Tamara Levitz, Et Al., "Colloquy Musicology Beyond Borders,"

Musicology Beyond Borders?
Author(s): Tamara Levitz, Convenor

Source: Journal of the American Musicological Society , Vol. 65, No. 3 (Fall 2012), pp. 821-
861
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological
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Colloquy
Musicology Beyond Borders?

TAMARA LEVITZ, Convenor
Contents:
Introduction 821
TAMARA LEVITZ
What Inclusiveness Excludes 825

ERIC DROTT
Working on the Boundaries: Translation Studies, National

Narratives, and Robert Lachmann in Jerusalem 830
BRIGID COHEN
¿“Reinventar” la musicología para América Latina? 834

VICTORIA ELI RODRÍGUEZ
“Reinventing” Musicology for Latin America? 837

Translated by Tamara Levitz
Borderline Subjects, Musical Objects 840
RYAN DOHONEY
Musicology on the Edge: Reflections on Medieval Borders 844

EMMA DILLON
(De)Constructing Musicology’s Borders along the Color Line 849

MATTHEW D. MORRISON
Works Cited 856
Introduction
TAMARA LEVITZ
North American musicology appears to be in a period of giddy expansionism.

In 2011, the program committee for the annual meeting of the American
Musicological Society (AMS) increased the acceptance rate for papers from 25
to 30 percent (programming 192 papers over 144 the year before), and the
board welcomed nine study groups: a rapid recent proliferation since the orig-
inal creation of the LGBTQ and “Hispanic” (subsequently Ibero-American
Music) study groups in 1991 and 1993 respectively. As a result of these devel-
opments, the annual meeting ran nine sessions simultaneously that year. At the
Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 65, Number 3, pp. 821–862 ISSN 0003-0139, electronic ISSN
1547-3848. © 2012 by the American Musicological Society. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission
to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website,
www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/jams.2012.65.3.821.

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822 Journal of the American Musicological Society
business meeting, treasurer James Ladewig celebrated the society’s net assets
of $4,369,498, and the editor of this Journal, Annegret Fauser, announced
that the number of articles in each issue would increase. Presenters celebrated
the society’s musical and intellectual diversity (one might say “multicultural-
ism”), and pointed toward recent articles that extend the geographical and
genre reach of the discipline beyond its traditional borders or push toward
greater interdisciplinarity.1 Sitting there in the business meeting listening, I
wondered whether a utopian era of boundless intellectual possibility was now
really upon us. Is North American musicology poised to take on the world?
Perhaps not, because at the very moment when dramatic expansion of the
discipline seems imminent, North American musicology is also showing visible
signs of shutting down. Anybody who is on the job market or cares about
people who are knows how frightening the situation appears to have become:
drastic recent cuts at the University of California, University of Pittsburgh, and
the University of Florida—to name just a few examples—point toward a shift
in priorities in public education in the United States that is having dire conse-
quences for how musicologists—and scholars across the humanities for that
matter—will be able to do business and thrive into the twenty-first century.
Standards are also declining as academic publishers outsource and cut corners
on everything from copyediting to typesetting. As the economy collapses, a
nostalgia for familiar borders grips the discipline: music-history textbooks in-
sist on nineteenth-century national frameworks in spite of global advances,
brilliant scholars choose to work within the geopolitical confines of the Cold
War, and minority groups establish their voices in ghettoized study groups
that are now incorporated into the AMS rather than functioning as a challenge
to its status quo. In a recent article in the New York Times on the celebrations
for Richard Taruskin at Princeton, James R. Oestreich hinted at the fierceness
of this retrenchment by reporting on how Karol Berger described musicology
at that conference as “drowning in a flood of ever-new products of an industry
paralyzed by an inability to discriminate among them,” only to be countered
by Susan McClary championing the inroads made by “the barbarians at the
gates: women, gay people, Africans, and Asians.” More noteworthy than the
radicalness of each of their positions (if reported correctly) was their willing-
ness to resurrect an impenetrable wall between what is inside and outside
musicology.2
The paradox of simultaneous expansion and contraction in musicology
eerily mirrors the inner dynamic of neoliberal, global capitalism. Recently,
Nick Vaughan-Williams and others have examined this dynamic from the per-
1. Such optimism about the utopian potential of crossing metaphorical borders is evident in
Caryl Clark’s elegant celebration of the AMS’s musical and intellectual diversity in “Caryl Clark
talks about the AMS Program Committee”; and in several recent manifestos on sound studies, in-
cluding Keeling and Kun, “Introduction: Listening to American Studies.” See also Garrett and
Oja, eds., “Studying U.S. Music in the Twenty-First Century,” esp. 712–15.
2. Oestreich, “The World According to One Musicologist.”

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Colloquy: Musicology Beyond Borders? 823
spective of Limology or Border Studies. Vaughan-Williams describes how be-

fore the fall of the Berlin wall, scholars studied borders primarily from empiri-
cal and critical geopolitical perspectives as located at a fixed point at the
geographical outer edge of sovereign states, the power of which they delim-
ited and whose citizens they identified and defined. Since 1989, however,
global policies, decentered border administrations, and the disjuncture be-
tween territorial and juridical limits have led to a shift from geo- to biopolitics
(a term associated with both Georgio Agamben and Michel Foucault). The
internal borders between nation states in the European Union (EU) were
gradually abolished with the Schengen Agreement (1985) and Amsterdam
Treaty (1997), leading to the European Council’s creation of Frontex in 2004
as an agency for “integrated border security” for the entire EU. At the same
time, the UK Border Act of 2007 allowed the Secretary of State to require
biometric passports for non-EU immigrants and asylum seekers. These actions
freed up movement within the EU and UK, while making entry into both
more difficult and ultimately life-threatening for some. They facilitated the
movements of “easy” travelers and limited that of “risk” travellers, creating the
paradox of simultaneous expansion and contraction noted above. Further,
starting in 2002, the United States government exerted a legal control beyond
territory boundaries by claiming it could torture detainees in Guantanamo
specifically because they were not on US soil. In these cases, government offi-
cials did not erase borders to create an unlimited global context of empire, but
rather reinforced borders on the basis of the biometric data recorded in travel-
ers’ passports.
Vaughan-Williams’s work convinced me that rather than euphorically cele-
brate metaphorical cultural border crossings, it might be time for musicolo-
gists to turn their attention to the material reality of borders themselves and
the violence they perpetuate.3 Why is the old geopolitical, cultural border of
“Western Europe” so firmly ensconced in musicology (as the border to be
crossed), in spite of the fact that it has long been replaced by the heavily po-
liced and guarded political and economic entity of the EU? And how can mu-
sicologists expand their discipline to include music from countries all over the
world, while still insisting on their disciplinary and methodological distinction
from their colleagues in Ethnomusicology—for example, through the separa-
tion of their national societies in North America and through standard univer-
sity processes of hiring and teaching? Is the desire for global border crossings
a form of imperial nostalgia? Or a way of denying the fact of having to live in a
walled fortress (the US, UK, or EU, for example) that includes or excludes
people based on their biopolitical data? Or is it a sign of what Lauren Berlant
calls “cruel optimism”—a relation of attachment to the compromised condi-
tions of possibility of “the good life” promised by liberal capitalism in the
3. Numerous scholars have already initiated groundbreaking work in this area. See, for exam-
ple, Corona and Madrid, Postnational Musical Identities, and the activities of the Border Studies
Archive.

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postwar period?4 Have threats to the humanities and to the prestige, privilege,
and power of tenured academics in North America caused musicologists there
to go into denial about their situation, and to prefer escaping into the chimera
of an expanding discipline over the harsh reality of having to interrogate and
perhaps dismantle and reorganize the material borders that have historically
secured their position? Can musicologists really integrate Mexico into “U.S.
Music Studies” while ignoring the physical barriers recently erected to prevent
intellectual and physical mobility in the other direction and the draconian
measures that have led to tragic loss of life on the US-Mexican border?5 If they
do so, are they not expanding the domain of North American musicological
law and method beyond the territory in which it is historically valid, just as the
US government has done in Guantanamo?
Vaughan-Williams responds to the moral dilemmas created by the violent
shift from geo- to biopolitics by seeking “alternate border imaginaries” and
new political concepts adequate to these contemporary conditions. Drawing
on critiques of sovereignty and borders offered by Walter Benjamin, Jacques
Derrida, Carl Schmitt, Foucault, Agamben, and others, he reminds us that
the modern sovereign territorial state was founded in violence (in a moment
when laws were created out of non-laws) and that violence is fundamental
to its juridical-political order. Violence occurs when law-making and law-
perpetuating functions merge, as they do with the police, whose spectral force
is most potent when borders are established and in the border regions. In
Agamben’s terms, the sovereign decides which life is worth living, condemn-
ing those who don’t fulfill their terms to an existence he controversially
describes as “bare life”—a “zone of indistinction” represented by the concen-
tration camp and by Guantanamo.6 Vaughan-Williams concludes that these
borders and zones are exceptional places—states of exception in Carl
Schmitt’s sense—“scars in the territorial landscape that act as reminders of ‘the
sufferings, the crimes, the tortures’ that rarely fail to accompany the founding
of states as distinct entities.” Resistance will occur in these very border regions,
he insists, in places where the boundary between the inside and outside of the
state is blurred, where refugees and those who don’t identify in a community
dwell, and where lines and borders cannot be drawn.7 His political appeal
resonates with Walter D. Mignolo’s call for “border thinking” or “alternative
centers of enunciation,” a “thinking from” the margins made possible by the
reestablishment of colonial difference.8
4. Berlant, Cruel Optimism. I thank Ryan Dohoney for drawing my attention to the connec-
tion between my argument and Berlant’s work.
5. I respond here to George E. Lewis’s provocative challenge in “Americanist Musicology
and Nomadic Noise,” 692–93. On the border violence and the case of Anastasio Hernández
Rojas, see Epstein, “Crossing the Line at the Border.”
6. See Agamben, Homo Sacer.
7. Vaughan-Williams, Border Politics, quotation at p. 70.
8. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs.

