Bridging Emerging and Established Approaches to Music Research

Bob Kosovsky

The annual conference of the Music Library Association was held last week.  They had streaming of all sessions held in particular room. (I'm glad to see streaming is becoming a near-regular activity of even smaller conferences.) For me the most thought-provoking session was the panel "Bridging Emerging and Established Approaches to Music Research."  Here's the summary from the program:

"Approaches to understanding music have undergone vast changes in the last quarter century. Feminist, anthropological, and deconstructionist theories—among many others—transformed musicology in the 1980s and 90s, while a rise in digital innovations and their applications during the new millennium has remade the face of inquiry in the humanities. The kinds of resources used by researchers and performers have similarly changed dramatically in form, content, and function. In spite of these changes the adoption of particular methods by scholars in the field and students in the classroom has been uneven.

This panel will feature three speakers whose backgrounds are in music history, theory, and librarianship. They will address ways in which interdisciplinary methodologies, theories, and digital innovations can be applied across the music discipline and how this may impact traditional music research instruction and pedagogy. A round-table discussion will follow the panel in order to generate input and ideas from the participants. This panel will be part of a series traveling to other music research societies such as AMS, SEM, SAM, and CMS where a broad spectrum of approaches to research and uses of resources will be surveyed. We plan that the panels and discussions that follow will provide the basis for a publication exploring major established and emerging approaches that have informed music research and that will continue to do so in the future."

(You'll note that SMT is not one of the named societies.) Te summary sounds dry to my ears; the session was really quite enlightening--even exciting--and broached topics that have been discussed on AMS-L and here on SMT Discuss, including the relevancy of the way musicology is practiced and whether it has any meaning for society in general.  (Just substitute "music theory" or "analysis" for any of the times the speakers mention "musicology" - a term they all find too restrictive.)

Despite being an 85 minute session, the streaming service (Ustream) divided all sessions into hour-long portions, so you'll need to view two videos to see the entire session and the question-and-answer period (which was rather long).

The session begins in the first video at 5:55:  http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/84073685

The second video continues:  http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/84075518