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The Theorist's Sense of History: Concepts of Contemporaneity in Composition and Analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Arnold Whittall
Arnold Whittall*
Affiliation:
King's College, Lodon
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Extract

My title is as much a play on words, or even a choreographic flourish, as the statement of a thesis. After all, to say that theorists have, or should have, a sense of history is rather like saying that composers, singers or instrumentalists tend on the whole to be able to read music. Having a sense of history is not just a necessary preliminary to adequate professional attainment in all branches of musicology: it is what being a theorist, and an analyst, is all about. And that is just as true for the theorist as practitioner - as pedagogue promoting the perception of structures - as it is for the theorist who is primarily an historian of theory. For the theorist, having a sense of history means knowing something of the past, and being able to interpret that ‘something’ in ways which may be judged uncontroversially orthodox or wildly idiosyncratic, but which in the end enable theorists to make worthwhile contributions to the state of the discipline in their own time.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 112 , Issue 1 , 1987 , pp. 1 - 20
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Musical Association, 1987

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References

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