Postscript

Extract

This conference illustrates how far the social history of music has come within the last two decades. Since musicological study was founded in the late nineteenth century, social topics have sometimes been looked upon as a threat to the integrity of the field, indeed of the music itself; the imputation of social interpretations seemed to some people to undermine the whole endeavour of musical study. The very grammar of the often-used phrase ‘Music and Society’ carried with it an unfortunate dualism that made the two parts seem disjunct, indeed ultimately incompatible. What was so refreshing about this conference was that the old problem just did not come up. It was assumed implicitly, as has been happening increasingly in the literature, that music is part of society, and that society turns to music to fulfil certain needs integral to it. With so fussy an old issue set aside, we can now go on to much more profitable matters. Some problems do remain, of course, over how independent musical and social analysis are of each other, but that is a tactical question as to the conduct of research that does not raise doubts about the very nature of the field as the old question used to do.