Cinderella; or Music and the Human Sciences. Unfootnoted Musings from the Margins

It has become fashionable among scholars to wax autobiographical with the reader, presumably to shed any remnant of the illusion (suggested implicitly by the conventional apparatus of a scholarly text and footnotes) that one might be speaking with an objective voice, or with an argument whose merits can be considered and even accepted without reference to personal and therefore circumstantial prejudice. Today's penchant for presumed full disclosure of one's subjective standpoint, however, is more likely either a species of authorial vanity masquerading as methodological scrupulousness or evidence of a greater interest in oneself than the subject one is writing about. In this case, the reader who wishes to distill the prejudices of the author and speculate on their origins must begin with the author's notion that one can talk effectively about the character and value of arguments by using procedures of reading and research that hold up under scrutiny and require no subjective apologetics. Botstein concludes that the definition of future methods of analysis, including the setting of the research agenda, cannot be undertaken from within the current traditions of music history or musicology

Aesthetics and Ideology in the Fin-de-Siecle Mozart Revival

What remains from the fin-de-siecle Mozart revival is, of course, its aesthetic influence on twentieth-century neoclassicism and modernism, particularly within the tradition of the Second Viennese School. Despite the fantastic commercial popularity that Mozart's music now enjoys, from the historian's perpective the turn to Mozart in the early twentieth century constituted an effort to revive the claims among many musicians on behalf of a model of purely musical hearing and listening. A premium on form and procedures of musical development within works of music-on structural devices overtly detached from the sort of extramusical illustration associated with Wagner-became a hallmark of much twentieth-century concert music. The turn away from the associative musical strategies of late Romanticism helped make much of twentieth-century music less accessible and therefore less popular. Wagnerism held the key to the mass audience. Therefore, from the vantage point of the late twentieth century, the rediscovery of Mozart during the early 1900s helped lead, on the one hand, to the most extreme deification and dissemination of Mozart and his music within the museum of music, and, on the other (albeit indirectly, through the medium of modernist advocates of theories of absolute music) to the relative marginalization of contemporary music and musical modernism in our own time

The aesthetics of assimilation and affirmation: recontructing the career of Felix Mendelssssohn

Es una traducción de: The aesthetics of assimilation and affirmation: recontructing the career of Felix Mendelsohn, perteneciente al libro "Mendelsohn and his world" editado por Larry Todd. Princeton University Press (1991).Paul S. McLaney (traductor)

The Exiled Intellectual and the American University

Dr Leon Botstein, Professor at Bard College, gives a lecture on the subject of the tradition of learning institutions providing exile to intellectuals from countries in crisis. Lecture held at the Graham Center, Modesto Maidique Campus, Florida International University on February 25, 2013