ABSTRACT
The ‘New Musicology’ is plainly to stay. If that remark sounds a shade weary, the weariness is not so much a reflection of innate British conservatism as a reaction to the unmistakable whiff of hype. The phrase ‘New Musicology’ was first used by Jean-Jacques Nattiez in the blurb for Carolyn Abbate’s book Unsung Voices and repeated by Arnold Whittall in his enthusiastic review of that book for Music Analysis. The sheer exuberance of argument, the sheer delight in language, displayed by some proponents of the ‘New Musicology’ could hide a return to a descriptive style of musical commentary redolent of Donald Tovey – though without his insights. As James Webster does in his book on Haydn, that analysis is but one strand in a multi-layered, ‘multivalent’ mode of discourse. Musicology is too important to be bothered with the merely new: the term ‘New Musicology’ actually does the movement a disservice.
