Summary
Quirk Historicism’s introduction discusses the recent trend among music scholars to use objects trouvés and historical micronarratives in their interpretations as a reaction to New Historicism. Musicology may be one of the most inclusive fields in the humanities despite sharing a suffix with taxonomic endeavors like zoology or early stages of anthropology (62). Journal articles and conference presentations on music philosophy, close readings, reception history, and microhistory coexist with philological studies and source analyses. Musical development integrates various aspects to create a broad environment influencing any interaction context from history and music.
Like literary studies, musicology has struggled for at least the past quarter of a century with the question of interpreting and explaining texts (63). As the analytical methods used to understand significant works shifted, the academic focus shifted to narrative histories of musical contexts. Some musicologists have come too close to distrusting reading and instead adopt the role of “collector of curiosities,” gathering and analyzing data from various sources better to understand ancient societies’ musical practices and motivations.
Before this collecting fad took off, “history” was usually defined as “context.” The French Revolution, the Third Reich, and the Napoleonic Wars provided convenient historical contexts for discussing musical works in context, enriching the works but revealing their pragmatic and contingent nature. Some of the brought-in concepts seemed streamlined as if they had been filtered through the brain’s “abstract thought” region, as in the Pixar film Inside Out (61). It is easy to write off earlier approaches to music history as simplistic or reductive because music historians now use more nuanced and material methods. To discuss music concerning categories like gender, race, and nation, however, contextual dyads were welcome and necessary excuses.
Music historians abandoned chronological accounts after learning about New Historicism. Anecdotes blurred the line between texts and contexts, scattering them into complex discursive constellations and undermining the context’s clarity and coherence. The music historian has access to a virtually infinite amount of historical material, with the significance of any given detail heavily depending on the author’s imagination and persuasion. With a few changes, this summary could cover almost any humanities subject in the 1990s and 2000s. “Objects trouvés” and historical “micro-narratives” that once fit neatly into contextual patterns or served as isolated anecdotes have staged a mutiny in music (65). They thus increase in the service of a narrative logic that overwhelms and supplants larger critical goals.
What Kind of Story Is History
Representations have been heralded as the premier multidisciplinary journal since it first appeared on the publishing scene. Since it was first published, the journal has maintained a position of preeminence among innovative academic work in the interpretive social sciences and the humanities (312). Representation seeks to define and focus on the most pressing intellectual issues of our time through the publication of unique issues organized around a single topic. In contrast, common issues feature cutting-edge research and discussion on various topics in literature, history, art history, anthropology, and social theory. Musical development across time-space depicts great interconnectedness between various fields, from arts and history to social organizations.
Each issue of Representation provides a chronological account of significant developments in various fields, catering to a broad audience (368). Similar to the articles published in 19th-Century covert music covers a wide range of subjects connected to the music that occurred during the “long” nineteenth century. There are no hard and fast boundaries for the time frame, so it can start as early as the 18th century and go as far forward as the 20th century.
This publication encourages submissions on any historical or musical subject that either influenced the music of the nineteenth century or was influenced by the music of the nineteenth century (373). The breadth of subject matter is very similar to that of the previous century. Music theory, composition, performance, social and cultural context, hermeneutics, aesthetics, analysis, documentation, gender, sexuality, history, and historiography are some topics that fall under this category.