He cites the blurb for a list of themes in Adams’s essay collection, which will serve for present purposes too: ‘Elgar’s Catholicism. Hugh Wood’s review in the Times Literary Supplement (21Mar.
But the wider, more reactionary public for studies of British music seems resistant to the intrusion of the jargon-sprinkling professional into their comfortable amateur drawing room. The most perceptive of the traditional school of writers on Elgar, among them Michael Kennedy and Diana McVeagh, have generally welcomed studies which often take an antagonistic stance towards their own writing, in tenor if not in viewpoint. In a recent article Adams has compared the amateur Elgarians who have written most of the earlier studies of Elgar to Sherlock Holmes fanatics who have made a fiction stand in place of a real person and have ‘created a reductive cultural construct that they call “Edward Elgar”, whose behaviour is only tangentially related to that of any actual person’ (‘Review Article: Elgar Studies’, in Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 4/1 (2007), 121–30 at 121). His insistence on treating this periphery of Anglo-American musicology to the same interdisciplinary cultural, historical, and sexual interrogation as music closer to the centre of the musicological canon has encouraged a generation of younger scholars to apply the full range of their musicological training to the study of this music in a way that was unknowable a generation ago. Byron Adams has become one of the central figures in studies of British music in the early twentieth century.
0 kommentar(er)
