Understanding Twentieth Century Music Historiography
Twentieth Century Historiography. Branches profundas. Investigación thorough and methodological research and interpretation of sources and treaties. Corrientes XX Cultural History. The music historians moved to the early twentieth centuries in the wake of borrowing from Art History many of the terms. Wolfflin, in particular, influenced ideological history without names, devoid of biographical facts in relation to positivism and aware of shapes and styles. The history of art or music would be branches of cultural history, whose task would be to attract the cohesive elements of a given culture, based on the conviction that the spirit of the age leaves its imprint on every expression of culture. Guido Adler produced a work based on the styles. Dilthey’s philosophy was applied to musical historiography and history conceived in cultural terms. Hermeneutic theory questions whether music can be considered a universal language. In the past, the symbolic capacity was the result of convention, and to the extent that such conventions fell into disuse, musical works lost their symbolic character. Today, it seems clear that the spontaneous aesthetic effect of music, which is unlike other languages, needs to be understood as the literature of a language; its symbolic content does not depend on universality. The task of hermeneutics is to reconstruct the symbolic elements of the music of the past. The Idealism. Friction, with the current neo-idealist, wrote a few pages dedicated to music but had a great influence on musical aesthetics and historiography. Parente opposed the history of music deterministically conceived as a continuous chain of forms and techniques built post and was unaware of their creators. For him, the history of music should be a series of descriptions of individual masterpieces as absolute creations, linked between them by extrinsic relationships.
Sociological Theories. The sociological interpretation of art emerged in France in the last decades of the century. The sociology of music as a discipline studies the field of interrelations between music and society. The production and consumption of music are an inseparable reality that may differ. Since 1930, three branches have emerged on the stream: 1. Positivist, which wrongly thinks the change is voluntary; 2. Idealistic, where reception is a mere epiphenomenon, and the essence is the social objective in itself; 3. Materialistic, focusing on practical factors of production mode. Neopositivism and Reaction. Skepticism lacks the courage to historiography. To the extent that music history can be viewed as the history of musical thought, it requires analytical methods that promote a semantic-conceptual history, with the understanding of the thinking that has been expressed in the symbols of communication. Kerman noted that the term musicology is still associated with documentation, the verifiable, analyzable, and positivistic, and does not question why. Treitler, Kerman, and positivism attacked and called for the implementation of a new method of critical interpretation, denying the dichotomy of objective/subjective and stressing the need for a new relationship between observation and interpretation. Dalhaus also drew a link between the history of music and the aesthetic dimension. The progression from positivist musicology to critical musicology is essential.