Download PDF by JolantaT. Pekacz: Musical Biography: Towards New Paradigms

Musical biography has hardly ever been an item of theoretical and methodological mirrored image. Our present-day notion of the lives of renowned composers and performers of the previous has been principally shaped by way of cultural and political assumptions of nineteenth-century biographers and their twentieth-century fans. whereas older biographies are being scrutinized for veracity and 'updated' with new proof, their historiographical premisses and narrative thoughts stay principally unchallenged. The epistemological upheavals within the humanities because the Nineteen Sixties have generated a physique of theoretical suggestion that has undermined the various assumptions of conventional biography. as a result, a lot of those assumptions have misplaced their carry as achievable underpinnings for present-day scholarly biography. for instance, the buildup of evidence is not any longer believed to carry us toward an figuring out of the topic; nor are the normal perspectives of the unified self and the self as a foundational concept taken without any consideration. This quantity brings jointly musicologists and historians who discover, via person case reviews, the wealthy strength of those new theories for writing musical lives. The authors of this quantity research how the insights supplied by way of those theories remove darkness from our severe reassessment of older biographies - and the interpretations of musical works those biographies have been used to construe - and aid forge new methods to musical biography. The authors additionally discover the capabilities musical biographies served in numerous historic contexts, the relevance of biography for musical feedback, the reliability of archival facts, the ethics of biography, the calls for put on biography by way of feminist and gender background, and the hot probabilities provided by means of cinema. The individuals to this quantity problem the view that biography has little significance for tune heritage, research, and feedback. jointly, they reassert biography's centrality and relevance, and dem