Music, Politics, and the Academy

by Pieter C. van den Toorn

Advocates of "new musicology" claim that technical methods of music analysis are conservative, elitist, positivist, and emotionally arid. Pieter C. van den Toorn challenges those claims, asking why cultural, sociopolitical, or gender-studies approaches to music should be deemed more democratic or expressive of music's content or impact. Why should music analysis be thought incapable of serving larger aesthetic ends?

Van den Toorn confronts Susan McClary, Leo Treitler, and Joseph Kerman in particular, arguing that hands-on music analysis can penetrate the complexity of music and speak to our experience of it. He criticizes new musicologists for retreating from issues of musical immediacy by focusing on cultural issues. In later chapters van den Toorn defends Schenkerian methods and demonstrates the usefulness of technical analysis in the appreciation of Beethoven, Debussy, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky.

Genres: Music

252 pages, Paperback

First published December 2, 1995

About the author

Pieter C. van den Toorn is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His books include The Music of Igor Stravinsky (1983), Stravinsky and the Rite of Spring (1987), and Music, Politics and the Academy (1995), Stravinsky and The Rite of Spring won the Deems Taylor-ASCAP award in 1989 and the Outstanding Publication Award of the Society for Music Theory (SMT) in 1990. Articles on a variety of subjects ranging from Beethoven to Stravinsky and atonal music have appeared in the Journal of Music Theory, Music Analysis, Perspectives of New Music, and the Journal of Musicology.