Volume 19, numéro 1, 1998

EN :

John Shepherd

This intervention suggests that the recent and welcome emergence of fieldwork as a prominent feature of much current work in popular music studies has deflected attention from an undertaking that characterized the early days of popular music studies: that of developing from within the various protocols of cultural theory concepts to explain the meanings, significances, and affects that music as a socially and culturally constituted form of human expression holds for people. In tracing a shift from theoretical to ethnographic concerns in work carried out in popular music studies by musicologists, ethnomusicologists, social anthropologists, and sociologists, it is suggested that a renewed emphasis on theory in musicological work in popular music studies may be of consequence for the academic study of music as a whole.

Beverley Diamond

In response to the editor's question concerning theory and fieldwork, this colloquy argues that the two are inseparable. Further, the importance of fieldwork in providing "alternative theory" which challenges the consistencies of academic thinking is emphasized. For this reason, the article eschews disciplinary history as a means of tracing important theoretical currents in music scholarship and, instead, presents arguments which confront the hegemonies of any history, any discourse of intellectual continuity, positing incidents which expose the social contingencies of theory.

EN :

This paper argues that a number of recent responses within North American musicology to critical scholarship that has challenged disciplinary conventions have in common a deep loyalty to the aesthetic experience of music as a supreme value. The vigour with which this value is defended has close parallels in religion, and such defences have indeed sometimes resorted to explicitly religious terminology. The institutional situation of North American musicology in university music departments dominated by Western classical music instruction strengthens this ideology, which continues to resist socially oriented study of music.

EN :

The Canadian composer-conductor Ernest MacMillan wrote England, an Ode, for chorus and orchestra, in a German prison camp in World War I, and was awarded a D.Mus. by Oxford University for it, in absentia. The score is examined alongside background documents, including MacMillan's unpublished memoirs, for its ambitious musical features, its conformity to the degree specifications, and the influences it suggests (MacMillan studied works by Debussy and Skryabin while incarcerated, and received advice from a fellow-prisoner, the composer Benjamin Dale). The choice of text, a decidedly imperialistic poem by A. C. Swinburne, is measured against MacMillan's later association with Canadian cultural nationalism.

FR :

Les avant-gardes des années 50 et 60 ont été marquées par l’appropriation de la technologie à des fins créatives. Elles visaient également la démocratisation de l’art en favorisant la participation simultanée de plusieurs intervenants et de diverses formes artistiques, d’une part, et en désinvestissant le créateur du pouvoir décisionnel absolu, d’autre part. La Semaine internationale de musique actuelle, organisée par Pierre Mercure à Montréal en 1961, exemplifie ces aspects par le recours à la multidisciplinarité et à la musique électroacoustique, alors en plein essor. Elle accueillait donc certains des plus illustres représentants de l’avant-garde mondiale d’alors, en musique surtout, mais également en danse, en cinéma et en arts visuels, et ce, malgré les contraintes économiques de l’époque, qui ont pourtant eu un impact sur la provenance des œuvres.

EN :

This brief study is a tribute to Greta Kraus who taught for many years in the Faculty of Music, University of Toronto. It is a personal interpretation of a single song, "Der Neugierige" from Franz Schubert's Die schöne Müllerin, following the linear approach developed by Heinrich Schenker, with whom Greta studied many years ago in Vienna. Greta had maintained her interest in Schenker's ideas, particularly their practical application to performance issues, throughout her long and industrious teaching career.