ABSTRACT
The scientific turn Kerman describes in positivist and formalist musicology repudiates a more general musicology that is reluctant to declare its method or purpose, preferring to assume that one absorbs a particular mindset and learns the rules by association. Structuralism echoes many discourses prevalent in music theory that resonate with Eduard Hanslick’s contention that music is about musical ideas. One of the most repeated complaints made of analytical methodology is that it pretends to uphold the neutral values of a symbolic system instead of understanding itself as a shaping discourse. Like other methods of textual reading, it enacts a form of situated subjectivity. With this knowledge, musicology starts to look more like an ensemble of discourses of varying compatibility. Poststructuralism offers a powerful critique of music’s institutions and methodologies, and does much to bring musicology into general humanities discourses, preventing perception of it as an isolated discipline with its own narrow concerns.
