Studies of Music in the Twentieth Century

Author(s): William W. Austin

Source: The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Jan., 1982), pp. 63-66
Published by: University of California Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/763637
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STUDIES OF MUSIC IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

WILLIAMW.AUSTIN
ow do musicologists cope with music of the twentieth century? As
variously as composers, performers, and listeners do. That is, I believe, not so variously as the millions of scholars, authors, and readers
cope with the Babel of world literature of the twentieth century, but
more variously than the smaller numbers of scholars, choreographers,
dancers, and fans cope with the exciting rise of contemporary dance. If
music itself is a sister to poetry and dance, musicology may be an in-law,
keeping up her late-nineteenth-century alliance with art history, while
ogling at anthropology and sociology, and studiously renewing her
ancient family roots in music theory.
Literary scholarship prospers today on polemics among competing
schools of criticism, sometimes to the point of neglecting poets and
usurping their appeal to common readers. Musicology, still a slender
thing in proportion to the blowsy amplitude of song and dance, encourages most musicologists to concentrate on some chronologically
continuous part of the thousand-year European library of scores. Their
work coheres and progresses. It presupposes a consensus about some
values, and shuns discussion of most values. Typically, it refines texts
and interprets them historically. Thus it resembles nineteenth-century
philology more nearly than late twentieth-century semiotics or deconstruction. Of course musicologists reflect and participate in some
twentieth-century trends, but the coherence and gratifying progress of
their philological work do not extend to much collective treatment of
new music. Rather, individual musicologists interested in new music
have to seek their own paths individually. Some musicologists whose
interest is only sporadic or only lip-service may seem to console themselves with kinds of journalism about new music that they would scorn
in relation to any period from Guido to Wagner. Yet a hope of some
scholarly consensus about Stravinsky, Cage, and the rest is still alive.
In this situation, perhaps my best response to Musicology's request
for a thousand words or so is frankly to discuss my own fluctuating
hope. Music in the 20th Century (1966) was addressed to "anyone
interested in the music of Schoenberg, Bart6k, and Stravinsky." Readers
might like, I said, "to partake in a growing consensus affirming their
importance." I hoped that this consensus would soon extend to jazz,
H

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though my editors doubted this. I was more confident that the consensus
would soon extend to Debussy. Did I persuade Professor Lang? I
emphasized that Debussy sought a broad audience only with reservations: he could not compete with Strauss, Puccini, or Lehar, nor did
he wish to; he could not yet compete with Mozart. About Mozart's
audience and its ways of listening, I noted that all of us were very
ignorant, but all could observe some twentieth-century changes. I
thought it worthwhile to relate the consensus on Stravinsky,Bart6k, and
Schoenberg to that on the classics, but I adhered to Debussy's thought
that "classic" was an inappropriate label for contemporaries.
The New Grove (1970-80) can be cited in a crude way as confirming my assertion, my hope, and my trust. In number of pages per
entry, Stravinsky, Bart6k, Schoenberg, and Debussy rank here above
Strauss. Jazz is almost catching up. Of course Grove contains ample
evidence for questioning any consensus, but the table that follows
includes several interesting bits of confirmation.
Table 1: Prominent 20th-century composers in The New Grove.
Composers Born Around:

Pages
in

Grove
27
26
23
22
21
18
16
15
14
13
12
11
10

1860

1875

Mahler

1895

1905

1915

1925

Schoenberg
Debussy
Strauss
jazz
Elgar
Janrcek
Ives

Britten
Berg

Faurd
Puccini
Sibelius

Ravel
Webern
Vaughan Williams

9
8

Rakhmaninov

7
6

Hoist
Reger

1885
Bartdk
Stravinsky

Hindemith
Prokofiev
Weill

Shostakovich

Tippett
Kodaly

Delius
Nielsen
Satie

Skryabin

Malipiero
Grainger
Szymanowski
Varese

Copland
Poulenc
Eisler

Boulez
Stockhausen
Henze
Messiaen
Carter
Dallapiccola

Cage
Berio

Walton

While my first book was in press, I wrote three articles that remain
unpublished. One on Charlie Christian was written for a Festschrift
that never found a publisher. One on Stockhausen was meant for The
Musical Quarterly, one on Frank Martin, more analytical, was offered
to Perspectives of New Music, but their editors had their own reasons
for rejecting these. I mention these articles for two reasons: to indicate
my specialized efforts in relation to the consensus, and to console, if I
can, younger rejected authors.
With some hesitation, I accepted the invitation of Professor

