Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• PEKACZ, JOLANTA T

Titel

Memory, History and Meaning: Musical Biography and its Discontents

Ist Teil von

• The Journal of musicological research, 2004-01, Vol.23 (1), p.39-80

Ort / Verlag

Philadelphia: Taylor & Francis Group

Erscheinungsjahr

2004

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Taylor & Francis

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Musical biography remains largely uninfluenced by theoretical reflection and is reluctant to consider new approaches. Our present-day perceptions of the lives ofprominent composers and performers were largely formed by the cultural and political assumptions of nineteenth-century biographers, but their followers have been happy with both the politics and the premises. Musical biography typically develops in a way similar to a realistic novel-a coherent, unified voice claims to present the truth about a life, while omniscient narration, repeating themes and symbols, and a linear chronological presentation of events provide readers with theillusion of totality and closure. The cause-and-effect linearity implied by the chronological plot is considered a reliable way of ordering the subject's life, and the author a trustworthy narrator who understands the relationship between the private self and the public world. At the same time, epistemological upheavals in the humanities in recent decades have made scholars critical about the traditional assumptions of biography. Critics argue that the coherence of life as presented in a traditional biography is illusory-created by papering over the cracks, concealing the unknown, and making causal connections that stem from the mind of the biographer rather than from the subject. Not only do lives not have the neat trajectory that the biographer typically aspires to achieve, but the personalities-"selves"-of the subject are fragmented and shifting rather than unitary and coherent, defying any biographical aspiration to identify the "real" person. Furthermore, biography reflects a central cultural understanding of its time; as that understanding changes, the need for a new biography arises. The claim that biographies should be periodically rewritten becomes a legitimate proposition. The purpose of this essay is to subject the traditional assumptions of musical biography to critical scrutiny in view of the recent epistemological and methodological developments in the humanities. Musical biography today must accept the challenges history faces in the areas of both methodology and narration, and reconsider its traditional premises. 1 Earlier versions of this article were presented as papers at the 37th Annual Conference of the Royal Musical Association on "Theory and Practice of Musical Biography," King's College, London in 2001, and at the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in Atlanta in 2001.