This is a few weeks late, but I just saw that Tim over at The Rambler noticed a significant revision to the paperback edition of Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music. Briefly, a few years ago Tim argued that Taruskin's discussion of Penderecki was rather flawed. Apparently, those flaws were fixed up in the new paper edition, with a citation for Tim and everything. A nice move on RT's part.
But it makes me wonder--how many other changes are there between the hardcover and paperback editions? Neither the Oxford site nor sales outlets like Amazon make any note of changes. Apparently an Oxford rep claimed in at least one instance that the editions are "essentially identical" with the exception of "stray typos and minor items" being corrected. I guess the Penderecki could be thought of as a minor item, but it makes one wonder.
This seems particularly apropos now that we're all being inundated with sales calls and emails from eager little Oxford representatives about the forthcoming one-volume textbook edition, which will no doubt be a formidable player on the textbook market when it comes out. I certainly would never fault Taruskin and his editors too much for problems like that noticed by Tim, given how much music history he dealt with. Nor do I have a problem with the erudition and utility of OHWM; like most of us working musicologists I use it all the time to help prepare for my teaching. When you're teaching a survey for the first time, especially material far outside of your own research interests, it's a great source for getting updated on the contemporary scholarly issues for a given time period.
But--and this is a big "but"--I do have great reservations with the project as a whole. I think one of the biggest challenges facing our discipline is our tendency towards monophony. We're a very small group of scholars, of startling uniformity of background, and for various historical reasons we operate under a tremendous amount of "discipline," in the Foucauldian sense. That is, attempts to introduce new methodologies and subject matter into musicology are tightly regulated and usually prevented full scale. Not by any one person or institution, of course, but by the manner in which power circulates in musicology. Just look at the experience of someone trying to introduce, oh, let's say, feminist criticism into musicology in the 1990s. Not exactly a radical proposition given that other scholarly fields had been doing feminist criticism for several decades, but we all know how that went over.
I worry that a project like OHWM only serve to discipline us even more, boiling what limited diversity of voices and opinions we have down to that of one man. I'm sure that is not Taruskin's intention at all, but I just don't think its existence augurs well for musicology.
3 months ago
5 comments:
I'm totally doing the OUP focus group at AMS. I'm fascinated by the process more than anything else.
Also, in fairness, it's not like there was any discipline where feminist criticism wasn't violently rejected by the Powers that Be. It doesn't make it okay, of course.
I can't tell if all of these surveys and focus groups are real, or if it is just a kind of intensive marketing strategy.
It's true that every discipline went into an uproar about feminist theory, but I meant more that it took so long to make it to musicology--my impression is that those sorts of critiques were rocking various other disciplines in the mid-1970s.
It's so fascinating that we were 20 years behind, and that even so the same questions were still so shocking!
I think they are both real and marketing.
If you buy Attali's argument, music itself is often prophetic of future social realignments and values. However, music scholarship has a long history of conservatism and slowness to catch on to new bodies of critical and theoretical knowledge. I agree that feminism faced opposition from the Power at Be in a variety of disciplines, but music poses a unique challenge. It's hard not to at least acknowledge the feminist reading of literature, say, or art. But music, in its very intransience, can be a tricky medium on which to pin meanings. This accounts in no small way for the lag.
Thanks for the link, Phil - we at the Taruskin Challenge take particular interest in this topic, of course!
I agree that a single-authored history (by RT, no less!) being used as the standard text is a problematic situation to say the least. I would agree with your trepidatious assessment if there was any degree of consensus in the musicological community that Taruskin's achievement amounted to The Truth, which there most decidedly is not. (As McClary put it in her review, it's "the world according to Taruskin," certainly not the world according to the discipline as a whole.) The OHWM has been a controversial endeavor from the beginning - what RT project isn't? - and, despite bellicose claims to be the only "real" history out there, all of the critical drumming it's gotten will certainly weaken its ability to serve as a disciplining text. Then again, when was the last time a musicological work has garnered this much press, both good and bad? (And as we know, any press is good press.) I certainly hope that the monumentality of the OHWM doesn't hoodwink people into putting too much faith in it...
I would be terribly interested in some sort of accounting of what kinds of content changes happened between hardback and paperback editions. Your post has generated some discussion over on our blog too (Taruskin Challenge), where I commented that I noticed changes up front to the introduction/preface system of the paperback volumes (Taruskin's comments are dated 2008). This is a fairly major change, since it frames the entire work. If I had more time, I would wade through the different intros, and see how they vary...
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