The Composer as Pole Seeker: Reading Vaughan Williams's Sinfonia antartica ...

• Main Author: Beckerman, Michael
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: Columbia University 2000
• Subjects: Music; antartic*
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.7916/d8pz57s0; https://academiccommons.columbia.edu/doi/10.7916/D8PZ57S0

It is a commonplace of history that we do not encounter events from the past, but rather descriptions of these events. To be more contemporary, and perhaps more accurate, we encounter "spins" on the events. While a kind of precise objectivity based on careful duplication of experiments may be prized by the "hard" sciences, most historians today do not believe that such things as "the past" or "culture" will yield to such treatment. The more we seek to "pin down" an event, to argue for a document's "authentic" privileging, the more any kind of objective truth may recede, to be replaced by yet another false front. It is, of course, not necessarily the facts which are in doubt in a particular case, but how they are assembled, organized and presented. The reality of the past, if it appears to us at all, does so through what some have called the "convergence of evidence," and always requires a leap of faith on the part of any investigator or beholder. If this is true of history in general, it must also be true ...