Cultural History, Cultural Studies and Music History

Cultural history is, on the one hand, the branch of cultural studies that writes history and concentrates on historical sources. On the other hand, cultural history is a direction within historical research that seeks to expand its types of sources, questions, and methods. This Janus-faced character is not a peculiarity but rather typical of the structures of scholarly organisation. “Cultural studies” (or “cultural sciences”) is also used as a collective term for mere conglomerates of traditional humanities disciplines. By contrast, demonstrating shared and clearly defined methods and questions appears to be a primary task of contemporary cultural studies.

However, cultural studies cannot be presented as a clearly bounded field like other branches of research; rather, they function as a catalyst that intrudes into or overlaps with various disciplines, influences them, and in the process changes itself. This dynamic conception—a challenge to research—arises from the historical context of scholarly paradigm shifts or “turns,” which over the past fifty years have increasingly overlapped and displaced one another. Cultural studies have been practiced and theorized differently in its various phases, just as the concept of culture itself has undergone profound change. The “cultural turn,” which made this explicit, was particularly decisive between roughly 1960 and 1990 for the kind of cultural history that has since been called, in some places, “new cultural history.”

First, cultural history tends to extend the idea—already known since Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803)—of a virtually shared cultural destiny of human beings and peoples to all areas of life, especially those “below” so-called high culture, above all the so-called folk culture. “New cultural history” now investigates, alongside politics, art, social history and economic history, topics such as everyday life, material culture, religion, magic and myth, ritual and play, the body, gender, illness and death, locality (“spatial turn”), identity, consciousness of time and space, “cultural memory,” as well as—under the influence of semiotics—the mediating function and mutability of signs and symbols. In view of such generalisation or dilution of its claims, the “cultural turn” has by now been predicted to be at an end. And where culture is presented as a universal “text” (text theory), criticism deriving from the “linguistic turn” intensifies, arguing that this is not a genuinely new subject matter but merely a new language game.

Second, “new cultural history” builds bridges to ethnology, anthropology, demography, religious studies and other academic disciplines that favour fieldwork methods and are confronted with alternatives to the European-Western tradition. Methodologically and substantively, this brings the phenomena of “otherness” and “difference” into play. The branch of “cultural studies” seeks alternatives to “hegemonic” discourses, particularly in the realms of political life, social theory and media culture. The “history of mentalities,” drawing on Johan Huizinga and the Annales School, explores forms of thought and feeling that underlie the institutions and practices of the past as deep structures, thereby aiming to enrich contemporary knowledge with an entire additional dimension. Here cultural history can counter its critics with significant achievements.

In historical musicology, as in historical research in general, interpretation or reconstruction of the past inevitably takes the place of dialogue with, and the investigation of, an “ethnographic present”. The challenge of musical cultural history lies in making conscious—even within the non-verbal medium of music and not only in its verbal discourses—the forms of thought and feeling, the alternative concepts and the modes of mediation of past cultures. Performances of early music, too, are confronted with such tasks almost daily.