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What might a musicology that dwelled in the border look like? I don’t think
it would consist of situating oneself in a violent border zone and there contin-
uing the musicological business of collecting sounds of resistance as musicolo-
gist Janie Cole and former oil trader Nancy Galdy propose to do in their
project “Music Beyond Borders.”9 And surely it would not consist of repre-
senting border issues—or creating border listening regions through aesthetic
forms with broad commercial appeal and cult status—in the academy.10 On
the contrary, I think that if musicologists want to operate in the border they
will need to become acutely aware of the material reality of the borders against
which they chafe, and be willing to confront in their scholarship the explosive
violence that will emerge if they interrogate truly the power relations all bor-
ders sustain and reinforce.11 They will need to recognize the difference be-
tween North American musicological tourists’ metaphorical fantasies of global
freedom and the concrete reality of what Emily Apter theorizes as the “check-
point,” which regulates traffic of people and goods and, in David A. Fleni and
Karim Matter’s interpretation, enacts relations of power through rituals of
crossing in which language and translation become matters of life and death.12
Rather than adopting the familiar mode of anti-imperialist resistance once
practiced by new musicologists now incorporated into the discipline, musicol-
ogists in the borders would need to seek new forms of political activism, per-
haps by imagining themselves to be in a permanent state of exception or to be
intellectual refugees. The musicology in the borders they would create might
resemble what Suzanne Cusick has done in researching musical torture in
Guantanamo.13 It would surely not be celebratory, and probably impossible to
sustain without collapsing the discipline and creating it anew.
What Inclusiveness Excludes

ERIC DROTT
As Tamara Levitz argues in her introduction to this colloquy, musicology is

increasingly troubled by the question of its borders. Recent decades have wit-
nessed a sustained effort to broaden musicology’s purview, both in terms of
the musics it addresses and the interdisciplinary perspectives it countenances.
In contrast to this expansionary impulse stands the countervailing tendency to
retreat in the face of perceived threats to musicology’s self-identity, the better
9. See http://www.musicbeyondborders.net/
10. Josh Kun runs this risk in “The Aural Border.”
11. Georgina Born points toward such an approach in “For a Relational Musicology.” Born
insists on very firm boundaries around the musical work, however, and sidesteps the issue of mate-
rial boundaries by exploring their “conceptual” counterpart.
12. Apter, “Translation at the Checkpoint”; and Fleni and Matter, “The Global Checkpoint.”
See also Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty.
13. See Cusick, “Music as Torture: Music as Weapon.”

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to safeguard repertoires and methods at risk of being washed away by a flood

of musical and disciplinary others. As Levitz makes clear, each response to the
problem of musicology’s limits has its shortcomings. The one replicates the
logic of late capitalism, with its unending quest to find new market niches to
exploit, while the other seeks solace in familiar constructs like the work con-
cept and the canon. But it also needs to be acknowledged that each response
has its allures. Even if musicology’s “giddy expansionism” is symptomatic of
the way neoliberal values have infected academic work, it has the benefit of
remedying the discipline’s many historic sins of omission. And even if a retreat
to well-trodden terrain is inadequate to the challenges presented by shifting
social realities, it nevertheless bespeaks a latent desire to resist precisely those
pressures that neoliberal capitalism exercises on musicological research and
musical life more generally.
If current responses to musicology’s border troubles prove unsatisfactory—
be it the impulse to surmount existing frontiers or to crouch defensively be-
hind them—then perhaps a more fruitful way forward would be to train our
attention on the figure of the border itself. Levitz offers one model in this re-
gard, reminding us of the violence that the establishment and enforcement of
any determinate frontier necessarily entails. But this is not the only model.
Over the past decade, a number of scholars have offered sustained critiques of
the boundaries that musicology imposes upon the musical field in constituting
its objects of study. Gary Tomlinson, for one, has sketched the historical
process by which European music was discursively segregated from its extra-
European counterparts, an act of demarcation that enabled musicology to
claim for western art music the mantle of a spurious universality.14 Along simi-
lar lines, Georgina Born has recently emphasized the way in which individual
music cultures are defined in terms of what they exclude, by the “constitutive
outside” generated as a result of expelling some disavowed other(s).15 More
recently still, George Lewis has argued for a deterritorialization of Americanist
musicology, noting how a category like American music can be and often is
“articulated far beyond America’s shores,” thus blurring the hard-and-fast di-
visions characteristic of the discipline’s geographical imagination.16 The critical
interventions undertaken by Tomlinson, Born, and Lewis, their manifest dif-
ferences notwithstanding, all bespeak a change in the basic unit of musicologi-
cal analysis: the focus is no longer on individual music traditions, but on their
interaction and interpenetration. This in turn presupposes the adoption of a
totalizing vantage point, one that is capable of encompassing cultural differ-
ence without effacing it, as well as disclosing the constructedness of bound-
aries too often taken as given. Whence Tomlinson’s call for a “sweeping
neo-comparativism,” which would resituate musicology within the framework
14. Tomlinson, “Musicology, Anthropology, History.”

15. Born, “For a Relational Musicology,” 217.
16. Lewis, “Americanist Musicology,” 692.

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of “a general ethnomusicology.”17 Or Born’s call to institute a “relational mu-

sicology,” whose expansive vision would sidestep the discipline’s dogged belief
“that research on music must be founded on aesthetic advocacy of the music
to be studied.”18 Or Lewis’s call for a “nomadic musicology,” which would re-
ject “a comparative, border-drawing methodology” to account for “the per-
manence of permeability” and “the transience of borders.”19
More than anything else, the reflexive interrogation of musicology’s border
politics has the benefit of bringing to light the exclusions that have long un-
derpinned our scholarly activities. But by the same token the disciplinary reori-
entation entailed by this line of inquiry risks fostering a belief that the
particular form of self-awareness thus achieved is tantamount to self-awareness
tout court. Despite the obvious merit of such approaches in relation to the nar-
rowly conceived musicology of yesteryear, the notion that a neocomparativist,
relational, or nomadic musicology should point the way forward for music
studies must also be held up for scrutiny. What uninterrogated assumptions
animate the injunction to adopt the kind of expansive, totalizing view that
these approaches presuppose? What is the “constitutive outside” of a research
paradigm that seeks to reveal how the lines separating inside and outside are
drawn in the first place? In short, what might be excluded by the inclusive per-
spective that a critical reflection on musicology’s borders demands?
Some insight into these questions may be gained by considering how forms
of cultural distinction have evolved in recent decades, and by contemplating
how they resonate with the values embodied by critiques of musicology’s lim-
its. As research in the sociology of taste over the past twenty years has indi-
cated, the exclusivity that has long been a hallmark of legitimate cultural
practice (and which still informs everyday conceptions of cultural elitism) has
itself been progressively delegitimized, supplanted by strategies that rely upon
displays of eclecticism and openness to mark individuals’ social position.20 This
“omnivorous” posture does not stigmatize specific repertoires or practices as
déclassé; rather it treats them, along with their more “respectable” counter-
parts, as potential ingredients in a singular and singularly distinctive cultural
mix, one that presumes and effectively signals a high level of educational at-
tainment, untrammeled access to cultural goods, and command over the time
and resources necessary to master a variety of social and aesthetic codes.
Subsequent research in this area has moved away from the simplistic and in
many respects pernicious model that sets “highbrow” omnivores above and
against “lowbrow” univores, taking into account the fact that engagement
with diverse cultural practices may be observed across social groups, irrespec-
tive of occupational category, educational attainment, ethnicity, or gender
17. Tomlinson, “Musicology, Anthropology, History,” 69–70.
18. Born, “For a Relational Musicology,” 217.
19. Lewis, “Americanist Musicology,” 692.
20. See Peterson and Simkus, “How Musical Taste Groups Mark Occupational Status
Groups”; and Peterson and Kern, “Changing Highbrow Taste.”

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(though age correlates strongly with the diversity of one’s tastes, with younger
cohorts more likely to partake of a broader palette of cultural offerings than
older ones).21 In an era when digital media and the Internet have lowered the
barriers to cultural consumption, what matters less is the quantitative breadth
of individuals’ cultural repertoires than its qualitative composition, with pref-
erence for classical music and other artforms traditionally coded as “high” still
tracing a subtle yet significant symbolic boundary. Not all forms of cultural
eclecticism are the same; nor are all treated equally. Also significant is the pre-
cise manner in which actors both deploy and construe the wide-ranging cul-
tural repertoires they engage.22 Is breadth of taste conceived in terms of a
high-minded desire for self-improvement to be achieved through exposure to
diverse aesthetic experiences? Or is it figured as a kind of diversity by default, a
result of one’s inability to discriminate between different genres and artistic
codes? What is above all crucial to observe about recent mutations in practices
of cultural distinction is how displays of aesthetic openness turn the virtue of
inclusiveness into a means of symbolic exclusion, as individuals’ comportment
vis-à-vis cultural difference—along with the specific habitus that such com-
portment implies—becomes the basis for the formation of in-groups and out-
groups. In this regard, new modes of cultural distinction bear much in
common with stances occupying homologous positions in contemporary civic
discourse, namely those that extol the virtues of tolerance and cosmopoli-
tanism. As Wendy Brown observes, discourses of tolerance typically presup-
pose a hegemonic liberal subject who has mastered and thereby transcended
cultural attachments. Such discourses divide the world into two broad groups,
“those who are said to be ruled by culture” and “those who are said to rule
themselves but enjoy culture.”23 Similarly, Craig Calhoun notes that appeals
to cosmopolitanism—understood as a curative for the ills of ethnocentrism—
devalue what are characterized as narrow, parochial attachments, and hence
“disempower those who lack substantial personal or organizational re-
sources.” The problem, Calhoun remarks, is that “would-be cosmopolitans
don’t recognize the extent to which cosmopolitan appreciation of global di-
versity is based on privileges of wealth and perhaps especially citizenship in
certain states.”24
Lurking behind the foregoing is the issue of class, a topic that has come
back into public view after many years of hiding in plain sight. Indeed, in a re-
cent colloquy published in this Journal, Gayle Sherwood Magee called on her
fellow Americanists to pay greater attention to how this oft-neglected deter-
21. Warde, Wright, and Gayo-Cal, “Understanding Cultural Omnivorousness”; and Ollivier,
“Modes of Openness to Cultural Diversity.”
22. See Ollivier, “Modes of Openness”; and Atkinson, “Context and Genesis of Musical
Tastes.”
23. Brown, Regulating Aversion, 20.
24. Calhoun, “Class Consciousness of Frequent Travelers,” 893.

