Introduction: The spirit of positivism and the search for alternatives : musicology and criticism at the end of the nineteenth century --Part I: Eduard Hanslick and the challenge of Musikwissenschaft: Forgotten histories and uncertain legacies ; Music criticism as living history --Part II: Heinrich Schenker and the challenge of criticism: Music analysis as critical method ; Composer, critic, and the problem of creativity -- Paty III: Guido Adler and the problem of science: A science of music for an ambivalent age ; German music in an age of positivism -- Epilogue: Into the twentieth century

More than a century after Guido Adler's appointment to the first chair in musicology at the University of Vienna, this book provides a first look at the discipline in this earliest period, and at the ideological dilemmas and methodological anxieties that characterized it upon its institutionalization. Author Kevin Karnes contends that some of the most vital questions surrounding musicology's disciplinary identities today-the relationship between musicology and criticism, the role of the subject in analysis and the narration of history, and the responsibilities of the scholar to the listening public-originate in these conflicted and largely forgotten beginnings. Karnes lays bare the nature of music study in the late nineteenth century through insightful readings of long-overlooked contributions by three of musicology's foremost pioneers-Adler, Eduard Hanslick, and Heinrich Schenker. Shaped as much by the skeptical pronouncements of the likes of Nietzsche and Wagner as it was by progressivist ideologies of scientific positivism, the new discipline comprised an array of oft-contested and intensely personal visions of music study, its value, and its future. Karnes introduces readers to a Hanslick who rejected the call of positivist scholarship and dedicated himself to penning an avowedly subjective history of Viennese musical life. He argues that Schenker's analytical experiments had roots in a Wagner-inspired search for a critical alternative to Adler's style-obsessed scholarship. And he illuminates Adler's determined response to Nietzsche's warnings about the vitality of artistic and cultural life in an increasingly scientific age.