ABSTRACT
Much of the discussion in this book so far has consciously modified or avoided altogether the cultural studies paradigm that has now found such dominance in cultural musicology. The previous chapters have consistently urged, instead, a consideration of expressive culture that integrates it with other aspects of human life. The notion has been not so much that any instance (including “the economic”) in itself determines the course of character of musical expression but, rather, that music occurs within, and is conditioned by, a wide range of activities and circumstances that are not in themselves “artistic” (though they may, including the economic, take on many aspects of artistic design). One would have to suspect that most musicologists who would characterize their work as “cultural musicology” would endorse such a notion, stated in such a generalized fashion, although in practice, even those rare musicological works that integrate cultural theory about music with discussions of society overall do so with the latter more as background to the former as foreground. In part, those approaches represent something of a strategic essentialism, as previous studies of art and society have often tended to underestimate the power of music in shaping culture. Also, the foregoing chapters have, of course, singled out urban change and conditions as particularly tied to musical developments, including the characteristics of much music per se; at least, they have argued that those aspects of human life particular to urban geography have been a heretofore neglected set of instances. Some music theorists and musicologists may well agree with that, too, or at least not be theoretically predisposed to challenge it. But at the same time, one of the more abstract, yet quite pressing, purposes of this book is also to establish a specifically Marxist approach to music theory and musicology; that approach would see the production and reproduction of human life and culture (the latter taken in the broadest possible sense) as irreducibly integrated to music (even if necessarily separated out for the purpose of examination), and it would also treat capitalism as a fundamental and systematic force. It is this last purpose that may meet with more skepticism from the music-theoretical and musicological community at large, given both the images (or rather loaded keywords, like “totalizing”) that have attached themselves to Marxism and the lineage of cultural musicology in what are presumably post-Marxist paradigms. So in this chapter I will illustrate why such an integrated approach—one that looks, as it were, through both ends of the telescope—can alone offer, if not an adequate, at least a particularly rich account of contemporary musical culture. Furthermore, that integrated approach will constitute, by its nature, a challenge to the dominant cultural studies paradigm in cultural musicology.
