New Musicology - Relationship To Music Sociology

Relationship To Music Sociology

New Musicology is distinct from German music sociology in the work of Adorno, Max Weber and Ernst Bloch. Although some new musicologists claim some allegiance to Theodor Adorno, their work has little in common with the wider field of Adorno studies, especially in Germany. Adorno's own radical comments on gender, ethnicity and sexuality are rarely taken into account. New Musicologists frequently exhibit strong anti-German tendencies, especially in regard to nineteenth-century German music theorists including Adolf Bernhard Marx and Eduard Hanslick, also the twentieth-century figures Heinrich Schenker and Carl Dahlhaus.

A fundamental distinction has to do with attitudes towards modernism and popular culture. Influential, oft-cited essays such as McClary 1989 and McClary 2006 are highly dismissive of modernist music. German music sociologists tend to be more favorable towards modernism (though by no means uncritically) and severely critical of popular music as inextricably tied to the aesthetics of distraction as demanded by the culture industry. Metzger describes 'a fascistic element' in the music of the Rolling Stones. New Musicology, on the other hand, often overlaps with postmodern aesthetics; various New Musicologists are highly sympathetic towards musical minimalism (see McClary 1990 and 2000 and Fink 2005).