Most Valuable Figures in Musicology

Theodor W. Adorno is widely known as a famous composer and musicologist. He was one of the members of the Frankfurt School and devoted a great part of his life to the critics of the music. In general he accepted and understood only the music of such musicians as Anton Webern, Alban Berg and Schonberg. As all the members of the Frankfurt School he refused jazz, rock and other areas of modern musical culture. In comparison with the representatives of the Birmingham School who perceived modern culture and considered it to be a part of cultural optimism, Theodor Adorno supported pessimistic views on the contemporary cultural development and influence of the modern musical styles on the way of life.

John Corbett devoted his work “Free, Single, and Disengaged: Listening Pleasure and the Popular Music Object” to the evaluation of the popular music. He recognized experimental genres in popular music and supported the idea that music should be freely developed. John Corbett gave special place to the jazz and considered this style to be one of the dominant in the popular music. The author involves the reader into the world of contemporary musical development highlighting the importance of listening to the natural music. He argued that recorded songs cannot be listened as they irritate our ears and it is really fetishistic doing it. He considered that listeners should be completely involved into the world of natural sounds instead of imagining a visual presence of the song meaning. Jazz is one of the styles which should be taken to the first place.

Speaking about the book “The place of music” by Andrew Leyshon, David Matless, and George Revill, it is important to stress that the authors provided the place for the music which functions as a culture. The book highlights the aspects of relationships between the music and the space from the historical, social and empirical point of view. The authors draw a line between cultural politics of the music and political economy of the noise. The main point is devoted to the ignorance of the place of music which depends on the geographic factors. The scholars do not outline the importance of the physical location of the modern music due to some social and art sciences. The authors strived for stressing the necessity to pay attention to the role of the contemporary cultural geography. They expressed a great interest in the development of the music geography and tried to show the logical connection between the popular music and geographical location. One can notice that their approaches to the study of the contemporary music were not standard and were not based on the traditional cultural geography. To my way of thinking this method of study can be criticized by the modern scholars as it does not coincide with usual visions of the music development and characterizes modern music only as a part of its physical location.