7/24/2019 Two Book Reviews: Music and Alternate History

1/3

Methods ITheory

1131

veat, the book's strength lies in its perceptiveness and

breadth of interpretation of the history of the concept

of time. Mooij's accuracy in comprehending and in

transmitting the essence of such difficult and compli-

cated philosophies is remarkable.

OLIVER W . HOLMES

Wesleyan University

JEFFREY H . JACKSON and STANLEY C . PELKEY,

editors.

Music and History: Bridging the Disciplines Jackson:

University Press of Mississippi. 2005. Pp. xvii, 268.

$50.00.

For decades, musicology and history have seemed to

revolve in different orbits. Musicologists inherited the

Romantic notion of a transcendent art work and dis-

cussed pieces as things unto them selves. W here histor-

ical connection was sought, it was of stylistic influence

strictly within the musical sphere. The second half of

the twentieth century saw that model recede if not col-

lapse, to be replaced by a new emp hasis on cultural con-

text. The context remained inward looking, however:

how can a culture illuminate a musical work, rather

than how can a musical work illuminate a culture? For

most historians in the Anglo-American tradition, music

has been predominantly a sideshow, a fascinating bit of

the past but mostly deco rative, of little fundam ental im-

portance to understanding the past. Music's place in the

historical dialogue has been further complicated by the

shee r techn ical difficulties of musical analysis. Few his-

torians have the training or the inclination to engage in

nuanced discussion of musical details, and for those

that do, who would be able to read it?

This book attempts to do precisely what the title sug-

gests. Edited by Jeffery H. Jackson and Stanley C.

Pelkey, it consists of thirtee n ch apte rs by different au-

thors, plus an introduction , and a concluding resp onse,

by the editors. Not counting Jackson and Pelkey, four

of the contributors are musicologists, six are historians,

and two specialize in language and literature. The top-

ics themselves are diverse. Lawrence Levine reminisces

on his discovery of nineteenth-century music; Helen

Marsh Jeffries examines music in a sixteenth-century

Oxford college; Laura Mason investigates women and

music in the French Revolution; Pelkey discusses na-

tional identity and music in British periodicals; Dorothy

Potter focuses on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's music

published in Federal Am erica; Burton Peretti raises the

issue of jazz and conserva tive politics; Ch arles Fre em an

seeks to uncover progressive idealism in two twentieth-

century operas; Sandra Lyne deals with portrayals of

Asians in Puccini operas; Michael Antonucci illumi-

nates encoded messages of resistance in southern blues;

William Weber and Donald Burrows consider Henry

Purcell's reception in early eighteenth-century Eng-

land; Jam es A. Davis suggests ways Dix ie could be

used in the classroom; and Michael Kramer proposes a

the implication of comments in the eighteenth-century

nivers l Journal in the formation of the Western clas-

sical canon. Most of the studies in this book address

issues of reception or the conditions of production: for

instance, who sang in the Chapel College Choir in Ox-

ford in the sixteenth century, or M ozart's repu tation in

Am erica as determined by music published in Philadel-

phia, or jazz funding by the U.S. government in the

1950s and 1960s.

Several chapters are framed around important cur-

rent historical topics. Antonucci's discussion of the

blues leads to nuanced political discussions; Mason's

discussion of musical activity in the French Revolution

addresses central gender issues; Pelkey's examination

of British periodicals in the eighteenth and nineteenth

centuries assesses the role of music in the formation of

nation al cu ltures; and L yne's analysis of two Puccini op -

eras deals with questions of European attitudes toward

other cultures. Although Pelkey is a musicologist, any

of these articles, it should be noted, could have been

written by a historian with only minimal knowledge of

music. They demand little or no expertise into the na-

ture of music itself as a historical document.

Kramer addresses issues of the musicological/histor-

ical divide more clearly than anyone else. Using the

multitrack metaphor of the recording studio, he envi-

sions a quadripartite disciplinary division of musicol-

ogy, ethnography, theory, and cultural history; his

model clearly privileges cultural history as the grand

overseer that pulls all the other tracks together. His

analysis is rich and nuanced, although I question

whether the boundaries between musicologist, ethnog-

raphe r, theorist, and cultural historian a re as distinct as

he portrays them. This is especially true in the study of

popular music, which necessitates a more cultural ap-

proach than the transcendent model of some classical

music studies. Emphasis on recent popular music has

another advantage to the historian: the recording, not

the score, is the primary docum ent. While transcription

requires as deep a musical knowledge as score reading,

the recording itself is at least accessible.

Does this book succeed in what it sets out to do:

bridge the disciplines? In

itself

probably not, in part

because, as the final chapte r, Res pon se, reveals, Jack-

son and Pelkey may be critiquing more past than cur-

rent practice, confining historical musicology to the

study of great works, separating musicology and eth-

nomusicology, and continuing to view music as object

rather than experience. Heuristically, yes: the editors

have done a valuable service in raising the basic ques-

tion of the two disciplines, each of which has as a goal

an examination of the past, and some essays do hint at

roads to rapprochement. As musicologists and histori-

ans both draw on cultural studies, more common

ground will likely be found.

