ningsinriktningar och vetenskapsteoretiska problem inom svensk akademisk musikforskning efter 1941

Abstract

This article presents an brief recapitulation of the results achieved by the HSFR-project ”Research aims and metascientific problems in swedish musicological research since 1941”. The project implied a mapping and a critical analysis of the different views in course
during this period within swedish musicology, and in the first place of the metascientific and esthetical prerequisites implied. It is in general terms possible to speak about three main currents within the discipline during this period. The earliest current is represented by the ”Uppsala school”, with Carl-Allan Moberg as a main figure. This school was mainly based on neo-kantian principles. Great importance was given to formally based views, when dealing with metascientific as well as esthetical subjects. Wide socio-cultural perspectives were regarded as inevitable when describing a musical history which was seen, in a classical humanistic spirit, as one among several aspects of the general history of the human culture. While contacts with the contemporary musical life were rather sparse, great attention was given to the development of methodological lines in order to assure musicology’s place among the sisterly esthetical disciplines in the academical family, which was of great importance for the institutional incorporation of the discipline at the universities at the time prior to the actual period. The strength of this tradition resided in its relatively homogeneous metascientific and esthetical bases. Its greatest weakness appeared when its norming systems and concepts became highly problemised by the modern musico-cultural and scientific development. The second main current appeared with the arrival of a younger generation of scholars in the 1940’s, grew stronger in the 1950’s and attained hegemony within the discipline in the 1960’s. This current was characterized by its close ties to the esthetical modernism blossoming in Sweden in the wake of World War II, as well as by its roots in a new philosophy, influenced by natural science, as well as by new modes of thought in the area of, for instance, psychology and sociology. The result was, among other, a concentration
on the concrete musical work of art, a concentration reminding of the neocritical tradition within litterary science. This implied that research was aimed at theoretical, and above all, psychological questions dealing with the prerequisites of the musical experience, as well as an renewed interest in the difficulties related to concepts such as art and work of art. The earlier generation’s stress on methodology was kept, and was even reinforced under the effect of ideals influenced by natural science. Another result of this relationship was also a positive attitude vis-à-vis an increased specialization within the discipline. The third main current developed in he late 1960’s and 1970’s around Jan Ling’s activity at the musicological institution in Gothenburg. Against a background of culminating massmedia explosion, leftist movements and youth revolts in the late 1960’s, a turn was made in the direction of some of the ideals that had marked the first mentioned tradition. A traditional stress on the humanistic roots of musicology was mixed with an anthropologically wide cultural view as well as a strong interest in music’s social prerequisites. Standpoints streaming mainly from German humanities tradition were blended with, among other, ideas rooted in North American pragmatism as well as French structuralism. Simultaneous to the renewed links to an older academic tradition, there has been a strong ambition, within this as well as the other currents here described, to stress musicology’s nearness to musical life as well as to practical musical exercise. The strenghth in this tradition has lied in its combination of holism and wider perspecives, while its weakness lies in a sometimes disturbing indistinctiveness in its theoretical outlines.