ABSTRACT
At its most extreme, structuralism presented a bleak outlook for musicians. Max Harrison’s observation summed up the situation: A consequence of science’s nineteenth-century victory over religion was that art came to be considered almost exclusively in terms of form and technique rather than as a language of communication: novelties of technical procedure and formal arrangement, the processing of ‘information’, of well-chosen acoustic facts took precedence over communication. Such a dislocation between the world of musicology and the world of practice became harder to sustain once post-structuralism, with its commitment ‘to tracing discontinuities and resistance to totalizing explanations’, began to take hold in the later years of the twentieth century. While topic theory was developing during the early 1980s and beyond, another line of enquiry started to open up, one which also challenged the supremacy of the objective, self-sufficient musical work.
