For a Relational Musicology: Music and Interdisciplinarity, Beyond the Practice Turn

Abstract

What would contemporary music scholarship look like if it was no longer imprinted with the disciplinary assumptions, boundaries and divisions inherited from the last century? This article proposes that a generative model for future music studies would take the form of a relational musicology. The model is drawn from the author's work; but signs of an incipient relational musicology are found scattered across recent research in musicology, ethnomusicology, and jazz and popular music studies. In support of such a development, the article calls for a reconfiguration of the boundaries between the subdisciplines of music study – notably musicology, ethnomusicology, music sociology and popular music studies – so as to render problematic the music/social opposition and achieve a new interdisciplinary settlement, one that launches the study of music onto new epistemological and ontological terrain. In proposing this direction, the article points to the limits of the vision of interdisciplinarity in music research that is more often articulated, one that – in the guise of a turn to practice or performance – sutures together the historically inclined, humanities model of musicology with the micro-social, musicologically inclined aspects of ethnomusicology. The article suggests, moreover, that this vision obscures other sources of renewal in music scholarship: those deriving from anthropology, social theory and history, and how they infuse the recent work gathered under the rubric of a relational musicology. As an alternative to the practice turn, a future direction is proposed that entails an expanded analytics of the social, cultural, material and temporal in music. The last part of the article takes the comparativist dimension of a relational musicology to four topics: questions of the social, technology, temporality and ontology.

Audible Ecosystemicsas Artefactual Assemblages: Thoughts on Making and Knowing Prompted by Practical Investigation of Di Scipio's Work

“…It seems to me, though, that it is on precisely this basis that the sub-discipline is well placed to make a substantive contribution. Given the current direction of some musicology, with an increasing interest in the performative and the practical (Born, 2010), being able to account for our sustained, lived engagements with music, as I have attempted here, could yield valuable additional perspectives to those developed by (ethno-)musicologists, sociologists, anthropologists, psychologists, et al…”

Rumo a uma etnografia da música contemporânea. Prólogo para um projeto de investigação*

“…Como conciliar níveis de análise? E como responder aos sucessivos apelos à interdisciplinaridade (e.g., Born, 2010a;Boia, 2015)? Que papel reservar à abordagem contextual?…”

Social implications arise in embodied music cognition research which can counter musicological “individualism”

“…Having recognized this essentialism for what it is, scholars have identified its impact on the politics of scholarship and disciplinarity (Bohlman, 1993), spotting also its “preoccupation with the bounded, internal, immanent development of the lineages of Western art music” (Born, 2010, p. 209). Following such public recognition (in the academic sphere, at least) of this tendency to essentialize, and of its legacy on the remit and conceptual vocabulary of wider musicological research, one might expect the problem to be resolved.…”