All Arts Aspire to the Condition of Musicology: Victorian Musicology as Interdiscipline

Zon, Bennett

Abstract

This chapter traces the idea of an interdiscipline to Walter Pater’s famous adage ‘All art constantly aspires to the condition of music’. It utilizes Pater’s idea to identify the origin of Victorian musicology not as a discipline, but as an interdiscipline. According to the rules of anderstreben all art aspires to the condition of music because music is the only art that successfully collapses matter and form. In the construction of their interdiscipline Victorian musicologists, like Pater, would adopt ekphrasis as a methodological practice and anderstreben as a theoretical belief. For one thing Victorian musicologists struggled to understand and explain music’s purpose without reference to other disciplines, and in some instances disciplines like anthropology and theology seemed to hold mutually contradictory opinions, even if voiced through the same musicologist. The Victorian musicological subject defined himself or herself within a matrix of three intersecting areas of socio-cultural development: professionalization, education, and popularization.

Citation

Zon, B. (2019). All Arts Aspire to the Condition of Musicology: Victorian Musicology as Interdiscipline. In B. Lightman, & B. Zon (Eds.), Victorian culture and the origin of disciplines (283-307). CRC Press Taylor & Francis Group. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429277139-13

• Online Publication Date: Jun 24, 2019
• Publication Date: Jun 24, 2019
• Deposit Date: Jul 22, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Dec 24, 2020
• Pages: 283-307
• Series Title: The nineteenth-century
• Book Title: Victorian culture and the origin of disciplines.
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429277139-13
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1655148
• Contract Date: Apr 30, 2019