Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology

by Joseph Kerman

With this book, Joseph Kerman establishes the place of music study firmly in the mainstream of modern intellectual history. He treats not only the study of the history of Western art music--with which musicology is traditionally equated--but also sometimes vexed relations between music history and other fields: music theory and analysis, ethnomusicology, and music criticism.



Kerman sees and applauds a change in the study of music toward a critical orientation. As examples, he presents fascinating vignettes of Bach research in the 1950s and Beethoven studies in the 1960s. He sketches the work of prominent scholars and theorists: Thurston Dart, Charles Rosen, Leonard B. Meyer, Heinrich Schenker, Milton Babbit, and many others. And he comments on such various subjects as the amazing absorption of Stephen Foster's songs into the canons of "black" music, the new intensity of Verdi research, controversies about performance on historical instruments, and the merits and demerits of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.

Contemplating Music is filled with wisdom and trenchant commentary. It will spark controversy among musicologists of all stripes and will give many musicians and amateurs an entirely new perspective on the world of music.

Genres: Music, Nonfiction

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

About the author

Joseph Wilfred Kerman -- born Zukerman -- (1924 - 2014) was an American critic and musicologist. One of the leading musicologists of his generation, his 1985 book Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (published in the UK as Musicology) was described by Philip Brett in The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians as "a defining moment in the field." He was Professor Emeritus of Musicology at the University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a book for the casual reader, but an important one. Contemplating Music is the very book that set the stage for how musicology is taught at the collegiate level in our times. Kerman's philosophies are slightly flawed in some areas, only because this book is an exploratory piece in how we were to move forward. Reading this book helps one who is studying music comprehend why our understanding of ancient music and all that came after stands where it does. If it is a field you hold interest in, I do recommend reading Contemplating Music.

Reader beware: not a very captivating read in any sense. This book is written in very technical terms by a professor, to other leading members of musicology. Also note, much of the book is filled with name dropping and discussions on the research of others. You need not know who these people are necessarily to absorb the themes Kerman pens, but know that there is a lot of sifting of information required here.

[Lobstergirl · Rating 4 out of 5]

Don't be fooled by the arid title and hideous cover, or put off by the admittedly frightening term musicology. (It's still a less offensive word than wedges.) If you know nothing about classical music history or criticism, yes, this will be a dense foray. But it will still be pleasant reading. It received a glowing review from the New York Review of Books, which indicates accessibility for the nonspecialist reader. Kerman has become one of my favorite writers on music, with a style not only coherent but vivid and imaginative. A few months ago I had never heard of him. Now, I want to read everything he ever wrote.

Samples:

"...a dictionary, even the best dictionary, is essentially just another trophy of positivism."

"[Babbitt's] writing of the 1950s had developed into a strange amalgam. Conjoined with a fanatical scientism, a search for quasi-logical precision of reference which tortured his syntax into increasingly Jamesian spirals for very un-Jamesian ends, there was an undertone of distress, even rage, erupting into repeated assaults and innuendos directed against various predictable targets."

I feel my appetite being rewhet!

[ziva razpet · Rating 4 out of 5]

kralj 💯🙏❤️

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although more than 20 years old, Kerman's analysis of the field remains depressingly accurate. And even when he's not on-target, Kerman is always articulate and provocative.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Why the ethnomusicology hate, Joseph Kerman? This book caused many a raised eyebrow and "hmmm". In a good way.

[Jarry J arjona · Rating 5 out of 5]

quiero leerelo