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minant shapes musical practice—an appeal I whole-heartedly endorse.25 But,

as Magee intimates, it will not suffice to simply incorporate the music(s) as-
cribed to this or that class into the list of repertoires we address through our
teaching or research, or to revise our disciplinary borders so as to integrate this
category into the set of determinants that our scholarship must henceforth
take into consideration. For such gestures, however justifiable or well inten-
tioned, are themselves implicated in the dynamics of class. Musicologists, after
all, are classed subjects—not just on account of our diverse “class origins,”
whatever they may be, but more importantly on account of the way we are so-
cialized into the academy, the particular kind of work we perform within its in-
stitutional confines, and the functions such work fulfills within the larger social
division of labor. Furthermore, one consequence of this work, whether we like
it or not, involves the formation of other classed subjects: not so much by
what we communicate explicitly to students and colleagues, but what we con-
vey implicitly, by the kind of relationships we exhibit with regard to certain
cultural practices, the kind of familiarity we evince with some musics as op-
posed to others, and the subtle, unconscious value judgments we express,
even when we are striving to remain value-neutral.
But the main reason care must be taken when incorporating class into our
disciplinary remit is that doing so unthinkingly, without accounting for our
own entanglement in its snares, risks reproducing contemporary forms of
class-based distinction. Similar risks are courted by injunctions to institute a
“relational” or “neocomparativist” musicology, to say nothing of efforts at re-
constructing the field along more expansive lines. Even though I am con-
vinced of the necessity of such initiatives, and even though I have tried to put
them into practice in my own work on music and politics in France, I cannot
help but suspect that they are driven by more than an empiricist desire to ad-
dress the reality of musical difference, or a politico-ethical imperative to re-
dress the troubling exclusions that hitherto defined musicology. Rather, calls
to interrogate boundaries and disrupt hierarchies, far from exorcising the
specter of “aesthetic advocacy,” are themselves redolent of a particular set of
aesthetic values, a certain taste culture, one indexed to those social positions in
possession of the resources necessary to range freely across social, cultural, and
artistic regimes. Unless the reflexive consideration of musicology’s borders is
prepared to acknowledge this fact—that the inclusive, totalizing view of the
musical field it advances originates from a particular location in social space,
embodying the values and interests associated with this position—it threatens
to entrench new boundaries and erect new hierarchies, even as it calls existing
ones to account.
25. Magee, “Rethinking Social Class,” 696–99.

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Working on the Boundaries: Translation Studies, National

Narratives, and Robert Lachmann in Jerusalem
BRIGID COHEN
During a time when historical musicology is expanding its subject matter and
geographical purview, it is all the more important to theorize cultural cross-
ings carefully, reckoning with the ideological boundaries that have historically
defined the discipline. I suggest here how one such set of foundational
limitations—musicology’s reliance on national models of history—can be illu-
minated and challenged through a sustained engagement with the growing
field of translation studies. To animate this point, I turn to a particular histori-
cal episode: the comparative musicologist Robert Lachmann’s boundary-
crossing pedagogical activities in Mandate Palestine, set against the hotly
contested nationalist movements of that era.
In a recent JAMS colloquy, Alejandro Madrid reminded readers of musi-
cology’s “ideological foundations . . . in the project of state building.” These
foundations, he suggests, have been increasingly put under pressure by a his-
tory of “transnational musical flows.”26 If the discipline of musicology origi-
nated in the need to tell the history of nations and their cultures, then many
of its traditional norms (especially in studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-
century contexts) seem at once well suited to this aim and resistant to the sus-
tained examination of cultural boundary-crossings in all their complexity. I
would take these nation-centered tendencies to include: (1) the elaboration of
artistic lineages (often, though not always, suggesting national schools and
styles); (2) the identification of “central” figures and phenomena within rela-
tively unified ideas of “society” or a “public sphere” (often implicitly equated
with a national civic space); and (3) the tracing of relationships between
bounded cultural categories (whether these categories are defined by nation,
by ideas of Western vs. non-Western culture, or by other signs of demarca-
tion). While a burgeoning interest in transnational musical networks increas-
ingly challenges these norms, it is striking the extent to which the “deep
structures” of nation-centered historiography persist, even within many studies
of musical migration.27 As literary scholar Emily Apter notes, “National char-
acter ghosts theories and approaches even in this era of anti-essentialism.”28
In this context, translation studies has emerged as a vital “interdiscipline”—
engaging fields from comparative literature to anthropology to media studies
to law—because it foregrounds dilemmas of cultural plurality (rather than the
nation’s unity) and displacement (rather than impermeable boundaries).
26. Madrid, “American Music in the Age of Postnationality,” 699–703. See also Cohen,
Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora, 12–22.
27. Cohen, Stefan Wolpe and the Avant-Garde Diaspora, 13–16.
28. Apter, Translation Zone, 42.

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Historically, translation studies emerged as a subdiscipline within literary

scholarship pertaining to the practice and theory of literary translation. Yet, in
recent decades, developments within this field have attracted a timely and en-
ergetic dialogue among disciplines about conditions of cross-cultural en-
counter.29 This exchange has centered on the “gap” between an original text
in a source language and its translation in a target language—a split that
evokes dilemmas of cultural transmission more generally. As Walter Benjamin
argued, translation is a task that points to the impossibility of easy transfer
across boundaries (or simple equivalency between disparate languages), while
also insisting on the necessity of this difficult transfer for the survival of cultural
texts and practices.30 The impossibility of simple transfer—the insurmountable
gap between different media or languages—ultimately brings “newness into
the world.”31 In other words, translation theory since Benjamin focuses on
translation not as a space of loss (implicitly positioning translations as inferior to
their originals), but rather as a space of contingency and transmutation neces-
sary to the afterlives of cultural practices. At the same time, recent theorists
have seen translation as far from politically benign or neutral, but inextricably
bound up in power dynamics with often profound material consequences.32
Such insights prove relevant to many cultural practices beyond translation in
its strict literary sense. For the purposes of this essay, translation studies sug-
gest modes of historical continuance that benefit from cultural crossings and
their unpredictable play of difference, thus opening historiographical alterna-
tives that better model diasporic experience and other cultural exchanges than
do the familiar nation-centered narratives. Moreover, “translation” works as a
provocative concept-metaphor that draws attention to musical practices that
depend upon similar “gaps” between media (through transcription, record-
ing, etc.), which also make possible cultural transmission and change.
A translational turn in historical musicology would bring together the disci-
pline’s long-standing historiographical emphases with an intensified focus on
cultural exchange more commonly articulated in ethnomusicology. As such,
the turn toward translation studies would bring theoretical depth to the grow-
ing interests in transnational cultural networks and media studies that have
taken hold in the field. It would also enrich and gesture beyond traditional
studies of musical exoticism, foregrounding networks of power far more com-
plicated than the standard unidirectional accounts of “centralized” Western
appropriations of “peripheral” non-Western sources that have long organized
their focus.
29. Ibid.; Berman and Wood, Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation; Venuti,
Translation Studies Reader; Bohlman, “Translating Herder Translating”; Cohen, “Diasporic
Dialogues in Mid-Century New York,” 147–48, 168–69.
30. Benjamin, “Task of the Translator.”
31. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 303–37.
32. Apter, Translation Zone, 3–11.

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To explore such translational possibilities in concrete terms, let us consider

the case of Lachmann in Jerusalem, which has received some valuable schol-
arly attention but calls out for more.33 Having lost his appointment at the
Berlin Staatsbibliothek when the Nazis seized power in 1933, Lachmann was
invited by Hebrew University president Judah Magnes to found the Phono-
gram Archive for Oriental Music in association with the university in 1935.
After immigrating to Jerusalem, Lachmann worked as a steady proponent for
cross-cultural music education in the Yishuv and in Arab institutions of learn-
ing. The following words, drawn from a quasi-Socratic dialogue in an unpub-
lished manuscript, exemplify his advocacy of this project:
A. Is it desirable to have an Arab section [of music taught in schools] consider-
ing that European music represents a higher stage of musical development?
B. We must not consider Eur. and Arab music as representing different stages
in the same line of development. We must rather think of them as different
kinds of music, each having gone through centuries of development and capa-
ble of further development. There is a fundamental difference between
European music and Oriental music (of which Arab music is a branch), but
both have the same right to exist.34
Though Lachmann had long made similar arguments before his exile, this
document is distinguished by its place within an unprecedented field of peda-
gogical practice in Palestine.35 In 1937, Lachmann began to use the recorded
musics of the Archive as a basis for classes in cross-cultural music education for
secondary-level students in Arabic- and Hebrew-language schools. In a mo-
ment of candor, he justified his work in terms of a broad aspiration for improv-
ing cross-cultural understanding in the Middle East: “My work necessitates
free intercourse with all the different ethnical groups in this country and the
Near East generally. It may therefore be made to contribute, however mod-
estly, towards aims beyond its immediate scope, towards a better understand-
ing between Jews and Arabs.”36 Lachmann was supported by a network of
individuals joined together by the technologies of the Phonogram Archive:
technicians and assistants (most notably, Edith Gerson-Kiwi) alongside musi-
cians and other research associates (including oud virtuoso Ezra Aharon). By
1937, Lachmann suggested to Magnes that he would need to share director-
ship of the Archive with an Arab scholar in order to bring cultural credibility
and a greater knowledge base to the Archive in the context of its work outside
the university.37
33. Bohlman and Davis, “Mizrakh, Jewish Music, and the Journey to the East,” 114–25;
Katz, Lachmann Problem.
34. Lachmann, “Musical Education in Arab Schools.”
35. Racy, “Historical Views of Early Ethnomusicologists,” 80.
36. Cited in Katz, Lachmann Problem, 198.
37. Ibid.

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Lachmann’s projects generally fit within a wider pacifist Zionist agenda as-
sociated with Brith Shalom. This society was founded in 1928 as a loose-knit
organization—centered in Jerusalem and associated with such thinkers as
Magnes himself, Martin Buber, and Arthur Ruppin—that sought to establish
Jewish-Arab cultural understanding as the primary goal of the Yishuv.38 They
tended to advocate founding an Arab-Jewish binational federation in the re-
gion as an alternative to a Jewish-majority nation-state. This “post-national”
vision drew on many ideas, ranging from socialism to Habsburg-inspired
models. Although Brith Shalom’s political influence fell into steep decline in
the 1930s—in the shadow of the Holocaust, the 1936–39 Arab Revolt, and
the attendant rise of militarized nationalisms—educational projects remained
at the core of its proponents’ mission.
Lachmann’s practice in Jerusalem can be described as translational on more
levels than can adequately be explored within the space of this essay. Most
notably, the Phonogram Archive was a laboratory that, as Bruno Latour has
argued of laboratories in general, performed a “translational” function.39 In
other words, laboratories need not be thought of as merely expanding knowl-
edge of familiar entities, but rather as transforming the relations and signifi-
cance of those entities by breaking down boundaries (or “translating”)
between “in-house” and wider social spaces. In keeping with this, I wish to fo-
cus on the Archive as a lever for social change—an approach that contrasts with
the trope of cultural conservation that has often been used to describe
Lachmann’s work as a comparative musicologist. Like a scientific laboratory,
the Archive worked to isolate and transfer unwieldy, complex elements (musi-
cal material, knowledge, and sources) from a broad social field into a space for
intensive analysis, supported by specific and powerful technologies (phono-
graph recording, written transcription, and archival collection). Once
Lachmann and his associates had transferred and interpreted musical objects
of study within the Archive, they made a complimentary translational move
outward again, using the knowledge gained in the Archive to leverage educa-
tional projects in the “outside” world. To be sure, the “translational” power
dynamics that shaped Lachmann’s activities were far more complicated than
this basic laboratory model would suggest, especially given the wider contexts
of the Mandate’s colonial setting, Lachmann’s and his associates’ exile condi-
tions, power dynamics within Hebrew University, and the funding networks
linking Lachmann’s work with donor circles in the United States. Yet transla-
tion studies offers the conceptual models that would illuminate such power
relations, while spotlighting the productive “gaps” that helped to constitute
the Archive’s space of creativity: gaps in the communications among
European-Jewish scholars, Mizrahi immigrants, Palestinian Arab musicians,
and other actors in the Archive; between cultural contexts of performance and
38. Ratzabi, Between Zionism and Judaism.

