What Was, or Is, Critical Musicology?

Dai Griffiths
Oxford Brookes University

The British Critical Musicology group or forum appeared exactly on Sunday 5 July 1992 at a conference on popular music held in Ealing: Charlie Ford can be heard on an extant cassette tape proposing the group's formation, and referring to discussions a group of us had held the night before in a curry house. Asked to identify the intellectual tributaries that flowed into the idea of Critical Musicology in the UK,[1] I'd have four points scrawled on my hand before entering the examination hall:

1

This was a mixture of elements characteristic of the time but, in the UK in the early 1990s, the aspect I remember being most important was feminism, and if I want to recapture that time it's by re-reading Stephen Heath's article on male feminism[2] while listening to PJ Harvey's debut album, Dry.[3] Feminism enabled Critical Musicology to carry off a double trick: to talk about real life - 'why were there so few female drummers' led to 'how many female members of staff did a Music Department contain?' - while opening out approaches to musical texts (past or present) viewed through the filter of this (arguably) extra-musical category; so there would be Mavis Bayton's book Frock Rock on the one hand, and books by Susan McClary and Marcia Citron on the other.[4] Feminism was more the door-opener than pop music itself, although pop-music texts (partly because of words in songs and music videos) were easier to talk about; and where feminism led, talking about race and class followed with the 'history of popular music opening out the whole field of music history', as I can imagine Richard Middleton saying and showing.

A degree of glasnost was in the air, the freshness of youth and novelty: 'Let's put our heads together and start a new country up', as REM sang in 1986. I remember Charlotte Purkis's paper on music in Jane Campion's 1993 film The Piano at Salford in 1995,[5] and a sense that here was a debate we could all contribute to, something we could all claim to be expert in. The group did have that openness - open as in Open University - and adopted practices that I imagine are quite familiar to certain sorts of political or religious group or sect: no formal agenda (beyond an agreed theme ahead of the session), no hierarchies, an insistence that everyone had a voice, a readiness to travel and host (to avoid British academia's insidious gravitation towards London, Oxford and Cambridge). The group was new only in avoiding alliance with many other groups that already existed in Britain: the Royal Musical Association, the Society for Music Analysis, the International Association for the Study of Popular Music, the British Forum for Ethnomusicology and others. And so the group has seemingly dissolved, but as an appendix here (published for the first time) is the group's CV, with apologies for meetings missed or misrepresented. It would be fair for many of the group's membership to claim that, if asked what we got up to between 1994 and 2003, the enclosed list is a significant part of the answer.

2

Aide-memoire

When it appears at the very end of my book on Radiohead,[6] preceded by a chunk of Raymond Williams on Plan X, the idea is that the reader takes special tablets to understand the purpose and significance of a single sentence by Thomas Frank. The same sentence also seems to me - perhaps with equal mystery - to sum up a tension in the time of Critical Musicology (1992-2004): 'Top managers were enriched in proportion to the amount of power and security that workers lost: this is the single most important point one needs to know to understand corporate thought in the nineties.'[7] For the Critical Musicology Forum, a collective approach was difficult to maintain in a context - the 'corporate' aspect of British Higher Education - that emphasised individual production alongside the securing of research funds; this was the era of winners and losers, star individuals[8] and, especially, league tables for the ranking of social phenomena, as much as for sporting achievement or sales. Valiantly the group in 1997-8 tried to make a funding bid, but failed to reach the point of submission: it was difficult to create 'track record', to agree methods and outcomes, to envisage modes of dissemination. The language seemed inappropriate to the group and better handled in more specific contexts, and there was a sense that what mattered for the group was the chance to get away from all of that.

