Absolutely Essential Reading:

Joseph Kerman, Musicology (1985) Chapter 1

Leo Treitler, The Power of Positivist Thinking (review of Kerman),
Journal of the American Musicological Society 42/2 (1989), pp. 375402.
Richard Taruskin The History of What?, introduction to his Oxford
History of Western Music
Further Reading:
Stefan Berger et al. (eds), Writing History: Theory and Practice
(Hodder Education, 2003)
Leo Treitler, The Historiography of Music: Issues of Past and
Present, in Cook
and Everist (eds), Rethinking Music (1999)
Vincent Duckles, Johann Nicolaus Forkel: The Beginning of Music
Historiography, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 1, No. 3 (Spring,
1968), pp. 277-290.
Vincent Duckles, Patterns in the Historiography of 19th-Century
Music
Acta Musicologica, Vol. 42, Fasc. 1/2 (1970), pp. 75-82
Leo Treitler, Toward a Desegregated Music Historiography, Black
Music Research Journal, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Spring, 1996), pp. 3-10
Christopher Williams, Of Canons and Context: Toward a
Historiography of Twentieth-Century Music, Repercussions, 2.1
(1993), pp. 31-74.
James Webster, The Eighteenth Century as a Music-Historical
Period?, Eighteenth Century Music, Volume 1 / Issue 01 (March
2004), pp 47-60 .