Today odalisk has offered a �state of the union address� on the subject of trends in academia and wonders if she�s presumptuous. I think she�s spot on. And forgive me, but I�m about to be a lot less succinct than she in explaining why.

I first began graduate school in (gasp) 1991. When I entered my program had a full four years of course work: two years of full time, comprehensive exams, two more years of part time when you were supposed to be writing masters papers and figuring out your dissertation subject, orals, and then the dissertation. During my fourth year, I had a sort of existential crisis, where I rediscovered my love for performing and also my distaste for conducting my life by the rules of others � the indentured servitude of a fellowship student. I took a leave of absence that began as short term, but ended up lasting about five years, during which time, I embarked on a successful and enjoyable career in arts management, got married, and had a kid. I didn�t think I would return, but when I was forced to quit my job when I had my son (my office only had 7 full-time employees, and thus couldn�t really afford to offer a maternity policy of any kind), after getting through the first few months of baby haze, I found myself thinking more and more about my abandoned dissertation project and eventually made my way back, got a fellowship, and should (fingers crossed) be done by this summer.

But back to my field. The field of musicology (to use the term in its broadest sense) is generally divided into three subfields: musicology (this is the narrow use of the term and refers to the study of Western music history), music theory (the analysis of musical works, usually Western classical music but occasionally other things as well) and ethnomusicology. I can�t remember whether ethnomusicology was a term I�d encountered before graduate school, but I�d certainly never had a class in it. Ethnomusicology is both a repertoire (music of the world, including Western folk musics and popular music � in other words, just about everything BUT Western classical) and a set of methodologies (largely borrowed from anthropology and including both fieldwork techniques and theory).

When I first began graduate school, I was a music theorist. I was interested in what made individual pieces tick, what made those musical moments that gave you goosebumps so spine-tingling. I wanted to understand what made sound make me feel a certain way. Music theory seemed the best way to do that at the time. My undergraduate training had been somewhat unorthodox. It taught us to glean the tools for analysis from the piece you are analyzing � every good piece reveals its own tools. Intellectually, this was exactly right and it meant that I could tackle any piece. But it did not prepare me for graduate school, which requires the knowledge of the history of the discipline and its traditions. And the traditions of music theory, heavily based in Germanic tonal music of the 19th century, seemed alien to me. And they were not particularly friendly to the French music of the early twentieth century that was my greatest interest.

Lucky for me, I had chosen a graduate school that allowed for free movement between the subdisciplines. Many do not. At Indiana University, for example, History and Theory are separate departments and ethnomusicology isn�t even part of the School of Music. It�s part of a department of folklore studies that�s more linked to anthropology than to music. This was not uncommon. It�s still not, although I think the barriers are starting to fall.

Initially, I was drawn to ethnomusicology because I really liked the professor who taught most of the classes (he�s now my advisor). But gradually I began to see that while I was still primarily interested in Western classical music, the questions ethnomusicologists sought to answer were much more interesting to me than those I�d encountered elsewhere in my field. I began working on projects that looked at topics like music and politics and cultural policy and I began developing what became my dissertation topic, which is a sort of ethnography of a particular American classical music tradition. All of this was sort of out there when I began the work, although there were certainly some examples of the combination of the repertoire of musicology and the methods of ethnomusicology.

After returning from my self-imposed hiatus, I discovered that my work is now squarely in a field that didn�t exist before. My department still chooses to define me as an ethnomusicologist, although the vast majority of my work has been in musicology and this doesn�t quite fit. But now there�s an established grey area � the field of American music. For some reason, American music is where all of us who don�t like to be penned up in historical traditions have ended up. American music includes methods and repertoires from both the musicological and the ethnomusicological traditions. It�s the land of the free, the melting pot of my field. It�s also taking over the new hires in my field � good for me!

As Odalisk noticed in her field, there is an emphasis on projects that look at small moments, minutia, and make large connections from them. For example from my own variety of work, I might deconstruct a particular performance, looking at who the audience was, who the musicians were as individuals, what they played and in what order, what they wore, program notes, program advertisements, public relations, criticism, etc. After a detailed analysis, then connections are made to broader social trends. This kind of thing was previously not done in traditional musicology, except perhaps in Medieval music where the music is so heavily determined by church liturgy and politics that it is very hard to deal with it in any other way.

There is also a tendency to focus on repertoires that were previously considered peripheral or unworthy. Like music by American composers, for instance. Or performance artists and pop stars. The pretensions of the world of Great Art have been thoroughly raked over the coals as racist, colonialist and sexist. While no one wants to say that Brittany Spears deserves the same attention that Bach does, there are still things to be learned from examining her popularity with a microscope (although I, for one, am glad to give that job to someone else). This seems analogous to the visual art world�s interest in design at the moment (Exhibit A: yesterday�s New York Times Magazine section). And both seek to create a field that is more inclusive than exclusive.

I think that by and large, this is a good thing, if only because in creating interdisciplinary work, it expands the material studied and the questions asked about it. It does, however, have some alarming � or at the very least disorienting � ramifications. The most important question that remains unanswered in this inclusive environment is one that I have been asked over and over again by students listening to music in my ethnomusicology classes: How do you know if it�s good?

Our whole approach to art is changing so that the question of quality no longer seems to be an issue. Does this really make sense? How can we not be able to say that Bach is better than Brittany Spears? The problem is that comparing Bach to Brittany is comparing apples to oranges. And if you start doing that, than it is only a short step to statements like �German composers are better than French composers.� Or �Catholic music is better than Islamic music. � What I generally tell my students is that the first question to ask is �do you like it and why (or why not)?�. Then think about how the music fits into its context (time, place, use). What is the music trying to accomplish. Does it do it?

But some of these questions also cause problems for Bach. Bach�s work was written for a utilitarian purpose (weekly Masses) and was not actually ideally suited to its situation � too difficult, too long, too many people required, etc. (The intentional fallacy rears its ugly head.)

Perhaps Bach�s music isn�t so great after all.

0 people said it like they meant it