3

Equally, and more generously, the democratic, participatory aspect of international academia - peer review, for example - meant that Critical Musicology could easily find a home, in Fredric Jameson's postmodern world beyond scandal.[9] To take both terms in turn, 'critical' turned out to be relatively straightforward: for all their shady practices at the individual Departmental level, as recipients of public funds, Universities, Colleges, Schools tend to be open and liberal institutions - not like Tesco, I imagine, and not like working in a call centre; while 'musicology' turned out to be a broad church ready to welcome work that flowed from the tributaries listed above. If the work was good enough, it was published.

4

Those four elements were in turn underpinned by two underlying schisms. In a couple of sentences Robert Fink identified theory or analysis as the point of tension, rather than musicology as such: 'The truly rancorous ideological battle is not between New and Old Musicology, but between competing definitions of the New: the 1978 New (structuralist/music-theoretical) versus the 1988 New (poststructuralist/feminist/cultural). The ground of the battle is analysis, and the most powerful ideological fireworks erupt when the New Musicology challenges Music Theory for analytic authority over canonic musical texts.'[10] Something similar happened to the term 'contemporary' in music, as suggested by Richard Cohn's conclusion to the Grove entry for 'Harmony', where the 'truly rancorous battle', at least in theory, is between so-called popular music and so-called contemporary classical music: 'Perhaps the most important trend in practical harmony at the beginning of the 21st century is the reintroduction of contemporary music, in the form of folk music, jazz, show-tunes, rock and so on into manuals of practical harmony, in both Europe and North America, in the service of compositional and improvisational as well as analytical training.'[11]

5

What is critical musicology?

I'm sceptical of the idea that there is an exigent agenda, beyond critical musicology, a radical musicology that takes all of those tendencies further, not least because there's no reason why such work can't be included in that 'broad church' of musicology. However, there is a radical debate that starts further back, and continues to structure the field so that, in short, if I were setting out in Critical Musicology today, I'd be reading Peter Williams.[12] Williams wants to be starting something, and has been for some time, especially at the good and old Musical Times, where his sounds the more strident voice in a pub full of genial conservatives. As with all great critics, his comments have that double effect: reactionary tosh, you might at first think, but the criticism lingers.[13] I think too that, rather than going further inside critical musicology - with my Robert Fink and Richard Cohn quotations to hand - both music theory and so-called popular music play a critical role in mounting a counter-argument.[14]

6

I shall select and summarise some of Williams's views before moving to discussion. Williams is less an elitist, an attitude he readily affects and that sometimes provides good jokes,[15] as a pragmatist: 'it is a question of asking what is useful in a particular set of ideas when art is long and life short' (2004, 51). 'What in music is not pragmatic?', he asks at one point: the symphonic orchestra is 'pragmatic like all music. Music is what people have made.' Pragmatism doesn't tend of itself towards any party-political alliance - Richard Rorty was a pragmatist of the left[16] - and Williams's pragmatism concerns usefulness, use-value. With reference to music education, he's attentive to the idea of students emerging from a course of study able to offer something useful in areas variously titled 'society' (2009, 13), 'the world' (2009, 8) and 'the community' (2009, 8). We hear at one point from the 'prospective employer' (2009, 10). Four examples (2004, 55) of what music graduates can 'do': 'learn to hear with finesse, demonstrate well, train the young, direct choirs'. Elsewhere, and less specifically, 'the graduating student went off with certain skills to do something useful in the world, make some practical contribution to the community' (2009, 8). They can be 'professional or amateur' (2009, 9).

7

Williams is attentive to the way students are prepared for University, and fears that what is opening up is a gulf between the private (or fee-paying) sector and the state (or publicly-funded) sector. A-level in Britain (the examination that prepares for entry to Higher Education, usually taken at the age of eighteen) is seen as 'a classic instance of renegation' (2009, 9).[17]

