American Musicology in the 1990s

Rethinking the Politics of Social Capital: Challenging Tocquevillian Perspectives

“…Commentators frequently identify the contribution of Joseph Kerman (1985) as a turning point in this regard. Essentially he asked both editors of musical editions (who sought to be as "faithful" to the composer's "original intentions" as possible -itself a museumsanctioned project fraught with all sorts of difficulties and contradictions) and the historians of music (known in the USA, where Kerman was writing, as "musicologists") the big question -"So what?".…”

Cultural Memes, Innate Proclivities and Musical Behaviour: A Case Study of the Western Traditions

“…The ways in which music is used by people in their everyday life is the interest. Such factors range widely to include: feminist discussions of male domination in society and how music became a tool and an emblem of an undeniable inequality by gender (Leppert and McClary, 1987;Leppert, 1988;McClary, 1990;Cook, 1998); Marxist arguments concerning the essentially middle-class nature of music's supposed aesthetic impact on listeners (Weber, 1975;Eagleton, 1990;Cook, 1998;Small, 1998); musicological arguments about the crucial role of context in decoding and deciding performance practice norms (Kerman, 1985;Cook, 1999); and, recently, social constructivism emphasizing our proclivity to construct our persona, our environment, our lifestyle, and the meanings we are attracted to, through the musical choices we make (Stokes, 1994;Martin, 1995;DeNora, 2000;Juslin and Sloboda, 2001;MacDonald et al, 2002;Connell and Gibson, 2003).…”

His name was Prince: a study of Diamonds and Pearls

“…Within the socalled 'classical' musicological milieu, the process of revealing the underlying ideology of this apparently 'objective' musicology has lasted for several decades. The reliance on a classical-romantic aesthetics has been brought to the surface and is, by now, thoroughly criticised (see, for example, Kerman 1985). In my view, Hawkins' analysis perpetuates some of the problems with this tradition.…”