ABSTRACT
The significant changes in musicology during the closing years of the twentieth century resulted in the establishment of new approaches that probed the social and cultural relevance of music within a media-saturated political context. All of the authors in this volume form part of a general paradigmatic shift that took place in musicology from the 1990s onwards. In paying tribute to Derek Scott's achievements, one share a common mission, namely that of interrogating the methods and traditions that have influenced the discipline. In 1990 an article by Derek Scott, 'Music and Sociology for the 1990s', appeared in The Musical Quarterly, asserting that the 'prevailing climate of cultural relativism' now needed to change. Scott also glanced back reminding us that 'art music' criticism had been part of the agenda for ethnomusicologists, sociologists and music anthropologists for decades. One of Scott's foremost contentions would centre on music's autonomous status in the wake of modernism.
