Do We Need Music History?
BY Morteza Abedinifard, July 4, 2023
Themes:
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914-16.
“There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair [verweilen: a reference to Goethe’s Faust], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.” Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” (1940), translated by Dennis Redmond.
Variation
The most fundamental argument about the necessity of music history is not the essential role of history for understanding the origins of our current practices—simply where they came from. The answer to this question usually consists of a large number of musical terms and ideas that we know and use today and which are rooted in and connected to certain historical periods. Based on this model, one must show how our understanding and treatment of melody, harmony and other musical elements are engrained in history. This model, however, leaves a deeper question intact: why do we need that historical connection or why do we need to be informed about the historical roots of our current ideas and practices when we can have an understanding of them in their modern context? This question, if answered locally, is not a difficult one. As an example, one can justify the significance of music history through the significance or even necessity of stylistic knowledge for performers to interpret/perform pieces from the past (and even contemporary works) in the ‘right’ manner. Performers’ understanding of musical style can enrich their understanding of ways in which different elements are treated in different historical periods. The historical knowledge can, in this particular case, make the performance of musical works sound informed and true to their historical contexts.
But when it comes to the question of music history in itself, i.e., why we need any kind of historical awareness about music in the first place, the question is more challenging. It is a question about our relationship to the past on the most fundamental level: why history at all? Applying this global question to the local question raised above, here we are concerned with that ‘rightness’ in our practice, interpretation, or understanding in general. Why does it matter to be historically ‘right’? My suggestion is that one response to this question could focus not on the way in which music history can improve our understanding of the past, but how it is an integral part of understanding our present and motion towards future. A clarification is necessary here; this understanding is different from the way in which past is used as a model for understanding present. It is rather about the ways in which the structure of present and future is nothing but the possibilities conditioned by the past. The storm that drives us from present towards future is nothing but the past. We see in present and future what the past brings us. This does not mean that change is impossible as it could happen in the unknown and unfamiliar materiality or objectivity that unfolds in future, but that new objectivity is always conditioned by our historical subjectivity. To clarify this latest point, Kant’s formulation of ‘concept’ can be helpful. Concepts are ways in which we make the world of objects, or more specifically the intuitions we receive from them, knowable. It is through concepts—which exists in us as subjects—that knowing the world and objects becomes possible. Drawing on Kant’s insight, music history is nothing but the accumulation of this subjective possibility for understanding any practice in the first place. A ‘pure’ ahistorical encounter with any musical object, from present or past is ‘blind’ and makes us aware of areas in the musical thought that we would not be aware of, and we would not see it without the historical knowledge. For example, a history of Western music makes us aware of the gradual accumulation of sonic and intellectual ideas or components that together have constructed the sound we call music and our understanding of it. Understanding both the objective and conceptual structure of music and how it has developed throughout history makes us aware of possible assumptions, certain premises, and in general, ideas associated with it.
This historical approach can be a powerful way to make the music we hear and our hearing of it more relevant to who we are. We learn that, for example, experiencing music as something spiritual or otherworldly or as an art completely non-material and abstract must be seen in the background of the historical construction of music as the world harmony especially in the pre-1800 conceptual map. For example, the roots of musical abstraction, as secular as it may sound, might be traced back to a religious view of what music is and what kind of relationship it has with the material world and the influence that musical practice of such a view has had on music as an object and a concept. This might simply show that the current commonplace notion of music as a non-material art (the protoformalist view of music) is conditioned and made possible through certain historical developments in music history: the role of music in the church; expressionist movement of the 17th century; the quasi-religious approach of the early 19th century Romanticism, etc. In this respect, the study of music history could provide us with the grounds in which a current conception of music has been formed especially in cases where the links or connections between them are not clear.