I certainly recognise quite a bit of what he diagnoses, though some of this is more prominent in the US than the UK, and in the UK it is found in certain quarters much more than others. This was not a world in which he any longer wished to operate.Īt first, Paul’s blog post provoked a lot of expressions of sadness and regret, combined with various individuals imploring musicology to look at itself and how it has got to this state. There was a real sense of sadness in the portrayal of a situation in many quarters in which anyone who dissents from this type of ideology is subject to personalised attacks, shaming, no-platforming, and attempts to have them removed from their posts, and how the dogmatic approach mirrors that found in media, politics and business. Then he went on to describe his own sense of joy and liberation upon discovering a lot of such music, coming from a background in which it played almost no part.
Then he noted the necessary consequence which would likely be drawn of the dogmatic statement: that music departments stop teaching Beethoven and Wagner, rather than the alternative he suggests by which such music can be used as a means of understanding more about the social contexts from which they emerged. He followed this with a considerably more nuanced view compared to this dogmatic utterance. He exemplified this with a stark statement (an imaginary one, but definitely of a type with which many will be familiar) about how, on account of the interactions between nineteenth-century music and imperial societies, ‘The classical music canon must be decolonised’ (my emphasis). In this, without engaging in any targeted critiques of individual scholars or groups, he identified the heart of the problem with which he no longer wanted to be continuously embroiled: an approach to scholarship which preaches dogma and allows for no dissent from orthodoxies, in drastic opposition to the spirit of critical thought which was what drew him to academia in the first place. Paul published a ‘farewell blog post’, which has been widely shared on social media. To friends he is Paul, and I will refer to him as that from this point, as I am mourning the loss to the profession not only of a brilliant scholar, but also a close personal friend. Harper-Scott from academia, at the age of 43, to take up a job in the Civil Service. Also accompanied by Emily Tan and Lindsay Edkins, not in the picture!įor several months, various friends have known about the upcoming departure of Professor J.P.E. Paul and I at the Hartlepool Headland, Xmas 2019. harper-scott, james hepokoski, julian rushton, keith jenkins, Liszt, martin stokes, marxism, music business, music technology, musical theatre, napoleon, nicholas cook, nicholas mathew, paganini, paul harper-scott, performance, popular music, richard taruskin, Rossini, royal holloway, russell group, slavoj zizek, society for music analysis, the event of music history, the quilting points of musical modernism, theodor adorno, Verdi, Vladimir Jankélévitch | Leave a comment ankersmit, golden pages, hayden white, henry stobart, j.p.e. The departure from academia of a brilliant scholar unafraid to critique the relationship of culture to capital Posted: Octo| Author: Ian Pace | Filed under: Academia, Culture, Germany, Higher Education, History, Music - General, Musical Education, Musicology, Politics | Tags: alain badiou, alun munslow, beethoven, benjamin walton, carl dahlhaus, Caroly Abbate, dead white composers, decolonisation, donizetti, Elgar, ethnography, ethnomusicology, f.r.
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