Two Book Reviews: Music and Alternate History
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Transcript of Two Book Reviews: Music and Alternate History
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7/24/2019 Two Book Reviews: Music and Alternate History
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Methods ITheory
1131
veat, the book's strength lies in its perceptiveness and
breadth of interpretation of the history of the concept
of time. Mooij's accuracy in comprehending and in
transmitting the essence of such difficult and compli-
cated philosophies is remarkable.
OLIVER W . HOLMES
Wesleyan University
JEFFREY H . JACKSON and STANLEY C . PELKEY,
editors.
Music and History: Bridging the Disciplines Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi. 2005. Pp. xvii, 268.
$50.00.
For decades, musicology and history have seemed to
revolve in different orbits. Musicologists inherited the
Romantic notion of a transcendent art work and dis-
cussed pieces as things unto them selves. W here histor-
ical connection was sought, it was of stylistic influence
strictly within the musical sphere. The second half of
the twentieth century saw that model recede if not col-
lapse, to be replaced by a new emp hasis on cultural con-
text. The context remained inward looking, however:
how can a culture illuminate a musical work, rather
than how can a musical work illuminate a culture? For
most historians in the Anglo-American tradition, music
has been predominantly a sideshow, a fascinating bit of
the past but mostly deco rative, of little fundam ental im-
portance to understanding the past. Music's place in the
historical dialogue has been further complicated by the
shee r techn ical difficulties of musical analysis. Few his-
torians have the training or the inclination to engage in
nuanced discussion of musical details, and for those
that do, who would be able to read it?
This book attempts to do precisely what the title sug-
gests. Edited by Jeffery H. Jackson and Stanley C.
Pelkey, it consists of thirtee n ch apte rs by different au-
thors, plus an introduction , and a concluding resp onse,
by the editors. Not counting Jackson and Pelkey, four
of the contributors are musicologists, six are historians,
and two specialize in language and literature. The top-
ics themselves are diverse. Lawrence Levine reminisces
on his discovery of nineteenth-century music; Helen
Marsh Jeffries examines music in a sixteenth-century
Oxford college; Laura Mason investigates women and
music in the French Revolution; Pelkey discusses na-
tional identity and music in British periodicals; Dorothy
Potter focuses on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's music
published in Federal Am erica; Burton Peretti raises the
issue of jazz and conserva tive politics; Ch arles Fre em an
seeks to uncover progressive idealism in two twentieth-
century operas; Sandra Lyne deals with portrayals of
Asians in Puccini operas; Michael Antonucci illumi-
nates encoded messages of resistance in southern blues;
William Weber and Donald Burrows consider Henry
Purcell's reception in early eighteenth-century Eng-
land; Jam es A. Davis suggests ways Dix ie could be
used in the classroom; and Michael Kramer proposes a
the implication of comments in the eighteenth-century
nivers l Journal in the formation of the Western clas-
sical canon. Most of the studies in this book address
issues of reception or the conditions of production: for
instance, who sang in the Chapel College Choir in Ox-
ford in the sixteenth century, or M ozart's repu tation in
Am erica as determined by music published in Philadel-
phia, or jazz funding by the U.S. government in the
1950s and 1960s.
Several chapters are framed around important cur-
rent historical topics. Antonucci's discussion of the
blues leads to nuanced political discussions; Mason's
discussion of musical activity in the French Revolution
addresses central gender issues; Pelkey's examination
of British periodicals in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries assesses the role of music in the formation of
nation al cu ltures; and L yne's analysis of two Puccini op -
eras deals with questions of European attitudes toward
other cultures. Although Pelkey is a musicologist, any
of these articles, it should be noted, could have been
written by a historian with only minimal knowledge of
music. They demand little or no expertise into the na-
ture of music itself as a historical document.
Kramer addresses issues of the musicological/histor-
ical divide more clearly than anyone else. Using the
multitrack metaphor of the recording studio, he envi-
sions a quadripartite disciplinary division of musicol-
ogy, ethnography, theory, and cultural history; his
model clearly privileges cultural history as the grand
overseer that pulls all the other tracks together. His
analysis is rich and nuanced, although I question
whether the boundaries between musicologist, ethnog-
raphe r, theorist, and cultural historian a re as distinct as
he portrays them. This is especially true in the study of
popular music, which necessitates a more cultural ap-
proach than the transcendent model of some classical
music studies. Emphasis on recent popular music has
another advantage to the historian: the recording, not
the score, is the primary docum ent. While transcription
requires as deep a musical knowledge as score reading,
the recording itself is at least accessible.
Does this book succeed in what it sets out to do:
bridge the disciplines? In
itself
probably not, in part
because, as the final chapte r, Res pon se, reveals, Jack-
son and Pelkey may be critiquing more past than cur-
rent practice, confining historical musicology to the
study of great works, separating musicology and eth-
nomusicology, and continuing to view music as object
rather than experience. Heuristically, yes: the editors
have done a valuable service in raising the basic ques-
tion of the two disciplines, each of which has as a goal
an examination of the past, and some essays do hint at
roads to rapprochement. As musicologists and histori-
ans both draw on cultural studies, more common
ground will likely be found.
