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By Carol Lieberman, Acting Chair, Music Department
When people learn that
I teach music at the College of the Holy Cross they often
ask, "What place could a music department
have in a liberal arts college?" Good question. In Europe,
music performance and scholarship are considered separate
disciplines and are housed in different institutions: the
conservatory for performance, and the university for
historical musicology.
But in the United States liberal arts colleges, music performance
and scholarship coexist happily under one roof and in one
department. Thus, our scholars may perform, and our performers
may delve into original manuscript sources in the search
for their most "historically-informed" interpretations. Music
students at Holy Cross, performers, composers and budding
historians alike, take advantage of these intellectual and
artistic explorations, and can be found sitting in the music
library late at night consulting Beethoven's sketches for
his string quartets, or examining the various completed scorings
of Mozart's unfinished Requiem. If they come out with anything
after their four years here, it is the knowledge that historical
context is everything. Not only do they "know" Stravinsky's Rite
of Spring of 1913, they can also place that great work
in the historical continuum--they know why Paris was such
an important musical center before the First World War; what
movements were breaking ground in visual arts, dance, literature
and architecture; how great men and women influenced an entire
generation's ideas about the world in which they lived.
In this academic atmosphere of creative investigation the "early
music movement" has also made its mark on campuses across
the country. In fact, interest in early music has grown to
the extent that it now appears to embrace music from the
Middle Ages to the first part of our own century. Clearly,
we are witnessing a new approach to the discipline, a mode
of inquiry, which is not confined to a particular period.
Composition has also been influenced by the academy. Reacting
to the "modernism" they began to perceive as constraining,
many composers looked to music of the past and to music of
other cultures to reinvigorate their work. At the same time,
a flowering of Baroque and Classical period instrument performance
came into vogue. Performers using these "authentic" instruments
were striving to recreate music of the past as it was originally
performed, and were collaborating with musicologists to reinterpret
17th, 18th and 19th century aesthetic and stylistic treatises.
Composers also incorporated the now "exotic" timbres of 17th and
18th century Western instruments as well as tonal systems
and instruments of other cultures. In this way, performers,
musicologists, ethnomusicologists and composers engaged in
exciting dialogues and discussions.
This is not just an academic phenomenon, however. By the
1950s, early music had become standard fare in symphonic
and chamber music concerts. The legendary conductor
Arturo Toscanini insisted on a more faithful reading of the
score than many of his colleagues, and contributed substantially
to the creation of a climate more receptive to stylistic
purists. A similar attitude was voiced by Igor Stravinsky
(who perhaps inadvertently, took issue with Felix Mendelssohn
who revived and conducted J.S. Bach's Saint Matthew Passion)
when he wrote in 1947:
"The Saint Matthew Passion of Johann Sebastian Bach
is written for a chamber-music ensemble. Its first performance
in Bach's lifetime was perfectly realized by a total force
of thirty-four musicians, including soloists and chorus...And
nevertheless in our day one does not hesitate to present
the work, in complete disregard of the composer's wishes,
with hundreds of performers, sometimes almost a thousand.
This lack of understanding of the interpreter's obligations, (italics
mine) this arrogant pride in numbers, this concupiscence
of the many, betrays a lack of musical education." 1.
According to Stravinsky, if one truly seeks to follow the
composer's wishes, one must try to re-create the actual sound
that the composer might have heard. The assumption is that,
through education, we really can re-create music of the past
as it was originally conceived. Although this notion is today
considered somewhat naive, we have nonetheless witnessed
an explosion in scholarship investigating such topics as
French and Italian ornamentation, dance tempos, sketch studies,
and stylistic practices that were never precisely notated
in their era. Just twenty-five years ago, this kind of research
would probably not have been undertaken by undergraduates;
now our students are increasingly aware of and interested
in these questions. It should be mentioned that all
this musical ferment owes a great deal to the invention of
the photocopy machine and the compact disc. An enormous body
of unpublished music has been made available in recent years--quickly,
cheaply, and even legally--through photocopy. Similarly,
the compact disc has enabled us to re-master old recordings
that had been consigned to oblivion. The latest technology
has therefore brought us closer to the past.
Today, "new music" may incorporate jazz, pop, rock, non-Western
music, computer generated and synthesized sound and 18th
century forms. This eclectic "Postmodern" approach
to composition has seen some early music performing groups
commission composers to write for harpsichord, recorder,
viola da gamba, Baroque violin, flute, oboe and other "old" instruments.
Juxtaposing "period" and electronic "instruments", combining
Western popular music with ancient non-Western chant, creating
multi-media collaborations that offer countless possibilities
for new artistic expression -- all point to the vitality
which a college music department in a liberal arts institution
can help foster, and in which students can be active participants.
To return to the question, "What place could a music department
have in a liberal arts college?" The answer is, at
Holy Cross, a very exciting and innovative one, where learning
and teaching by both students and faculty take place every
day.
Notes
1. Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music, translated
by Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl, Vintage Books, New York, p.
135.
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