Other Classics

Abstract

Abstract History is less what happened than what is seen to have happened, and modern musicology was built on a new way of seeing the Viennese classics. The ‘Beethoven Hero’ paradigm construed music as expressing its composer’s subjectivity, experienced by listeners as the composer speaking directly to them; it privileged narrative values of continuity and directedness. But it also excluded the many premodern dimensions of Austrian music around 1800, rendering them unintelligible. Nicholas Cook creates a reverse image of the modern approach (based e.g. on juxtaposition rather than continuity, ineffability rather than textuality) and use it as a lens through which to see (and hear) the classics. Compositions that did not fit the ‘Beethoven Hero’ model can now be understood as period community music; otherwise baffling views of contemporaries begin to make sense. Even the music’s sound image is othered. Underlying all this is the contrast between premodern and modern senses of self.