Periodic Parity

I’ve been thinking recently about the issue of periodization in music. I think most musicians would agree that the division of Western music’s history into periods is useful mainly as a pedagogical convenience: Although some crucial musical developments can be pinned down to particular years, it’s sort of absurd to imagine that music written just before 1750 and music written immediately afterward, for instance, is qualitatively different by virtue of that boundary. Even if some swaths of music history can be distilled to a single paradigm shift, they can’t all be.

It gets even murkier in the 20th century. My impression is that most standard texts sort of throw up their hands after Wagner and call the whole Debussy-through-Danielpour period “Contemporary” or some similarly nondescriptive adjective. I don’t know whether periodization is under active debate among musicologists, but the consensus, I gather, is that (due in large part to the factors I mention above) it would be pointless at best and deceptive at worst to divvy up the last hundred years.

Which is fine on some level, but it also slights the last century of music in survey texts by alienating it from the reductive but—at an early stage—instructive era scheme we all know and love. I’m convinced that new music would be easier to explain to younger students if introductory textbooks made a genuine effort to periodize it just as the preceding centuries’ music has been. To my eye, WWII seems like a reasonable division, especially insofar as that conflict helped bring about a major epistemological change (sort of like the 1755 Lisbon earthquake). In fact, given the stylistic plurality that has discouraged 20th-century periodization efforts, I think it’s possible that any future period breaks might be defined by important “current events” rather than by advancements in the field of music.

In any case, consideration is due. As long as we’re aware that periods, taken alone, present an inherently over-simplified model, I feel that we can only make gains in the educational realm by demanding “period parity.”