Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World

A mapping of musical modernity

What has history got to do with music? Music, surely, has to do with the present moment. We value it as a singularly powerful means of intensifying our sense of the present, not to learn about the past. If we listen to Mozart, it’s for pleasure, not for a snapshot of Viennese life in the 1780s. Nevertheless, that begs the question why we take pleasure in something from such a distant time and place. We don’t enjoy the plumbing systems of the 1780s, or surgical procedures of nineteenth-century medicine, nor do we wear the clothes our grandparents did. So why do we use music from all these times as part of our own present? Why is old music still so resonant?

One answer to that question is that, for all the differences of musical style across several centuries, the concerns of old music are remarkably similar to those of today. Such a view pushes against a normative understanding of history which sees historical time unfold like the line on a graph, moving irreversibly from left to right. Music history has certainly been told that way, as a narrative of development and progress which sees each generation take up and transform the achievements of previous ones. Of course, that produces a glaring and awkward contradiction – unless you want to argue that the latest music is always the best.

Which leaves you with a history of linear change without any corresponding logic of explanation. A more interesting view might be something that looks like a map of the London Underground or the New York subway. What happens to our understanding of music if we think of the broad period of modernity, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, not as a journey along a one-way road, but as a space traversed in multiple directions? Such a mapping of musical modernity would suggest not only reading in different directions (backwards and laterally, as well as forwards) but also the intersecting of quite different lines – those of music with those of science, technology, politics, literature, philosophy. Since all these lines and all their possible connections are present simultaneously, Bach is as present as Boulez, and the exploration of tonal space is a short stop from the great voyages of discovery that shaped modernity from the sixteenth century onwards.

Music has often been a poor relation in the big accounts of western history and society and for several reasons: it doesn’t represent the world with the visual precision of painting or literature, is notoriously difficult to talk about, and is widely agreed to lack objectivity. But what happens if we take it seriously as a way of knowing the world, a kind of knowledge both embodied and highly cerebral at the same time, sensuous (and therefore particular, subjective, and personal) but also rational (and therefore general, objective, and shared)? It may be that we have seriously underestimated music’s role in our collective world-building.

Recent shifts in frameworks of knowledge from philosophy to neuroscience, evolutionary biology to acoustics and linguistics, lend themselves to such a view. Of course, music hardly competes with the kinds of knowledge that science affords. Its value lies elsewhere – in the unremarked and unattended ways in which it confirms, questions and re-makes our habitual ways of knowing the world. In which case, to think about the music of our past is to map a geography of sensibility – the frameworks in which we have represented our experience of the world and of ourselves. From that perspective, music suddenly seems pretty central to the story of modernity.

Aside from the words it sometimes carries, music rarely speaks about the world directly, nor does it record historical events like some acoustic chronicle. It offers no discursive account of the Reformation or the French Revolution, colonialism or capitalism, Descartes or Newton, industrialization or the rise of digital technologies, and yet it is highly articulate about the changes in sensibility of which such events are as much a product as a cause. The history of instrument making and tuning systems, for example, is a material form of the history of scientific rationalism, and the great musical forms of the past four centuries are no less ordered in their structure and grammar than forms of linguistic thought. Yet at the same time music is utterly counterfactual, the work of the imagination, imitating the world only to remake it in ways both playful and critical.

So, to reverse my opening question, what has music got to do with history? Rather more than we thought, perhaps, once we understand that music does not simply reflect modernity but plays an important part in its making. But of course, though it may be the object of historical scrutiny, music remains first and foremost a present experience, an aesthetic encounter here and now. From the sounding of the first note, no listener thinks of history, even though in every bar of music – from Monteverdi to Berio, and Beethoven to Saariaho – we participate in a network of thought and sensibility that runs through music like the DNA of our modernity.

Image credit: Music Company, Petworth. William Turner. Tate Gallery, London, UK. Public domain via WikiArt.

Recent Comments

There are currently no comments.