ABSTRACT
"The Musicology of the Future" seems to linger over old viewpoints more than suggest new ones. It reveals patterns of thought that not only already threaten to harden into new orthodoxies of postmodern musicology but that have, at the deepest level, moved little from the putative truths they aim to leave behind. Lawrence Kramer rightly locates the origins of what they may call modernist musicology in nineteenth-century views of the signifying distance between music and words. He betrays the modernism when he dubs "criticism" the "rhetorical" and "subjective" language by which they might contextualize music. Finding alternatives to close reading without forgoing entirely the specific discussion of music they have habitually enabled is a ticklish task, as Kramer's attempt should warn them. In the sleight-of-hand that decontextualizes his contextualism, Kramer falls back on a central tenet of modernist musicology: the sweeping subjective powers of the composer to speak to the critic through the music.
