia in “the first socialist state on German soil.”16 They set to work building a society from the ground up, fashioning new institutions and radically reforming old ones. Knepler and his colleagues sought not only to apply Marxist methodologies to the study of music, but more ambitiously, to place musicology in the context of a universal system of knowledge, to which objective laws pertain. For Marxists, “there is no such thing as ‘music history’ ” since this can only be understood as part of general history.17 Moreover, Marxism wished to deal not only with the past but ( even more) to change the future. In contrast to Western musicology, Knepler wrote, the aim of Marxist musicology “is the improvement of our musical culture.”18 These goals gave East German musicology a radically different profile from the West German and North American mainstream at that time. First, and most importantly, the Marxists rejected the main principle of traditional German Geisteswissenschaften ( literally, science of thought) , which was rooted in the Kantian distinction between the disembodied Geist and the tangible material aspects of life.19 Instead, they favored a non-dualistic notion of human life and thought. The discipline was renamed Gesellschaftswissenschaften ( science of society) to reflect the social basis of all activity. Whereas for Geisteswissenschaft, the individual subject is at the center, Gesellschaftswissenschaft shifts the emphasis to the collective.20 15 Knepler emphasized the distinction between returnees and voluntary immigrants: “Auch die sogennanten Remigranten sind, genauer betrachtet nicht alle Rückkehrer. Viele sind zum Beispiel in die DDR gegangen, weil dort eine Alternative zum Kapitalismus versucht wurde. Dazu gehören herausragende Männer und Frauen . . . Auch ich bin kein Remigrant, sondern aus Überzeugung in die DDR gekommen und dort geblieben.” Letter to the author, 17 Oct. 2001. 16 One encounters this phrase repeatedly in the literature; see for example the editor’s introduction to Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft 21 ( 1979) : 131. 17 Knepler, “Music Historiography in Eastern Europe,” in Perspectives in Musicology, ed. Barry S. Brook, Edward O. D. Downes, and Sherman Van Solkema ( New York: Norton, 1972) , 228. 18 Knepler, “Music Historiography,” 228. This statement reflects a fundamental tenet of Marxism. See Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach”: “XI. The philosophers have only interpreted the world differently, the point is, to change it.” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, parts 1 and 3, trans. R. Pascal ( New York: International Publishers, 1960) , 199. 19 The dualism between Geist ( mind, thought, spirit) and the body reflected by the German term Geisteswissenschaften is not implied by the corresponding English or French terms ( “humanities” and “sciences humaine”) , see Wolfgang Frühwald, Hans Robert Jauß, et al., Geisteswissenschaften heute: Eine Denkschrift ( Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991) , 25. 20 Cf. Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach”: “VI. [ T] he essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each separate individual. In its reality it is the ensemble ( aggregate) of social relations” ( The German Ideology, 198) . This content downloaded from 140.247.0.106 on Tue, 7 May 2013 15:33:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 503 T H E JO U RN AL O F M U SI CO LO G Y 504 This redefinition of the humanities had a wide-reaching impact on Marxist musicology. While the Western discipline of the 1960s and 70s focused heavily on positivistic and philological approaches to music before 1800, East German musicology focused on theory and method. When asked during a 1972 visit to New York if East German musicologists were planning to bring out editions of lesser known composers, Knepler replied, “too much emphasis has been laid on it.” We have a “store of knowledge,” he continued, “and don’t know what to do with it. The theory of historiography and the theory of musicology are much less developed than the accumulation of ever more knowledge.”21 Although Knepler’s plea for a more methodologically aware musicology fell on deaf ears at the time, his concerns do not seem so radical in the wake of Joseph Kerman’s call to arms in Contemplating Music of 1985 and the following surge of interest in theoretical issues.22 Other principles of Marxist musicology also sound surprisingly current. First, popular and folk music received a lot of attention; this was a logical consequence of the obligation to look at the products of all social classes, not just the bourgeois or the elite.23 Second, the desire to improve society resulted in a strong emphasis on music pedagogy, which was taken quite seriously. Third, in connection with the desire to understand how people perceive music, much work was done in music psychology, music perception and cognition, semiotics, and information theory. Finally, and for our purposes most germane, there was a compelling need to rewrite the history of music in all periods. The most urgent task for Marxist music historians was to reconnect music with society. If you believe that music as a human product is primarily a system of communication and a social practice ( although one with a stron g aesth etic compon en t) , th en you will n ot be satisfied with a historical account that treats the internal logic of styles and genres, nor with one that presents a parade of great composers and their works disconnected from their social contexts. You will need to find out how music communicates, between which people and in what contexts, how it did so in the past, what is communicated and for what purpose, and finally how the “message” of a work changes, if it does, over time. There can be no completely autonomous music in this scheme. One consequence of this is that the received epochal divisions become useless, since they are based on a notional stylistic cohesion that evaporates Knepler, “Music Historiography,” 245–46. Joseph Kerman, Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology ( Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1985) . 23 One of the leading scholars of popular music today, Peter Wicke, was a colleague of Knepler’s at the Humboldt-Universität. 21 22 This content downloaded from 140.247.0.106 on Tue, 7 May 2013 15:33:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SH REFFLER once you give priority to human activities ( including political activities) over abstract musical developments. You will also need to figure out how to deal with music’s expressiveness. Having given up the notion of the musical work as an autonomous object, you cannot claim for it an unmediated, ahistorical aesthetic presence, but rather need to show that aesthetic responses to it are dependent on historical and social factors. Further consequences of a Marxist approach to historiography are a vastly expanded time scale and geographical range. It would need to extend much further back in time than conventional music histories in order to be able to perceive developments on the largest scale. Moreover, one could not confine this history to a handful of European nations, because of the Marxist view that no society was inherently superior to another ( except insofar as they had accepted Marxist forms of government) . “The modern musicologist must take into consideration the whole world, not as peripheral regions . . . but as regions demanding, and gradually receiving, full attention.”24 Knepler devoted two decades of work to the task of rewriting music history in the manner I have just outlined. His two-volume Musikgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts was to be the beginning of a six-volume treatise, never completed, on the history of music from the French Revolution to the present.25 By choosing this time span, Knepler rejected the traditional epochal divisions based on musical style, structuring his account around political upheavals and economic change instead. Accordingly, he sees the period from the late 18th to the 20th centuries as a single historical unit ( presumably this epoch ended in 1989) . In his Geschichte als Weg zum Musikverständnis, Knepler attempted nothing less than an exposition of a new theoretical basis for writing music history. In more than 600 closely argued pages, he sought to defend his view of music as an essential element in human society that required historical investigation to be understood. While he advocated the use of various systematic approaches ( such as psychology, cognition, and linguistics) to explain how music functions and how people use it, he claimed that “one must go back to the beginnings, for without the genesis of music, its essence cannot be completely understood either.”26 24 Knepler, “Music Historiography,” 234. The special attention given to the music of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries by Marxist historians also makes sense, since in this time of industrial development and social upheaval Marxism itself became established. 25 Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1961. 