Keeping Score

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.