Music History and the Historicist Imagination: Revisiting Carl Dahlhaus and Leo Treitler

Abstract

This text offers a discussion and reappraisal of the historical impact of the Prussian historical school in general and of historicism in particular, epitomised in the works of Leopold von Ranke and Johann Gustav Droysen, on the historiography of music, as diagnosed by Carl Dahlhaus and Leo Treitler in Foundations of Music History and Music and Historical Imagination, with special focus on the distinction between historicism and Treitler’s “neopositivism”, its role and those of narrativity, aesthetics, and the work concept in music historiography.