Paul R. Farnsworth

Musicological Attitudes on Eminence

IN 1938, 1944, 1951, and again in 1964 the author polled the members of the American Musicological Society in an effort to learn which composers these musicians held in highest regard.1 Secondary interests were to find how similar the attitudes were within the group and how much the attitudes had changed over the thirteen year period between the last two polls. In the letter sent in the late spring of 1964 was the following paragraph:

Attitudes Toward Composers As Reflected in Three General Encyclopedias of the Early 1960' s

IN AN EARIFIER articlel the writer reported on the treatment accorded certain traditional (born before 1870) and contemporary (born after 1870) composers by two fairly recently published musical encyclopedias and by the Encyclopaedia Britannica for four of its publication years 1929, 1942, 1950, and 1957. The composers under consideration had in 1951 been assessed for eminence by an elite musical group, the members of the American Musicological Society. The research indicated that, while the musical encyclopedias did reflect musicological attitudes quite well, the Encyclopaedia Britannica had largely frozen its attitudes by 1929, i.e., it had made few major changes since that date. The situation was found to be especially serious in the case of the composers born since 1870, for the impression given was that no composers of merit were appearing on the musical scene. Appaxently, the space method of studying eminence, first used by Cattell2 at the turn of this

Elite Attitudes in Music as Measured by the Cattell Space Method

ECAUSE of the pressures of time and space, musical historians must be selective in their scholarly endeavors. They are able to treat exhaustively only a relatively few composers; they must completely ignore many of the Western worlds serious composers and can give only scant attention to others. This is true not only in their classroom teaching but also in the writing they do for music histories and encyclopedias. Such selectivity does not mean, as many laymen suppose, that these musicologists know the eternal worth of each composer, i.e., how much classroom discussion or encyclopedia space each composer forever deserves. Yet, at any one time, musical academicians are found to agree astonishingly well that composer x was one of the most skilled and creative and composer y much less effective in employing the rules of some one school of composition, while composer z was one of the most able proponents of music based on somewhat different rules. The popularity of the several musical grammars waxes and wanes with the years since, in a sense, the rules are in a continuous process of recodification. It is a truism that the interest of the Western world is, in general, relatively weak in the compositions of alien cultures and the music of periods long past, maximum for the serious Western compositions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and far less intense for contemporary endeavors where the rules of composition are as yet only partially understood and accepted. Lay interest, developed as it is through formal and informal schooling, tends to reflect, in great degree, the taste of the musical specialists. But how can we study the views of the musically elite, the regard with which they hold the composers of serious Western music? We can, of course, interview musicologists in some fashion and this has been done in several surveys.l We can study concert programs or other evidences of the sort of music the public is offered.2 At the turn of the century the psychologist, J. McKeen Cattell8, suggested the use of an indirect approach to the study of elite taste, the measure of the relative amounts of space in encyclopedias devoted to the various composers. The reader will no doubt think of a number of valid objections to this procedure, particularly when general encyclopedias like the Britannica are employed. Yet, in spite of the obvious crudities of the Cattell method, data collected through the use of this indirect space-allotment method have tended to show moderate agreement with results obtained by the direct