RESEARCH AND WRITING IN MUSIC HISTORY

General Principles for Writing about Music

One of the most important aspects of studying the history of music is to learn to form and to express
your own ideas about the music you hear. Discovering and sharing musical experiences are no less
genuinely musical activities than composing or playing music. Your reading about music should be only a
step toward talking and writing intelligently and effectively about it.
To write effectively about music is inevitably difficult, since by its nature music expresses its
ideas nonverbally. As Felix Mendelssohn once pointed out, the difficulty in all writing about music is that
the music itself is always perfectly precise and definite, whereas words are imprecise and ambiguous.
Nevertheless, we need to communicate about music and our experiences in hearing, playing, and
studying it. When we succeed in sharing our thoughts about music, we enrich each other’s musical lives.
It should be a pleasure to hear and study music and to exchange ideas about it. Whenever
possible, write about music that matters to you. You might select music for an instrument that you play
or for setting poems that you love. When you do not have the freedom of choice, however, enjoy the
opportunity to make the acquaintance of unfamiliar music. Study to understand new pieces and
composers; understanding is the first step toward liking a new work. Your interest in your subject will
help to make your writing interesting. If your reader discovers that you are not interested in the music,
he or she will soon lose interest also.
There are many types of writing about music, each with particular requirements of content and
style. A simple essay might begin by establishing the historical and biographical context in which a
musical work was composed and then proceed to an analysis of the music. A more challenging project
would be to compare the histories and stylistic characteristics of two or three pieces. Program notes
require a special approach from the musically knowledgeable writer, since the description of the music
in program notes must take into account that the audience may not have specialized or technical
vocabulary. A performance review or critical essay allows the expression of personal judgments but also
demands especially clear and well-argued reasoning. Finally, a research paper calls for thorough
documentation, careful construction, and a highly precise style.
It generally works best to approach writing about music in an “inductive” way, first establishing
facts and then using them as the basis for conclusions and judgments. In other words, start by asking
and answering the “what, when, where, and who” questions about the music, then go on to the “how
and why.” Do not neglect these latter questions; they are harder, but they are the ones that produce
interesting and significant results.

Research Sources

When you begin to write about music, you will want to make yourself familiar with some basic research
sources and tools. The standard encyclopedic reference source on music in English is The New Grove
Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition (London: Macmillan, 2001). This monumental work has
spawned a variety of smaller dictionaries and books on particular topics that update the main twenty-
nine-volume set. It is also available online. Among the best one-volume references are Baker’s
Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, edited by Nicolas Slonimsky (8th ed., New York: Schirmer, 1992),
for information about performers and composers, and The Harvard Dictionary of Music, 4th edition,
edited by Don Michael Randel (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993),
for discussions of other topics.
It is important to go beyond such basic reference books, of course. The articles in The New
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians generally provide substantial bibliographies that will give you a
good start. General and specialized reference sources are listed in Vincent H. Duckles, Ida Reed, and
Michael A. Keller, Music Reference and Research Materials, 5th edition (New York: Schirmer, 1997). For
further material, with brief summaries of the contents of each item, you should consult the series RILM
Abstracts (Répertoire internationale de la literature musicale), which is available online. Periodical
articles about music are also indexed in The Music Index and Music Article Guide.
Several very extensive series of studies of music history by periods provide more detailed
coverage than can be incorporated in any single-volume history. Largest of these is the New Oxford
History of Music, published by Oxford University Press. W.W. Norton and Company pioneered in
producing a set of classic volumes, The Norton History of Music Series, devoted to the main periods of
Western music history, and has now released a second series, The Norton Introduction to Music History,
in a more up-to-date format. A set of more concise volumes has been published by Prentice-Hall as the
Prentice-Hall History of Music Series. A recent and magisterial survey, although with distinct points of
view, is Richard Taruskin, The Oxford History of Western Music (6 volumes; New York: Oxford University
Press, 2005).
You will also want to use the very best editions of musical scores you can find. The compositions
of almost all the leading composers in the Western tradition have been published in complete critical
editions that can be relied on for accuracy. A number of major composers’ complete works are currently
appearing in new scholarly editions based on the most authoritative original sources and sophisticated
methods of research. Less prolific composers whose output may not warrant individual editions are
often represented in collected editions. A useful index to all these editions is Anna Harriet Heyer,
Historical Sets, Collected Editions, and Monuments of Music: A Guide to Their Contents (Chicago:
American Library Association, 1980).
Finally, a word of warning: Avoid such materials as program notes and recording notes or
Internet websites as sources for information or critical judgments. There are exceptions to this rule, for
example, when a composer has provided comments on the music especially for a certain performance
or recording. But program and recording notes are notoriously unreliable. They may be written by
authors who do not have the time or background to base their writing on thorough research and musical
analysis. Their purpose also makes it unlikely that they offer balanced and objective information and
evaluation. Because Internet sites have no provision for review by experts, as most book publishers
have, anyone can post information, regardless of her or his qualifications or the quality of the material.
If you do discover interesting facts or ideas in these materials, be sure to verify them in more reliable
sources.

