ABSTRACT
This chapter argues the idea that a balance might be struck between critical and more reparative or phenomenological descriptive approaches in musicological inquiry. The methodological framework many of the people working under the rubric of cultural musicology or Susan McClary's 'project of critical musicology' employ is almost an anti-methodology, insofar as it is amenable to a large number of theoretical impulses and disciplinary influences. The type of academic criticism Kerman espoused implies a mode of writing about music that does not hesitate to relate musical sounds to surrounding discursive formations. Criticism as a method can be parsed out into a number of interrelated activities, including description, analysis, interpretation and evaluation. Research in the 1990s placed a strong emphasis on interpretation and hermeneutical method. The attitude of outsiderness that is set forth in the Frankfurt school position is symptomatic of what Paul Ricoeur and subsequently Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick have dubbed 'the hermeneutics of suspicion'.