26 “Die Sache aber er fordert ein Zurückgehen zu den Anfängen, denn ohne die Genese der Musik läßt sich auch ihr Wesen nicht voll verstehen” ( Geschichte, 20) . All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. This content downloaded from 140.247.0.106 on Tue, 7 May 2013 15:33:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 505 T H E JO U RN AL O F M U SI CO LO G Y 506 We cannot ignore history even if we use purely analytical approaches, because “already every single musical sound has a history.”27 Knepler does not however present a history of music, but instead offers the framework in which one could be written. This framework is intentionally broad, chronologically, conceptually, and in terms of its choice of subject matter. In order to understand the history of music as a system of communication—and not just as art—it is necessary, according to Knepler, to extend the time span of the investigation back into the pre-history of mankind, when language and music were not yet separated. The extended frame allows him, for example, to see the history of composition as a subset within the history of music rather than its prime concern. Knepler’s framework is conceptually broad in that it considers not just musical objects but also human communication, social organization, political events, and other types of activity and collective behavior. Moreover, it takes the whole range of sound ( and sounding music) as its object and not just schematic reductions in musical notation. Many histories of music, Knepler writes, leave out what million s of people main ly con sider to be music: “Popular an d dan ce music, Beat, jazz. . . .” Such histories are also unlikely to treat music from parts of the world outside of Europe and the United States, even though Knepler urges the inclusion of non-Western music in the history of music ( Geschichte, 17–18) .28 In spite of the utopian methodological program, which is carried out with consistency and great verve, there are still vestiges of oldfashioned hero worship, for example the chapter that treats Mozart as the high point of his epoch. ( At times like this one remembers that the author was after all a 71-year-old Viennese.) While clearly positioning itself “against” Western musicology ( just as Dahlhaus’s Grundlagen was written against Marxist approaches) , Knepler’s Geschichte also aims to defend the importance of history to counter increased interest in systematic, “scientific” approaches in the DDR at that time ( Geschichte, 7) . 27 “. . . schon jeder beliebige musikalische Klang hat seine Geschichte” ( Geschichte, 20) . In taking music’s historicity as his point of departure he already departs from Dahlhaus, who views music’s “Kunstcharakter” in a dialectical relationship with its “Geschichtlichkeit.” This is the subject of the chapter “Geschichtlichkeit und Kunstcharakter” ( Grundlagen, 36–55) . 28 Dahlhaus also discusses the issue of whether non-Western cultures can be said to have History, defined as the measurable process of change, and answers in the negative. Dahlhaus admits the danger of cultural bias when applying modern Western standards to other cultures, but ultimately chooses to stick with the Western notion of musical progress, because without it a history of works, which is “einzig durch Orientierung am Prinzip der Neuheit überhaupt als solche isolierbar” would be “verdrängt durch eine Kulturgeschichte” ( Grundlagen, 25) . This content downloaded from 140.247.0.106 on Tue, 7 May 2013 15:33:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SH REFFLER The Marxist Model Marxism recognizes “societies as systems of relations between human beings, of which the relations entered into for the purpose of production and reproduction are primary.”29 Since these relations are necessarily dynamic, the Marxist historian will be more concerned with showing “how societies change and transform themselves” than with investigating stable systems.30 The interaction between “stabilizing and disruptive elements” can be captured by a dialectical mode of thinking.31 The model of Marxist social organization can be pictured as a pyramid.32 At its base lie the social relations of production ( Produktionsverhältnisse) , that is, the contractual, economic, and personal relationships between, for example, employer and employee, owner and worker, or lord and peasants. The nature of these relationships is explained by the level of the productive forces ( Produktivkräfte) , the workers and their skills, the state of technical knowledge that determines the tools available, the material conditions, and the like. ( A classic example of how productive forces influence the relations of production is the invention of the cotton gin, which at one stroke rendered super fluous the labor of thousands, causing social unrest and largescale migration.) The relations of production together with the productive forces that determine them form the “base” ( Basis) . The tip of the pyramid, resting on the base, comprises the political and ideological “superstructure” of society ( Überbau) . Here Marx situated all political organization, legal systems, social institutions, as well as, by implication, all artistic production: “Upon the different forms of property, upon the social conditions of existence, rises an entire superstructure of distinct and peculiarly formed sentiments, illusions, modes of thought and views of life. The entire class creates and forms them out of its material foundations and out of the corresponding social relations.”33 Eric Hobsbawm, On History ( London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997) , 148. Ibid., 149. 31 Ibid., 153. 32 My discussion of Marx and Engels’s three-tier model of social structure is drawn largely from S. H. Rigby, “Marxist Historiography,” in Companion to Historiography, ed. Michael Bentley ( London: Routledge, 1997) , 893–913. 33 Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte [ trans. unnamed] ( New York: International Publishers, 1963) , 47. “Auf den verschiedenen Formen des Eigentums, auf den sozialen Existenzbedingungen erhebt sich ein ganzer Überbau verschiedener und eigentümlich gestalteter Empfindungen, Illusionen, Denkweisen und Lebensanschauungen. Die ganze Klasse schafft und gestaltete sie aus ihren materiellen Grundlagen heraus und aus den entsprechenden gesellschaftlichen Verhältnissen” ( Marx, Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte [ 1851–52] , quoted in Knepler, Geschichte, 348) . 29 30 This content downloaded from 140.247.0.106 on Tue, 7 May 2013 15:33:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 507 T H E JO U RN AL O F M U SI CO LO G Y 508 Just as the level of the productive forces explains the nature of the relations of production, the nature of the latter in turn determines the nature of the superstructure. As theorized by Marx and Engels, the forces flow in a single direction only: upwards. This corresponds to the core Marxist belief that “ideas, thoughts, concepts do not produce, determine and dominate men, their material conditions and real life, but rather the reverse.”34 Because of its emphasis on disruptive as well as stabilizing forces and its concern with the material basis of society, intellectual Marxism is often called dialectical materialism. This model, as George Iggers has pointed out, is “macrohistorical and macrosocietal.”35 It does not aim to grasp small-scale developments and is structurally blind to the thoughts, feelings, and motivations of individual actors. It operates deductively rather than empirically. It postulates universal laws that govern every layer of a hierarchically organized system. Such hierarchical, totalizing models now tend to be called master narratives. Even if one accepts the model for the sake of argument, conceptual problems remain, primarily having to do with the relationship between base and superstructure.36 Where is the dividing line between them ( for example, how can one separate the employer-employee relations in the base from the legal system in the superstructure) ? How does the base actually influence the superstructure ( a very acute problem in the case of artworks) ? How do the disparate elements within the superstructure relate to each other? If the economic base takes structural priority in this model, how can one avoid economic reductionism when analyzing phenomena in the superstructure? And finally, what role do individuals play in this scheme?37 In spite of these problems, Marxist historians believed they were uniquely in a position to reveal large-scale structures and connections hidden from view by empirical historiography.38 In other words, dialec34 Hobsbawm, On History, 160. See also the first of Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach”: “The chief defect of all materialism up to now . . . is, that the object, reality, what we apprehend through our senses, is understood only in the form of the object or contemplation; but not as sensuous human activity, as practice; not subjectively” ( The German Ideology, 197) . 35 Iggers, Historiography, 98. 36 This problem is discussed in Rigby, “Marxist Historiography.” 