Writing about Music, Culture, and the Other Arts

As this book stresses, music cannot be understood separately from the context of history and the
development of philosophical and aesthetic thought. In writing about music, you should try to keep in
mind how music and the lives and thoughts of musicians reflect the times and places from which they
come and how they in turn affect their contemporaries and successors.
When you relate music to works in other fields, be careful to think about them in more
substantial terms than superficial details. Consider the aesthetic foundations of the works — what ideas
they seek to express and how they seek to express them. Pay attention not only to the use of similar
subject matter of works in different art forms but also to similarities in the methods and forms of their
construction.
Be sure when you compare music to the visual arts or literature that you draw reasonable
relationships. Choose as examples works that have enough in common to make comparison sensible.
Examples must come from the same time and place, share subject matter, have the same relative scope,
serve similar functions, or in some other way justify comparison. Otherwise any connections between
them will seem accidental, and their differences will be meaningless.

Writing about Composers’ Lives

Music always arises out of the experiences of real live people. The biographies of composers can help us
to understand much about how and why they produced their music. You should discover as much as you
can about the events and ideas that provide the backgrounds for composers’ works and the
circumstances and purposes that surrounded the creation of the music.
Although practically anything in composers’ lives might turn out to have affected their music, it
is not true that everything affected every work. When writing about music, therefore, you need not
include every detail of the composer’s life. Concentrate on the facts that surrounded the composition of
the specific work or works you wish to discuss. In addition, state explicitly what the connections
between the composer’s life and music are.
In writing about the works of artists, it is easy to succumb to the “biographical fallacy” and
interpret the works as mirroring the lives of their creators. Artists, poets, and composers express their
ideas and reflect their experiences in their works, but they do not present their biographies as directly as
writers sometimes seem inclined to think they do. (Even when artists treat autobiographical subjects,
they are most likely to do so in ways that reflect considerable imagination, if not downright deception.)
Be careful therefore not to interpret music pieces as expressing the details of composers’ lives.
On the other hand, our most important understanding of a composer as a person must come
from his or her music. The nature of an artist’s life is such that day-to-day or personal matters hold a
relatively insignificant position in comparison to the art itself. Insipid musical ideas and undisciplined
musical forms cannot be redeemed by the observation that the composer was kind, generous, or in any
other way admirable as a person. By the same token profound musical insights and masterful handling
of musical materials can overshadow a composer’s objectionable character traits or disagreeable
personal behavior. To the extent that we care that a composer is a musician, that composer’s music is
the most important evidence of his or her biography.