39. Latour, “Give Me a Laboratory and I Will Raise the World,” esp. 145–47.

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media of recording and transcription; among Lachmann’s research priorities,

the institutional aims of Hebrew University, and the agendas of Brith Shalom;
and so on.
There is plenty at stake in the reappraisal of such translational episodes, es-
pecially given their place (or non-place or partial place) within consequential
national histories. Lachmann’s Archive underwent over fifty years of neglect
after his 1939 death. Since its restoration in the early 1990s, Lachmann has
been recognized retrospectively as having established “the material basis for
ethnomusicology in the modern state of Israel.”40 Yet no scholarship has yet
examined or explicitly acknowledged the Archive’s relationship to the cultural-
political agenda of Brith Shalom.41 This lacuna surely results from the impulse
to rehabilitate Lachmann within an implicitly national narrative, which jars
with that organization’s agonistic relationship with the very idea of the nation-
state as a primary basis for political community. Yet such lacunae increasingly
call out for redress, not only in the case of Israeli history (which throws into
relief questions of plurality and state-building so vividly), but also in those of
every other nation or community characterized by similar dilemmas of diver-
sity at its very foundations.
¿“Reinventar” la musicología para América Latina?

The leading Cuban musicologist Victoria Eli Rodríguez wrote this entry in
Spanish, reflecting in it on a seminal essay on the discipline of musicology that she
wrote in 1998.42 We have included both the original Spanish and, following this,
Tamara Levitz’s English translation, in order to raise the question of linguistic
borders and make the act of translation transparent.
Ante todo agradezco a la musicóloga Tamara Levitz su invitación a participar
en este Coloquio. El tema propuesto, relacionado con la delimitación del ob-
jeto de estudio y la conceptualización epistemológica de la Musicología, ha
emergido en diferentes momentos y ha tomado y toma matices de gran actua-
lidad, condicionado por situaciones históricas particulares, como sucede en el
presente. Sin pretender historiar un asunto que lleva sobre si más de 100 años,
de delimitación, compartimentación y división—musicología histórica, siste-
mática o teoría y musicología comparada; musicología histórica versus etno-
musicología o antropología de la música; así como nuevas denominaciones
relacionadas con estudios particulares como “musicología popular,” “musico-
logía de género,” y tantos otros, que han tratado de ampliar o trascender los
40. Bohlman and Davis, “Mizrakh, Jewish Music, and the Journey to the East,” 116.
41. Bohlman, Davis, and Katz have, however, explored how Lachmann sought to forge
boundary-crossing solidarities through education.
42. Eli Rodríguez, “Hacia una funcionalidad mayor de la ciencia musicológica.”

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compartimentos al uso, me permito tomar como centro de mi participación la

necesidad que tiene la musicología latinoamericana de repensar en sus fronte-
ras e incluso modificarlas.
De todos es conocido que la escisión existente sobre todo entre musicolo-
gía histórica y etnomusicología que se ha desarrollado en la práctica musicoló-
gica de cuño europeo y en las instituciones académicas norteamericanas ha
tenido repercusión en el ámbito científico y académico latinoamericano, en la
medida que una buena parte de los profesionales de estas ramas en el conti-
nente se han formado durante mucho tiempo en las universidades extranjeras
y preferentemente en las norteamericanas. Resulta muy difícil y complejo dejar
a un lado esa “tradición” cuando vivimos en sociedades muy estratificadas y
donde aún perviven los valores y las posiciones neocolonialistas.
Pero las preguntas en el momento actual son, entre otras: Los criterios esté-
ticos y los cánones formales y musicales impuestos o heredados de la “musico-
logía occidental” son adecuados al estudiar las realidades latinoamericanas?
Debe el musicólogo latinoamericano mantenerlos o debe desprenderse de
ellos? Las fronteras, marcadas por la academia, europea o norteamericana, re-
sultan pertinentes para el estudio de las culturas musicales de América Latina?
Como he escrito en 1998, “las culturas musicales latinoamericanas se
muestran como una compleja trama que, al decir del novelista y musicólogo
cubano Alejo Carpentier, ‘hay que aceptarla en bloque, tal como es, admitién-
dose que sus más originales expresiones lo mismo pueden salirle de la calle
como venirle de las academias.’ ”43 “Es así que al enfrentar la musicología este
acontecer particular ha de hacerlo desde una posición de análisis del amplio sis-
tema de relaciones que la cultura musical posee, donde el objeto no puede cir-
cunscribirse al estudio del llamado ‘arte musical culto’ [privilegiando el texto,
definiendo modelos y patrones], con el fin de poner al descubierto o racionali-
zar los elementos o medios expresivos que han sido puestos en práctica y con-
trastarlos con los cánones tomados o impuestos por otras culturas. Tampoco
ha de proponerse, de forma aislada, el estudio de los modos de hacer que se
han conservado y modificado en diferentes comunidades—en general en gra-
ves condiciones de subdesarrollo—y para esto partir de los postulados teóricos
y metodológicos de otra disciplina: la etnomusicología.”44
El pasado19de marzo, el musicólogo mexicano-norteamericano Alejando L.
Madrid en sus palabras de inauguración del XIII Premio de Musicología Casa
de las Américas en La Habana, señalaba que “la presente crisis académica,
social y presupuestal global es precisamente uno de los momentos en que la
musicología y sus instituciones necesitan reinventarse. Sin embargo, esta rein-
vención no puede ceder ante los modelos utilitarios que pretenden definir a las
43. Carpentier: “América Latina en la confluencia de sus coordenadas históricas,” 17; Eli
Rodríguez, “Hacia una funcionalidad mayor,” 56.
44. Eli Rodríguez, “Hacia una funcionalidad mayor,” 56. Se confunde, en este último caso,
la esencia del etnos con un limitado radio de acción, al vincular este con comunidades de un nivel
precario de desarrollo económico y social.

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humanidades desde fuera; debe ser una transformación que identifique y criti-
que los modelos ideológicos que la musicología ha ayudado a reproducir.”45
En este proceso urgente y necesario de reinvención musicológica no es
posible la exclusión de personas, pueblos y repertorios y retomar viejos
criterios—aún presentes entre algunos intelectuales—de segregación de las
culturas Latinoamérica y oposición de ellas a una cultura occidental “superior”
y hegemónica, o pasar por alto las políticas esgrimidas por los “países del pri-
mer mundo” en relación con las condiciones históricas de otros territorios
implicados hoy día en enfrentamientos de diversa índole. En momentos de cri-
sis, embargos económicos y guerras fratricidas se han visto involucrados enor-
mes pérdidas de valiosas vidas humanas, así como la destrucción irreversible de
patrimonios culturales y artísticos de las naciones y de la humanidad.
En medio de un panorama histórico tan complejo, el musicólogo latino-
americano tiene ante si “la vivencia y la espontaneidad del hecho folclórico en
medio de la variabilidad y la mutabilidad que les son propias, junto a una mú-
sica popular urbana que se proyecta con fuerza a través de la industria cultural
y los medios de difusión, y una valiosa música académica que no ha sido muy
favorecida en los circuitos internacionales de concierto. Estas esferas lejos de
excluirse se interrelacionan en el devenir histórico musical del continente y han
sido decisivas en la definición de las identidades de los músicos latinoamerica-
nos. Para hacer posible la explicación de estas interinfluencias y el estudio de la
música como medio para perfilar nuevas realidades, se requiere de un instru-
mento metódico y teórico que permita un análisis de forma integral, que deje
a un lado las rigideces esquemáticas que no pueden concebirse hoy en medio
del quehacer científico.”46 Ha de someterse a juicios críticos el aparato con-
ceptual “construido” y “probado,” por la musicología y la etnomusicología
europea y norteamericana, e ir a la selección de aquello que resulte útil ha-
ciendo las modificaciones que la situación histórica y cultural de América
Latina demande.
El valor inestimable que puede alcanzar la ciencia musicológica latinoameri-
cana actual—e incluyo a la musicología en su conjunto—está en su “papel
aglutinador de disciplinas afines, en el carácter activo que ha de asumir acor-
tando las distancias que la separan de otras ciencias sociales, sin aislar el hecho
musical en todas sus especificidades como lenguaje de la funcionalidad social
que le es intrínseca.”47 Sin embargo no ha de perderse de vista, y retomo las
recientes palabras de Alejandro Madrid, que “vivimos un tiempo de crisis eco-
nómica, social e ideológica a nivel global; se trata de un contexto de capita-
lismo desbocado en el que las humanidades se han visto atacadas de una
manera inusual por no encajar en el modelo utilitario que el capital transnacio-
nal nos impone.”48
45. Madrid, “Solo un enfoque multidisciplinar.”
46. Eli Rodríguez, “Hacia una funcionalidad mayor,” 57.
47. Ibid., 57–58.

