Scott Pfitzinger, Composer genealogies : a compendium of composers, their teachers, and their students [Book Review]

Abstract

Scott Pfitzinger's massive book is a thoroughly surprising release, not least because it seems as if such an encyclopaedic examination of teachers and followers in Western art music should have been produced long ago. Indeed, it is an indication of just how long-overdue such a project is that its cover, which depicts a family tree leading from Johann Sebastian Bach near the trunk to Richard Strauss near the branches, seems like an artefact from a far earlier, less rhizomatic era. In fact, Pfitzinger's study as a whole seems, whether knowingly or not, to be rather conservative when considered within the larger context of cultural studies in the twentyfirst century, entirely bypassing questions of the production of truth, meaning, and authority so central to the structuralist and post-structuralist projects, not to mention the innumerable fields of critical study that have emerged in the humanities since the 1960s. [excerpt]