Why Music Is Good For You

by Ruth A. Solie

David Gramit. Cultivating Music: The Aspirations, Interests, and Limits of German Musical Culture, 1770–1848. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002. xi, 272pp.

I n this book David Gramit might be said to be addressing The Question for current historical musicology. As Svetlana Alpers once suggested that the discipline of art history had been fundamentally distorted by its doting orientation toward the iconography and values of Italian Renaissance painting, so musicologists in recent decades have worried about the overwhelming centrality of the German canon in our understanding of musical style, value, and cultural meaning. Indeed, some have not been shy to suggest that this repertory has itself become an ideology, not only within academic musicology but, even as it now recedes into nostalgia, broadly across Western culture as a whole.