歷史性與藝術性的兩難：從Carl Dahlhaus的「結構音樂史」論歷史書寫的永恆困境

Arguably the most influential post-war German musicologist, Carl Dahlhaus has been a target of attack and source of inspiration for his intellectualist approach to musicology for decades. While his revision of European musical history has generated heated debates among scholars, Dahlhaus's historiography has not been treated with equal attention, especially, his idea of ”structural history” (Strukturgeschichte), a key term of his magnum opus The Foundation ofMusic History and a guiding principle of his musico-historial writings. This paper argues that Dahlhaus's structural history offers music historians a method of accessing different viewpoints of historical subjects without subsuming one under another. The aim of Dahlhaus's methodology is not to reduce history into some overriding superstructures. Instead, his structural history is able to unravel the dialectic tensions in history by showing the complexity of conflicting structures. Furthermore, although Dahlhaus's approach hides itself behind the facade of German idealism, his discussions of value relativism and non-linear historical time are rather compatible with postmodern historiography. Nevertheless, there is still an inherent tension in Dahlhaus's method; namely, in promoting relativism in value judgment, he does not fully explain the relationship between historic and artistic meanings in music.