108 年 國立臺灣大學音樂學研究所《專業英文（C）》

Read carefully the two passages below, and respond to the questions which follow them. Please write your responses wholly in English.

Passage 1
"Posterity has been good to Beethoven. He has been beautified in both the plastic arts and music scholarship, where so much of the field of
Beethoven studies is occupied by hagiography. Mainstream music history has therefore ensured a bias in favor of Beethoven's genius, an
unacknowledged but nevertheless elaborate set of instructions for his appreciation. Because pro-Beethoven culture is so extensive, the
experience of his music can be a very rich one. Yet to the extent that our attention to genius and its products (whether these are scientific
discoveries or works of art) occurs from the perspectives these cultures of appreciation provide, we are blinded to the visions of how music
history could have been otherwise. We close off from inquiry the issue of how and why some individuals, findings, and enterprises are
celebrated over others, why some are perceived as exemplary and others not. The social resources that make the identity of genius possible
(beyond practical and musical conditions) include such factors as what an audience will accept as legitimate, and when and from whom it will
accept certain types of work. To ignore these issues is to mystify genius, to take it out of its historical and interactional contexts. Moreover, to
decontextualize genius is to elide the moral and political character of many or most quarrels over what counts as 'valuable' work - to preclude,
in this case, a sociological consideration of aesthetics and of art forms, their social uses and social consequences."

• from Tia Denora, Beethoven and the Construction of Genius

Question: In what specific ways does this passage argue that Beethoven was not simply a genius? (50%)

Passage 2
"The culture concept was a powerful tool in understanding Others afar, and it became increasingly used in grappling with Others at home. The
civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s lent a new urgency to the concept of culture and the rhetoric of cultural relativism established
earlier in the twentieth century. What emerged were new discourses employing what were by then the familiar logics of cultural relativism,
new discourses called multiculturalism to refer to Others at home, and globalization to refer to Others abroad or emigrating from their homes.
Nonwestern cultures were celebrated as never before under the banners of globalization and multiculturalism, but Others were, at the same
time, still kept at arm's length, and still used for profit and for individual artistic advancement by western musical stars.
My argument is that 'globalization' and then multiculturalism, its domestic face in the (post)industrialized countries, are new incarnations of
an older set of conceptions of difference, but that they entail a greater degree of the commodification of difference, as well as its consumption.
This can be seen particularly in a recently influential position within the music industry, that of the producer."

• from Timothy D. Taylor, Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World

Question: What argument does Dr. Taylor intend to make in this passage by stating the position of the producer in the music industry? (50%)