37 Knepler commented here: “Der Marxismus ist keineswegs eine abgeschlossene und in sich stimmige Theorie. Es gibt heute mehrere ‘Marxismen’. In zwei Grundfragen gab es Meinungsverschiedenheiten zwischen Marx und Engels. Marx rückte ab von der Vorstellung, daß der Geschichtsverlauf von Gesetzmäßigkeiten bestimmt ist und wies der Entscheidung von Individuen Wirkung für den Geschichtsverslauf zu. Auch teilte Marx nicht Engels Auffassung, daß Denkprozesse Naturprozessen gleichen” ( letter to the author, 19 July 2001) . 38 Knepler wrote: “Seit Jahrzehnten schon hat mich der Gedanke beschäftigt, daß es nur mittels der Methode des Marxismus gelingen kann, jene tief unter der glänzenden Ober fläche des bürgerlichen Musiklebens verborgenen Zusammenhänge aufzuzeigen, die den Schlüssel zu seinem Verständnis bilden” (Musikgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, 1: 7) . This content downloaded from 140.247.0.106 on Tue, 7 May 2013 15:33:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SH REFFLER tical materialism was seen as an alternative to Rankean positivism ( “wie es gewesen ist”) .39 Its goals were ambitious: Knepler’s outline of a Marxist history of music claims to offer insight into how music can mean and communicate; this in turn will help us to understand the essence ( Wesen) of human communication in general ( Geschichte, 29) . Fully aware of the limitations of analyzing art within an economic framework, Knepler sought to come to terms with the vexed relationship between base and superstructure. Some of the difficulties, he wrote, have arisen simply from the professional division of labor between scholars who study events in the base and those who specialize in events in the superstructure, leading to a conceptual split between them that does not exist in Marx’s model ( Geschichte, 345) . A Marxist historian needs to keep both base and superstructure in view in order to determine large-scale events such as epochal divisions. Specifically, Knepler needed to show how major shifts in musical style were generated in some sense from the base ( since the base determines the events in the superstructure) without succumbing to a simplistic economic reductionism. Knepler’s solution was to emphasize the role of creativity in human labor, which according to Marx is the most important productive force.40 Given that “the development of the material productive forces takes place in people’s heads,” an element of human consciousness, of “ideology,” is already part of the base.41 Artistic expression, which is “not . . . merely ornament, idle amusement, something to do in your free time,” but rather “an essential means by which people create selfawareness and a sense of identity,” plays an important role in the formation of productive forces. “One can even say that the history of material production cannot be written without considering the history of art.”42 Following this statement, a startling inversion of what one normally thinks Marxist historians do, Knepler concludes that the human need for artistic expression and its effects on society should be situated in the base as well as in the superstructure: “It is simply wrong to conclude . . . that the development of the productive forces and changes in the base would have to be completed before ideological processes could register them. Nothing could be further from the truth. Creative people are Hobsbawm, On History, 148. Marx, Philosophisches Wörterbuch ( 1974) , quoted in Knepler, Geschichte, 345. 41 “. . . die Entwicklung von materiellen Produktivkräften geht durch den Kopf von Menschen hindurch” ( Geschichte, 346) . 42 “Sie [ die Kunst] ist nicht, wie bereits gezeigt, bloß Schmuck, Zeitvertreib, Freizeitgestaltung. . . . In allen Entwicklungsstadien der menschlichen Gesellschaft ist Kunst ein wesentliches Mittel menschlicher Selbsterkenntnis und Selbstgestaltung, und in allen Entwicklungsstadien der Kunst ist sie, obwohl sie Spaß machen kann, auch Arbeit. . . . Zugespitzt gesagt: Die Geschichte der materiellen Produktion kann ohne Beachtung der Kunstgeschichte nicht geschrieben werden” ( Geschichte, 346–47) . 39 40 This content downloaded from 140.247.0.106 on Tue, 7 May 2013 15:33:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 509 T H E JO U RN AL O F M U SI CO LO G Y able to anticipate in their thoughts or their artistic productions whatever future possibilities may lie in the productive forces and the base, long before these possibilities have been realized.”43 This significant modification of Marx’s model was not just a rhetorical move to allow Knepler to escape charges of economic reductionism. Rather, it follows logically from the argument built up in the first part of the book: that musical expression is as fundamental to human communication as is language. Since human beings have “used” music at every stage in their history ( which is why Knepler begins his account in prehistorical times) , music has played a role in forming human consciousness and therefore, indirectly, every aspect of human activity, including labor. Dahlhaus’s Dialectics vs. the Marxist Dialectic 510 Carl Dahlhaus ( 1928–89) , arguably the most influential music sch olar of h is gen eration , was professor at th e Tech n isch e Un iversität in Berlin from 1967 until his death in 1989. He devoted much of his career to thinking and writing about problems of historiography, building on the French school of Fernand Braudel and on the critical theory of the Frankfurt School.44 His notoriously complex writing style comes from his dialectical way of thinking, in which ideas are played off against each other and statements made are immediately qualified. Although this makes it difficult to pin down his ideas enough to contrast them with Knepler’s ( whose writing style, paradoxically, is not dialectical) , fundamental differences can still be identified. On the very first page of Grundlagen, Dahlhaus distinguishes between “a sociology of knowledge that pursues extrinsic relationships and a theory of history that examines intrinsic connections,” acknowledging somewhat defensively that for a Marxist, “in whose eyes the only alternative to overt bias is covert bias—this would look suspiciously like a conservative stance entrenched behind formal argument.”45 Throughout 43 “Es ist ein schlichtes Mißverständnis, wenn . . . gefolgert wird, Entwicklung der Produktivkräfte und Veränderungen an der Basis müßten erst vollzogen sein, ehe ideologische Prozesse sie registrieren können. Ganz im Gegenteil. Phantasiebegabte Menschen können denkend oder auch künsterische gestaltend vorwegnehmen, was an Zukunftsmöglichkeiten in Produktivkräften und Basis steckt, lange ehe diese Möglichkeiten realisert sind” ( Geschichte, 348–49) . Elsewhere, Knepler points out that nowhere in the writings of Marx is art specifically delegated to the superstructure; see Georg Knepler and Peter Wicke, “Das Prinzip der Prinzipienlosigkeit” ( review of Dahlhaus, Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte, in Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft 21 [ 1979] : 225) . 44 J. Bradford Robinson: “Dahlhaus, Carl,” in Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy ( accessed 1 Oct. 2003) , www.grovemusic.com. 45 The translations are taken from J. Bradford Robinson ( Foundations, here p. 1) ; I have revised some of them. The original quotations from Grundlagen are given in parentheses, as here ( “beharrt man also auf der Differenz zwischen einer Wissenssoziologie, die This content downloaded from 140.247.0.106 on Tue, 7 May 2013 15:33:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SH REFFLER the book Dahlhaus rigorously maintains this distinction between “external” and “internal” modes of inquiry. For him, political historiography is always external and cannot by definition do justice to the aesthetic, internal qualities of the artwork. The danger lies, as he repeatedly warns, in treating “the score of, say, the Ninth Symphony as a document to be weighted alongside other pieces of evidence in reconstructing the events surrounding its première or some later per formance.”46 ( That this is a caricature of Marxist methodology he seems to be aware.) Elsewhere, Dahlhaus finds it “generally characteristic of Marxist history that it frequently reaches a stature in its theory—and in its critique of nonMarxist history—that far exceeds its actual attainments in historiographical practice.”47 This defensive position is a consequence of Dahlhaus’s constant effort to cordon off a space in which the aesthetic presence of artworks can be preserved. He believed that one could treat the musical object as a work ( in the emphatic sense) or as a document. Both are completely legitimate modes of inquiry, the choice of which depends on one’s goals, as they are two sides of a dialectic. But Dahlhaus’s model is asymmetrical, and gives much more weight to the one side than to the other: “Either it [ music] forms the object which the historian wishes to comprehend and around which he marshals his explanations, or it can be simply the material he uses to illustrate structures and processes of social history.” Social and cultural histories, according to Dahlhaus, are doubtlessly valuable, but they cannot be music history.48 Elsewhere Dahlhaus formulates this idea more pointedly: One may use results from a sociological approach to inform the “internal” analysis and vice externen Zusammenhängen nachgeht, und einer Geschichtstheorie, die interne Beziehungen untersucht, so macht man sich in den Augen eines Marxisten, der in verdeckter Parteilichkeit die einzige Alternative zur offenen sieht, bereits einer konservativen Gesinnung verdächtig, die sich hinter formalen Argumenten verschanzt” [ Grundlagen, 8] ) . 