Space, Relations and Circumstances

Abstract

Europeanness and globality are neither aesthetically nor artistically defined terms. Ifwe accept current journalistic usage, they are even less new. The place of music, and therefore of musicology, is not outside the momentary or general, but it is different, and above ali closely connected with the historical (and the national). Antihistoricism of global »progress«, which eliminates the individual in the name of »Comprehensiveness« (uniformity following the model of market averages), is thus opposed to artistic contents. All the more so in the art of "unhistorical« nations, the music of which, together with relevant and related observations, have not even hitherto interested »the world«. Musicology, being a discipline of national importance, is obliged to pay regard to the standards of every individual society and to the patterns of its milieu. It has to be aware of its share in the cultural consciousness of the nation as well as of its subject matter. In fact, it is a matter of art music, of relations between »practical« musicians and »theoreticians«, of scholarly solipsism, of relevant subjects of research, of its organon and quality of its work. At the same time, musicology has to take into account the fact that the field of unanswered questions is - with each and every explication of the past and present (to be sure, of European and global) - growing rapidly. To reduce ali this to a common denominator of unifying or rather futuristic fantasies is quite an opportune political  issue, but not a scholarly principle, let alone an instrument of scholarship that takes shape through its understanding of history. Processes of integration are only continual circumstances of artistic happenings, not their programme. They are a basic element, and not a synonym of musical space, as well as of musical relations  and circumstances.