Bruno Nettl lays out a summary history of the discipline.

Discussing the various thinkers that precede

Addler but nonetheless still fail to create an identity of the scholarship such as Addler managed to.
Nettl identifies various criticisms of these early scholarships; the contemporaneous society
structuring how these academics went out into the world. He categorises them along 3 areas:
imperialism, nationalism, and a synthesis of those two. For me while his critiques may be just they
are merely aesthetic rather than critical. The lack of any epistemological analysis of the discipline
leads to a fatal flaw for me. The flawed thesis, antithesis and synthesis that Nettl draws in the
conclusion leads to missing that the contemporary contexts that Nettl identifies are not the cause of
the limitations that he notes in the early scholarship but are rather a consequence of the same
fundamental epistemology as the frontierism of that early scholarship. Ironically this lapse is due to
that same continued epistemology, which while aesthetically palliated still maintains its blind spots.

The feminising presence of woman that degrades the legitimacy of the society

Gender marks women as not men. The universality of men

Women in music have two stories where as men have one. There differences between these
narratives marks one as the other and precludes it from the “musical” discipline as the musical
component is diluted. The usual focus on life and works. One cant have a simple biography instead
you get a commentary, something less objective and legitimate.

The gendered story of the American musicological society can be told through the masculine anxiety
and/or the feminine marginalisation

The marginalisation within the discipline reinforces it within “real” life

Erotic power of music

the art of music

Speak for others: musicology presumes to speak for performers, educators, compoers, and for ‘the
music itself’

Cusick discuses the way that gender was constructive to and by the inception of the American
musicological society through the story of Ruth Crawford. How it can be both told through the
masculine anxieties of impotence and efemmemania and/or the feminine marginalisation. The
points on the dual narratives of feminine stories vs the singular nature of the counterpart is a lucid
example of the marking of “woman”-ness. Which carries into the anxieties around the erotic power
of music and then into the hierarchy around the art/science of music. Cusick claims that feminist
music makes not pretences of detached objectivity, rather relishes in its open political enquiry. We
see this clearly in the comparison to the limited analysis of Nettl. Cusick is able to identify how there
are epistemological limitations and through lines that blind the purview of musicology as a discipline.
She is able to point at the systematic causes and how those systems and the scholarship interact to
justify each other teleologically. Purely through a more concerted effort to be material rather than
rational/detached in her analysis.