Wie 'autonom' kann Musikgeschichte sein? Mögliche Perspektiven eines methodischen Wandels

The idea that music history mainly consists of the history of composition is the result of a historical process reaching back into the eighteenth century, an idea that has been a determining factor in the definition of scholarship within the development of academic musicology and which has had a favourable influence on attempts to objectify our understanding of musical works through analysis. Taking up where premises of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche left off, Carl Dahlhaus spoke of the paradoxical "relative autonomy" of the history of composition. In the meantime, the various objections to the autonomy of music from the social sciences have not as yet been consolidated into a methodologically sound, alternative model. Perhaps such an approach already exists in Rudolf Vierhaus' theory of "Lebenswelt", a concept taken from phenomenological sociology and adapted by Vierhaus for use in the theory of history. The related 'soft' categories (such as attitude, modes of thinking and perception) contain a hidden potential-until now only partially articulated and hardly systematized-capable of productively overcoming the aporetical discussion concerning the "relative autonomy" of music, offering thereby the possibility of an integration of music history not merely based on vague associations within the panorama of the social sciences.