Descriptive and Analytical Writing

Music itself should always be at the heart of your writing, but you will probably discover that to write
successfully about music itself is difficult. One of the most frustrating types of writing to read is the essay
about music that merely consists of a guided tour through the score or a blow-by-blow account of a
performance. We soon give up reading such descriptions in frustration. If we want to know how the
music goes, we would prefer to go directly to a performance, a recording, or a score. Of course, there is
much to be said for effective descriptions of particular things that take place in a piece of music. When
you write about music, be as simple, direct, and precise as possible. You must master a certain
vocabulary of musical terms and learn to use them properly. However, avoid using technical jargon
when ordinary language will do.
Be sure you choose analytical methods appropriate to the music you discuss. According to a long
tradition, curricula for music theory and analysis concentrate on the study of triadic, functional
harmony. This theoretical approach is not generally appropriate for music other than that of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however. Nevertheless, you should not shy away from analyzing
and writing about earlier and later music. For the earlier periods in the Western musical tradition a basic
understanding of the church modes and the principles of intervallic consonance and dissonance provide
the foundations for harmonic analysis. Discussing the most complicated analytical problems of early
music, those of fourteenth-century rhythm, requires in addition a bit of skill in arithmetic. The analysis
of some twentieth- and twenty-first-century music, especially pieces in free atonal and serial styles, can
be quite challenging and profits from some special techniques, also. Remember that in most cases
composers have developed their musical styles without waiting for theorists to design analytical
techniques to explain it. Writers about music are still working out the necessary methods to deal with
recent styles.
A useful book on analysis is Jan LaRue, Guidelines for Style Analysis, 2nd edition (Warren, Mich.:
Harmonie Park Press, 1992). It provides a systematic approach to the various components of musical
style (sound, harmony, melody, rhythm, growth) and has established some standard symbols for
identifying elements of a piece of music and methods for diagramming musical structures.
Writing musical analysis must then go beyond description and beyond naming the various
events in a work. Identifying harmonies, devices of counterpoint, and standard musical forms is only the
beginning. Analysis should undertake to answer the more challenging questions of how musical
elements interact to make an effective work, the functions of harmonic progressions for which we have
no conventional identifiers, why the form of a piece or movement departs from standard procedures.
These questions and others like them are difficult to answer, but they hold the reader’s interest because
they probe the musical character of the individual work.
Analysis should eventually lead to broader and deeper insights about a work. Its direct purpose
is to show how the different elements of style work together in the music. Its ultimate goal, like that of
every aspect of writing about music, should be the understanding of the ideas a musical work expresses.

Writing Style

Because music is an art, writing about it presents special problems of literary style. The material about
which we are writing has sensuous and subjective qualities that we cannot easily translate into
language. We cannot do justice to the music if we try to avoid those qualities, but neither can we allow
them to carry us away.
The sensuous nature of musical material requires vivid and specific descriptions. Try to write
about the things that take place in a piece of music with the most explicit nouns and active verbs you
can find. Do not avoid adjectives and adverbs either. We cannot increase the value of our discourse
about music by adopting a tone of artificial objectivity and neutrality. To describe a melody as conjunct
may be accurate, but the description is so empty that it does not distinguish between the fluid
smoothness of a Renaissance vocal motet line and the energetic wiggling of a Baroque instrumental
part. To say that a certain melody is directed upward hardly captures the nature of a particular musical
experience if what the listener hears is a brilliant trumpet arpeggio that rockets abruptly out of the
orchestral texture.
On the other hand, we need to resist any urge to indulge in flamboyant imagery or fanciful
metaphors in our writing. The romanticism of a few generations ago produced many amusing examples
of this sort of “purple prose.” A violin line may wiggle, but it is not like a worm; the tone of a trumpet is
often brilliant, but it does not call the orchestra to arms.
Another principle to remember is to write about the music directly. Focus on the music’s history,
purposes, character, and construction. Let those factors support any opinions you may want to present.
In the context of well-presented evidence a critical judgment should not be mistaken for a statement of
fact. When you come to express your impressions and judgments, you can generally do so without
prefacing each statement with the words “I think” (or something deadly, such as “In the present writer’s
opinion”). To begin with “I think” also has the disadvantage of turning the sentence into a statement
about the writer rather than about the music. Your reader is likely to be more interested in reading
about music than about you and will learn more about you from what you think about music than from
what you say about yourself, anyway.
 In expressing your judgments and particularly in writing conclusions make sure that general
statements really follow from the facts that you have already presented about the music. An
unfortunately frequent type of conclusion in student papers observes, for example, that Beethoven was
one of the greatest composers who ever lived, that everyone should know his music, and that his works
will continue to be played and appreciated as long as civilization lasts. All this may be true, but it is
unlikely that any particular essay has demonstrated it. When in doubt about the ending of your essay,
consider whether perhaps a simple summary conclusion will make a good ending or whether it might be
best simply to stop.