8

Williams watches teachers carefully, their skills and motivations. Personal history is offered up as useful background: Williams taught at Edinburgh till 1985,[18] moving on to Duke University in the USA, and is able to view both systems with authority. There seems to be little doubt that the US experience is preferable: a list of eight features is presented as unlikely to be matched in the UK (2009, 10), from 'marvellous libraries' to 'an intellectual liveliness that keeps instructors on their toes'. The life of the British academic is, on the other hand, summed up by four or five points of scathing and raging criticism (2009, 11): 'Their instructors will be in thrall to childish evaluatory procedures (the Research Assessment Exercise), often taking the king's shilling by participating in them themselves, publishing otiose 'research', using up their finite time at conferences, competing for 'development moneys' available to them (with unbelievably time-consuming red tape) from so-called Research Boards, in effect a sop against the collapse of their status (everybody a 'professor') and of their salary (much less than a GP's).' The relationship between the number of staff to the number of students, resulting in the time available for teaching, is part of this comparison (2009, 7-8 and 10).

9

Williams is of the view that what he terms the 'centre'[19] in the study of music has been displaced by what he terms at one point 'circles of marginality' (2009, 11). Williams lists all sixteen chapters of the volume An Introduction to Music Studies only to counter them with five excluded topics of his own: 'harmony, counterpoint, orchestration, ear-training and keyboard harmony' (2009, 12).[20] The conception of centre and margin is fundamental to Williams's criticism, and informs, for example, the dichotomy of 'studying music and studying music studies' (2009, 14), the idea that there is 'something tangential about writing, reading and talking about it [music]: a step removed from the real thing' (2009, 11), or the tension between the study of music's being of 'certain music and its language' (2009, 7), in that phrase's precision[21], and its being seen in terms redolent of the sublime: 'something big, challenging, inexhaustible' (2009, 8). However, he sees these dichotomies in terms of order of progression, adding a personal touch in this important point (2009, 8): 'I was always sceptical of the new topics not because I was against them - on the contrary, I have worked a great deal on some of them myself - but because they seemed to me premature' (2009, 8).

10

With centres and margins, Williams again has his beady eye on colleagues down the corridor. If they begin to offer courses in marginal subjects, swerving from the centre and taking up the space formerly occupied by it, they do so either for political reasons - pater les bourgeois is a favoured formulation (2009, 8; 2004, 56) - or for Oedipal reasons: the lucky recipients of traditional training killing off their background by denying that training to the next generation (2009, 8). The relationship between teachers and students can become awkward as a result, as suggested by a cheeky comment: 'Surely - dreadful thought! - music examples are not so paltry because the authors wondered whether the students could be expected to read them' (2009, 13).

11

One last thing to note: that Williams is sceptical of the place of music analysis, for 'one can easily understand why many have turned against musical analysis in its modern manifestations' (2004, 54), elsewhere positioning Schenker in a hyphenated sextet: 'the Kant-Hegel-Marx-Freud-Schenker-Adorno habit of explaining all on one revealed system' (2004, 63).[22]

12

I shall now discuss some of these points. Concerning pragmatism, the reader may have been disappointed by the list of four things that music graduates are able to do, the one that ends with 'direct choirs' (no bad thing, of course). The paucity of this listing ties up to two other points: Williams's respect for 'those stalwarts of professional British training, the diplomas in organ-playing' (2009, 9), countered against the fact that, as he sees it, in a rare joke that falls flat: 'now it is so much more broadening to learn to play MIDIs' (2009, 9). Williams fails to drive the pragmatic points home. On the one hand that, in order to be trained as organist, the young musician had to possess a least a passing tolerance for the patient repetitions of the Anglican service - otherwise how else does one gain access to the damn things? - this rather than wanting to play in an Emerson Lake and Palmer tribute band or step up to the stool at Blackpool Pier. On the other hand - what in music is not pragmatic? - learning to operate digital music is precisely a pragmatic requirement for contemporary music. Williams' idealism here gets the better of his pragmatism.

