Music Criticism and the Challenge of History

More than a century after Guido Adler's appointment to the first chair in musicology at the University of Vienna Music Criticism and the Challenge of History provides a first look at the discipline in this earliest period and at the ideological dilemmas and methodological anxieties that characterized it upon its institutionalization. Author Kevin Karnes contends that some of the most vital questions surrounding musicology's disciplinary identities today-the relationship between musicology and criticism the role of the subject in analysis and the narration of history and the responsibilities of the scholar to the listening public-originate in these conflicted and largely forgotten beginnings.