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Se impone en esta reflexión sobre las fronteras en la musicología la formula-

ción de nuevas preguntas y consideraciones en medio de un conjunto de ejes
cruzados que aúnan lo local, lo regional y lo nacional y que promueven la defi-
nición de identidades superpuestas en el ámbito latinoamericano; identidades
que por una parte tratan de reconocerse y afirmarse en lo propio, y por otra, se
contrastan y singularizan frente a las demás culturas.
Una propuesta desde el ámbito latinoamericano lleva a considerar la necesi-
dad de una labor interdisciplinaria y dialogante con otras ciencias que permita
a la musicología latinoamericana no sólo “la elaboración de las bases teóricas
de la investigación y análisis de la música en sus diferentes modos de hacer,”
sino también que se proyecte más intensamente hacia “los aspectos sociológi-
cos y sicológicos de la creación musical y el consumo,” a los factores económi-
cos y administrativos que la industria cultural en el espacio global demanda y a
los aspectos estructurales que están presentes en el funcionamiento social de la
música y que se ven constantemente modificados por la intensificación de los
flujos migratorios que ha traído consigo la situación internacional.49
“Reinventing” Musicology for Latin America?

Translated by Tamara Levitz50
Above all I would like to thank Tamara Levitz for her invitation to participate
in this colloquy. The proposed topic, as it relates to defining the object of
study and epistemological conceptualization of the discipline of musicology,
has emerged at different times in history, and taken on degrees of contempo-
rary relevance that vary with historical circumstance, as is the case today.
Rather than offer a history of how music scholars have been defining, com-
partmentalizing, and dividing the field of music studies in the last more than
one hundred years—of how they have divided it, for example, into historical,
systematic, and theoretical musicology or comparative musicology; or into his-
torical musicology versus ethnomusicology or the anthropology of music, as
well as into the new denominations related to particular fields of study such as
popular music studies and musicology and gender, and many other subdisci-
plines, all of which try to expand or transcend the usual compartmentalization
of the discipline—I will concentrate in my response on the need to rethink and
possibly modify the borders of Latin American musicology.
Everybody knows that the existing split between historical musicology and
ethnomusicology, which developed as a consequence of an essentially Euro-
pean musicological practice and in North American academic institutions, had

50. I am grateful to Elisabeth Le Guin for thoughtfully reviewing, commenting upon, and
correcting my Spanish translation. I have added bracketed indications in the translation to make it
clear that Victoria Eli Rodríguez is quoting herself in the original.

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a great impact on the Latin American scientific and academic community inas-
much as a large number of professionals in these disciplines on the [South
American] continent were trained for many years in foreign and preferably
North American universities. It would be difficult and complex to cast aside
this “tradition” when we are still living in highly stratified societies in which
neocolonial values and perspectives still operate.
And yet in the current climate questions arise, among them: Are the aes-
thetic criteria and formal and musical canons imposed or inherited from
“Western musicology” adequate for the study of Latin American realities?
Should the Latin American musicologist maintain or abandon them? Are the
borders determined by the European and North American academy pertinent
to the study of musical cultures in Latin America?
[As I wrote in 1998], “Latin American musical cultures present a complex
picture, which, in the words of the novelist and musicologist Alejo Carpentier,
‘has to be accepted en bloc, as it is, by admitting that the most original ex-
pressions of that culture can emerge from the street as well as from the aca-
demies.’ ”51 [Again, as I wrote then]: “To confront this particular reality,
musicologists have to analyze [Latin American] musical culture’s broad system
of relations. They cannot limit their object of study to so-called art music
[privileging the text and defining models and patterns], with the goal of ex-
posing and rationalizing elements and expressive means put into practice by
the composer and contrasting them with canons taken from or imposed by
other cultures. Neither can they suggest studying in an isolated fashion the
creative means that have been conserved and modified in different, usually
gravely underdeveloped communities, and to this aim depart from theoretical
and methodological premises of another discipline: Ethnomusicology.”52
On 19March2012,the Mexican–North American musicologist Alejandro L.
Madrid indicated in his inaugural speech for the Thirteenth Musicological
Prize of the Casa de las Américas [at the Seventh International Musicological
Conference] in Havana that “the current academic, social, and global bud-
getary crisis offers precisely one of those moments in which musicology and its
institutions must reinvent themselves. Those reinventing the discipline cannot
succumb to utilitarian models that define the Humanities from the outside,
however: rather, they must identify and critique ideological models that the
discipline itself has contributed to reproducing.”53
As we engage in this project of the urgent and necessary reinvention of mu-
sicology, it will not be possible for us to exclude persons, peoples, and reper-
toires, or for us to take up again old criteria—still circulating among certain
51. Carpentier: “América Latina en la confluencia de sus coordenadas históricas,” 17. See Eli
Rodríguez, “Hacia una funcionalidad mayor,” 56.
52. Eli Rodríguez, “Hacia una funcionalidad mayor.” In the latter case, the essence of ethnic-
ities becomes confused with a limited radius of action as a consequence of being linked with
communities that exhibit precarious levels of social and economic development.
53. See Madrid, “Solo un enfoque multidisciplinar.”

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intellectuals—for segregating Latin American cultures and opposing them to

a “superior,” hegemonic Western culture. It will also not be possible for us to
overlook the politics of “First World countries” in relation to the historic con-
ditions of territories implicated today in confrontations of various kinds. In
moments of crisis, economic embargo, and fratricidal conflict we have wit-
nessed enormous loss of valuable human life, as well as the irreversible destruc-
tion of cultural and artistic heritage of the world’s nations and humanity.
Working within such a complex historical panorama, the Latin American
musicologist has to negotiate, [as I said in a modified form in 1998], “folk-
loric events in light of their variability and mutability, popular urban music dis-
seminated through the cultural industry and advertising media, and academic
music that has not received much support on the international concert stage.
These spheres, far from excluding each other, have been interrelated in the de-
velopment of music history on the [South American] continent and have been
decisive in defining the identities of Latin American musicians. In order to ex-
plain the reciprocal influences of these musics and the study of music as a
means of outlining new realities, we need a methodological and theoretical
apparatus that will allow us to analyze the situation in an integral way.”54 We
need an apparatus that will allow us to cast aside rigid schemes that are no
longer viable in light of the scientific task at hand. We need to judge critically
the conceptual apparatus “constructed” and “proven” by European and
North American musicologists, and need to seek a conceptual apparatus that
proves useful in making the modifications required by the historical and cul-
tural situation of Latin America.
[I still believe today, as I did in 1998], that the invaluable contribution of
contemporary Latin American musicology, and musicology on the whole, lies
in its role as the “glue that binds together related disciplines, and in the active
role it plays in bridging the gap that separates it from the other social sciences,
yet without isolating music in all its specificity as a language from the social
functions intrinsic to it.”55 Nevertheless we cannot forget, and here I quote
again Alejandro L. Madrid, that “we live in a time of global economic, social,
and ideological crisis, [and that] we are dealing with a context of unbridled
capitalism, in which the Humanities have come under unusual attack for not
fitting into the utilitarian model imposed by transnational capital.”56
This reflection on borders in musicology leads to the formulation of new
questions and considerations amidst a set of crossing axes that draw together
the local, regional, and national, and that promote the definition of identities
superimposed on the Latin American scene—identities that, on the one hand,
seek to recognize and affirm each other in themselves, and that, on the other,
compare and distinguish themselves in opposition to other cultures.

55. Ibid., 57–58.

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[I would still conclude, as I did in 1998], that the basis of a solid discipline
of Latin American musicology lies in “elaborating theoretical premises for the
investigation and analysis of music in all its different modes of production,”
and also in engaging more intensely with “sociological and psychological as-
pects of musical creation and consumption,” and, I would add today, with
economic and administrative factors that the global cultural industry demands
and with structural aspects of the social function of music that are being con-
stantly modified by the increased migratory flows brought on by the interna-
tional situation.57
Borderline Subjects, Musical Objects

RYAN DOHONEY
Borders are queer things. They mark where home is. They give a measure of
comfort by securing for us a habitable space. They are, however, not given.
Borders are established through struggle.58 Often hard-won, they need to be
defended as they protect our home, not that of another. Borders are agonistic
sites of contestation and, as such, are provisional and relational. I will respond
to Tamara Levitz’s provocations by considering music’s role in maintaining
and reconfiguring borders between self and other, and thus in what Isabelle
Stengers has called “productions of subjectivity”—practices through which we
sense ourselves and our place in the world.59 I am interested in particular in
border drawings and crossings as they occur in the relational dynamics of mu-
sical experience.
A growing number of musicologists are studying the relationship between
musical experience and subject formation. Naomi Cumming, Benjamin
Piekut, and Antoine Hennion have all proffered approaches for analyzing how
subjective borders are marked and reconfigured through sound production.60
Cumming makes a convincing case for the importance of music in the con-
struction of a “sonic self ” or a particular musical being composed out of a net-
work of social and affective relations. Hennion notes that our attachments
(musical and otherwise) in many ways constitute our sense of self and mark
us off from what we are not. Piekut, in a similar vein, argues that “every musi-
cal performance is the performance of a relationship.”61 Rather than reinscribe
Enlightenment notions of sovereign selfhood in the productions of subjec-
tivity they document, these scholars track the construction of selves out of un-

58. As Deleuze and Guattari have written, “Now we are at home. But home does not preex-
ist.” Thousand Plateaus, 311.
59. Stengers, “Experimenting with Refrains,” 39.
60. Cumming, Sonic Self, Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise, and Hennion, “Those Things
That Hold Us Together.”
61. Piekut, Experimentalism Otherwise, 159.

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stable attachments that are constantly in flux. “Like a live wire, the subject
channels what’s going on around it in the process of its own self-composition,”
Kathleen Stewart writes, “it’s a thing composed of encounters and the spaces
and events it traverses and inhabits.”62 We traverse and inhabit sonic borders in
the most sublime and mundane of our musical experiences. Sound rubs up
against what we think we feel and how we live. A sound can change us, and
force us to do something we didn’t expect to do.
Carolyn Abbate recognizes music’s capacity to participate in the formation
of subjectivity when she discusses music’s drastic abilities to reconfigure our
perceptions and the kinds of stories we tell about them. In the rush to critique
Abbate’s work, we have foreclosed productive paths for the drastic, which I
would reinterpret as a peculiar musical affect marking different kinds of border
crossings and reconfigurations that invite our attention and documentation—
instead of reducing us to silence. Through her “autobiographical tidbits”
Abbate conveys her sense of the affective flow and perceptual reconfiguration
that occur during particularly intense live performances. I am most interested
in her discussion of the possibilities in attending to the “neurological misfire”
that accompanies drastic experience, which leads to uncertainty and confusion
in response to music.63 Abbate restricts the drastic by privileging its produc-
tion during live performance, however. Yet the type of “presence” she cele-
brates occurs as well when human beings confront technologies and
nonhuman objects. The relationships of which music is made are not only be-
tween people but also between people and things.64 As Hennion notes, music
“cumulates intermediaries, interpreters, instruments, mediums, all needed for
its presence in the musical milieu.”65 Listening to any performance or record-
ing is to partake in an experience distended in space and time and mediated by
musicians, playback systems, instruments, and both physical and virtual bodies.
It was a rather mundane activity that got me thinking along these lines. In
early 2012 I indulged in my penchant for thrift-store shopping in downtown
Portland, Oregon. I wandered into a Goodwill boutique, a well-curated and
62. Stewart, Ordinary Affects, 79.
63. Abbate, “Music—Drastic or Gnostic?,” 536, 535. My reinterpretation of “the drastic”
(one might say deliberate misreading) is in sympathy with James Hepokoski’s critique of Vladimir
Jankélévitch: “While not discounting the directness of music’s impact as performed—which must
remain an elemental reality for any considered reflection—one might still ask the counter-
Jankélévitchian question of whether one ever approaches the captivating force of music in an
unmediated way, as an isolated and independent subject emancipated from external constraints,
free to recognize on one’s own terms the ineffability believed to be really there”; Hepokoski,
“Ineffable Immersion,” 230. For another view on confusion and lack of mastery over musical ex-
periences and our attempts to narrate them see Dubiel, “Uncertainty, Disorientation, and Loss as
Responses to Musical Structure.”
64. On the unpredictability of subject-object relations and the power of non-human agents,
see Bennett, Vibrant Matter; Latour, Reassembling the Social, 63–86; and Whitehead, Adventures
of Ideas, 175–90.
65. Hennion, “History of Art—Lessons in Mediation,” 238. See also idem, La passion
musicale.

