The Recovering Choir Director

Michael Lawrence posts an insightful essay on the NLM in which he questions the collectivist view of music history:

…The practice of looking at music history in the collectivist or telescopic way cheats much great music of its timelessness. To look at a work of art as “Medieval” or “Baroque” is to lay the groundwork for the thinking that sees, for example, Gregorian chant as appropriate for people who suffered from scabies and the Black Death, but not fitting for advanced modern man. This view renders music — and, to an extent, its hearers — zeitbedingt, i.e. time-bound.

It seems to this writer that we should be paying more attention to the individual attributes of the composers and less attention to the categories into which thinkers have placed them. We should be looking at music from the inside out, not from the outside in as is done in the telescopic view. More careful study of this sort will help us to avoid musical generalizations — including generalizations about what constitutes “sacred” music. Finally, our observation of composers as individuals will allow the voices of these composers to be heard, and perhaps, divorced from the theoretical baggage which we have heaped upon them, they will say things we’ve never heard before.

Read the whole piece.