Dahlhaus on Music History
Created | Updated May 11, 2003
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~sjoh1661/
“The significance of art: historical or aesthetic?”: the title of chapter two of Dahlhaus’ Foundations of Music History. Like the matter under debate in this essay, it is the question of context versus form. It is easy to see how important the historical context might be in forming a piece of music – had Haydn not had patronage, would he have written so many symphonies? If he had just been given a salary and told to write whatever he wanted, would he still have written symphonies, or would he have chosen another option?
History, says Dahlhaus, is memory made scientific: the study of living memory is there to account for the difference between how the population remembers the general situation as it was and how it sees the current situation (where members of the population were individually affected by an historical event); the study of longer-term social memory is there for the same purpose, but is based much more heavily on documentary evidence (and individuals were only very indirectly concerned with the events themselves, having occurred in previous generations). However, in music, there is no difference between living memory and non-living memory: music history, unlike its standalone counterpart, does not consist of a list of dates and occurrences, rather of a set of experiences which are just as valid today as they were when first written – when Elgar wrote the Enigma Variations he intended their meaning to be somewhat mysterious and obfuscated (hence the title!), and this underlying mystery is no less present in a performance of the work in the early twenty-first century than it was at the premiere in 1899 over a century earlier. Effectively, the “events” which are felt only by their repercussions in what Dahlhaus calls “political history” live on and still occur today in music history.
When considering how to perform a piece, the performer will almost without exception always consider as most important the will of the composer. Very rarely would a performer change a note or reverse an Urtext dynamic marking on a whim. But with regards to form, the intention of the composer can become a little blurred. If it is said that a movement from a Haydn symphony is “in” sonata form, what is meant? Did Haydn have a book on compositional techniques which he referred to whenever he wanted to write such a movement, or did he invent it from scratch and happen to have similar ideas to contemporaries as well as predecessors and successors? Or did he wish to copy the sonata form of others in a pastiche; or to build on older versions; or to use the older forms (however modified) to write in a new style?
In this particular example, Haydn possibly saw the development of the Baroque dance suite (and was familiar with the canon of dance suites) and built on this form and other contemporary developments in form to create his own variable version with which he could experiment.
Sonata form is a good example of a traceable process of experimentation and then modification, right up to Bartók; in the first movement of his fifth string quartet, for example, he uses sonata form as described in textbooks on classical form, except that rather than modulating from Bb to F, he modulates to E, diminishing the dominant.
But this idea of tracing the line of development has a number of problems: once it is taken into account that Haydn could be said to use a slightly different variation on his basic concept of sonata form, we see that Haydn used 104 different versions of sonata form, however similar they might be; and other composers are in the same situation. Also, contemporaries may have developed the same starting point into two different branches of a particular form (of which, again, each one may have been subdivided into variations) which were in turn taken as starting points, and so on. The number of different versions of a form is limited only by the number of pieces written “in” that form (the concept of being “in” a form already having been explained as problematic).
Even if this way of tracing routes and lineages in an almost genealogical way were entirely satisfactory, music is often classified in terms of what is canon and what is not considered “accurate” or “formally perfect” enough to be seen as canon. When a student of music is taught to write fugues, he is normally taught to write a pastiche of a fugue of Bach, and Buxtehude’s and Telemann’s styles could be considered worse fugues where the latter two committed no offence other than writing their fugues with a different training, different job (and hence different patron) and different methods of working in the first place.
If a purely formal view of the concept of history were to be taken, it could be neither linear nor exclusive: it would be necessary to arrange the findings in a huge family tree consisting of various works (so whilst Haydn’s symphonies would be sisters, Bartók’s string quartets might be considered grandchildren of distant cousins), and also to take into account and treat equally all music that had ever been published, however ignored by performers and musicologists, because the probability is that someone, somewhere, once played it and incorporated an idea from it into his own composition.
As regards a solution to the problem of stylistics versus socio-history, Dahlhaus accurately (although perhaps less than helpfully) postulates that “whether and to what degree a stylistic or a social history of music, or some reconciliation of the two, is appropriate to a particular fragment of musical reality will vary according to the period, field, or genre studied.” However, there are, as outlined above, some basic problems with viewing music history in purely formal terms.