MICHAEL BROYLES

Pennsylvania State University

7/24/2019 Two Book Reviews: Music and Alternate History

2/3

1132

Reviews of Books

York: Cambridge University Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 524.

$30.00.

September 11,2001,reminded people that events can

change the course of history, and that no amount of

structural reasoning can completely erase the force

of contingency in human affairs. Gavriel D. Rosen-

feld, a historian of twentieth-century memory, has

turned his focus to the genre of writing that centrally

turns on contingency: counter-factual history, or al-

ternate history, or, as most people know it,

what-if

history. What if Adolf Hitler had won the war? What

if he had survived? What if he had been shot in 1930?

Shot in 1944? What if the Holocaust had happened

differently? In historical or futuristic fiction, comic

books, film, works of history, and even in works by

professional historians, these scenarios are played

out. Rosenfeld has gathered together the scenarios,

considering them in terms of chronology, the n ational

origins of their authors, and the response of their au-

diences. He starts with the assumption that counter-

factual history tells us a great deal about memory,

and ends with an insight that Nazism and the Holo-

caust have in the half-century after their occurrence

become normalized to a problematic degree.

To argue his case, Rosenfeld scrutinizes what ap-

pears to be an absolutely prodigious amount of ma-

terial; a scrupulous historian, he gives us the precise

number, kind, and date of counter-factual scenarios.

Those in which Hitler won the war number sixty-

three, with the United States proving the most pro-

lific producer, having generated twenty-eight such

works, including fifteen novels; Great Britain is then

a close second, with twenty-seven, and Germany a

distant third, with six, five of which were written in

the period from the mid-1960s on. One could be skep-

tical about what such a small sample could tell us

about collective memory. Yet Rosenfeld offers sur-

prising insights. He shows, for example, how British

works slowly abandoned the belief that World War II

represe nted the finest hour, culminating in Rob ert

Harris's account of British and American willingness

to collaborate with the victorious Axis, and in the ar-

guments of the conservative publicists Alan Clark

and John Charmly that England might have been bet-

ter off had it stayed neutral. The questioning, accord-

ing to Rosenfeld, refiects a declining sense of self-

confidence in Great Britain, and a greater desire to

question national myths. Such desires have hardly

troubled the United States, where the opposite ten-

dency has emerged, the Vietnam era notwithstand-

ing. Here the tendency to see American involvement

in moralistic terms has remained central, and has of-

ten been used against politically pacifist posi-

tionsin a famous 1967 episode of Star Trek, for ex-

ample. If anything, American triumphalism has

increased, with Newt Gingrich's novel

1945

(1995)

serving as an example. The Un ited States, not the So-

A Republic, not an Em pire: Reclaiming America s Des

tiny (1999), arguing the reverse: that the Unite

States should have stayed out of Europe, for inter

vention only made Europe safe for Stalinism.

Com pared to the British and the Am ericans, the Ger

mans have proved reluctant to take up the topic, al

though Rosenfeld has unearthed a curious quarry. Hi

gems include the classicist Alexander Dem andt's essay

If Hitler Had W on, which argued that Germ an

would have softened over time, with the racial stat

adopting a human visage; and Michael Salweski's por

trayal of an aging Nazi totalitarianism with its teet

gradually falling out. Rosenfeld sagely acknowledge

that these essays do not represent the views of German

as such, and is careful to point out their critical recep

tion. Most Germans, he shows, retain a highly mora

istic and critical approach to the past, even if this, too

is slowly changing.

Rosenfeld then considers those works that imagin

that Hitler survived the war (twenty-nine in number

and those works that wonder whether the world wa

better with or without Hitler (eighteen). Surprisingl

we find few authors who argue that the world woul

have been unequivocally better off had Hitler been a

sassinated. Finally, Rosenfeld tells us abou t a few work

(only six) that imagine alternative Holocausts.

The larger analytical point that Rosenfeld tries t

make involves the sea change from moralistic narrative

to normalizing narrativesa change that occurre

however hesitatingly, in the 1960s. In different coun

tries,

this normalization took different forms, but N

zism and the Holocaust, according to Rosenfeld, n

longer cast the same pall over the imagination. The th

sis is convincing in its outlines and makes sense, b

Rosenfeld pushes it to make bold claims that his ev

dence, clearly and precisely delineated, strains to su

po rt. In his conclusion, for exam ple, he writes: Th

waning of the fears and fantasies that have animate

alternate histories suggests that Western Society h

largely recovered from the traumatic experience of th

Nazi era (p. 380). Per hap s he is right. This is a fin

book , fluidly written and sm artly conceived, that pu ts a

important topic on the table. But for the sake of debat

I would suggest that traumas stay with people in u

canny ways, often across generational divides. I wou

also point out that in real history, the exceptional

traumatic points of the Nazi past, in particular the d

structive fury associated with the Holocaust, is on

now being researched in its excruciating local deta

and Germans, as Daniel Jonah Goldhagen right

if controversially argued, had by the mid-1990s hard

scratched the problem of the excessive cruelty of ind

vidual perpetrators during the Holocaust. Put d

ferently, there are many ways to sear traumatize

nerves.

7/24/2019 Two Book Reviews: Music and Alternate History

3/3

Copyright of American Historical Review is the property of University of Chicago Press and its content may

not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written

permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.