Stephan Hammel lecture on Red Musicology: The Concept of Style and the Materialist Conception of Music History

Dr. Stephan Hammel will speak on Red Musicology: The Concept of Style and the Materialist Conception of Music History in the Music History and Theory Guest Lecture series at 5 pm in the CAC first floor lecture room. This even is free and open to the public.

Musicology today has almost entirely abandoned the robust, scientific conception of style that served as the discipline’s core theoretical achievement at the moment of its institutionalization. This conception, as it appears in Guido Adler’s programmatic Der Stil in der Musik (1911), holds that music’s formal structures are best understood as the products of, and points of departure for, processes of organic self-development. The concept serves as the basis for a science of music that promises to both guide and underwrite musical decision making at a time when the norms from which such decisions might flow find themselves in the realm of the decidable. Armed with a historical reconstruction of stylistic development, the modern musician can ground formal innovation in verifiable knowledge about the progressive trajectory of stylistic norms, thereby avoiding the twin dangers of a kind of musical relativism on the one hand, and unenlightened, unreflective reliance on tradition on the other.

Adler’s vision of a science of musical style that could generate a practical normative framework both authoritative and universally shared was tied to his political liberalism. Style history was an expression of faith in enlightened rationalism at a time when nationalist movements threatened to reintroduce the necessary conditions for traditional authority at gunpoint. That faith did not survive long after the Second World War. By the 1970’s, Claude Palisca could write that the demise of style history had left the discipline rudderless and open to the charge that its practices would best be marshaled in the service of music criticism.

This paper revisits the project of a scientific style history to argue that many of its methods and ambitions can be given a new lease on life in the context of a materialist historiography. A ‘red’ musicology would interpret form as determined by relations of musical production, and understand the organic self-development of musical structures as driven by progressive growth in society’s music making capacities. At a time when a resurgence of right wing populism increasingly takes aim at scientific authority, left musicologists do well to reflect on how their work can play a part in both the defense of civilization and the struggle for human emancipation.