Recent Publications by Emory Scholars

Stephen A. Crist and Roberta Montemorra Marvin, eds., Historical Musicology: Sources, Methods, Interpretations, Eastman Studies in Music (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2004; paperback edition, 2008)

How do we know what notes a composer intended in a given piece? – how those notes should be played and sung? – the nature of musical life in Bach's Leipzig, Schubert's Vienna? – how music related to literature and other arts and social currents in different times and places? – what attitudes musicians and music lovers had toward the music that they heard and made? We know all this from musical manuscripts and prints, opera libretti, composers’ letters, reviews in newspapers and magazines, archival data, contemporary pedagogical writings, essays on aesthetics, and much else. Some of these categories of sources are the bedrock of music history and musicology. Others have begun to be examined only in recent years. Furthermore, musicologists – including biographers of famous composers – now explore these various kinds of sources in a variety of ways, some of them richly traditional and others exciting and novel. These seventeen essays, all newly written, use a wide array of source materials to probe issues pertaining to a cross section of musical works and musical life from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. The resulting, pluralistic profile of current musicology will prove welcome to anyone fascinated by the problems of reconstructing – reimagining, sometimes – the evanescent musical art of the past and pondering its implications for musical life today and in the future.

Yayoi Uno Everett, The Music of Louis Andresen, Music in the Twentieth Century, no. 21 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007)

For much of his career, the internationally known and still active Dutch composer Louis Andriessen has been understood as an iconoclast who challenged and resisted the musical establishment. This book explores his compositions as a case study for exploring the social and aesthetic implications of new music. Everett chronicles the evolution of Andriessen’s music over the course of five decades: the formative years in which he experimented with serialism and collage techniques; his political activism in the late 1960s; ‘concept’ works from the 1970s that provide musical commentary on philosophical writings by Plato, St Augustine and others; theatrical and operatic collaborations with Robert Wilson and Peter Greenaway in the 1980s and 1990s; and recent works that explore contemplative themes on death and madness. Everett’s analysis of Andriessen’s music draws on theories of parody, narrativity, and intertextuality that have gained currency in musicological discourse in recent years.

Kevin C. Karnes, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History: Shaping Modern Musical Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna, AMS Studies in Music, no. 4 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)

More than a century after Guido Adler’s appointment to the first chair in musicology at the University of Vienna, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History provides a first look at the discipline in this earliest period, and at the ideological dilemmas and methodological anxieties that characterized it upon its institutionalization. Author Kevin Karnes contends that some of the most vital questions surrounding musicology’s disciplinary identities today – the relationship between musicology and criticism, the role of the subject in analysis and the narration of history, and the responsibilities of the scholar to the listening public – originate in these conflicted and largely forgotten beginnings. Karnes lays bare the nature of music study in the late nineteenth century through insightful readings of long-overlooked contributions by three of musicology’s foremost pioneers – Adler, Eduard Hanslick, and Heinrich Schenker. Shaped as much by the skeptical pronouncements of the likes of Nietzsche and Wagner as it was by progressivist ideologies of scientific positivism, he argues, the new discipline comprised an array of oft-contested and intensely personal visions of music study, its value, and its future. Through sophisticated and meticulous presentation, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History demonstrates that the new discipline of musicology was inextricably tied in with the cultural discourse of its time.

Tong Soon Lee, Chinese Street Opera in Sinapore (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008)

Since Singapore declared independence from Malaysia in 1965, Chinese street opera has played a significant role in defining Singaporean identity. In carefully tracing the history of amateur and professional performances in Singapore, Tong Soon Lee reflects on their role in fostering cultural nationalism and entrepreneurship. He explains that the government welcomes Chinese street opera performances because they combine tradition and modernism and promote a national culture that brings together Singapore’s four main ethnic groups – Eurasian, Malay, Chinese, and South Asian. In performing Chinese street opera, amateur troupes preserve their rich heritage by underscoring the Confucian mind-set that a learned person engages in the arts for moral and unselfish purposes. Educated performers also control behavior, emotions, and values. They are creative and innovative, and their use of new technologies indicates a modern, entrepreneurial spirit. Their performances bring together diverse ethnic groups to watch and to perform, Lee argues, while also encouraging a national attitude focused on both remembering the past and preparing for the future in Singapore.