Conference “Narrating Musicology: Fachgeschichte(n) der Musikwissenschaft,” Bern, September 2021
The nineteenth century saw the institutional establishment of musicology and art history, with tenured positions for the latter being installed in Germany approx. 1810 and Hanslick attaining a lectureship for “musicology” in 1856 as part of Count Thun’s reform of Habsburg education. Besides promising scholarly innovation, Thun’s reform moreover addressed political concerns by fostering scientific positivism as a nation-neutral method, thereby striving to appease conflicts between Austria’s ethnic groups. The great success story of positivism in Habsburg academia is therefore dependent primarily on the specific cultural and political setting of the Austrian empire and its ethnically diverse inhabitants. Although early musical research betrays close parallels to art-historical methodology (and their common ancestors philology and archeology), both subjects evolved in different directions over the years. While Kunstgeschichte unfolds along the lines of historicist thought, Musikwissenschaft draws from a broader spectrum of academic disciplines, with a more prominent role of natural science. This phenomenon is at least in part due to the specific cultural and political situation from which these subjects emerge. While the German academic landscape favored historicist approaches, the beginnings of musicology are more closely tied to Guido Adler’s 1885 essay “Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft” and its Austrian (i.e. positivist) context. While Adler’s later works fall more in line with “historicist” scholarship, the 1885 essay paints a broader picture, integrating disciplines such as aesthetics, physiology, and psychology into Adler’s two-pronged concept. Rather than implying a “splitting” of musicology into historical and systematic approaches, Adler’s essay implies an inclusive concept, bridging the gap between Hanslick’s formalism, “philological” musicology, and the natural sciences by way of positivist scholarship. This bridging is reliant on the specific setting of nineteenth-century Austria, which by way of Adler’s reception history affected Western musical research for many decades.