Some Practical Considerations

When you begin any kind of writing, consider your subject and your reader. Be sure that the subject is
appropriate to your interests and abilities, the medium in which you are writing, and your reader. Keep
in mind the reader’s reason for reading your work, his or her technical knowledge, and how much
background information he or she will already have. Decide what the most important points are that
you wish the reader to understand and how to organize and present them in convincing fashion. Think
about how much background and explanation you need to supply.
When you have collected your information, analyzed the music, and decided on a general
approach, make an outline. The purpose of the outline is to allow you to organize your information and
thoughts without having to concern yourself with the problems of creating elegant prose. Do not
hesitate to try more than one outline, if you can envision more than one way to arrange your material,
then choose the best of your options. In outlining, try to make sure that each outline entry has real
content; a good way to do this is to make a sentence outline, in which each entry is a complete sentence
with its own subject and verb. Check your outline to make sure that it allows for everything you want to
say; if it does not, you may find that when you try later to include additional items, the flow of the
writing become difficult to follow.
Perhaps the most difficult stage for most writers is the time when they sit facing a blank sheet of
paper (or video display screen) and have to begin. The best solution is simply to begin, without concern
for polish, and to get your thoughts on paper (or on your hard drive or disk). You need not start at the
beginning of the introduction and work through to the end of the conclusion. It often works better to
begin with the straightforward statements of fact or some other stylistically simple portion of the essay.
It is much easier to correct and polish rough writing than to create a literary masterpiece in your head
before starting to write at all. Even if you discard entire paragraphs, you have wasted no more time than
if you had just been staring at a blank page.
Do not forget to give credit for any quoted words, facts, or ideas you have taken from others.
Plagiarism includes not only failing to identify quotations but also neglecting to acknowledge and cite
sources for information and ideas. In different types of writing credit is given in different ways. Less
formal writing, such as program notes or reviews, generally allows for acknowledgment within the
course of the prose—readers of performance notes or the daily newspaper do not expect footnotes.
More formal papers, such as research papers, require detailed citations, either as footnotes or in the
more recent style with parenthetical references in the text.
Once you have completed your draft, reread and critique it carefully and objectively. You might
want to check the following, making several passes through the draft, if necessary:

 Introduction. Does the essay begin in such a way that it catches the reader’s interest? Is your
subject or main point clearly stated? Can the reader get a good sense of the approach that you
have taken?
  Statements of fact. Are all the statements of fact true? Are they well supported by
documentation or analysis? Are they clearly and objectively stated? Is each one necessary? Are
they presented in the best order?
 Paragraph organization. Does each paragraph have a single topic? Is the topic clearly presented
to the reader in a topic sentence (usually the first sentence of the paragraph)? Do the
paragraphs lead logically from one to the next?
 Opinions and conclusions. Are your opinions logically and clearly based on the facts as you have
presented them? Are your judgments and conclusions objective and fair?
 General style. Have you kept the music in the forefront of the reader’s attention? Have you
achieved the tone you intended? Have you used the best words to say what you meant? Are too
many sentences short and choppy or long and complicated? Have you double-checked for
grammatical errors arising from the revision process and for typographical errors? Have you
read the essay aloud, listening to hear whether it sounds natural and pleasant?

A thorough writers’ guide specifically directed toward musical writing is Demar Irvine, Irvine’s
Writing about Music, 3rd ed., revised and enlarged by Mark A. Radice (Portland, Ore.: Amadeus, 1999).
This book offers helpful suggestions about the step-by-step mechanical procedures of writing a paper,
general rules of grammar and principles of style, and comments on different types of writing. Its models
for footnote references and bibliographic form are unfortunately now outdated and should not be used.
A more concise book of the same type, illustrating more up-to-date references and bibliographic form, is
Joanthan Bellmman, A Short Guide to Writing About Music (New York: Longman, 2000). A small
handbook giving up-to-date formats as well as other technical recommendations is D. Kern Holoman,
Writing About Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988).
For most of us writing is not primarily an art but a craft. Like any other craft it is not automatic; it
requires attention to technical details, trial and criticism, and much practice. It is worth the time, effort,
and thought needed to do it well. Also like any other craft it grows more satisfying as we work harder at
it. Experiment with different approaches and styles in writing about music and develop your enjoyment
of this aspect of musical experience.