This article examines the “Lives in Musicology” column in Acta Musicologica (introduced in 2017 by Federico Celestini and Philip V. Bohlman) as a lens for reflecting on the discipline of musicology. Eight renowned scholars – including pioneers in musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory – from the United States, Europe, East Asia, Africa, and Australia – revisited their careers, revealing the construction and trajectory of the field. Their autobiographical accounts, analyzed through the theory of autobiography by Jaume Aurell, trace the discipline’s expansion from the Western canon to diverse research areas, the establishment of new concepts, and the radical shift in Acta Musicologica editorial policy from conservative positivism focused on the Germanic canon toward a pluricultural and multilingual global musicology.
Tatjana Marković (Wed,) studied this question.