The compass revisited: Rewriting histories of music in the south
The history of music in the countries of Southern Europe has, in general, been examined either from the West or from the East. This has had to do with traditional and univestigated assumptions of divisions on religious and linguistic grounds, amongst others, and a lack of familiarity with t...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts - Institute of Musicology of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts
2018-01-01
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| Series: | Muzikologija |
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| Online Access: | http://www.doiserbia.nb.rs/img/doi/1450-9814/2018/1450-98141825199M.pdf |
| Summary: | The history of music in the countries of Southern Europe has, in general,
been examined either from the West or from the East. This has had to do with
traditional and univestigated assumptions of divisions on religious and
linguistic grounds, amongst others, and a lack of familiarity with the
relevant literatures which it self derives in large part from a lack of
familarity with the relevant languages. Thus, there has been very little
comparison of aesthetics in the context of emerging or newly-established
nations, and the vital and simultaneous investigation of modernism in those
countries, that takes into account both the countries of the Mediterranean
and of the Balkans, rather than viewing them as peripheries and discussing
them almost exclusively in relation to a theoretical centre. In a number of
recent publications and papers, I have aimed to break down some of the
seborders precisely by confronting the question of tradition and modernism
and bycomparing and contrasting the music of the Latin/ Roman Catholic
South-West with that of the Slavic and Greek/Orthodox East, at the same time
endeavouring todiscuss this problem in a very broad sense, which I believe
to be necessary in establishing the groundwork for future investigation in
this area. In this article I discuss this approach and examine the problems
inherent in its implementation, given both the need for breadth of
historical and geographical vision (i.e., denationalizing music histories)
and for the avoidance of a musicology of cliche, born of ideology rather
than unbiased curiosity. |
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| ISSN: | 1450-9814 2406-0976 |