ABSTRACT
This chapter identifies theoretical anticipations of Nicholas Cook’s ideas, and more broadly of several current themes in critical musicology, in the work of the early twentieth-century German music critic Paul Bekker (1882-1937). Encapsulating Bekker’s, and Cook’s, predominating attitude as one of ‘epistemological humility’, I argue that tensions between music theory and criticism in Germany around World War I foreshadow much of the struggle over the status of music theory within New and Critical Musicology since the interventions of Joseph Kerman. Bekker’s scepticism towards the definitive claims of both musical texts and our discourse about them was combined with an explicitly sociological analysis of performance, listening, and the ‘socially formative power’ of music. This was based on the idea that musical ‘form’ qua value is not a compositional attribute, but the product of an interactive process between the performed ‘sound image’ of a work, its social and spatial context of performance, and the collective perceptions of its audience. Though Bekker’s insights have generally been interpreted in relation to later twentieth-century German aestheticians and theorists such as Adorno and Dahlhaus, they arguably embody a much more ontologically flexible, pluralist, and progressive conception of music and its aesthetic foundations.
