Twentieth-Century Britain and United States

When our book Music and History: Bridging the Disciplines was first published (2005), we noted that the disciplines of history and musicology shared a common interest in “the many changes in how people represent their experiences.” Nevertheless, we acknowledged that fundamental differences existed, including the treatment of music as an aesthetic object versus as an historical document, and how the relationships between text and context were conceptualized. Fundamentally, scholars in both fields have to wrestle in one way or another with the “’musicality’ of music,” but each may do so differently because of training, historiographical interests, and methodologies. Historians and musicologists may count different things, such as performance, reception, or sound itself, as evidence. While we offered only a starting point then, today, we can reflect on the intellectual motivations behind the book’s development and also on the lessons we have learned in the years since.