JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
No abstract
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. Musical Times Publications Ltd. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Musical Times. Winitle reports on The Colston Symposiuii held earlier this year at the University of BristolT ravelling back from a Music Analysis conference in the late 80s, one of the delegates complained that she had heard nothing to help her as an aspiring composer. Whether other composers would have agreed is impossible to say, but her complaint certainly touched a nerve: in those days, analysts did tend to stand apartnot just from composers, but from historians, performers, critics, and even ethnomusicologists. For those of us who had grown up with the previous generationof Keller and the composers of the Manchester School in Britain, or of Babbitt and Cone in the United States the situation was certainly ironic. At that time, analysis was primarily an adjunct to composition; it was a private activity, undertaken mainly by composers; and it was certainly not the 'sub-discipline' of music which it was destined to become. If the composers chose to commit their findings to print, it was not because they couldn't subsume them into their own pieces, but because they wanted to help forge a new common language. And it was mainly for this reason that they looked at familiar (tonal) and rather less familiar (atonal) music in new ways. No one, for example, who attended Peter Maxwell Davies' 'week-end' at Southampton University in the late 60s will forget the galvanising effect of seeing his highly detailed graphic analysis of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunairean analysis undertaken well before 'Schenker' had become part of any syllabus in a British university.Nor has the delegate been alone in her complaint. In the June 1994 issue of The Musical Times, Milton Babbitt himself brought the criticism up to date:The professionally most valuable and stimulating colleagues, since they are also interested in music, who have emerged as educational forces within the past three or so decades are the analytical theorists. But as their number and prestige increase, they, also, have tended to distance themselves from the contemporary composer.Notwithstanding this distancing, he concludes that the fact that they, whose primary professional pursuit is the analytically achieved understanding of, andon occasionthe responsibly non-entailed evaluation of compositions, are never placed on commissioning panels, or recording juries, or in any position of critical influence is but another evidence of the triumph of unreason.Instead, their authority and influence have been undermined by the ubiquity of the recent music aestheticians, whose anti-professionalism takes the form, among a number of other forms, of...
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