| My dissertation plumbs the historiographical underpinnings, narrative strategies, and critical reception of Donald J. Grout, Claude V. Palisca, and J. Peter Burkholder's A History of Western Music (HWM) by employing Hans Kellner's theory of the middleground ---that space between documents (background) and the fine tuned narrative (foreground)---and Hayden White's system of epistemological analysis. Archival research at Cornell, Yale, and Indiana Universities has identified documents establishing each author's middleground, disclosing his method for choosing subjects, exercising "objectivity," and narrating music history. The historiographical and pedagogical writings of Grout, Palisca, and Burkholder, in addition to a diachronic study of HWM's eight editions, reveal each author's use of language as evinced by emplotment, formal argument, ideological implication, and trope. "Getting the story crooked" about a textbook that has served the discipline since 1960 reveals fault lines within the development of American musicology at large and HWM in particular. |
