ABSTRACT
The Musical world that we so take for granted should today be a cause for grave concern rather than for the complacency that so typically attends it. The deformations that characterize the musical world at large are no less apparent in those havens of a supposedly purified and privileged musical practice: for instance the university or academy. To speak personally, my own deep disquiet about the nature of music and musical scholarship began about the time that I first entered the university musical world as an undergraduate. This disquiet has not mellowed with the passing of time. Today I am disturbed about how we see music and our relationship to it; about what we talk about when we discuss music, and those things that we somehow never find a place for in our discussions; about precisely what we teach and those things that we manage to leave out of our teaching, our researches and our scholarly writing. In a word, I am concerned about the highly selective nature of our preconceptions about music – all those notions that are part of our musical scenery and that we simply take for granted, and that therefore deeply influence the quality of our musical understanding. This is by no means a local problem: I think it occurrs in most parts of the world with which we are familiar.
