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Virtuosity and the Musical Work: The Transcendental Studies of Liszt.

Article Excerpt
Virtuosity and the Musical Work: The Transcendental Studies of Liszt. By Jim Samson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. [viii, 240 p. ISBN 0-521-81494-4. $75.] Music examples, bibliography, index.

For some time now, musicology has sought a methodology that offers a persuasive response to the assertions of the Critical Studies discipline (called Theory in the U.K., as opposed to Music Theory) regarding musicology's insufficient acknowledgment and treatment of the social, cultural, and economic context of a work (sometimes called its "thick context"). The criticism has a long history; it is true that musicological preoccupations were, for a long time, bibliographical and editorial. It is also true that the discipline's putative myopia regarding all other kinds of inquiry has been exaggerated to the point of falsity, with "the music itself" and cognate phrases now carrying talismanic power to belabor the discipline from within and conjure up the Bad Old Days. An example of this would be Matthew Head's identification of "a recourse to 'the musical'" as one of the contemporary musicological ploys that "amount to an unscholarly resistance to ... cultural theory. There is no scholarly escape route from this theory." ("Musicology on Safari," Music Analysis 22/1-2 [2003]: 218.) According to this common paradigm. Theory first, then (maybe) the music, as it relates to Theory.

Whatever the music, and...