Keeping Score: Music, Disciplinarity, Culture(Knowledge: Disciplinarity & Beyond)

The study of music is ancient, but the disciplined study of music dates back only some two centuries, and began by adapting discourse from pre-existing methods of science and the values of the arts. In the course of the 20th-century, such fields as musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory and composition have become separate disciplines, each taught and perpetuated by their own professional societies. Music has thus followed the common tendency of Western culture to divide its experience into branches of thought, but is has not yet become saturated with the self-critical historical scholarship that now dominates other disciplines. This diverse collection of essays argues for and demonstrates the effort to redefine the methods, goals and scope of musical scholarship. It gives voice to new directions in music studies, including traditional and ""new"" musicology, music and psychoanalysis, music and film, popular music studies, and gay and lesbian studies. Influenced by ongoing debates about disciplinarity, it explores the emerging and receding paradigms in the field as it accounts for the status of music disciplines in the early 1990s and points ahead to the course of musical scholarship in the coming decades. These essays speak to music study from within its own languages and enter into important conversations already taking place across disciplinary boundaries throughout the academy.

Table of Contents:
Introduction - music, disciplinarity, and interdisciplinarity, Anahid Kassabian; rethinking contemporary music theory, Patrick McCreless; terminal prestige - the case of avant-garde music composition, Susan McClary; we won't get fooled again - rock music and musical analysis, John Covach; Liverpool and the Beatles - exploring relations between music and place, text and context, Sara Cohen; the invention of American musical culture - meaning, criticism and musical acculturation in antebellum America, Richard Hooker; adequate modes of listening, Ola Stockfelt; ""Out of Notes"" - signification, interpretation and the problem of Miles Davis, Robert Walser; writing ghost notes - the poetics and politics of transcription, Peter Winkler; sisterhood - a loving lesbian ear listens to progressive heterosexual women's rock music, Jennifer Rycenga; Janacek's ""Jenufa"" and the tyranny of the domestic, Jenny Kallick; at the twilight's last scoring, Anahid Kassabian; listening subjects - semiotics, psychoanalysis and the music of John Adams and Steve Reich, David Schwarz.

About the Author :
David Schwarz is Joseph E. and Grace W. Valentine Professor of Music at Amherst College. Anahid Kassabian is Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University. Lawrence Siegel is a composer and teacher working in Westmoreland, New Hampshire, and Minneapolis.