ABSTRACT
Musicology, to paraphrase Merleau-Ponty, manipulates its world and gives up living in it. Paradigmatically, it tends to reduce critical thought to a set of data-collecting techniques, treating each of its objects with infinite blandness as though it were an object-in-general – ‘as though it meant nothing to us and yet was predestined for our own use’. Nothing in musicology’s formal operational thinking asks it to understand its own foundations or to call them into question (at the one extreme); or (at the other) to disclose the human horizon of its endeavours – the value and meaning that presumably drench the objects that inhabit the world of its operations.
