| Sumario: | In one of the best accounts to have emerged recently of the history of biography, Hermione Lee's I Biography: A Very Short Introduction i , the opening chapter sets out ten rules for writing in this sometimes controversial genre.[1] Among these principles are the requirements for truth, comprehensiveness, accuracy of citation, and objectivity. Musical biography has historically held something of a problematized or, to borrow Philip Olleson's words, an "untidy" place within music history, because it "steps outside the specialist arena and addresses a wider public."[3] Indeed, musical biography has long stood outside the musicological arena. As early as 1857, H. Byerley Thomson's I The Choice of a Profession i proposed a tripartite paradigm of the music profession with the composer at the top of the hierarchal tree, and the music critic at the bottom - but with no mention of the biographer.[4] Musical biography was to fare only slightly better in later writings. [9] In relation to the connections between musical biography and psychology, we see all too clearly the resistance to this relationship played out in the reception of the field.[10] Arguably, it took the publication of Maynard Solomon's I Beethoven i biography in the late 1970s to establish the respectability of psychobiography in musicology.[11].
|
|---|