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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 April 2017
This article examines the idea of ‘Critical Networks’ as a way of studying the relational structures that shaped music criticism in the long nineteenth century. We argue that the personal, institutional and international networks that supported the dissemination of critical ideas about music are worthy of study in themselves, as they can yield insights beyond prevailing methodologies that centre on individual cases.
Focusing on the institutional culture of music criticism means looking beyond the work of individual critics and the content or influence of their views, towards the structures that determined the authoritativeness of those views and the impact of these structures in shaping the operation of critical discourse on music at the time. Examining these networks and how they operated around particular periodicals, tracing transnational exchanges of both ideas and critics, and uncovering the various ideological alliances that were forged or contested within critical networks, can not only provide a thicker context for our understanding of historical ideas about music, but it can also challenge current views about the history of our discipline and the kinds of structures that condition our own ideas about music and music history.
1 Brake, Laurel, ‘“Time’s Turbulence”: Mapping Journalism Networks’, Victorian Periodicals Review 44.2 (2011): 115–127 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 115.
2 Brake, ‘“Time’s Turbulence”, 116.
3 ‘ Piekut, Benjamin, ‘Actor-Networks in Music History: Clarifications and Critiques’ Twentieth Century Music 11.2 (2014): 191–215 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, here 192.
4 Piekut, ‘Actor-Networks in Music History’, 196.
5 Taruskin, Richard, The Oxford History of Western Music, Vol. 1: Earliest Notations to the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005): xviiiGoogle Scholar. (Original emphasis). In a more recent comment, Taruskin noted that this sentiment had ‘met with more resistance than any other in the Ox’, especially from those who took it to mean that music history was a history of individuals. See Taruskin, Richard, ‘Agents and Causes and Ends, Oh My’ The Journal of Musicology 31.2 (2014): 272–293 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 289.
6 Piekut, ‘Actor-Networks in Music History’, 192.
7 von Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, Collected Works, vol. 12 (Scientific Studies), ed. and trans. Douglas Miller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994): 64 Google Scholar, cited in Holly Watkins, ‘Musical Organicism in the Age of Systems Theory’.