46 Foundations, 4, also 28 ( “Eine Musikgeschichte streng nach dem Muster der politischen Historie—eine Schilderung also, in der die Partitur der Neunten Symphonie lediglich als Dokument behandelt würde, das neben anderen Zeugnissen eine Rekonstruktion des Ereignisses der ersten oder einer späteren Aufführung erlaubt—wäre offenkundig eine Karikatur” [ Grundlagen, 13–14, also 49] ) . 47 Foundations, 123 ( “Es ist insgesamt für die marxistische Geschichtswissenschaft bezeichnend, daß sie in der Theorie—und in der Kritik an nicht-marxistischer Geschichtsschreibung—nicht selten einen Rang erreicht, hinter dem sie in der historiographischen Praxis weit zurückbleibt”[ Grundlagen, 197] ) . 48 Foundations, 124 ( “[ Musik] bildet entweder den Gegenstand, den der Historiker zu verstehen sucht und um den er die Erklärungsgründe versammelt, oder ein bloßes Material, das er benutzt, um sozialgeschichtliche Strukturen oder Vorgänge zu illustrieren. Niemand zweifelt an der wissenschaftlichen Rechtmäßigkeit sozial- oder kulturhistorischer Darstellungen, in deren Panorama auch die Musik einen Platz findet; die Behauptung aber, es handle sich dabei um die ‘eigentliche’ Musikgeschichte, ist befremdlich” [ Grundlagen, 197] ) . This content downloaded from 140.247.0.106 on Tue, 7 May 2013 15:33:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 511 T H E JO U RN AL O F M U SI CO LO G Y 512 versa, but “it is the ‘intrinsic,’ functional coherence of a work that serves as the final arbiter in deciding which facts do or do not belong to the matter at hand.”49 This is because there is, according to Dahlhaus, a categorical difference between the aesthetic presence of an artwork and its historical function, “despite an awareness of history which colours our aesthetic perceptions.”50 Emphasizing the historical contingency of music confuses its artistic quality ( Kunstcharakter) , which is the main point, with its mere documentary status of “reflecting” a social condition. “For even if this deciphering were to provide a complete ‘explanation’ of a piece it would still not come to grips with it as art: the exchange of categories, from work to document, would be an infringement of the rights of music as an art form, which are the rights that warrant its existence.”51 This formulation—that a musical artwork itself makes the claim ( Anspruch) to be considered as art—recurs again and again throughout the book. Marxist historians, according to Dahlhaus, deny artworks this Anspruch, and limit themselves to using them solely as illustrations of non-musical events.52 For Marx, Dahlhaus claimed, music, along with other elements of the superstructure, has no history of its own, but merely piggybacks onto social history.53 As we have seen, Marxist historiography rejects the dualism that lies at the heart of Dahlhaus’s argument. Political and economic conditions are in no sense background, “external” events, but rather constitutive ones for all aspects of life, including artistic expression. For Knepler, human creativity as a primary force of production itself helps to constitute society. This dialectical relationship between music and society— which continually shape and reflect each other—should not be artificially separated by the historian. Although Knepler reiterates the Marxist truism that “there is no such thing as ‘music history’,” this does not stop him from thinking about 49 Foundations, 32 ( “Wer eine ‘immanente’ Deutung um des Kunstcharakters willen für unumgänglich hält, verurteilt sich keineswegs zu vorsätzlicher Blindheit gegenüber ‘externen’ Dokumenten, sondern beharrt lediglich auf der Behauptung, daß der ‘interne’ Funktionszusammenhang eines Werkes die Instanz sei, von der es abhängt, welche Fakten ‘zur Sache gehören’ und welche nicht” [ Grundlagen, 54] ) . 50 Foundations, 35 ( “trotz eines die ästhetische Wahrnehmung färbenden historischen Bewußtseins” [ Grundlagen, 61] ) . 51 Foundations, 64 ( “Wer in der Er fahrung der Aktualität . . . die Substanz eines musikalischen Werkes zu er fassen glaube, vertausche die Vergegenwärtigung des Kunstcharakters, auf die es eigentlich ankomme, mit einer Entzifferung des musikalischen Gebildes als Dokument des ‘Zeitgeistes’ oder des geschichtlichen ‘Bewußtseinsstandes’: einer Entzifferung, die das Werk als Werk ver fehle, auch wenn sie es lückenlos ‘erkläre’. Der “Kategorienwechsel—vom Werk zum Dokument—verletzte den Anspruch, den Musik als Kunst von sich aus erhebe und um dessentwillen sie da sei” [Grundlagen, 106] ) . 52 Foundations, 88 ( Grundlagen, 144) . 53 Foundations, 121–22 ( Grundlagen, 194) . This content downloaded from 140.247.0.106 on Tue, 7 May 2013 15:33:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SH REFFLER music and its aesthetic implications.54 In contrast with the purely functional, non-aesthetic role which Dahlhaus believes Marxist historiography ascribes to music, Knepler acknowledges music’s power to affect human beings; in fact the notion of music as a “means of expression” ( Träger von Ausdruck) is one of his basic assumptions.55 Whereas for Dahlhaus the artwork ( ideally) possesses an aesthetic presence that reaches beyond its own time, for Knepler music’s expressive power is a communicative one and as such is inextricable from its social function. In prehistoric societies, Knepler speculates, music served as a complementary alternative to language; one allowed the communication of extreme and unformed emotion ( music) while the other allowed formulation of precise ideas ( language) ( Geschichte, 36–37) . The close link between music and language has been maintained throughout history. Musical material has been shaped over the eons in specially coded ways, each appropriate for its particular social environment, in order to heighten music’s communicative power. Even “art music,” which developed much later, still carries the vestiges of the primeval yells and sighs of prehistoric music. Knepler’s model for the social function of music can be summarized as follows: First, people engage in musical activity ( as players or listeners) , which results in a musical product; here the distinction between improvised and notated music is not important. The producers and the receivers of the music share an understanding of the music for reasons that have their roots in the biological and anthropological disposition of human beings since prehistoric times. The musical product, whether it is unnotated music used to accompany some activity, or Beethoven’s Ninth, makes a statement. The statement is related to a certain concept of the world [ Weltbild] ; the nature of this relationship must be analyzed from case to case ( Geschichte, 197) . All the relationships that result from this constellation—those between the producers, the recipients, the musical product, its statement, the expressed Weltbild —are to be understood dialectically, but they are themselves situated within a specific societal frame, which in turn is dependent on the particular productive forces and relations of production that pertain for that society ( Geschichte, 197–98) . Music scholarship since the mid 19th century, has, according to Knepler, attempted to separate music from its semantic, communicative function and to replace it with a purely “syntactical” one ( by this he means an internally consistent, “musical” one) . From Hanslick to Riemann, many theorists, including Schenker, have sought to reduce the 54 55 “Music Historiography in Eastern Europe,” 228. “Musik ist Träger von Ausdruck” is a chapter heading ( Geschichte, 47–51) . This content downloaded from 140.247.0.106 on Tue, 7 May 2013 15:33:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 513 T H E JO U RN AL O F M U SI CO LO G Y 514 content of music to the relationships between notes, labeling its expressive content as something “external.” Knepler believes that to deny music’s communicative, semantic function means to exclude its emotional impact and correspondingly, its aesthetic value. The issue is not whether it is desirable to look at works isolated from their context— analysis “of the notes” is a legitimate activity under some circumstances —but how we use and value this kind of analysis. The problems begin for Knepler when the “element of syntax is taken as an absolute, when the relative autonomy of musical processes is taken to be absolute autonomy, when syntactical analyses, which would be better called descriptions of procedures, are pretentiously and arrogantly taken to be the whole story.”56 The conceptual separation of music’s syntactical elements from its capacity to express emotive meaning is an unfortunate development in music scholarship, to which he believes Dahlhaus in his Einführung in die systematische Musikwissenschaft, an otherwise brilliant study, succumbs.57 Knepler’s approach therefore does not exclude experiencing the work as an aesthetic object, but it does question the validity of deriving value judgments from aesthetic response: “The concept ‘value’ is relational. A value judgment cannot be uttered without a point of reference . . . Value, understood as an ethical category, refers to people’s lives in a specific social system and historical situation.”58 Since every aesthetic response is historically based, Knepler finds it impossible to separate historical from aesthetic considerations. The Issue of Musical Autonomy Although Dahlhaus acknowledges the dialectical relationship between history and aesthetics, he maintains that the primary duty of the music historian is to write a history of art rather than a history of art ( Grundlagen, 204) . It is impossible to do justice to both: “Music history, being the history of an art form, seems doomed to failure: on the one side it is flanked by the dictates of ‘aesthetic autonomy’, on the other by a theory of history that clings to the concept of ‘continuity’. Music 56 “Der Spaß hört auf, wo . . . das Teilelement Syntax verabsolutiert wird, wo die relative Autonomie musikalischer Processe für absolute Autonomie ausgegeben wird, wo syntaktische Analysen, die man besser ‘Verlaufsbeschreibungen’ nennen sollte, anspruchsvoll und arrogant für das Ganze ausgegeben werden” ( Geschichte, 43–44) . 