Constructing Musicology

There is widespread agreement that musicology has undergone a paradigm shift. This swing can be attributed to two not always separable causes: the wider repertoires now studied and the impact of theory on research in the humanities and social sciences. This analysis attends to both currents, examining and explaining the theoretical issues raised by various musics. Topics discussed include: Joseph Kerman's call for a shift from fact-finding to critical interpretation; Adorno's and Dahlhaus's scrutiny of the bourgeois tradition; the impact of post-structuralism on musicology; the semiotics of music; how gender is constructed in music; the relevance of psychoanalytical theory to musical understanding; classic critiques of the culture industry; how identity and image are negotiated in song; debates in ethnomusicology; and modernity in music. The author's overall aim is to show the forces at work in contemporary musicology, to demonstrate that traditions are socially constructed, and to suggest that established beliefs can be transformed in a theoretically flexible environment.

Table of Contents:
Contents: Preface; Traditions: Kerman; Adorno; Dahlhaus; Discourses: Structuralism; Poststructuralism; Texts; Semantics; Voices: Gendered music; Embodied music; Lacanian psychoanalysis; Identities: Critique; Value; Perspectives; Places: Orientalism; Ethnomusicology; Positions: Modernity; Musicology and postmodernism; Culture; Framing the fifth; Reconstructing musicology; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

About the Author :
Alastair Williams is Reader in Music at Keele University, UK. He has research interests in modernism and modernity, Austro-German music, critical theory, and subjectivity in music. He is the author of New Music and the Claims of Modernity (Ashgate, 1997), Constructing Musicology (Ashgate, 2001), and Music in Germany since 1968 (Cambridge, 2013), and a contributor to The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music (2004). He has also published articles in a wide range of music journals. He has received funding from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the British Academy and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Review :
'Alastair Williams' Constructing Musicology provides a useful conspectus of salient trends in the discipline over the last half-century or so.... an intelligent short guide to the discipline...' BBC Music Magazine ’Williams’s book is both broad and deep, covering a wealth of critical approaches to a diversity of classical, popular, and non-Western musics. Unfailingly clear, accurate, and fairminded in its mix of summary and critique, Constructing Musicology conveys the reasons why theory has become so fundamental to current musical scholarship, while at the same time conveying the sense of challenge and excitement that theory, when well used, can create. This book is at once a gift to students and an important work of scholarship that helps advance the new construction it describes.’ Lawrence Kramer, Fordham University, USA. ’The 1990s were a time of rapid change in musicology, prompted largely by a dizzying array of influences from different strands of critical, literary, and inter-disciplinary theory. In this concise book Alastair Williams separates, orders, and explains the principal intellectual currents involved, charting their influence across a range of musicological subdisciplines. To those coming for the first time to contemporary musicology, the result is an accurate and up-to-date road map, a kind of Rough Guide to a changing discipline; others will recognize familiar theoretical landmarks but gain a new sense of how they link up with one another. Constructing Musicology is a one-stop shop for contemporary thinking in and around musicology.’ Professor Nicholas Cook, University of Southampton, UK 'Williams provides much food for thought. This book can be read profitably by both music faculty and graduate students.' Choice