Decentering Music

Abstract

This book examines the struggle for the authority to speak about music at a time when the humanities are in crisis. By linking the institutions that support musical research, including professional associations and universities, to complex historical changes such as globalization and the commodification of knowledge, this book undertakes a critique of musical scholarship as an institutional discourse, while contributing to a general theory of disciplinary structures that goes beyond the limits of any single field. In asking a number of fundamental questions about the models through which disciplinary objects in music are constructed, the book suggests unexpected relationships between works of musical scholarship and the cultural networks in which they participate. Thus, David Lewin's theory of musical perceptions is compared to Richard Rorty's concept of the “liberal ironist”, Susan McClary's feminist narrative of music history is juxtaposed with T.S. Eliot's “dissociation of sensibility”, and Steven Feld's work in recording the music of the Kaluli people is compared to the treatment of ambient sound in contemporary cinema. Developing a framework for interpretation in dialogue with a number of poststructuralist writers, the book goes far beyond applying their thought to the analysis of music; by showing the cultural dilemmas to which their work responds, it suggests how musical research already participates in these ideas.

‘Effing the Ineffable’:1The Work of Susan McClary and Richard Leppert and (Part of) their Legacy

“…27 One such faction was represented by Kofi Agawu, who enunciated his position at the 1995 American Musicological Society/Society of Music Theory/Society for Ethnomusicology conference 'Analyzing Music under the New Musicological Regime', which catalyzed a months-long debate on the American Musicological Society (AMS) email thread; another concerned the debates between Lawrence Kramer and Gary Tomlinson. 28 If some of the foci of Leppert's and McClary's work had been broached by earlier scholars, let us not forget that it was as recently as 1981 that the earliest major publication on women's music appeared: Aaron L. Cohen's International Encyclopaedia of Women Composers. 29 Feminism 'broke' on the socio-cultural scene in the 1970s, around the same time as postmodernism.…”

Whoever pays the piper calls the tune: pressures on academic freedom and the discipline of music in the UK

“…He suggests that there are two main aspects to the crisis facing musicology. One is the increasing ‘professionalization’ of the humanities; that is, ‘their gradual remodelling to conform to corporatist values’ that homogenises discourse into a ‘false consensus’ . The other side of the crisis is more specific to the musicological discipline, foregrounding its internal inconsistencies.…”

“…Remember how, as we saw, Post argues that: ‘At the heart of this ongoing debate about the status of the humanities is the question of whether the authority of humanities scholarship is to be regarded as disciplinary or instead as charismatic, like artistic authority.’ A ‘top‐down’ view of music in higher education shows that it is affected by this kind of division in a profound way that relates to the structuring of its professional institutions into universities and conservatoires. As Korsyn writes, the difference between these institutions is that they are predicated on polarised ‘ideological state apparatuses: art and education’ . Thus, the sorts of discourses that arise from each demonstrate that the frameworks of knowledge they produce function at odds with one another.…”

“…Korsyn highlights the significance of such juxtaposition thus:

the very [musical] phrase that inspired Koestenbaum to rhapsodize about bending time and gender led Narmour to measure minute variations among performances with a stopwatch. This dichotomy seems emblematic of the tensions in current musical research, in which factions embrace radically different values, treating each other with contempt, or sometimes with a bland tolerance that is a mask for indifference But to appropriate his examples for my purposes, the chasm between the methods and expression of these writers also illustrates the kinds of problems Post explores in legitimating academic freedom.

…”

“…the very [musical] phrase that inspired Koestenbaum to rhapsodize about bending time and gender led Narmour to measure minute variations among performances with a stopwatch. This dichotomy seems emblematic of the tensions in current musical research, in which factions embrace radically different values, treating each other with contempt, or sometimes with a bland tolerance that is a mask for indifference …”