Reflections on music, history, and music history...
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This is written by the late German musicologist Carl Dahlhaus, and is first published in German in the 1970s. A rare work making use of theories in the German academic tradition, it starts from the historiological reflections by Droysen and Ranke, via the writings on music by Marxist philosophers like Adorno and Ernst Bloch, and then Gadamer's hermeneutics, finally using the issues in structural and reception history from literary theory, to discuss the problems in writing a history of musical works (very often by German composers, from the 3Bs to Schonberg and Webern). This book provides the methodological background for his history of nineteenth-century music, and can be seen as a reflection on history applied specifically to the realm of music. Some long, complex and twisty sentences, together with unfamiliar terms, names of scholars and composers, might make reading a bit difficult (but certainly easier than most continental works), and though this, as how Dahlhaus described it, is a "peripheral discipline", readers familiar with either philosophy, history or music, or humanities in general, will earn from the other disciplines by digging this. Try to put many of the ideas in this book in easier language, with more empirical support, then you'll find the themes of many books on musicology or philosophy of history from the 1990s onward.
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