La biografía musical en la era post-neomusicológica

Abstract

The present text contains reflections on several pressing issues that haunted me during the research and writing of a biographical and critical study on Vicente Martín y Soler (published in 2008). After a brief account of the several concepts that have served as ideological and methodological support of musical biography through its history, I describe the present paradoxical situation of the subgenre within our discipline. On the one hand, the recent emphasis on what positivist musiciology used to call “context” (which has now entered the sphere of “text”) and the return with a vengeance of musicology’s concern with meanings would seem to place the study of a composer’s life, works and psyche in a privileged position: he is the most significant mediator between social conventions and personal solutions, between collectively maintained symbols and individually perceived meanings—in short, he is a key link in cultural reproduction. Nevertheless, methodological constraints put forward in recent decades put the would-be biographer face to face with a number of thorny problems. ¿How can he go beyond the mere chronological ordering of data without incurring in hypostasis, intentional fallacies, essentialization, and so many other demons that musicology vainly attempts to exorcize? ¿How can he place this individual within the world in which he lived, without reccurring to categories such as ‘classicism’, “romanticism”, “nacionalism”, that seem nowadays so laden with ambiguities and contradictions, so much in need of rigorous delimitation? ¿How can he describe the development of his personality and his style without slipping into evolutionist linearity? ¿How can he link the circumstances of his life with the inner processes that led him to write what he wrote, without falling into the trap of that amateur psychologism that marred musicians’ biographies for decades? The answers to these and other questions are not formulated as general guidelines, but as provisional solutions that seemed appropriate for my research and writing.