Musical Historicism - Meaning of "musical Historicism"

Meaning of "musical Historicism"

The term "historicism" has acquired various, sometimes confusing meanings over a wide range of disciplines. The British philosopher Karl Popper, who disliked modern music and strongly preferred the works of Bach, Mozart, and Schubert, spoke of "the failure of the historicist propaganda for the modern in music." He opposed the socioscientific doctrine of historicism that discoverable laws of historical change make it possible to predict future developments. Repudiating the claim that Schoenberg was "an inevitable historical force", Popper dismissed the idea of producing art work "ahead of its time" (Gopnik 2002).

When referring to the arts, however, the term "historicism" generally denotes something distinctly different from the historicism targeted by Popper's critique. It designates "a style (as in architecture) characterized by the use of traditional forms and elements" (Merriam-Webster 2003). Historicism stands in contrast to modernism, "a self-conscious break with the past and a search for new forms of expression" (Merriam-Webster 2003). However, it should be noted that "historicism", thus defined, does not necessarily exclude such recently established traditions as atonality, whose earliest use can be dated to 1908 (the finale of Schoenberg's second string quartet). Nor does it exclude the possibility of strong historical influences in modernist works of art.

Another difficulty stems from the fact that distinguishing between the old and the new in music is not as straightforward a process as it might seem. The modernist music of Schoenberg, for example, draws abundantly on traditional elements and techniques, including the twelve tones of the chromatic scale, consonance and dissonance, variation, inversion, and retrograde, as well as traditional forms such as the concerto, suite, string quartet, string trio, symphony, and wind quintet, and sometimes is dependent on historical conceptual content (e.g., the biblical traditions undergirding Moses und Aron). Whereas the historicism of the Ancient Dances and Airs for Lute (1917–31) by Ottorino Respighi is readily apparent to the ear, since the composer drew directly on the works of 16th- and 17th-century composers, the historicism informing the Music of Changes (1951) by John Cage, based on the ancient Chinese I Ching, is deeply embedded in the compositional process (Tomkins 1976, 111–12).

The study of history and historical influence also raises fundamental questions about the nature of time. Many physicists, including Einstein, have maintained that the familiar division of time into past, present, and future is an illusion, from which it necessarily follows that "old" and "new" are terms as relative as "up" and "down" (Davies 2006, 9). Since concepts of time and history and the average lifespans of human beings living in different periods and cultures are variable, these, too, are factors that must also be considered.

These problems notwithstanding, even a superficial look at history reveals that historicism played a significant role in the creation of new music long before the stimulus afforded by the rise of musicology and the widespread publication and dissemination of modern editions and recordings of earlier music.