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miniaturized version of the more familiar thrift stores planted in strip malls
across the country. I made my way past some costume jewelry and chintz to
the small men’s section hoping to find a tie or some other professorial garb.
The soundscape of the store, as is often the case in retail environments, was
not intrusively apparent.66 The music encouraged evenly hovering attention to
shopping, the task at hand. The selection of Top 40 hits from the 1980s and
1990s gave me a sense of, if not comfort, at least familiarity and allowed me to
feel sonically at home. This soundscape was not necessarily conducive to in-
tense experience, and yet something drastic did happen when “Take My
Breath Away”—a song written by Giorgio Moroder and Tom Whitlock and
performed by the band Berlin—started to sound from the speakers.
“Take My Breath Away” is familiar to those who have seen the film Top
Gun from 1987, in which it accompanies a rather tame love scene between
Tom Cruise and Kelly McGillis. As the song began to play, two shoppers at
the Goodwill appeared deeply affected by it. They stopped what they were do-
ing, mouthed the words in silent karaoke, and stared up at the speakers. I no-
ticed their sudden shift in bodily attitude: they appeared captured by the song
and held in momentary reverie. After several moments of immersion (lasting
the length of the first verse and chorus) they began to shuttle back and forth
between two observable modes of listening: at certain moments they treated
the song as background music to their shopping, while at others they aban-
doned themselves to spontaneous flashes of sonic absorption. Although the
shoppers may have appeared to be going inward in their moments of reverie,
or setting up a border between themselves and the outside world by creating a
fantasy of being sonically separate from it, they were in fact redrawing their
connections rather dramatically by focusing acute attention on the technologi-
cal apparatus (the speakers) that was enabling their drastic experience. Because
I observed the changes in the shoppers but didn’t feel the experience myself, I
had some trouble empathizing with it. I kept wondering, “What is going on?”
I am not sure that I have gotten it right. There is something in this experience
that reminds me of Raymond Williams’s “structures of feeling”—which de-
scribes intensities of feeling that are felt before they can be narrated.67 Such
affects are “changes of presence” that “do not have to await definition, classifica-
tion, or rationalization before they can exert palpable pressure and set effective
limits on experience and action.”68 If we open up Abbate’s definition of the
drastic, we begin to understand that it describes not a blank moment of pure
listening, but rather a chain of relationships established between subjects and
objects as they enter social and technological networks they did not foresee.69
66. See Sterne, “Sounds Like the Mall of America”; and DeNora, Music in Everyday Life,
131–50.
67. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 128–37.
68. Ibid., 132. Emphasis in original.
69. Abbate is not alone in idealizing liveness and physical copresence. See my critique of
philosopher Adriana Cavarero along these lines in Dohoney, “Antidote to Metaphysics.”

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What makes my autobiographical tidbit of interest to border thinking is

that it gives evidence of how listening experiences divert our attention and
profoundly affect our sense of self. David Hesmondhalgh questions whether
music’s role in the production of selfhood is always positive, however. He ar-
gues that contemporary modes of listening such as those I’ve described above
exemplify a form of musical subjectivity particular to neoliberal capitalism.
Drawing on the work of sociologists Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello,
Hesmondhalgh describes this subjectivity as “connexionist”: “the self is an
individual enterprise, and transitory relationships and commitments are con-
sidered more legitimate than stable ones because rapidly changing one’s con-
nections can supposedly lead to personal growth and greater self-realization,”
he writes.70 Many current technologies—Facebook, for example—dramatize
and visualize our hyperconnected selves; others like Spotify integrate social
networks with musical tastes resulting in a visualized real-time display of our
listening practices.
The Goodwill scene above is no less technologically mediated. Music ex-
erted power over the shoppers by reorienting their attention to a technologi-
cal apparatus and created a sense of presence and immediacy that drew them
away from their daily, mundane tasks. This story demonstrates that something
happens to us when we’re in the world listening. We become reoriented and
affected, brought into dialogue with memories, technologies, emotions, and
practices that alter our borders and wrap us up in experiences that we may not
be able to name or describe terribly well. Recognizing these boundary situa-
tions and finding ways to articulate how they function will go a long way to-
ward achieving an understanding of the aurality of contemporary life. As
Hesmondhagh, Hennion, and Georgina Born agree, music’s ability to blur or
maintain borders influences both our daily lives and our scholarly work. Thus,
more and more, it seems urgent that we attend to the ways in which we are
being made and remade by sound. And yet many of us shy away from reflex-
ively considering how we listen because we fear that our reflections will sound
too personal or subjective. This reticence may lead us, as Gary Tomlinson
wrote eloquently nearly two decades ago, to fall short in the ethical task of
attending to “the immense complexity of the historian’s dialogue with past
subjectivities.”71 I believe that we are at a crucial juncture and that we need to
reassess the terms of our historical dialogues lest the border between musicol-
ogy and matters of worldly concern become permanently impermeable. Given
the state of the discipline as described by Levitz, we might well wonder where
we stand in terms of our own subjective agency. Are the borders we tear down
70. Hesmondhalgh, “Towards a Critical Understanding of Music, Emotion, and Self-

Identity,” 334. See also Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit of Capitalism. See also Eric Drott’s
contribution to this colloquy for a related critique.
71. Tomlinson, “Musical Pasts and Postmodern Musicologies,” 20. On the disciplinary con-
straints on personal accounts see Guck, “Music Loving, or the Relationship with the Piece.”

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being replaced by others over which we have little control? And what might
we do about it?
Musicology on the Edge: Reflections on Medieval Borders

EMMA DILLON
This contribution offers observations about the border of the most enduring,
and frequently contested, territories of the discipline, namely, the medieval
border of the Western musical tradition: the edge that marks the beginning of
music history. For decades, it has been the starting point of staple undergradu-
ate history surveys; and in its most recent narration, Richard Taruskin’s
History of Western Music, the “curtain goes up” with the earliest notated tradi-
tions, beginning with Gregorian chant. Furthermore, by virtue of its roots in
nineteenth-century philological methodologies, the study of medieval reper-
tories marks another border: the beginnings of the field of musicology itself.
The continuous presence of the medieval border thus makes it a prime witness
to the topic of this colloquy, capable of speaking not only to the question of
what constitutes a disciplinary border, but also of the complicated and chang-
ing history of borders within musicology. During its long lifespan, it has wit-
nessed expansions and contractions, and, like the larger territory it demarcates,
it has been construed as only marginally relevant and restrictively dominant by
turns. Yet throughout all these formations and reformations, one constant re-
mains: the seemingly unassailable endurance of the medieval border, manifest
in the continuous practice of medieval-music studies in the mix of musicolo-
gies past and present. My purpose is not to rehearse the reasons for its ongo-
ing presence, or that of the historical territory it frames; nor is it to defend,
depose, or map the current position of the tradition, even though these possi-
bilities remain pressing in many quarters. Instead, I will explore what place the
practice of medieval borders may have in the border musicologies imagined by
Tamara Levitz and other contributors. Specifically, the case of medieval bor-
ders illuminates questions pertinent to Levitz’s consideration of contemporary
directions of our field: what is the place of historical musicology in a musicol-
ogy attuned to contemporary geopolitical borders, what might it contribute
to, and learn from, these emerging initiatives? Pressing here is another, more
challenging question: can, or indeed should, the historian or historically in-
clined participate in a future musicology in the border, a musicology in
which one that is acutely aware of the “material reality” and violence of to-
day’s borders?
Medieval musicology does not just mark a border of disciplinary history. It
is unequivocally in the border: a space of in-betweens. We can thus understand
the tag “medieval musicology” as a kind of abbreviation. Expanded, it opens
out onto a compound or chain of hyphenated identities, whose baseline is the

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triple-barrel of medieval musicology–musicology–medieval studies (the last of

which itself is a contraction of multiple disciplines). I borrow the hyphenated
model for expressing the interdisciplinary or relational nature of the field from
a recent study by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen on “difficult middles” in medieval
Britain, to propose a way of understanding the medieval border as a collective
comprised of distinct disciplinary or institutional identities.72 That hyphenated
status derives from the multiple disciplinary origins from which its evidence
and methodological, theoretical, and linguistic resources derive; and also from
its varied audiences for publication and presentation. It reflects, too, the
economies of academic and institutional affiliation. A medieval musicologist
working in North America may typically hold membership to the American
Musicological Society and the Medieval Academy of America, for starters.
Institutional affiliations in Departments of Music will be as “musicologist” or
“historical musicologist” alongside colleagues who identify as theorists or eth-
nomusicologists; some might have visiting rights and obligations to Medieval
Studies programs.
The hyphenated category can draw attention to potentially boundary-
shifting possibilities. For residence “in the border” can reveal a dissonance—
between modern and medieval ontologies and taxonomies: that the study of
medieval repertories can draw on so many disciplinary categories illuminates
crucial differences between contemporary and medieval ideas of music. For
example, the engagement of chant and liturgy by musicology, art and architec-
tural history, and religious history, to name but a few, is symptomatic of the
fact that chant is not so much a musical tradition, as it is a facet of devotion
habits; meanwhile, the singing voice is “vox” according to the practice of
words and grammar. Such cases exert a strain on the traditional limits of the
medieval border, pointing to the possibility of other ways to demarcate the
field. Indeed, closer scrutiny of where the medieval borderline was first in-
stated exposes it not as an originary or absolute limit at all. Taruskin’s curtain
goes up not on a beginning, but rather “in the middle”: mapped between lit-
erate and oral practices, between music practices that adapted more readily to
a version of music that came later, and those that did not. Musicology pursued
the path of literate traditions: “which not only made music history possible,
but also to a large extent determined its path.”73 Persistent though the literacy
narrative is, seen through the lens of borders, the extending of the hyphenated
chain common in medieval musicology points to the increased desirability of
shifting the border. Such a move indicates the possibility of a music before
music became Music. Border awareness is thus a directive for different begin-
nings and alternative ontologies. While such border awareness encourages
change from within, it can also influence conversations about taxonomies of
72. Cohen, Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain.

