Rob Wegman, Princeton University
Who's Afraid of Long-Term History?
In this contribution I propose to take a look at the problems and difficulties of writing long-term history. In historical musicology, as in other disciplines, there has been a tendency for scholars to operate within the relative security of short-term history (where it’s easier to hide behind the facts), and to avoid more sweeping narratives on the apparent assumption that these are correspondingly more liable to interpretive error, prejudice, or distortion. The result is that outworn models and narratives, some of them dating back to the nineteenth century, continue to frame our historical understanding by default. College textbooks perpetuate received periodizations, schools and generations, lines of development, models of influence, continuity, and change, and scholars continue to teach from these textbooks in the classroom.
For all the current interest in critical theory, there seems to be a deep-seated resistance to critical discussion about the assumptions that have gone into these textbook narratives. It seems as if the only choice open to us is either to perpetuate those assumptions (in textbooks and in the classroom) or else to reject the very idea of long-term history (in the evidence-based case-studies we present in our monographs and articles). Paradoxically, then, historical musicology really comprises two discourses that are strangely at odds: an aggressively revisionist one for short-term history, and an endlessly recycled one for long-term history.
Reflection on this paradoxical situation might help us to understand why some discourses in history tend to change while others remain immutable. How, and under what circumstances, do discourses undergo transformation? Why is it so easy for us to change our minds in one discourse, and so difficult to even contemplate a change of mind in another discourse, even when hard evidence is staring us in the face?