Music Practice Commons^™

Armchair Philology For The Post-Truth Age, James Brooks Kuykendall

Music

In music history classes, interactions with musical notation often take place via printed anthologies including material from many sources with varying editorial principles. Questioning how the music on the page got there likely does not cross students minds. They are presented with a polished text, with all the complications removed, that underscores the fixedness of the work concept. This article outlines an exercise that invites students to think like philologists, exploring a familiar and simple piece with a complicated textual situation: the hymntune generally known as ANTIOCH (usually associated with the text Joy to the World) appears widely in hymnbooks …