Following a fascinating talk on the narratives and directions of historiography surrounding Russian-Ukrainian relations and Eastern European discourses, I was made aware of a school of historiographical thinking that has seem to become ubiquitous within Academic circles yet its name perhaps much less so. I am referring to the 20th century movement known as The Annales School of History, its 'founders' March Bloch and Lucien Febvre un-convinced by the sectionality of historicism at the time and keen on comprehending how France could both prosper and stultify at the exact same time.
How could a country such as France produce both Art Nouveau, Impressionism,
and the fantastic outcomes of Bell Epoque and yet fall into destituteness politically and economically at the same time? What were the factors that led to this misalignment of national outcomes and could methodologies be created to better address this?
In this post, I will briefly introduce and discuss what The Annales School conventionally is, what they believed, some of the scene's inner movements, and conclude with some examples of contemporary 'Annales School'-type scholars found within Musicology today.
The 'Annales School' was founded in the later-half of the 1920s during a time where the world was recovering from WW1 (1914-1918), and there was great struggle and uncertainty under the Third Republic's shoddy leadership, while the effects of the Great Depression (1929-late 1930s) would impact France just as hard as everywhere else. However, amidst this political-economical turmoil were the formation of major cultural projects, scenes, and movements, collectively known as Années folles (crazy years). For example, Impressionism (e.g., Manet, Debussy, Roden) and the group known as Les Six (1920s-1950s), jazz and ragtime (e.g., Florence Mills, Josephine Baker, Sidney Bechet), along with ballet and dance (e.g., The Ballet Russe and The Ballets Suédois). Thus, there were two very different states of French society at the moment, and yet Bloch and Febvre were unconvinced they were mutually exclusive. Rather, such stark historical developments could be better explained if one took a wider and more comprehensive look at history through the lens of complimentary chronologies rather than distinct channels and "event"-based discourses as was the norm.
At the center of the Annales School was the journal Annales of Economic and Social History (Annales d'histoire économique et sociale but now Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales), founded in 1929 to provide a place for interdisciplinary evaluations of history through the prismatic lens of "human sciences." The journal would become the epicenter for the updating and modernization of historiographical discourses, and as Wolfgang Spohn writes that this "social-scientific historical approach," of which the journal fostered/(s) provides the place for deep examinations of historical movements outside the dichotomy of single-celled teleologies. Combining a "multilevel" and "multidimensional" perspective to historical study through application of sociology, linguistics, culturology, micro-macroeconomics, and other socio-historical field, the Annales School sought to provide a fuller view of what makes history and events actually happen, not necessarily the events which make up history itself.
As outlined by David Moon (2012), by coherently expanding the methodological purview of historical study and viewing history as a multi-layered phenomenon which in many ways sits outside of monolinear conceptions of time, the Annales School saw national history as a single whole. In the 1970s, Jacques Le Goff and Pierre Nora would coin the term "new history" and "total history" to demonstrate the connection between people, history, and truth.
Comparative history [people-led view of the world, "histoire des mentalités"]
Quantitative history
Fallacies of periodization [giving up segmented time points, "la longue duree"]
Interdisciplinarity
Emphasis on geography
Another helpful methodology was created by 3rd generation Annales French Historian Fernand Braudel who delineated the three temporal placements which could better show the relationships and unseen minutiae between the "event" and the "movement" around it. I am particularly keen on applying this tripartite form to study of Russian Hip-Hop because it forces the Scholar to rearticulate the plot points from the associated factors which were the sparks that generated those plot points in the first place. In short, what caused what and that caused what and how does the major event exemplify the outgrowth of other events?
Long term [structure]
Conjunctures [inner movements]
The event [immediate]
The emphasis on a person-first perspective and context-content holism when talking and discussing cultural, social, and historical developments can be found almost everywhere in contemporary Musicology. Some of the best example regarding Russian Musicology are Tarushkin, Fairclough, Viljanen, and Frolova-Walker, along with the more economically-centered work of Jacques Attali (Noise, 1977), along with the heady musical-centered works of Adorno, Howard Goodall (The Story of Music, 2013), and James Garratt (Music and Politics, 2019). It's hard to delineate specific Scholars in any sort of credible manner, as the Annales School's influence can be felt everywhere in modern Academic practice, irregardless of the discipline. But perhaps that the beauty of this school is its "effortless" impact on how history is told, written, conceived of, and quite possibly even made. By seeing everything as mutually related and connected by macro and micro teleological flows, the world around us can be better understood and the mythos of the "great men" narrative can be replaced with more true, realistic, rational, and even didactic alternatives.
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