57 Knepler here ( Geschichte, 50) refers to Carl Dahlhaus, ed., Einführung in die systematische Musikwissenschaft ( Cologne: Hans Gerig, 1971) . 58 “Der Begriff ‘Wert’ drückt eine Relation aus. Ohne Bezungspunkt läßt sich ein Werturteil nicht aussprechen . . . Wert, als ethische Kategorie verstanden, bezieht sich auf das Leben der Menschen in jeweils konkreten gesellschaftlichen Systemen und historischen Situationen” ( Geschichte, 63) . This content downloaded from 140.247.0.106 on Tue, 7 May 2013 15:33:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SH REFFLER history fails either as history by being a collection of structural analyses of separate works, or as a history of art by reverting from musical works to occurrences in social or intellectual history cobbled together in order to impart cohesion to an historical narrative.”59 ( Variants of this last sentence occur mantra-like throughout Grundlagen.60 ) Accordingly, the music historian must center his account around musical works that have artistic value. Since one can hardly use ephemeral Trivialmusik for this purpose, one should instead take works that mean something to us today.61 “[ A] music history that proceeds from a study of musical works . . . is based on the notion of the autonomy of art. . . . By drawing on the principles of novelty and originality . . . music historians present the development of music as an account of the origins of autonomous and unreduplicatable works of art, born of themselves and existing entirely for their own sakes.”62 An extreme consequence of a complete separation between the historical and aesthetic significance of music would be “that music is ‘historical’ . . . in inverse proportion to the extent that it qualifies as art. In this view, once art has attained the status of being classical it is elevated beyond the reaches of history and the faculties of historical perception; and by the same token, a work seems to bear an aesthetic stigma if it is possible to make salient points of an historical nature about it.”63 59 Foundations, 19–20 ( “Musikgeschichte als Geschichte einer Kunst erscheint unter den Voraussetzungen der Autonomieästhetik einerseits und einer sich an den Begriff der Kontinuität klammernden Geschichtstheorie andererseits als unmögliches Unter fangen, weil sie entweder—als Sammlung von Strukturanalysen einzelner Werke—keine Geschichte der Kunst oder aber—als Rekurs von den musikalischen Werken zu ideen- oder sozialgeschichtlichen Vorgängen, deren Verknüpfung dann den inneren Zusammenhalt der Geschichtserzählung ausmacht—keine Geschichte der Kunst ist” [ Grundlagen, 37] ) . 60 Hepokoski has shown the origins of this sentence in René Wellek and Austin Warren’s Theory of Literature ( 1949; 2nd ed. New York, 1970) , 253. See “The Dahlhaus Project,” 234–35. 61 Grundlagen, 19–20. This is consistent with Dahlhaus’s basic historiographical approach, which shifts the emphasis from the past to the present: “. . . daß darüber, was eine Sache ‘sei’, weniger deren Herkunft entscheide . . . als vielmehr der Inbegriff dessen, was an Möglichkeiten in ihr stecke. Nicht, wie sie geworden ist, was sie ist, soll als ausschlaggebend gelten, sondern was aus ihr werden kann” ( Grundlagen, 18) . 62 Foundations, 11–12 ( “Musikhistorie beruht als Werkgeschichte . . . auf der Idee autonomer Kunst. . . . Indem sich die Musikhistoriker am Prinzip der Neuheit und Originalität orientieren . . . beschreiben sie die Entwicklung der Musik als Ursprungsgeschichte des autonomen, individuellen, unwiederholbaren, in sich selbst begründeten und um seiner selbst willen existierenden Kunstwerks” [ Grundlagen, 23–24] ) . 63 Foundations, 25 ( “Eine andere Konsequenz derselben ästhetischen Prämisse wäre eine Geschichtsschreibung, die gleichsam resigniert und von einer schroffen Unterscheidung zwischen ästhetischer und historischer Bedeutung ausgeht: von der . . . Vorstellung, daß Musik im selben Maße geschichtlich . . . sei, wie sie an der Idee der Kunst gerade nicht teilhat. Kunst, die sich zu klassischem Rang erhebt, ist der Geschichte—dem Zugriff historischer Erkenntnis—in ihrem Wesen entrückt. Und umgekeht erscheint der Umstand, daß sich über ein Werk Entscheidendes sagen läßt, indem man es historisch bestimmt, als ästhetischer Makel” [ Grundlagen, 44] ) . This content downloaded from 140.247.0.106 on Tue, 7 May 2013 15:33:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 515 T H E JO U RN AL O F M U SI CO LO G Y 516 This categorical distinction between internal and external aspects of the work of art is not incidental, but rather determines how we tell what is Art and what isn’t: An artwork, by means of its internal musical logic and its novel aspects, claims its “self-sufficiency” ( Autonomieanspruch) .64 In Dahlhaus’s usage, the autonomy principle is unabashedly value-laden. It even has a moral dimension, apparent in cases where the composer’s integrity allows him to resist social pressures.65 However much Dahlhaus relativized and qualified the notion of musical autonomy and even viewed it as itself a historical phenomenon, it remains the central concept of his understanding of writing music history.66 To opponents of the principle of musical autonomy, Dahlhaus does not present arguments as much as to simply assert it as a “historical fact” and to point out the weaknesses of other approaches. “Documentary” and “social-historical” approaches lead to treating the musical work as mere information about whichever state of development it is a part. For Dahlhaus, the real problem is that such approaches do not permit a purely aesthetic contemplation of a work’s structure.67 The only way to reconcile the demands of historical consciousness and the principle of musical autonomy is to read history through the work: “Art history does justice to aesthetic substance only to the extent that the historian has read the historical nature of works from their internal constitution; otherwise it remains an arrangement which is extraneous to art and imposed upon art works from the outside.”68 Knepler, on the other hand, believes that music can never be autonomous because it is primarily a means of human communication. The development of seemingly functionless instrumental music since the 18th century ( for which he suggests the neutral label “Musik zum Zuhören”) reflects the increasing division of labor and occupational specialization that occurred in Western economies at the same time ( Geschichte, 193) . Even if we concede that “a culture that has at its disposal music other than that which is life- and work-related is richer than one that has remained at an earlier stage,” we cannot maintain that the absence of a function for music—namely that of accompanying non-musical activities—entitles us to claim that it has no function at Foundations, 13 ( Grundlagen, 25) . Foundations, 113 ( Grundlagen, 181) . 66 Foundations, 108–9 ( Grundlagen, 174–75) . Because of the particular relationship between Grundlagen and Die Musik des 19. Jahrhunderts, one has to keep in mind that by “music history” Dahlhaus means above all the history of 19th -century music. 67 Foundations, 27–28 ( Grundlagen, 47–48) . 68 Foundations, 29 ( “Nur in dem Maße, wie ein Historiker von der inneren Zusammensetzung der Werke deren geschichtliches Wesen abliest, ist die Geschichtsschreibung, zu der er schließlich gelangt, auch ästhetisch substanziell, statt ein kunstfremdes, von außen an die Werke herangetragenes Arrangement zu bleiben” [ Grundlagen, 49] ) . 