MICHAEL BROYLES
Pennsylvania State University
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1132
Reviews of Books
York: Cambridge University Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 524.
$30.00.
September 11,2001,reminded people that events can
change the course of history, and that no amount of
structural reasoning can completely erase the force
of contingency in human affairs. Gavriel D. Rosen-
feld, a historian of twentieth-century memory, has
turned his focus to the genre of writing that centrally
turns on contingency: counter-factual history, or al-
ternate history, or, as most people know it,
what-if
history. What if Adolf Hitler had won the war? What
if he had survived? What if he had been shot in 1930?
Shot in 1944? What if the Holocaust had happened
differently? In historical or futuristic fiction, comic
books, film, works of history, and even in works by
professional historians, these scenarios are played
out. Rosenfeld has gathered together the scenarios,
considering them in terms of chronology, the n ational
origins of their authors, and the response of their au-
diences. He starts with the assumption that counter-
factual history tells us a great deal about memory,
and ends with an insight that Nazism and the Holo-
caust have in the half-century after their occurrence
become normalized to a problematic degree.
To argue his case, Rosenfeld scrutinizes what ap-
pears to be an absolutely prodigious amount of ma-
terial; a scrupulous historian, he gives us the precise
number, kind, and date of counter-factual scenarios.
Those in which Hitler won the war number sixty-
three, with the United States proving the most pro-
lific producer, having generated twenty-eight such
works, including fifteen novels; Great Britain is then
a close second, with twenty-seven, and Germany a
distant third, with six, five of which were written in
the period from the mid-1960s on. One could be skep-
tical about what such a small sample could tell us
about collective memory. Yet Rosenfeld offers sur-
prising insights. He shows, for example, how British
works slowly abandoned the belief that World War II
represe nted the finest hour, culminating in Rob ert
Harris's account of British and American willingness
to collaborate with the victorious Axis, and in the ar-
guments of the conservative publicists Alan Clark
and John Charmly that England might have been bet-
ter off had it stayed neutral. The questioning, accord-
ing to Rosenfeld, refiects a declining sense of self-
confidence in Great Britain, and a greater desire to
question national myths. Such desires have hardly
troubled the United States, where the opposite ten-
dency has emerged, the Vietnam era notwithstand-
ing. Here the tendency to see American involvement
in moralistic terms has remained central, and has of-
ten been used against politically pacifist posi-
tionsin a famous 1967 episode of Star Trek, for ex-
ample. If anything, American triumphalism has
increased, with Newt Gingrich's novel
1945
(1995)
serving as an example. The Un ited States, not the So-
A Republic, not an Em pire: Reclaiming America s Des
tiny (1999), arguing the reverse: that the Unite
States should have stayed out of Europe, for inter
vention only made Europe safe for Stalinism.
Com pared to the British and the Am ericans, the Ger
mans have proved reluctant to take up the topic, al
though Rosenfeld has unearthed a curious quarry. Hi
gems include the classicist Alexander Dem andt's essay
If Hitler Had W on, which argued that Germ an
would have softened over time, with the racial stat
adopting a human visage; and Michael Salweski's por
trayal of an aging Nazi totalitarianism with its teet
gradually falling out. Rosenfeld sagely acknowledge
that these essays do not represent the views of German
as such, and is careful to point out their critical recep
tion. Most Germans, he shows, retain a highly mora
istic and critical approach to the past, even if this, too
is slowly changing.
Rosenfeld then considers those works that imagin
that Hitler survived the war (twenty-nine in number
and those works that wonder whether the world wa
better with or without Hitler (eighteen). Surprisingl
we find few authors who argue that the world woul
have been unequivocally better off had Hitler been a
sassinated. Finally, Rosenfeld tells us abou t a few work
(only six) that imagine alternative Holocausts.
The larger analytical point that Rosenfeld tries t
make involves the sea change from moralistic narrative
to normalizing narrativesa change that occurre
however hesitatingly, in the 1960s. In different coun
tries,
this normalization took different forms, but N
zism and the Holocaust, according to Rosenfeld, n
longer cast the same pall over the imagination. The th
sis is convincing in its outlines and makes sense, b
Rosenfeld pushes it to make bold claims that his ev
dence, clearly and precisely delineated, strains to su
po rt. In his conclusion, for exam ple, he writes: Th
waning of the fears and fantasies that have animate
alternate histories suggests that Western Society h
largely recovered from the traumatic experience of th
Nazi era (p. 380). Per hap s he is right. This is a fin
book , fluidly written and sm artly conceived, that pu ts a
important topic on the table. But for the sake of debat
I would suggest that traumas stay with people in u
canny ways, often across generational divides. I wou
also point out that in real history, the exceptional
traumatic points of the Nazi past, in particular the d
structive fury associated with the Holocaust, is on
now being researched in its excruciating local deta
and Germans, as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen right
if controversially argued, had by the mid-1990s hard
scratched the problem of the excessive cruelty of ind
vidual perpetrators during the Holocaust. Put d
ferently, there are many ways to sear traumatize
nerves.
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