13

Regarding A-level as betrayal doesn't get us far, and wheels too freely along the rhetorical road of dumbing-down: 'ease the intellectual demands or people won't do them' (2009, 9). There's nothing sacrosanct about insisting that people have gained advanced knowledge and skills by a particular age - there's no rush! - and I'm on the side of the school teachers keeping as many people as possible in the music classes. Nevertheless, it follows that skills which might have been covered earlier may need to be covered at University, or even later, in what we've learned to call 'lifelong learning'. The three-year undergraduate degree may be the stumbling block and, with the expansion of knowledge, more rather than less time may be needed to cover the subject. This is pie-in-the-sky of course, since University administrations in the UK at least are, if anything, keen to cram the degree into two rather than three years.[23]

14

Let's now turn to the sixteen chapters of An Introduction to Music Studies, dancing energetically to thumping dance music at the Royal Holloway club night, Williams's five elderly frumps sitting down, hoping and waiting to hear the comforting pentatonic melody that announces Dawn's 'Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree' from 1973. To say this without qualm: he's right that most of those chapters will assume that 'the basics' have been covered, and a conception of 'music studies' that doesn't factor in the time taken to acquire those basics leaves something unsaid and takes something for granted. Those skills, that training, do involve questions of access and funding and, yes too, in my experience, this circumstance is heading towards a distinction between public funding and private funding: the posh schools and - any minute now in the UK - the posh Universities.[24] I'm unable to comment on the American situation, though I do wonder whether all American colleges are comparable to Duke University.[25] Given his attention to national and political context, it's disappointing for the reader to find Williams following his fulsome tribute to the American University (the eight features unlikely to be matched in the UK) only with this lame (if impressively large-scale) evasion: 'The downsides of the US are obvious enough and don't need rehearsing here.' (2009, 10)

15

Britain has a particular problem in this respect, and I could recycle Thomas Frank even in this different setting. Leaving the British obsession with class to one side, league tables in education, and the divide between private and state funding, ensure that institutional context, the big picture, remains a Darwinian struggle for survival. For subject coverage, however, the sixteen Holloway chapters are more like equal points in a happy discussion. Enter the student, whose learning is necessarily mapped in time - either by being young or young in the subject - and whose order of learning is again crucial.

16

So-called popular music is in a particular position of both problem and solution in this regard since, as I've described, its claim to pragmatic prominence is effortless. It can account for any number of current buzz words - teaching skills for employment, skills of entrepreneurship, matching creative skills to the economy, learning through doing, acquiring business skills while developing practice, practice-based research - even if, behind the curtain, the enduring fault is Williams's good friend the 'prospective employer', certainly not anymore quite the consistent and dependable entity they may seem. However, a curriculum narrowly driven by those pragmatic needs[26] will not produce a student able to read Walter Everett's detailed analyses of popular-music texts,[27] their musical language let alone the voice-leading graphs. Popular music contains its own attenuated version of the tension between idealism (chatting about Courtney Love for an essay on gender politics in music) and pragmatism (all hail the second-year band just signed to a record label!).

17

Williams at one point describes American students ready to undertake challenging studies in his favoured topics (2009, 10), and ends by describing as 'reductive and patronising' the view that such studies are 'pastiche composition'. Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will: here may lie a way forward, that what's being taught is a set of core skills with reference to tonal music and, by extension, non-tonal music and theory. That the repertory is a Bach chorale or an Elvis Costello recording doesn't matter unduly, except to say that the Bach chorale is easily visible as a set of chords and illustrates the inter-relationship of chord and voice with a certain immediacy; for Costello one has to work to produce the score (useful enough) and one has to disentangle voice and chord in the arrangement or orchestration (again valuable, if time-consuming). With those 'central' skills in place - delivered through instrument and voice, solo and ensemble, theory and practice - the whole field is still there for the taking, big, challenging, inexhaustible.

