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Eight stimulating papers and responses related to Beethoven's biography and music were given at the joint annual meeting of the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory in Austin, Texas on October 26-29.
Michael Beckerman (Washington University) spoke on "The changing denizens of Arcady: Nationalism and the pastoral in 19thcentury music." There he argued that the notion of the "pastoral" in music, art, or literature "invariably implies an eternal and unchanging vision of nature, that the implicit inhabitants of this world are a-temporal," and that "before the second decade of the 19th century most musicopastoral inhabitants (the shepherds and rustics of Handel, Vivaldi, Mozart, and Beethoven) were also a-geographic, that is to say, they inhabited a world of peasantdom, which may have been just about anywhere. Yet beginning in the early decades of the 19th century, and picking up steam after 1848, many composers made conscious efforts to create a kind of pastoral which was nationally specific." Thereby giving further evidence of Beethoven's close ties to the eighteenth century, Beckerman went on to explore "the connection between the characteristics of the pastoral and the symbolic choices made by composers involved in the attempt to create 'national music.'"
"Music and spirit: A .B. Marx's New Age of Criticism " was the topic of an important study on the history of music criticism by Scott Burnham of Princeton University. A .B. Marx was one of the most important critics of the early nineteenth century and figures prominently in the reception of Beethoven's music. Burnham chronicled that, "As part of an ongoing attack against what he perceived to be the entrenched conservatism of the popular Leipzig Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, Marx proclaimed that the spiritual demands of contemporary music called for a new age of criticism. His program for music criticism incorporates some of the prevailing insights of the Romantic and Idealist schools in Germany: art as a revelation of spirit, divinatory hermeneutics, the organic theory of art, and a teleological attitude toward history. The central experience that connects all these strands in Marx's aesthetic thought is his confrontation with the music of Beethoven."
Tia DeNora (University of Wales, Cardiff), speaking self-admittedly as an "outsider to musicology," focussed her attention as a sociologist on the topic,...