73. Taruskin, Oxford History of Western Music, 1:1.

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sound and music that ripple out far beyond the hyphenations of the medieval
border. As more recent fields such as sound studies and performance studies
grapple with musical ontologies, the example of the medieval border may
serve as a historical and historiographical touchstone.
Borders and border theories obviously have a past, and if border thinking is
to be embraced, a historically informed attitude seems desirable. Writers and
artists of the Middle Ages offer many alternate models, prompting points of
contact and contrast with contemporary borders. Borders, margins, and
frames pervade many mediums, visible in the decorated margins of manu-
scripts or cacophony of glosses that encompass and critique revered texts.
They articulate and comment upon divisions and relationships between sys-
tems of authority, geographical, racial, sexual, and religious difference to name
but a few. To be in the border was often to be hybrid or monstrous; it was a
space both dangerous and unsettling. Representations of geographical borders
in the topographical tradition of maps offer a vivid exemplum. Figure 1, from
a mid-thirteenth-century French Psalter, follows a common format, and the
looming Christ-figure is a clear cue that the map’s function is not to represent
actual space so much as to express religious ideologies. To the East, rounding
out the circular edge of the Jerusalem-dominated center, a neat border of the
so-called monstrous races or marvelous people line up like a hyphenated chain
of wonders, each of them expressing monstrosity through hybrid concatena-
tions of human and animal bodies parts.74 In their graphic challenge to ortho-
dox category of the human, they express fear and wonder of the unknown.
Similar anxiety about hybridity permeates literary evidence of experiences
of geographical and cultural territory. Here, I return to Cohen’s use of the
model of hyphenation in his study of self-identification by writers of mixed
backgrounds in twelfth-century Britain. While hyphenation works well in
modern parlance to express regional mixture (for instance, we might speak of
“Anglo-Normans”), such systems, however, “have no counterpart in medieval
terminology.”75 He goes on, explaining that “individuals of mixed ancestry
tended instead to have multiple identities available to them. The son of an
English mother and a Norman father might consider himself Norman when
hobnobbing at court, English when celebrating the history of his native coun-
try.”76 Writers like Gerard of Wales attempted to reconcile dual origins, high-
lighting how difficult it was to do so “when no terminology exists to express a
self that happens to be fabricated of grossly unequal parts.”77 The bodies in
which such composites resided were irrefutably “difficult.” Being neither one
74. A useful guide to medieval maps is Edson, Mapping Time and Space. See also Friedman,
Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought, esp. 37–58, for discussion of maps.
75. Cohen, Hybridity, 79.
76. Ibid.
77. Ibid., 80.

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Figure 1 World map, thirteenth century. London, British Library MS Add. 28681, fol. 9.
HIP/Art Resource, New York.

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nor the other, being both or all, was a disturbing place to be. Yet it was also in
such spaces that issues of identity were at their most acute, and where transfor-
mation and revelation could occur, as Caroline Walker Bynum’s work on
metamorphosis and identity has shown.78
Within medieval studies, attention to such borders and border attitudes has
spawned its own modern monsters—a scholarly community for whom cohab-
itation in the border is now commonplace. Michael Camille’s now-classic
1992 Image on the Edge is a benchmark study of the margins of medieval art,
whose broad audience is one instance of how border studies cut across old dis-
ciplinary boundaries. More recently, scholars such as Sharon Kinoshita, David
Wallace, and Ardis Butterfield have challenged the way we construct place and
language with regard medieval literary traditions, with far-reaching conse-
quences for a remapping of the tradition.79 Kinoshita’s work, for instance, de-
scribed as “medieval postcolonialism,” relocates French literature of the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries in a geographical frame that widens territories
of influence to include the Iberian peninsula and Eastern Mediterranean; her
work takes account, too, of the economics and politics of cultural exchange in
these regions. Such remappings have consequences, too, for the geography of
medieval music, indeed for any form of cultural production in this period.
Let me return to the questions of this colloquy, and to what the foray into
medieval borders suggests about the relationship of historical musicology to
the formation of musicologies born of today’s border realities. Scrutiny of
institutional histories that account for border formation, and consideration
of the evidence of border history itself, may certainly incite those active in bor-
ders of long standing to rethink “stock” narratives; and in redefining old bor-
ders, to make space for new territories. It may also serve new musicologies by
offering deeper context for ontological and taxonomical formulations. But it is
important, too, to mark a clear distinction between a historical borderism pur-
sued in medieval-music studies, and the borderism Levitz asks us to contem-
plate, one explicitly connected to today’s geopolitical realities. In keeping
those distinctions active, we may need to resist models of comparison or anal-
ogy. Instead, perhaps the more valuable lesson of the medieval borderism I
have sketched is what it says about being in the border in the academic practice
of music studies today. For it seems that, as never before, we are all, always, in
the border. Institutionally, we may live our scholarly hyphenations in singular,
discrete units, or as connected messy chains. The latter, for which there is no
real institutional terminology, let alone framework, is the harder, but also the
more productive course of action. In this space we must admit to one an-
other’s monstrosity, but recognize, too, that however dangerous monsters
may be, they are also sites of revelation and agents of change. In the border,
78. Bynum, Metamorphosis and Identity.

79. Kinoshita, Medieval Boundaries; Wallace, Premodern Places; and Butterfield, Familiar
Enemy.

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too, we might freely extend our hyphenations, guided by intellectual convic-

tion more than disciplinary prescription. It is difficult work to occupy such a
space, demanding of intensive labor to accumulate the expertise necessary to
develop the monster categories; it is difficult work, too, to make sense of an-
other’s monstrous concoction. But being in this border is a different kind of
labor, a different kind of difficult, to the borders evoked by Levitz and theo-
rized by Vaughan-Williams and Agamben. To effect a structural shift within
our borders has its own demands, and implications for institutional and intel-
lectual infrastructures. Yet we may undertake such shifts working within insti-
tutional environments considerably less perilous than the borders with which
many have to contend. These examples of musicology in the border may be
yet far from the trajectories envisioned by Levitz—of musicological borders
more violent and unsettling than are currently accommodated—but they
come with an opportunity: now more than ever, to model a borderism that re-
sists certain restrictive pasts of our field, and which in its monstrosity is deter-
minedly counter to the violent space of so many of today’s living borders.
(De)Constructing Musicology’s Borders along the Color Line

MATTHEW D. MORRISON
Since attending my first national American Musicological Society conference

in 2007 as an Eileen Southern Travel Fund recipient, I have witnessed a signif-
icant expansion in the boundaries of the discipline. Within this time, the soci-
ety has, at its national meetings, held a Presidential Forum on Diversity
sponsored by then president Charles M. Atkinson, and a special session on
approaches to race and ethnicity sponsored by the Committee on Cultural
Diversity.80 Musicological journals have expanded to include a larger diversity
of topics and authors. The AMS has recently supported monographs that
push the discipline’s subject matter, as well as its geographical and method-
ological borders. This JAMS colloquy, furthermore, suggests that the society is
taking seriously the subject of how it polices and protects its own borders.
Undoubtedly, North American musicology’s growth within this short time is
to be duly recognized. It seems as though we are at a place where we can now
consider seriously the possibilities of the discipline expanding beyond its tradi-
tional borders and fields of inquiry.
Yet as I write this response, there is a certain reality that is impossible for me
to ignore: my position as an African-American (henceforth “black”) male PhD
candidate in historical musicology. While I recognize that this is a position of
privilege that allows me to imagine a space and discipline without borders, my
almost singularity within the society forces me at the same time to reflect on
both the protection and policing of these very borders that I—through my
80. Presidential Forum, 2007; and “Musical Aesthetics of Race and Ethnicity.”

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scholarship and scholarly activism—seek to permeate.81 Before musicologists

can earnestly contemplate a “musicology beyond borders,” I think they must
first address one of its most sustaining and complex components: race. An in-
visible color line is built into musicology’s institutional foundations, and it is
this line that determines which subjects and people are considered worthy or
unworthy of entry into the discipline. I hope to render this line visible so that
it might be eradicated. Only when musicologists begin to question the struc-
tures that support the results of this eradication will they be able to welcome
fully new approaches, topics, inquiries, and people into the discipline—leading
to a state of what Levitz calls permanent “dwelling in the border.”
My desire to dismantle racial boundaries within the discipline must be seen
from my own perspective as a racialized subject both within the academy and
in society at large. Despite the hopes and dreams incited by the election of
a black President in 2008, the tragedy is that both the discipline and the
academy still function within the United States as a racial state. The (c)overt
policing of the nation’s geographical and institutional borders resembles that
of borders within musicology. As a black male PhD student in musicology, I
am constantly forced to reckon with the borders of race in my quotidian expe-
riences, which are inseparable from my experiences within the elite, predomi-
nately white spaces of academia. Whether I am being racially profiled and
“stopped and frisked” by police on the streets of New York City, or being
made acutely aware of the lack of scholars of color and related topics at the so-
ciety’s national conference, both situations cause me to realize the importance
of critiquing the construction and impact of race within musicology and its
discourses in order to move beyond its limitations and borders.
Considering the role of race in constructing musicology’s current

borders
In 2006, the AMS completed a demographic survey of its membership that
appeared in the fall 2007 AMS newsletter.82 According to the survey, 3,300
members were invited, and 2,250 members responded. From the data pro-
vided, the racial demographics reflected a discipline with an 85.97 percent
white membership, with over half of the members between the ages of forty
and sixty-nine. With only 9 percent of the membership identifying as non-
white ethnicities, and only 1.33 percent identifying as black, a question raised
by Ellie Hisama at the 2009 AMS conference in Philadelphia persistently rings
in my ears: “Might the society’s continued extreme lack of racial diversity in its
ranks, faculty and graduate students alike, account partially for the relative lack
81. By “singularity,” I do not mean to claim exceptionalism, but instead to convey the fact
that the number of black male graduate students in attendance has never exceeded what I could
count on a single hand since I began attending AMS conferences in 2007.
82. “AMS Demographic Survey.”

