Daniel Chua
James Currie
Thomas Irvine
Gavin Lee, chair
Judith Lochhead
Martin Scherzinger
Gary Tomlinson
In the 90s, many scholars criticized the undertone of universality in musicology, understood to be manifest in a focus on Western music, with clandestine Eurocentric values embodied in ostensibly neutral, empirically-oriented accounts of canonic works. Universality was also diagnosed in a range of epistemologies—from 19th-century musical aesthetics to pre-World War II comparative musicology which abstracted the world’s musical cultures into pitch systems.
James Currie
Thomas Irvine
Gavin Lee, chair
Judith Lochhead
Martin Scherzinger
Gary Tomlinson
In the 90s, many scholars criticized the undertone of universality in musicology, understood to be manifest in a focus on Western music, with clandestine Eurocentric values embodied in ostensibly neutral, empirically-oriented accounts of canonic works. Universality was also diagnosed in a range of epistemologies—from 19th-century musical aesthetics to pre-World War II comparative musicology which abstracted the world’s musical cultures into pitch systems.
This panel responds to the current musicological landscape, structured by many views which are not aligned under a hoary Eurocentric ideology. Poststructuralist musicological approaches to race, class, gender, sexuality, and disability have disrupted the univocal Eurocentric voice, making space for a “global music history” that looks beyond the West. But a new set of epistemological problems have arisen around the ethical precept of difference (Bloechl et. al. eds. 2015) that have not been satisfactorily addressed. Most disturbing is the universalist demand for difference as embodied in disconnected parcels of “contextual politics” (Currie 2009)—in musicology, many forms of the bird’s eye view are conventionally understood to be misleading or oppressive. This has led in part to a scenario where there is little sense of an overarching frame of reference for approaching methodological contradictions which have emerged: e.g. identity as deeply held belief and as deconstructed, narratives of agency versus those of oppression. Furthermore, contextual politics have contributed to a misunderstanding of legitimate scholarship which operates at a (by now) unfamiliar epistemological register of large-scale forces, long time frames, and a global view, often performing systemic analyses that are incompatible with a cultural outlook premised on a human viewpoint. The concept of a heterogeneous “totality” advanced in this panel responds to an emerging consciousness that something other than “difference” may be needed to fully grasp a range of catastrophic forces that spell impending humanitarian disasters in the twenty-first century: global capitalism, neocolonialism, climate change, and technological disruption. Much is at stake in assembling, under a new dispensation, a musicological bird’s eye view.
Experts in this panel speak to the register of “totality” from various perspectives including: a revisionist Marxist view of Romantic transcendentalism as a defense against encroaching industrialism (James Currie); the colonial and neocolonial resonance of the epistemology of cultural relativism embraced in music research (Martin Scherzinger); issues in music historiography on a global scale (Thomas Irvine); the explanatory power of biocultural evolution for human nature as well as human difference (Gary Tomlinson); the ethical force of the notion of an “alien” musical otherness which compels us to articulate what a post-humanist musicology might entail (Daniel Chua); a musical work as itself a model of the heterogeneous totality termed “assemblage” by Deleuze and Guattari (Judith Lochhead); and, a methodology of contradictions within the totality, premised on Slavoj Žižek’s conception of the “parallax view” (Gavin Lee, chair). Through rigorous interrogation of received musicological wisdom, we discern misconceptions about and articulate the value of a reconstructed totality. This session of two hours comprises 10-minute position papers and ample time for floor discussion.
