On a bender

Two recent arrivals on my bookshelf:

Music and Metaphor in Nineteenth-Century British Musicology -- Bennett Zon
Philosophies of Music History: a Study of General Histories of Music, 1600-1960 -- Warren Dwight Allen

I seem to be becoming something of an historiography junkie (well, nothing really new there!), but these are two books that I read during my Ph.D. studies.  I'm in the process of breaking parts of the thesis down into articles, which means a certain amount of revisiting sources.  I just want to put a couple of thoughts here about each of these books.

Warren Dwight Allen's book is a standard text in the field, although I admit I didn't encounter it until 2008 when it was recommended to me by someone I met at a conference in the UK.  So, I came home, took it out at the library and started reading.  I found it a bit hard to deal with at first -- it's not the sort of book where you can just dip in and out of chapter sections, so reading it through the index was probably not the best approach to take on this occasion.  The chapters dealing with nineteenth century music histories illustrate the conflict between the Great Man myth and evolutionism, and the ways in which these produced a particular mode of doing music history.  Now that I've got a bit more time on my hands, I think I'll enjoy the rest of the book!

Bennett Zon's book follows on from Allen.  This is another one where dipping into chapter sections simply will not do.  My first encounter was about dealing with the Great Man vs Evolution argument, which formed the basis of discussions in at least two chapters of my thesis.  I picked this book up again last week, and it's already sent me scurrying back to a couple of sources with a new perspective.  It's always good when a book does that!