It is now almost a formality to say that we have moved beyond the days when musicology was held in the pincer grip of positivism and formalism. Some of the momentum for this transformation was generated by Joseph Kerman famously chivvying the discipline to become a critical practice capable of participation in mainstream humanities debates. 1 Recast in his mould, it is no longer sufficient for musicology blithely to generate facts or for analytical theory diligently to pursue structural coherence; instead both enterprises are compelled to demonstrate their significance and to justify the artistic importance of the music at the centre of their enquiries. Kerman's critique of twentieth-century musicology has, not surprisingly, been well picked over, a recurrent criticism being that his diagnosis unhelpfully conflated positivism and formalism. This point is made several times in the recent essay collection edited by Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist, Rethinking Music, a symposium which, in many respects, amounts to a thoroughgoing reappraisal of musicology post-Kerman. 2 It may be true that the most unreflective forms of historical musicology and analysis shared a desire to be objective and disinterested. Certainly both depended on a naturalised form of discourse; nevertheless, their epistemologies were always different. On the one hand, the formalist fetish of`the music itself' which sought, above all, to locate internal structure was associated with a synchronic, structuralist view of music. On the other, positivism (as explained in an essay from Rethinking Music by Leo Treitler entitled`The Historiography of Music: Issues of Past and Present'), exerted an influence on musical historiography through its belief in`causal explanation as the exclusive mode of objective, corrigible . . . knowledge' (p. 376). When perceived as historical constructs, indeed, both epistemologies are transformed: historical musicology becomes more aware of its own historiography and analysis becomes contextualised; both disciplines are consequently made more fluid, thereby providing resources for a transformed mode of critical inquiry.Kerman's original act of conflation is symptomatic of a desire to find generalised tendencies in musicology, an inclination that can sometimes help to uncover conceptual similarities, but which can also be guilty of homogenising important differences. Seeking himself ± and laudably so ± for a way to integrate musicology with mainstream humanities research, Kerman of course went on to argue that musicology should follow the model of literary criticism. That he did so at a time when the very notion of an aestheticised linguistic
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