18

This may not be a critical musicology, which I think was bound up with the issues questions I started with, but is surely the makings of a radical musicology, going back to roots that grow in a student's development and, by a bad pun, to the roots of chords. There are plenty of examples of work going on in this regard: Walter Everett's Foundations of Rock is I think a heroic effort to get at the basics while avoiding the score; and one also admires the textbook writers (my favourites: Walter Piston, Eric Taylor, George Pratt, Tom Pankhurst, Edward Caldwell and Carl Schachter, Allen Forte and Steven Gilbert, Allen Cadwallader and David Gagn). But the point needs putting to musicologists of any description: every time that little score appears as example, somebody somewhere is imparting the knowledge necessary to gain that understanding.

19

I say again[28] to anyone interested in Critical Musicology, and in the spirit of Karl Marx: teach the basics in the morning - how to write sensible and readable English (a major qualification for musicology), and why there's a G flat here and an F sharp there - and in the afternoon you're free to ponder the application of Lacan to a popular-music text, the position of a critical realism, and voice-leading in an Elvis Costello song. But remember feminism: you have to organise this at Departmental and personal level, in a way that isn't merely exploitative: to avoid the situation whereby a low-paid worker with very little job security does your teaching in the morning so that you can think about utopia all of the time. Do that, brothers and sisters, and the Critical Musicology of the future takes care of itself.

20

Critical Musicology: CV

Idea first discussed at conference Rock: the Primary Text, Ealing, 4 July 1992

First planning session, London, 13 March 1993

Study Days and Conferences

First study day: University of Sheffield, 6 November 1993

Second study day: Oxford Brookes University, 30 April 1994

Conference - Goodbye Great Music?: University College, Salford, 1-2 April 1995

Third study day: University of Westminster, 11 November 1995

First inter-society conference (British Musicology Conference, with Royal Musicological Association and Society for Music Analysis): King's College, London, 18-21 April 1996

Fourth study day: Birmingham Conservatoire, 29 June 1996

Second inter-society conference (with International Association for the Study of Popular Music) - Aesthetics versus Sociology?: Oxford Brookes University, 26 October 1996

Third inter-society conference (with Royal Musicological Association and Society for Music Analysis) - Adorno and Analysis: University of Bristol, 15 February 1997

Fourth inter-society conference (with International Association for the Study of Popular Music, British Forum for Ethnomusicology and Open University Musics and Cultures Research Group): London, 2 July 1997

Study Day - The Ethnic in Music: University of Leeds, 11-12 July, 1997

Planning session: Morley College, 5 December 1997

Fifth study day: University of Sheffield, 4 May 1998

Fifth inter-society conference (with Society for Music Analysis): University of Southampton, 17 October 1998

Planning Sessions: Oxford Brookes University, 16 and 30 October 1998

Sixth inter-society conference (British Musicological Societies' Conference with Royal Musicological Association, Society for Music Analysis and British Forum for Ethnomusicology): University of Surrey, 15-18 July 1999

Sixth study day: Surrey University, 7 July 2000 (theme: authenticity)

Seventh study day: City University, London, 12 January 2001 (theme: intertextuality)

Eighth study day: University of Leeds, 2 July 2001 (theme: pedagogy)

Ninth study day: University of Nottingham, 21 January 2002 (theme: critical musicology and high modernism)

Tenth study day: University of Newcastle, 15 July 2002 (theme: access to music in higher education: the politics of inclusion)

Eleventh study day: University of Surrey, Roehampton, 20 January 2003 (theme: feminist musicology - where are we now?)

Twelfth study day: Birmingham Conservatoire, 23 June 2003 (theme: critical musicology and ethnomusicology)

Thirteenth study day: Birmingham Conservatoire, 7 January 2004 (theme: critical musicology and performance)

Fourteenth study day: Leeds College of Music, 28 June 2004 (theme: 'fight for your write': plagiarism, pastiche and parody - critical musicology and copyright)

Publications: newsletter (4 issues) and website http://www.leeds.ac.uk/music/info/CMJ/cmj.html