This volume demonstrates the recent direction of cultural history,
as it is now being practiced in both history and musicology, to
grasp the realms of human experience, understanding and meaning-how
they are constructed, negotiated and communicated on both an
individual and a social level. Just as historians in their quest to
understand the construction and transmission of meaning,
musicologists are turning to new inquiries into cultural
representations and their social dynamics, while remaining aware of
music's distinctive "register" of representation as an abstract
language and a performing art. As the case studies analyzed by
musicologists and historians in this volume attest, both fields are
not only posing similar questions but attempting to study music
itself together with the relevant framing factors and contexts that
imbued it with meaning. They are seeking to do so within a
factually accurate yet theoretically sophisticated interpretation
that combines the insights into language and semiotics
characteristic of "the new cultural history" and "new musicology"
of the 1980s and '90s with more recent sociological theories and
their perspective on how symbols function within the larger field
of social power. The volume illuminates how musicologists and
historians are practicing the new cultural history of music,
employing similar rubrics and specifically those emerging from the
recent synthesis of theoretical perspectives on language, symbols,
meanings, and their social as well as political dynamics. These
include questions of cultural identity and its expression, or its
constructions, representations and exchanges, into which music
provides a significant mode of access. The scholars who work in
these areas are concerned with those cultural sites of the
construction or attempted control of identity, as well as its
interrogation through active agency on a social and on an
individual level, which embraces subjectivity in its relation to
the larger cultural unit. Here we may see attempts on the part of
both historians and musicologists to engage with the new ways of
perceiving the articulation of music, ideology, and politics opened
up by figures such as Foucault, Bourdieu, Elias, Habermas and
others. Their study of meanings and symbols is thus both relational
and contextual as they strive to unlock the idioms not only of
social and political power, but of the strategies of contestation
or of refusal. Other scholars represented in this volume are
particularly interested in cultural practice, collective memory,
transmission and evaluation as it is forged and then negotiated,
here influenced by figures such as de Certeau, Corbin, Chartier and
Nora. Hence a part of this collection is devoted to cultural
experience, practice and appropriations, grouping together those
cultural arenas in which music both illuminates and is further
illuminated by a study of uses, collective practices, modes of
inscription, and of evaluation or reception. The contributors here,
both historians and musicologists, are apprised of all the
dimensions that may affect the construction of signification,
including specific material inscriptions as well as the symbolic
potential of the artistic language. Hence here we see a concern,
characteristic of "the new cultural history," with how the forms
assumed by texts may become an essential element in the creation of
their meaning since different groups encounter, "possess," and
experience a work in various ways, and within the context of
substantially different aural and visual cultures.
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