A New Musicology?

Most historical accounts of the emergence of a ‘new’ musicology tend to locate the first proper articulation of its motivating impulses in Joseph Kerman’s article, ‘How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get Out’ and his book, Musicology. This chapter argues that the deployment of the term is often unhelpfully, if not wilfully, misleading especially in its implicit dependence upon, or retro-active construction of, a supposedly ‘modernist’ musicology against which it is then seen to react or beyond which it is alleged to have ‘progressed’. Stephen Miles, for example, views the work of Rose Subotnik, Lawrence Kramer and Susan McClary as paradigmatic instances of ‘critical musicology’. However, critical musicology is more typically understood to have clear etymological and historical links with ‘critical theory’, in which case ‘critical musicology’ simply and obviously refers to the application of critical theory within a musicological context.