“The significance of art: historical or aesthetic?”: the title of chapter two of Dahlhaus’ Foundations of Music History. Like the matter under debate in this essay, it is the question of context versus form. It is easy to see how important the historical context might be in forming a piece of music – had Haydn not had patronage, would he have written so many symphonies? If he had just been given a salary and told to write whatever he wanted, would he still have written symphonies, or would he have chosen another option?
History, says Dahlhaus, is memory made scientific: the study of living memory is there to account for the difference between how the population remembers the general situation as it was and how it sees the current situation (where members of the population were individually affected by an historical event); the study of longer-term social memory is there for the same purpose, but is based much more heavily on documentary evidence (and individuals were only very indirectly concerned with the events themselves, having occurred in previous generations). However, in music, there is no difference between living memory and non-living memory: music history, unlike its standalone counterpart, does not consist of a list of dates and occurrences, rather of a set of experiences which are just as valid today as they were when first written – when Elgar wrote the Enigma Variations he intended their meaning to be somewhat mysterious and obfuscated (hence the title!), and this underlying mystery is no less present in a performance of the work in the early twenty-first century than it was at the premiere in 1899 over a century earlier. Effectively, the “events” which are felt only by their repercussions in what Dahlhaus calls “political history” live on and still occur today in music history.
When considering how to perform a piece, the performer will almost without exception always consider as most important the will of the composer. Very rarely would a performer change a note or reverse an Urtext dynamic marking on a whim. But with regards to form, the intention of the composer can become a little blurred. If it is said that a movement from a Haydn symphony is “in” sonata form, what is meant? Did Haydn have a book on compositional techniques which he referred to whenever he wanted to write such a movement, or did he invent it from scratch and happen to have similar ideas to contemporaries as well as predecessors and successors? Or did he wish to copy the sonata form of others in a pastiche; or to build on older versions; or to use the older forms (however modified) to write in a new style?
In this particular example, Haydn possibly saw the development of the Baroque dance suite (and was familiar with the canon of dance suites) and built on this form and other contemporary developments in form to create his own variable version with which he could experiment.
Sonata form is a good example of a traceable process of experimentation and then modification, right up to Bartók; in the first movement of his fifth string quartet, for example, he uses sonata form as described in textbooks on classical form, except that rather than modulating from Bb to F, he modulates to E, diminishing the dominant.
But this idea of tracing the line of development has a number of problems: once it is taken into account that Haydn could be said to use a slightly different variation on his basic concept of sonata form, we see that Haydn used 104 different versions of sonata form, however similar they might be; and other composers are in the same situation. Also, contemporaries may have developed the same starting point into two different branches of a particular form (of which, again, each one may have been subdivided into variations) which were in turn taken as starting points, and so on. The number of different versions of a form is limited only by the number of pieces written “in” that form (the concept of being “in” a form already having been explained as problematic).
Even if this way of tracing routes and lineages in an almost genealogical way were entirely satisfactory, music is often classified in terms of what is canon and what is not considered “accurate” or “formally perfect” enough to be seen as canon. When a student of music is taught to write fugues, he is normally taught to write a pastiche of a fugue of Bach, and Buxtehude’s and Telemann’s styles could be considered worse fugues where the latter two committed no offence other than writing their fugues with a different training, different job (and hence different patron) and different methods of working in the first place.
If a purely formal view of the concept of history were to be taken, it could be neither linear nor exclusive: it would be necessary to arrange the findings in a huge family tree consisting of various works (so whilst Haydn’s symphonies would be sisters, Bartók’s string quartets might be considered grandchildren of distant cousins), and also to take into account and treat equally all music that had ever been published, however ignored by performers and musicologists, because the probability is that someone, somewhere, once played it and incorporated an idea from it into his own composition.
As regards a solution to the problem of stylistics versus socio-history, Dahlhaus accurately (although perhaps less than helpfully) postulates that “whether and to what degree a stylistic or a social history of music, or some reconciliation of the two, is appropriate to a particular fragment of musical reality will vary according to the period, field, or genre studied.” However, there are, as outlined above, some basic problems with viewing music history in purely formal terms.
