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Disciplining Music

Musicology and Its Canons

Provocative and timely, Disciplining Music confronts a topic that has sparked considerable debate in recent years: how do musicians and music scholars "discipline" music in their efforts to confer order and meaning on it? This collection of essays addresses this issue by formulating questions about music’s canons—rules that measure and order, negotiate cultural constraints, reconstruct the past, and shape the future. Written by scholars representing the fields of historical musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory, many of the essays tug and push at the very boundaries of these traditional division within the study of music.

"Fortunately, in a blaze of good-humored . . . scholarship, [this] book helps brains unaccustomed to thinking about the future without jeopardizing the past imagine the wonder classical-music life might become if it embraced all people and all musics."—Laurence Vittes, Los Angeles Reader

"These essays will force us to rethink our position on many issues. . . [and] advance musicology into the twenty-first century."—Giulio Ongaro, American Music Teacher

With essays by Katherine Bergeron, Philip V. Bohlman, Richard Cohn and Douglas Dempster, Philip Gossett, Robert P. Morgan, Bruno Nettl, Don Michael Randel, Ruth A. Solie, and Gary Tomlinson.

227 pages | 1 halftone, 3 line drawings, 4 tables | 6 x 9 | © 1992

Music: General Music

Table of Contents

Preface
1: Prologue, Disciplining Music
Katherine Bergeron
2: The Canons in the Musicology Toolbox
Dan Michael Randel
3: Sophie Drinker’s History
Ruth A. Solie
4: Rethinking Musical Culture: Canonic Reformulations in a Post Tonal Age
Robert P. Morgan
5: Cultural Dialogics and Jazz: A White Historian Signifies
Gary Tomlinson
6: History and Works That Have No History: Reviving Rossini’s Neapolitan
Operas
Philip Gossett
7: Ethnomusicology’s Challenge to the Canon: the Canon’s Challenge to
Ethnomusicology
Philip V. Bohlman
8: Mozart and the Ethnomusicological Study of Western Culture: An Essay in
Four Movements
Brune Nettl
9: Hierarchical Unity, Plural Unities: Toward a Reconciliation
Richard Cohn, Douglas Dempster.
10: A Lifetime of Chants
Katherine Bergeron
11: Epilogue: Musics and Canons
Philip V. Bohlman
Contributors
Index

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