Beschreibung:
Whereas Walter Benjamin’s perception of modernity and its technical progress was predicated on a critical but positive view of human culture and its possibilities, more recent authors seem to advocate more pessimistic positions. Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, for instance, distanced himself from more recent developments of 20 th century music in his voluminous music history Musik im Abendland (1991); similarly, the six volumes of Richard Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music (2005) are characterised by the author’s conviction of the impossibility of writing a comprehensive history of music in the future: He sees his work as the last effort to describe the history of Western music in its entirety. Both Eggebrecht’s and Taruskin’s accounts show a teleological conception of history based on chronological time concepts; both authors consider theory and written documents as the crucial components of Western musical culture. Their books, however, reveal fractures and passages and therefore raise the question whether, and in which ways, the historical passage from modernity to postmodernity can provide the necessary tools for a music-historiographical methodology. In order to provide insight into the paradigm shift from modernity to postmodernity and its relevance for musicology, this article introduces Jean-François Lyotard’s conception of historiography. Elaborating on one of Theodor W. Adorno’s central thoughts, Lyotard attempts to combine universality and particularity, discontinuity and continuity, coining the term »micrology« as an alternative model that aims to replace the »grand narrative«. Lyotard’s aim is to develop a sensitivity for the forgotten, for everything that is lost or cannot be represented. Central to his theory are a non-teleological concept of time that favours horizontal passages and an emphasis on aesthetic experience. Taking Lyotard’s theory seriously and applying it to the writing of music history therefore entails considering a more diverse repertoire including musical phenomena that lack written evidence.