As exemplified in writings by Carl Dahlhaus and Georg Knepler, a debate about music historiography took place in East and West Germany in the 1960s and 1970s. A comparison between two books, Dahlhaus's Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte (Foundations of Music History) and Knepler's Geschichte als Weg zum Musikverstäändnis (History as a Means of Understanding Music), both published in 1977, is instructive as a measure of the two poles of the Methodenstreit: the one centered around music as autonomous work, the other around music as a human activity. The central questions raised prove uncannily current. The two scholars, who knew each other and respected each other's work, were both based in Berlin; but with Dahlhaus in the West and Knepler in the East, they represented the two different political systems that existed in the divided city between 1945 and 1989. In their work, and especially in these two books, Dahlhaus and Knepler defended their own positions and sought to point out weaknesses in the other side. While Dahlhaus's work is well known in English-speaking musicology, Knepler's is not. His contribution to music history and historiography was comparable to Dahlhaus's in importance, however, and his ideas anticipate many tenets of the "new musicology."
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