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of attention to race in the profession?” This leads to another question one

could ask in 2012: Is there even awareness that there is a “lack of attention” to
race in the profession? As I delved into musicological texts in my early gradu-
ate studies through coursework and in preparation for general examinations, I
became acutely aware that North American musicologists are little concerned
with topics related to racialized subjects and virtually totally disinterested in
critical approaches that consider race and its conceptual impact on music and
sound. Early in my career, I wondered what many scholars of color have won-
dered before me: could the lack of diversity influence my own feelings of
scholarly and personal isolation within the discipline?83
I was encouraged by “diversity” panels at the AMS annual conferences in
2007 and 2009, but as I continued my studies, the persistence of “whiteness”
within the discipline’s membership and scholarship, in addition to the lack of
large-scale efforts to change this situation, made me question whether musi-
cology was the place for a black, male scholar of music. After experiencing my
own musicological identity crisis, I looked for guidance to scholars of color
within the discipline and to their work, as well as to other scholars sensitive to
my unique position as a black musicologist. All of the people with whom I
spoke noted that if I did not claim my position and if I deserted the discipline,
my voice, as well as my unique identity, would be lost, and my individual expe-
rience would continue to be underrepresented within musicological discourse.
In order to assess more critically my own experience of and feelings about
the discipline, I knew I had to test them against empirical data. How did my
personal experience fit within the larger reality of the discipline? By completing
some empirical surveys, I hoped to gain a fuller understanding of where North
American musicologists currently stand in their attempts to expand the bor-
ders of the discipline through critical considerations of race and racialized
subjects. Table 1 shows what percentage of various important mediums of
musicological communication addressed racial/ethnic issues and/or racialized
subjects in the past two years.84 The sixteen pie charts in Figure 2 show these
figures as percentages of the whole.
To take race seriously within the project of expanding the boundaries of the
discipline would mean to document candidly, and raise consciousness about,
the direct connection between the number of doctoral students completing
dissertations on topics related to race and racialized subjects, the curriculum
and exams of graduate students in musicology, the tenured professors available
83. See Hisama, “Review of Musicology and Difference”; Lewis, “Americanist Musicology”;
McGinty, “Black Scholars on Black Music”; Ramsey, “Pot Liquor Principle”; and Southern,
“Interview with James Standifer.”
84. While this study was focused on considerations of race/ethnicity and racialized subjects,
similar demographic surveys of gender, class, and sexuality within the discipline would likely yield
comparable results. I collected this data by defining as “race” articles, dissertations, talks, or books
that focused on a racialized/ethnic and/or non-western subjects, or that contained sustained re-
flection on critical race theories. I used the sources shown in Table 1.

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Table 1 Percentages of Selected Vehicles of Musicological Discourse Addressing Racial/Ethnic

Issues and/or Racialized Subjects in the Past Two Years
2010 2011
Source race/total race/total
Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology 12/105 4/79

Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Fellowship Recipients 1/4 2/6
American Musicological Society Program and Abstracts; 10/67 7/76
Indianapolis 2010; San Francisco 2011
Publications supported by AMS Publication Subventions 8/23 6/22
Journal of Musicological Research 30 (2010) and 31 (2011) 3/10 2/11
Journal of the American Musicological Society 63 (2010) and 1/9 3/13
64 (2011) [if the colloquies are considered as a single item]
Journal of Musicology 27 (2010) and 28 (2011) 0/14 1/13
Current Musicology 89 (Spring 2010), 90 (Fall 2010), 2/6 4/7
and 91 (Spring 2011): 2010:2/6; 2011:4/7
to advise topics on race, the editors of musicological and academic publica-

tions who encourage and regularly publish work on topics related to race, the
committees selected to decide what subjects and methods will be presented at
conferences and awarded further recognition, the members in elected posi-
tions within the society, and ultimately, the diversity of topics and people
within musicology as a whole. The fairly low (although in some cases, increas-
ing) percentages of racial/ethnic topics represented in Figure 2 suggest that
more direct and active recruitment efforts are necessary to attract minority
candidates to the (musicological) academy, thereby diversifying the pool of
those who will develop the specialized knowledge necessary to considering
sound and music, and who will be able to contribute to reconstructing the
boundaries of the discipline. Recruitment would “kill two birds with one
stone,” in the sense that increased diversity in the discipline would lead to in-
creased diversity in the objects of study and methodologies, and allow the dis-
cipline to become even more expansive as minority and majority scholars
come into closer contact through daily interactions in the classroom and at so-
ciety meetings, as well as through their written work. The potential of such an
increase in minority representation and interaction could both implode and
explode the borders of the discipline.
Considering the future role of race in (re)structuring musicology’s

borders
The dynamic scholarly interaction that could potentially occur is aptly demon-
strated by this very colloquy. Tamara Levitz’s proposal to question the borders
of musicology within the society’s primary journal and Annegret Fauser’s ac-
ceptance of such inquiries as editor reflects both a concern and awareness for

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Figure 2a Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology
Figure 2b Alvin H. Johnson AMS 50 Fellowship Recipients
Figure 2c American Musicological Society Program and Abstracts: Indianapolis 2010; San
Francisco 2011
Figure 2 Percentages of various important mediums of musicological communication ad-

dressing racial/ethnic issues and/or racialized subjects in the past two years

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Figure 2d Publications supported by AMS Publication Subventions
Figure 2e Journal of Musicological Research 30 (2010) and 31 (2011)
Figure 2f Journal of the American Musicological Society 63 (2010) and 64 (2011) [if the
colloquies are considered as a single item]
Figure 2 continued

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Figure 2g Journal of Musicology 27 (2010) and 28 (2011)
Figure 2h Current Musicology 89 (Spring 2010), 90 (Fall 2010), and 91 (Spring 2011)
Figure 2 continued
change within the discourse and society. Furthermore, Levitz’s keen awareness
as a scholar and former AMS program chair led her to factor race into this dis-
cussion, as well as to invite a musicologist whose individual experiences as a
racialized person within the discipline might increase and expand the perspec-
tives offered.85
Yet even as I am aware of the dialogue created by participating in this collo-
quy, I cannot ignore the fact that there are still only a handful of black (male)
musicologists in the discipline—even fewer than in many other professions
and disciplines. I cannot ignore the societal structures that make it difficult for
minorities, particularly blacks and Latinos, to find themselves in musicological
programs in the first place. I cannot ignore the feeling that a small group
85. Levitz, “Philadelphia Program Selection.”

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of people decide who and what constitutes the discipline and actively (or
passively) protect its borders. I cannot ignore the urgent need to diversify the
ranks of the discipline in an effort to further expand its borders.
If senior ethnomusicologist Jacqueline C. Djedje had not visited my weekly
music seminar for majors as an undergraduate student at the Historically Black
Institution, Morehouse College, it is possible that I would never have consid-
ered the prospect of pursuing any type of musicology as a profession. If my ad-
visors had not encouraged me to attend the national AMS conference during
my first year of graduate study, and to apply for the Eileen Southern travel
fund, I would not have met minority and majority scholars and students sensi-
tive to my unique position, and I might not have felt a commitment to remain
in the discipline after attaining my Master’s degree. If there had not been
mentors in the field, particularly mentors of color, to encourage my work and
pursuits within musicology, I ultimately might not have thought it necessary
as editor-in-chief of Current Musicology to expand actively the borders of the
discipline by devoting an entire special issue of the journal to sound, race, and
performance.86
For musicology’s borders to be expanded, those who have the power to
expand the discipline into yet uncharted territory have an obligation to
articulate—with resounding clarity—the relationship between individuals who
choose to become a part of the discipline, musicologists at large, and the sub-
ject matter of musicological discourse. Only when greater consciousness is
raised about the historic development and structural premises that result in
the ethnic, gender, class, and racial demographics of the field will my voice,
body, and inquiries operate less in or on the borders of the discipline and move
into the center, creating unlimited potential for collective conversations, and
for sharing with others an equally unlimited multitude of perspectives and
methods.
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Tamara Levitz, Et Al., "Colloquy Musicology Beyond Borders,"

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Musicology Beyond Borders?

Author(s): Tamara Levitz, Convenor

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Musicology Beyond Borders?

What Inclusiveness Excludes 825

Working on the Boundaries: Translation Studies, National

¿“Reinventar” la musicología para América Latina? 834

“Reinventing” Musicology for Latin America? 837

Musicology on the Edge: Reflections on Medieval Borders 844

(De)Constructing Musicology’s Borders along the Color Line 849

Works Cited 856

North American musicology appears to be in a period of giddy expansionism.

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spective of Limology or Border Studies. Vaughan-Williams describes how be-

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What Inclusiveness Excludes

As Tamara Levitz argues in her introduction to this colloquy, musicology is

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to safeguard repertoires and methods at risk of being washed away by a flood

14. Tomlinson, “Musicology, Anthropology, History.”

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of “a general ethnomusicology.”17 Or Born’s call to institute a “relational mu-

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minant shapes musical practice—an appeal I whole-heartedly endorse.25 But,

25. Magee, “Rethinking Social Class,” 696–99.

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Working on the Boundaries: Translation Studies, National

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Historically, translation studies emerged as a subdiscipline within literary

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To explore such translational possibilities in concrete terms, let us consider

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38. Ratzabi, Between Zionism and Judaism.

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media of recording and transcription; among Lachmann’s research priorities,

¿“Reinventar” la musicología para América Latina?

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compartimentos al uso, me permito tomar como centro de mi participación la

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Se impone en esta reflexión sobre las fronteras en la musicología la formula-

“Reinventing” Musicology for Latin America?

49. Eli Rodríguez, “Hacia una funcionalidad mayor,” 57.

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intellectuals—for segregating Latin American cultures and opposing them to

54. Eli Rodríguez, “Hacia una funcionalidad mayor,” 57.

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Borderline Subjects, Musical Objects

57. Eli Rodríguez, “Hacia una funcionalidad mayor,” 57.

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What makes my autobiographical tidbit of interest to border thinking is

70. Hesmondhalgh, “Towards a Critical Understanding of Music, Emotion, and Self-

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Musicology on the Edge: Reflections on Medieval Borders

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triple-barrel of medieval musicology–musicology–medieval studies (the last of

72. Cohen, Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain.