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| New Musicology | |
|---|---|
| Name | New Musicology |
| Country | United States |
| Founded | 1980s |
| Disciplines | Musicology, Cultural Studies, Critical Theory |
New Musicology
New Musicology emerged in the 1980s as a revisionist movement within music scholarship that challenged positivist approaches associated with Heinrich Schenker studies, Charles Rosen-style formalism, and archival practices tied to institutions such as the Library of Congress, British Library, and Bibliothèque nationale de France. Advocates drew on ideas from figures and institutions including Theodor W. Adorno, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, Roland Barthes, and the journals Critical Inquiry, Representations, and Differences to reconceptualize analysis in relation to gender studies, postcolonialism, and race studies.
The movement coalesced amid debates involving scholars affiliated with Yale University, University of Chicago, Harvard University, University of California, Berkeley, and King's College London who reacted against methodologies practiced at Juilliard School-linked conservatories and archives such as the Sibelius Museum. Intellectual antecedents included the critical theory of Frankfurt School, the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and historiographies advanced at venues like the Modern Language Association and the American Musicological Society. Early forums and conferences at places like Cornell University and University of Oxford provided venues where scholars juxtaposed canonical repertories—works by Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Giuseppe Verdi—with newly foregrounded materials from Scott Joplin, Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelssohn, and indigenous repertoires collected in archives such as the Smithsonian Institution.
Prominent proponents included scholars associated with publishing houses and journals like Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, and JSTOR who cited theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Antonio Gramsci, Pierre Bourdieu, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Influential musicologists and critics often named in association with the movement include figures who published in Journal of the American Musicological Society, Music & Letters, 19th-Century Music, and The Musical Quarterly, alongside commentators drawing on works by Susan McClary, Lawrence Kramer, Christopher Small, Kofi Agawu, and Charles Rosen. Interdisciplinary interlocutors spanned the humanities and social sciences: scholars from Columbia University, University of California, Los Angeles, Princeton University, Duke University, and Rutgers University contributed theoretical frameworks derived from Jacques Lacan, Homi K. Bhabha, Stuart Hall, and bell hooks.
Methodologies combined close reading of scores and recordings with discourse analysis, reception history, and ethnography as practiced in departments like Oxford Brookes University and Indiana University Bloomington. Techniques incorporated semiotics influenced by Charles Sanders Peirce and Ferdinand de Saussure, deconstruction as advanced by Derrida, and performative theory derived from J.L. Austin and Judith Butler. Scholars applied concepts from post-structuralism, marxism as in the work of Karl Marx and Louis Althusser, and feminist theory associated with Simone de Beauvoir and Nancy Fraser to interrogate canons such as the repertoires of Gustav Mahler, Richard Wagner, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Igor Stravinsky. Methodological cross-pollination brought tools from ethnomusicology practiced at SOAS University of London and archival studies linked to National Archives (UK).
Research topics ranged widely: gender, sexuality, and identity in works by Giacomo Puccini, Gustav Holst, and Benjamin Britten; race and empire in repertories connected to George Gershwin, Scott Joplin, and colonial archives like the British Empire collections; labor and patronage in institutions such as the Metropolitan Opera, Bayreuth Festival, and Vienna Philharmonic; and the politics of canon formation involving Conservatoire de Paris and Moscow Conservatory. Studies examined popular-music intersections—Elvis Presley, The Beatles, Bob Dylan—and media forms preserved by BBC and NHK, Japan Broadcasting Corporation. Ethnographic and fieldwork-informed projects engaged with communities documented by Smithsonian Folkways and archives at University of Cape Town and University of the West Indies.
Critics located at institutions such as Princeton University Press and defenders of traditional methodologies in Royal College of Music argued that politicized readings risked neglecting technical craft central to scholarship on figures like Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Béla Bartók. Debates unfolded in venues including The Times Literary Supplement, New York Review of Books, and the New Yorker over whether theoretical approaches influenced by postmodernism and identity politics marginalized empirical archival practice exemplified by researchers at Riemenschneider Bach Institute and editors of collected editions like the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe. Polemics often referenced exchanges involving Susan McClary, Leon Botstein, Charles Rosen, and institutions such as American Council of Learned Societies.
The movement reshaped curricula at University of Michigan, University of Toronto, McGill University, and Yale School of Music, influenced editorial policies at Cambridge Opera Journal and altered programmatic emphases at festivals including Glastonbury Festival and Aldeburgh Festival. Its interdisciplinary reach affected film studies programs at New York University, influenced literary scholarship at Harvard University Press and Routledge, and informed museum exhibitions at institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Victoria and Albert Museum. While contested, its legacy persists in scholarship featured by Oxford Handbooks Online, curricular offerings at Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and continuing debates within the International Musicological Society.