Introduction: Music Among the Historians

Abstract

Historians and musicologists, along with most humanists, work today in a Schengen zone of scholarship, where people cross disciplinary borders without hindrance yet remain conscious of differences in language, custom, knowledge, and ways of going about their work. The differences are most evident when the object of study-in this volume, the history of music in Germany-is more or less the same but approaches to explaining or understanding the object, indeed definitions of what it is, vary considerably. Differences between disciplines, as between nations, are undeniably attenuated by the increasing volume of cross-border traffic. Few musicologists still protect the disciplinary boundaries that developed from the late eighteenth century to define and defend the study of music when it was a relative newcomer to the scholarly world, and many seek out historical methods and evidence previously regarded as irrelevant. Historians of culture too have breached the disciplinary boundaries in search of musical evidence, attracted not so much to what music critic James Oestreich dubbed the 'heightened ecumenism of musicologists' as to music's potential to answer their questions. 1 In the course of such border-crossings over the last few decades, a 'new cultural history of music' has emerged. 2 It draws on strengths of both disciplines yet retains the mark of the scholar's disciplinary training. How then does a historian explain music and account for its prominence in the societies, movements and lives of the people we study? This introduction and the articles that follow suggest, through a range of times and topics, the current state of this body of scholarship as well as where it is heading.