64 65 This content downloaded from 140.247.0.106 on Tue, 7 May 2013 15:33:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SH REFFLER all.69 One may certainly speak of Art, not based on amorphous “aesthetic” criteria, but rather on how well music fulfills the expressive and communicative requirements of its specific social context, including how it contributes to ( and draws from) that society’s productive forces and its relations of production. “Relative Autonomy” Knepler admits that the undeniable “otherness” of music—the fact that musical sounds are often organized in ways that allow them to be described, quite adequately, as closed systems—often makes it difficult to interpret it in terms of its communicative ( semantic) content ( Geschichte, 42–43) . The danger of an knee-jerk coupling of general history with music history was strikingly illustrated by Curt Sachs in 1946, in a passage commented upon by Knepler and many others, in which Sachs asked how it was that the music of Machaut could have been composed during “one of the worst episodes of the Hundred Years War,” or that Cervantes and Lope de Vega could have written their greatest works during the reign of Philip II, who “plunged his country into misery and moral disintegration,” or how Beethoven was able to tear the original dedication to Napoleon off the score of his Third Symphony, leaving the work unchanged?70 To assume such a close und unmediated connection between music and society is clearly ludicrous, Knepler responds. None of the objections raised by Sachs even approaches the Marxist conception of art history ( Geschichte, 340–41) . The relationship between musical and societal events ( or events of the superstructure and those of the base) is better characterized as one of relative autonomy: the system-like qualities of individual disciplines, such as mathematics or music, “are not independent of general conditions of society either, but the relationships to society are of a complex nature.”71 The coordination does not occur on the small-scale, “event” level, but rather over longer periods of time. 69 “So läßt sich also sagen, daß eine Musikkultur, die nicht bloß über Typen von Musik ver fügt, die an andere Lebens- und Arbeitsprozesse gebunden sind, reicher ist als eine, die über die ältere Stufe nicht hinausgeht” ( Geschichte 196–97, quotation on p. 196) . 70 Curt Sachs, The Commonwealth of Art: Style in the Fine Arts, Music, and the Dance ( New York: Norton, 1946) , 320–22. Sachs arrives at an even more pointed conclusion than Dahlhaus’s about the mutual exclusivity of art and politics: “No music that is directly connected with outer events or currents can be seriously considered as a work of art, even without discussing banalities like Giovinezza or the unspeakable Horst Wessel Lied” ( The Commonwealth of Art, 323) . One might ask about the artistic merits of Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, Britten’s War Requiem, Dallapiccola’s Il Prigionero, or Nono’s Il Canto Sospeso. 71 Knepler, “Music Historiography in Eastern Europe,” 230–31. This content downloaded from 140.247.0.106 on Tue, 7 May 2013 15:33:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 517 T H E JO U RN AL O F M U SI CO LO G Y 518 That is, major political and economic events do ultimately have an impact on broader musical developments, but actual, specific musical events enjoy a large amount of autonomy. In Geschichte, Knepler relies on the concept of relative autonomy but steers clear of offering a formula for it.72 In two lengthy case studies, Knepler seeks to illustrate how crucial musical developments exhibit “relative autonomy” while still being at some level inextricably bound up in their social context. In both his chosen examples, Notre Dame organum and Mozart’s comic operas, advanced compositional techniques developed from a mixture of “low” and “high” musical genres, which were in turn made possible by their specific social and political contexts. In Perotin’s organa, to take this example, the chant in the lower voice is stretched out in the broader metric dimensions of the sacred tradition, while the active upper parts reflect the dance rhythms of the peasant and minstrels ( Geschichte, 235) . This combination of the spiritual and the earthly had its roots in medieval philosophy and is expressed as well in the Gothic cathedral. The primary institutions of the time, feudalism and the church, provided the framework in which this “intersoziale Aneignung”—the exchange and appropriation of musical techniques and styles among different social classes—took place. The ultimate economic-political context, at the level of the base, was the urbanization of Europe between the 11th and the 13th centuries. This cannot be brought into a direct causal relationship with the compositions of Leonin and Perotin, but still the latter could not have come about without the former.73 “The composer may have set to work, filled with love for humanity and hope, even with a kind of utopianism, to find solutions on the parchment for problems which might have seemed to him to be purely musical, but were actually charged with the monstrous conflicts of that 72 In an earlier text ( “Musikgeschichte und Geschichte,” Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft 5 [ 1963] : 291–98) , Knepler had tried to pin down the location of various elements of music in the scheme. Certain aspects of music were “primary events” and situated in or near the base ( “Inhaltsbedingte Techniken,” “das Entstehen neuer Gattungen,” “die Herausbildung neuer soziologischer Kategorien”) , while others were “secondary” and even “tertiary events” ( such as dates of composition) which in their “Mikroverlauf ” appeared to function independently of the base. Aware of the difficulties involved, Knepler evidently gave up trying to formulate these relationships so precisely. 73 If one were to claim, for example, that “Komposition [ in the 11th and 12th centuries] sei ein Produkt der steigenden landwirtschaftlichen Erträge im 10. Jahrhundert, so hätte er eine grotesk grob-materialistische Konzeption vorgetragen; er hätte übersehen, daß materielle Produktivkräfte nicht automatisch und unmittelbar geistige Produktivkräfte freisetzen, daß jene andererseits nicht zustande gekommen wären, hätten Menschen nicht vorerst nachgedacht und die Resultate ihrer Denktätigkeit in Aktionen umgesetzt” ( Geschichte, 249) . This content downloaded from 140.247.0.106 on Tue, 7 May 2013 15:33:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SH REFFLER time.”74 Even works that do not overtly seem to reflect “great ideas of their time” ( die großen Ideen ihrer Zeit) , such as the symphonies of Brahms, bear the traces of their times and should be interpreted in that way ( Geschichte, 512) . Musical autonomy is therefore an illusion, even if the composers themselves believe in it. Dahlhaus accepts the notion that musical autonomy is relative— that the criteria for the autonomous work are themselves historically defined and therefore changeable—but he rejects the Marxist concept of relative autonomy.75 The two concepts are different; while musical autonomy operates on the level of the specific work ( which makes the claim to be considered “in itself ”) , relative autonomy refers to the larger hierarchical relationship between base and superstructure. Although the Marxist concept concedes, in Dahlhaus’s words, “some interplay between base and superstructure rather than positing a unilateral dependency” ( eine Wechselbeziehung zwischen Basis und Überbau statt einer einseitigen Abhängigkeit) , Dahlhaus does not accept the existence of such a sch eme at all.76 However, since there appears to be no consensus among non-Marxist historians about writing music history, “grappling with Marxist theorems seems all the more urgent, whether the intention is to take from them what is tenable, or reach a higher level of reflection in our own convictions, or simply to clarify matters by dismissing premises that do not apply.”77 It is with a tinge of regret, and in the sense of opting for a provisional working method instead of a solution for all time, that he advocates a pragmatic methodological pluralism, “the principle of doing without principles” ( das Prinzip der Prinzipienlosigkeit) .78 Knepler in turn, choosing that phrase for the title of his review of Grundlagen, does not dispute that a variety of methodological approaches is necessary for writing music history. He claims that Dahlhaus misunderstood modern Marxist theory by focusing exclusively on the 74 “Menschenfreundlich, hoffnungsvoll, ja utopisch in gewissem Sinn, mag er [ der Komponist] sich an sein Geschäft begeben haben, auf dem Pergament Lösungen für Probleme zu finden, die ihm rein musikalischer Natur geschienen haben mögen und die dennoch geladen waren mit den ungeheueren Konflikten jener Zeit” ( Geschichte, 237) . 75 This is discussed in the chapter “Über die ‘relative Autonomie’ der Musikgeschichte,” which is at the same time his most specific critique of Marxism in the book, and quite probably of Knepler’s work in particular, although he is not named ( Grundlagen, 174–204) . 76 Foundations, 116 ( Grundlagen, 186) . 77 Foundations, 122 ( “In einer Situation aber, in der von einem Konsensus der Nicht-Marxisten über tragende Prinzipien der Musikgeschichtsschreibung nicht die Rede sein kann . . . erscheint die Auseinandersetzung mit marxistischen Theoremen als dringlich, sei es, um sich anzueignen, was haltbar ist, oder um in den eigenen Überzeugungen einen höheren Reflexionsgrad zu erreichen oder um ihnen durch Abgrenzung von fremden Prämissen überhaupt erst festere Umrisse zu geben” [ Grundlagen, 195] ) . 78 Foundations, 122 ( Grundlagen, 195) . This content downloaded from 140.247.0.106 on Tue, 7 May 2013 15:33:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 519 T H E JO U RN AL O F M U SI CO LO G Y economic base and ignoring the role of the productive forces. The base, formed by the effects of these productive forces, is itself continually in flux. Marxist theory, especially the newer contributions of the postStalinist era, writes Knepler, posits a dynamic model of history, not the immovable structure that Dahlhaus rejected.79 The conciliatory tone of Knepler’s review and its effusive praise for Dahlhaus’s theoretical sophistication shows great respect for his political and intellectual opposite number as well as an intense desire to “bring him around.”80 Conclusion: Dahlhaus, Knepler, and the New Musicology 520 There is a clear ideological and political divide between our two protagonists. Dahlhaus, as we have seen, despite his interest in sociological approaches, viewed them ultimately as a threat to the integrity of the discipline and devoted much of his energies during the 1970s to explicitly warding them off.81 Knepler was a tireless advocate of a new musicology that he understood as part of a larger revolutionary activity. The political realities of the Cold War—nowhere more visceral than in divided Berlin, especially from 1961 to 1989, when the Wall served as a daily reminder—prevented both Knepler and Dahlhaus from even seeking to reach a middle ground, since they both stood for something larger. Although the ideological component of Knepler’s work is openly displayed—indeed his prominent status, especially before 1969, undoubtedly lent emphasis to his work in the totalitarian political context of musicology in the DDR—we can see now that the Cold War is over that Dahlhaus’s position was ideologically determined too. Even without explicitly addressing political topics, his defense of traditional German Geisteswissenschaft was as pointed a defense of Western values as can be imagined. On the other hand, several complicating factors seem to undermine the notion of an ideological divide. One such aspect is the paradox that Dahlhaus’s intellectual roots lie in the Marxist-inspired thinkers of the Braudel circle and the Frankfurt School, while Knepler was deeply influenced by older narrative models of music history as exemplified by 18th -century historians such as Padre Martini, Hawkins, Burney, and Knepler and Wicke, “Das Prinzip der Prinzipienlosigkeit,” 225. Knepler continued to respect Dahlhaus in later years: “Dahlhaus wußte und sagte, daß Musik mit anderen menschlichen Aktivitäten zusammenhängt. Sein Wissen, seine Musikalität, seine wissenschaftliche Phantasie, seine Kenntnisse besonders auf dem Gebiet gesellschaftlicher Theorien des 19. Jahrhunderts, ließen ihn erkennen, daß man mit dem Konzept einer reinen Autonomie nicht weiterkommt. Was er nicht akzeptieren wollte, ist, daß Klassenkonflikte in der Geschichte und das Funktionieren von Musik eine Rolle spielen” ( letter to the author, 17 Oct. 2001) . 81 Hepokoski, “The Dahlhaus Project,” 225. 79 80 This content downloaded from 140.247.0.106 on Tue, 7 May 2013 15:33:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SH REFFLER Forkel. Knepler’s writing has a traditional, narrative flavor quite different from Dahlhaus’s dialectical style, which is actually more characteristic of Marxist writing. Knepler’s style grows out of his belief that history has a progress that can be told, while Dahlhaus’s knotty prose betrays his desire to reflect the complexity of each situation. Furthermore, Dahlhaus’s reputation for being sympathetic to Marxist approaches attracted a large and international coterie of left-wing students,82 while Knepler became known ( especially after his retirement from the university) as the most anti-dogmatic of Marxists. Finally, Knepler’s fiercely independent views were controversial within the DDR. His frequent travel to scholarly conferences in the West and his close contacts with Western scholars aroused suspicion, as did his solidarity with his Czech colleagues after the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. Since the 1960s he had been under observation by the East German secret police ( Staatssicherheitsdienst, or Stasi) and in 1970 he was barred for political reasons from entering the Musikwissenschaftliches Institut at his university, although he continued to be employed there for another year.83 ( It would not be correct, however, to portray Knepler, who for many years enjoyed all the benefits of official approbation, as a dissident.84 ) Even so, Dahlhaus’s and Knepler’s views of writing music history could not ever have been reconciled, because they had very different notions of what music history is and what it is for: For Dahlhaus, music history is “memory made scientific” ( “wissenschaftlich gefaßte Erinnerung”) , while for Knepler, its aim is the much more ambitious “improvement of our musical culture,” or as he wrote to me in 2001: “What 82 J. Bradford Robinson writes: “[ Dahlhaus] was faulted for . . . his submission to Germany’s left-wing student movement of the late 1960s ( he regarded it with avuncular detachment and awaited the fruits of its scholarly labours) .” “Dahlhaus, Carl,” Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy ( accessed 1 Oct. 2003) , www.grovemusic.com. 83 On Knepler’s anti-dogmatism and his being under observation by the Stasi ( an honor bestowed upon a very large percentage of the population, it should be said) , see Gülke, “Zum Gedenken an Georg Knepler ( 1906–2003) .” The account of Knepler’s “Hausverbot” is related in Müller, “Ein Voltairianer: Georg Knepler zum Gedenken” and was confirmed in personal communications by Reinhold Brinkmann and Peter Gülke. Knepler described his outsider position to me as follows: “Meine Sicht der Welt und des Problems der Musikgeschichtsschreibung ist ähnlich oder gleich der Sicht von Theoretikern in kapitalistischen Ländern und, umgekehrt, im Osten hat diese Sicht viele erbitterte Gegner” ( letter to the author, 17 Oct. 2001) . 84 Knepler was for example involved in the public condemnation of the younger scholar Eberhardt Klemm, who in 1964 had dared to write about the deep and lasting influence of Schoenberg’s 12-tone music on that of his former pupil, Hanns Eisler. Klemm was subsequently barred from pursuing an academic career and was without a permanent job for 20 years. See Lars Klingberg, “Die Kampagne gegen Eberhardt Klemm und das Institut für Musikwissenschaft der Universität Leipzig in den 60er Jahren, Berliner Beiträge zur Musikwissenschaft: Beihefte zur Neuen Berlinischen Musikzeitung 9 ( 1994) : 45–51. This content downloaded from 140.247.0.106 on Tue, 7 May 2013 15:33:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 521 T H E JO U RN AL O F M U SI CO LO G Y 522 I and many of my friends and colleagues tried to do was not ‘application’ of Marxism onto music history, but rather the attempt to develop a theory of changing the world, which also sought a clearer understanding of music and music history.”85 Whereas Dahlhaus constructs a model of music history as a history of art, and must accordingly place artworks and their Kunstcharakter in the center of the investigation, Knepler’s model focuses on the activities, desires, and creativity of human beings: “When you do music history you are doing human history, whether you know it or not. The author should know it.”86 Many aspects of Marxist music historiography have again become relevant: the rejection of musical autonomy, the acknowledgment of popular music as a legitimate field of study, the plea to open up the inquiry geographically ( and to abandon the categories “center” and “periphery”) , and above all, the effort to see music as a social product and a social force. Like Knepler, many musicologists today would deny that music and society are categorically separate spheres, which may “reflect” each other. Knepler’s efforts to rescue music from the superstructure formed a crucial part of his thinking, for with artistic creativity as a force of production ( and therefore part of the base) , it cannot be said to “result from” or to “reflect” social and economic forces. Rather, both artistic expression and “society” are different manifestations of the same thing: human activity. Far from intending to read musical works as “illustrations” of society ( as Dahlhaus understands the goals of the Marxist project) , Knepler aims to show how music as a primal form of communication shapes every aspect of human interaction and society; music therefore needs to be understood in connection with social activities and not merely with other arts. Finally, music is multiply connected with the ideological network of the society in which it exists ( Geschichte, 22) . Conceptually, we are not too far from Lawrence Kramer’s description of the goals of the new musicology, which concentrates on the relationship between music and subjectivity, where subjectivity is understood not as the condition of private inward existence but as a disposition to occupy socially formed positions from which historically specific types of action and feeling become possible. Music in this con- 85 Foundations, 3 (Grundlagen, 12) ; “Music Historiography,” 228; “Was ich und viele meiner Freunde und Kollegen versucht haben, ist nicht ‘Anwendung’ des Marxismus auf Musikgeschichte, es ist vielmehr ein Versuch, eine Theorie der Weltveränderung zu entwickeln, die auch Musik und Musikgeschichte klarer als bisher zu verstehen sucht” ( letter to the author, 17 Oct. 2001) . It continues: “Daß mir und anderen dabei Fehleinschätzungen unterlaufen sind, die sich mehr oder weniger schnell als solche haben erkennen lassen, gehört dazu.” 86 “Man betreibt, wenn man sich mit Musikgeschichte beschäftigt, Menschheitsgeschichte, ob man es weiß oder nicht. Der Autor sollte es wissen” ( Geschichte, 544) . This content downloaded from 140.247.0.106 on Tue, 7 May 2013 15:33:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SH REFFLER text appears as a model of the communicative action by which one subject addresses and negotiates with another.87 The scholarly project that Knepler and his colleagues opened up ( and ultimately did not finish) resonates strongly with many current concerns, even though there was, as far as I can tell, little or no direct influence of East German and Soviet Marxist musicology on the North American scene ( with the possible exception of aspects of Richard Taruskin’s work) . If my account of Knepler’s thought sounds familiar, it is because of the transmission of Marxist thought to North America through French theorists ( Sartre, Lyotard, Foucault, Lacan, Kristeva, and others) , whose power ful reception helped to transform literary criticism and, to a lesser extent, historical studies. North Americans got their Marxism by way of France, not Germany ( French post-structuralist theory is still hardly received in German musicology) . There are even strong pockets of resistance in North America and Germany today, comparable to Dahlhaus’s position in the 1970s, to social readings of music from those who believe in the possibility of unmediated access to the aesthetic content of a work.88 This is especially true in Germany, where in large part because of Dahlhaus’s success in fending off not only Marxist approaches but also all methods with a sociological component, one finds very little sympathy for Anglo-American “new musicology.” What can we learn from this debate today? Useful as Knepler’s notion of music as a form of communication may be, it is harder to accept the structural model behind it, not because it is Marxist, but simply because it is a large-scale structural model. Master narratives, whether Marxist, structuralist, or psychoanalytical, have proven to be based on unified world views that ultimately have an interest in control. Historiography has responded over the last decades by shifting from macrohistory to micro-history, because, as Iggers put it, “the sources of exploitation and domination were not to be found primarily in institutionalized structures, in politics, or in the economy, but more importantly in the many interpersonal relations in which human beings exert power over others.”89 For Knepler, the crux of human power relationships resided in the class system, whereas more recent notions of social imbalances 87 Lawrence Kramer, “Ein Phantasiestück zur Jahrtausendwende,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 57 ( 2000) : 101 ( quoted from the English abstract) . 88 Pieter Van den Toorn, Music, Politics, and the Academy ( Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995) . 89 Iggers, Historiography in the Twentieth Century, 99. Iggers goes on to say, “Foucault in an importan t sen se replaced Marx as th e an alyst of power an d of its relation to knowledge.” This content downloaded from 140.247.0.106 on Tue, 7 May 2013 15:33:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 523 T H E JO U RN AL O F M U SI CO LO G Y 524 take other factors into account, such as the roles of nationality, gender, or race in the shaping of individual identities. If we accept Knepler’s conclusions but reject his methods, we might want to do the opposite with Dahlhaus, whose pragmatic “Prinzip der Prinzipienlosigkeit” remains more relevant than ever given the postmodern fragmentation of our world. Yet if Dahlhaus’s centering of music history around the musical work is adequate primarily for a history of 19th-century German music ( as has been often pointed out) ,90 for many other histories, for example of Italian opera, medieval music, American music, or 20th-century music, this category is of much more limited usefulness. Moreover, we ( or at least I) cannot take, with Dahlhaus, the musical canon as a historical fact, formed by an impartial, invisible hand. If music’s ability to have an aesthetic effect outside of its original context is supposed to be evidence of its emphatic Kunstcharakter, as Dahlhaus believed, then we would have to include today a vast range of musical styles, including Indian classical music, African pop, and salsa ( to name only a few) , which have likewise proved to be amazingly transplantable from their original contexts. Dahlhaus’s primacy of individual aesthetic experience has been confirmed, in a way he did not intend, in the home CD player, which allows us to turn music from widely divergent cultural contexts into absolute music ( in the literal sense of the word) . Our practice does not however confirm the timeless artistic quality of this music—its autonomy—but rather our endless capacity to misunderstand it ( even, of course, Beethoven’s Ninth) .91 This attempt at drawing a lesson from the Dahlhaus-Knepler debate shows how crucial both scholars remain, but also how necessary it is to rethink their positions so that the inquiry can progress. With Knepler we open up the field of inquiry, and with Dahlhaus we advocate a diversity of methods. At the same time we reject the “glue,” so to speak, or the common thread that held their respective approaches together: for Knepler the Marxist model and for Dahlhaus the primacy of the musical work. Where does this leave us? Although we do not accept Knepler’s totalizing model, his questions are still the ones we ask today: How does music communicate? To whom? Through which “codes”? Under what circumstances can this communication take place? In short, Knepler advocated a study of music as a factor in social interac- 90 For example by Philip Gossett, in his “Up from Beethoven,” review of NineteenthCentury Music by Carl Dahlhaus, New York Review of Books, 26 Oct. 1989, 21–26. 91 See Marcello Sorce Keller: “Why Do We Misunderstand the Musics of All Times and Places, and Why Do We Enjoy Doing So?” in Essays on Music and Culture in Honor of Herbert Kellman, ed. Barbara Haggh ( Paris: Minerve, 2001) , 567–74. This content downloaded from 140.247.0.106 on Tue, 7 May 2013 15:33:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SH REFFLER tion, every aspect of which is affected by asymmetrical value judgments and power relationships. These are questions that were relegated to the sidelines for many years in Western musicology, not because of any devious conspiracy ( which even Dahlhaus would not have been able to organize) , but simply because the field had developed a dynamic of its own, using a discourse that implicitly claimed to be non-ideological and therefore universal. At the same time, the more overtly political associations of Marxist methodologies hampered their acceptance during the 1970s and 1980s. Whereas to subscribe to a “sociological” framework in those years automatically implied a political position within the Cold War dichotomy, this labeling is no longer operative. While an intensive reevaluation of Dahlhaus’s work is more urgent than ever, we can now also turn, if not for answers then for fresh questions, to others previously hidden in the shadow of the Cold War. Harvard University ABSTRACT As exemplified in writings by Carl Dahlhaus and Georg Knepler, a debate about music historiography took place in East and West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. A comparison between two books, Dahlhaus’s Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte ( Foundations of Music History) and Knepler’s Geschichte als Weg zum Musikverständnis ( History as a Means of Understanding Music) , both published in 1977, is instructive as a measure of the two poles of the Methodenstreit: the one centered around music as autonomous work, the other around music as a human activity. The central questions raised prove uncannily current. The two scholars, who knew each other and respected each other’s work, were both based in Berlin; but with Dahlhaus in the West and Knepler in the East, they represented the two different political systems that existed in the divided city between 1945 and 1989. In their work, and especially in these two books, Dahlhaus and Knepler defended their own positions and sought to point out weaknesses in the other side. While Dahlhaus’s work is well known in English-speaking musicology, Knepler’s is not. His contribution to music history and historiography was comparable to Dahlhaus’s in importance, however, and his ideas anticipate many tenets of the “new musicology.” This content downloaded from 140.247.0.106 on Tue, 7 May 2013 15:33:56 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 525