Analysis, Performance, and History

Music theory, it was argued in chapter 1, can be a discipline at the service of music historians, providing them with the conceptual apparatus to analyze and assess music from the past. But music theory is also a part of music history, presenting itself for analysis and assessment. This double identity can be viewed as a special case of a problem fundamental to historiography: the problem of a historian's own historicity, which renders an objective truth outside history inherently impossible. Historians trained in modern hermeneutics know about this. They know that their reading of a source is at best a mediation, a give-and-take between two historical viewpoints, and that as such it is temporally conditioned. This explains why history is, on a fundamental level, at odds with science. For the result of a scientifi c experiment to be declared valid, it should not be temporally conditioned, but, on the contrary, be obtainable under all circumstances. It should make no difference at which time, in which location, and by whom the experiment is carried out. This requirement of repeatability goes against the very nature of historical research.

What Music Analysts Do

What music analysis has in common with the historian's account of past events is its historicity. The analysis results from a mediation between an observer and an object, and between the worlds they represent. It tells us something about the music and its historical background, while at the same time refl ecting the craft, the experience, the interests, and the expectations of the analyst. Even a hundred music students supplying the harmonies of a four-voice chorale setting by Johann Sebastian Bach with exactly the same function labels do not alter the fact that such an analysis represents a historically determined state of affairs: harmonic functions having become a special focus of music theory; the professional education of musicians having been assigned to institutions and coordinated in training programs; composition, performance, and analysis having drifted apart as musical disciplines; and works from different periods and of different styles having been integrated into a “classical” canon. In any case, this state of affairs was largely unknown to Bach. This example shows how complex analyzing music can be from a historiographical point of view. It may not only involve the historicity of an observer and an object, but also the historicity of the methods used.