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 Musikverstäändnis (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."
Since the middle years of the twentieth century, new classical music has been viewed in US culture either as something to be tolerated on symphony programmes or as a fringe phenomenon appealing only to an elite group of listeners often associated with the 'academy'. Yet despite all odds, the creation and performance of new classical music continues into the new millennium and to some extent has thrived because of the constantly changing conditions in which all music is created, performed, disseminated, and marketed in the United States. The contributions in this forum focus on the situations of new music in the cultural, economic, political, and social environments of the present in United States. In 'Art-Religion for a Global New Age', Andrea Moore examines the music of Tan Dun around the turn of the millennium, arguing that his market-friendly multiculturalism reanimated the power of art-religion for the post-Cold War era. In 'Conducting Business', Marianna Ritchey demonstrates how contemporary business literature deploys a musical analogy to promote 'creativity' as an economic resource in capitalist systems. She considers a recent opera about Steve Jobs that by aestheticizing corporate power serves to 'orchestrate' our lives. In 'The New Music Scene: Passionate Commitment in the Twenty-First-Century Gig Economy', Judy Lochhead examines the technological and economic conditions that have paved the way for a flourishing of a new music scene in North America. Considering performances by Yarn/ Wire and Ensemble Dal Niente, she argues that these conditions have resulted in new taste cultures that foster passionate commitment. In 'The Boundaries of "Boundarylessness": Revelry, Struggle, and Labor in Three American New Music Ensembles', John Pippen analyses the labour of three new music ensembles-Eighth Blackbird, Third Coast Percussion, and Ensemble Dal Nienteas a negotiation between conflicting concerns: art as anti-commericial and neoliberal discourses of value. He frames the building in which all three ensembles rehearse as a metaphor for how the musicians negotiate these conflicting concerns. In her afterword, 'Boundaries of the New: American Classical Music at the Turn of the Millennium', Anne Shreffler directly addresses the concept of 'boundarylessness' which is so often claimed for new music, demonstrating the persistence of boundaries, particularly those of gender and race.
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