Books in Brief: Contemplating Music

Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology, by Joseph Kerman (Harvard, 255 pp., $15)

Joseph Kerman, author of Opera as Drama and The Beethoven Quartets, has written a very good book about a very arcane subject: musicology, that branch of musical study which deals (in Mr. Kerman’s words) with “the history of Western music in the high-art tradition,” and which conservatory performance majors refer to among themselves as “the music major for music majors who don’t like music.” Mr. Kerman, who does like music and who has been writing exquisitely about it for several decades, is a first-rate musicologist who, in the guise of setting down “one musician’s analysis of modern ideas and ideologies of music,” has given us a passionate polemic against the kind of musicology that is obsessed with “the verifiable, the objective, the uncontroversial, and the positive . . . more and more facts, and less and less confidence in interpreting them.” His argument against positivistic musicology is both relevant and accessible to any intelligent listener. (“In one and only one of Haydn’s hundred-odd symphonies, material from the slow introduction quite unexpectedly recurs at the end of the first allegro movement. What possible ‘covering law’ could explain this feature of the ‘Drum-Roll’ Symphony? Positivistic musicology cannot even begin to deal with questions on this level—the level that counts, if we care about the symphony as a unique event in history.”) And Mr. Kerman frames his argument in a witty, contentious prose completely liberated from the chains of jargon. (“Half of the academic community writes when it has nothing to say, it seems, while the other half conspires to get that writing published.”) Contemplating Music goes beyond polemic to provide a lucid overview of important developments on the postwar musical scene: Verdi studies, the historical-performance movement, The New Grove, the rise of Milton Babbitt and the Princeton school of musical analysis. Mr. Kerman is especially good on ethnomusicology, correctly isolating “middle-class antagonism toward conventional middle-class culture” as a key factor in the ideological makeup of this burgeoning new academic racket. And there is a glorious dig at the business of music journalism: “The folklore of journalism is rich in rascally tales of music critics who switched over one fine day from the sports pages to revel in a life of ignorance and spite.”