STUDIESOF MUSICIN THETWENTIETH

CENTURY

65

Friedrich Blume to write on "Neue Musik" for the supplement to Musik

in Geschichte und Gegenwart and for a paperbackEpochen der Musikgeschichte (1974), reprinting Blume's and Besseler's important articles
on earlier periods. My article, addressed to anyone seeking perspective
on the "Neue Musik" slogan, reflected some changing estimates. Here
Cage, Boulez, and Stockhausen won proportionately more of my
attention than in Music in the 20th Century, though I still disclaimed
adequate knowledge to treat them as I could Schoenberg, Bart6k and
Stravinsky. Rock took a small place alongside jazz. Debussy got less
attention now, though I was and am and will be - in a moment increasingly concerned with him. Berg and Webern shared prominence
with Schoenberg, Bart6k, and Stravinsky. Schoenberg represented "new
harmonies," Stravinsky "new rhythms," Webern "new melodies,
structures, and processes," and Berg and Bart6k "new social groupings."
These headings did not confine any composer to discussion under a
single heading, but showed my continuing preference for naming
composers rather than "isms." The up-grading of Berg and Webern,
incidentally, did not mean giving Hindemith or Prokofiev much less
space than I had done before; rather it reflected my sense that any
agreement about Schoenberg, Bart6k, Stravinsky, Berg, and Webern is
a fragile one, more academic than most professors acknowledge. Even
jazz may be more an academic concern than it was before the triumphs
of rock. And Debussy?
"New Music" shows up in the next-to-last chapter of "Susanna,"
"Jeanie," and "the old folks" (1975), which is a study in cultural
history, addressed to "anyone striving to clarify" meanings of such
terms as Black, American, folk, popular, art, poetry, and music. The
"New Music" chapter dwells on Ives, then surveys dozens of more
recent composers, with some emphasis on Aaron Copland, Lukas Foss,
and Thea Musgrave. The final chapter dwells chiefly on Ray Charles,
with only Pete Seeger prominent among dozens of other "new singers
and song-writers." Throughout this book, while "clarification" is more
important than any possible consensus, there are references to hopes.
Thus, "For Foss and Musgrave,unlike Ives or Copland or Thoreau, the
hope of a 'universal language' is attenuated, if it survives at all." And
for Ray Charles, in his own words, "I don't care what they done to my
songs, but see the main thing, mama, what they tryin' to do to me....
But oh, I'm gonna keep on workin' on the buildin' just like you taught
me, mama." Readers might join me in hoping that our songs and our
scholarship could contribute to a collective enterprise like Charles'
"buildin' " if we would remember the "main thing" and take lightly our
possible, improbable special contributions. Clarification within one
realm does sometimes remove obstacles to our collaborating in whatever
other realm we choose together.
"Consensus" is a worn-out word. If I had been more alert to its
accretions of meaning from the 1950s, I should have seized on the
different metaphor that was gaining currency in the sixties: "network."

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When we abandon "consensus," we do not necessarily cast ourselves

adrift individually in the rough seas of impersonal society. We are
connected, by many networks, with a few neighbors and with uncounted
individuals all over the globe. Musicology, like literary scholarship, is
such a network. Within its loose, far-flung, and shifting expanses, there
are many smaller, more tightly woven networks. Which of these are the
most fragile we do not know. Which are tough enough to survive storms
and tidal waves we may sooner or later learn.
The music of Debussy seems to me so strong that the network of
its friends could survive and stretch even if the networks of Joyce and
Kafka, or Schoenberg, Bart6k, and Stravinsky, and jazz were shredded.
For some young composers today, as well as most performers and
listeners, Schoenberg, Bart6k, and Stravinsky are all too academic, too
much associated with schoolrooms. The whole European heritage of
skills and tastes can be represented by Machaut, Berlioz, Ives, and
Debussy, or by almost any sort of personal choice from among its
hundreds of masters. At the same time, non-European musics loom.
More and more composers - Cage, Boulez, and Stockhausen among
them - are learning to study something from India or Indonesia or
Africa as deeply as Debussy studied the little he could hear. More and
more young musicologists, I think, will be tracing connections between
Debussy and young composers, connections that may skip over Schoenberg and Stravinsky, while incorporating some extra-European link.
Though such scholars seek no new consensus, much less a patched-up
old one, they may be "workin' on the buildin' " of a global music and
musicology.

Cornell University