Making Musicology

At first glance, this colloquy’s assignment to authors of the “primary” essays may seem like an invitation to indulge in what Nicholas Mathew and Mary Ann Smart call “quirk historicism,” in which “the objets trouvés and historical micronarratives that once obediently fell into contextual patterns or acted as isolated anecdotes have staged a kind of mutiny, multiplying in the service of a narrative logic that overwhelms and even supplants any larger critical goals.”1 Fortunately, it also appears that, taken together, the primary essays in this colloquy push back on the potential for ruminations on so-called musical objects to elide such “larger critical goals,” taking seriously the political and ethical considerations that critics of quirk historicism endorse.One aspect of this resistance is a reflexive critique of what constitutes a musical object in the first place, since the entextualization of musical objects is not only an authorial but also an authoritative act. Chávez is “suspicious of the term ‘object of study’ given the epistemic violence wrapped up in that phrase, and thus evades the designation as it concerns the US–Mexico border,” directing readers toward the lessons of “scholarly perspectives . . . that have ultimately troubled objectifying compulsions.” Wells similarly interrogates how scholars conceive of their objects, writing that “the near-instant availability of rich artifacts and the connections we can quickly make and curiosities we can spark and (ostensibly) satisfy while rapidly traversing media platforms both old and new have certainly impacted not only the questions we ask, but also the objects of which we ask them.”This awareness offers a first step in the task, as stated in the invitation email from Jake Johnson, for the “secondary” scholars like me: to develop “an argument and/or a meditation on values central to American music scholarship.” But if the status of the object is not easily settled, what then of “American music scholarship” and the “values” that would serve as its centripetal force? I don’t presume to be able to define such scholarship or its values by extrapolating from a sample size of sixteen. To better account for what this selection of authors and topics might represent, here are a few observations:Given these last two considerations, we might think of the primary essays as a means of speaking back to a political moment in which powerful actors seek to constrain definitions of the “American” and the kinds of topics, approaches, and objects that should be deemed worthy of study and promotion. These essays offer ethically and politically informed alternatives to reductive notions about what properly constitutes the “American” while also critiquing how (and why) objects of inquiry might be conceived as such.In what follows, I privilege the “meditation” part of my charge and treat this as an opportunity to comment on a few compelling themes these authors take up. If there’s anything these pieces have in common, it’s that each author wants to draw attention to something or someone that might otherwise go unnoticed or be forgotten—by other scholars and critics, by listeners and spectators, by governmental and institutional authorities, or even by the people at the heart of their analyses. Some other, frequently overlapping themes with which authors critically engage include kinship, space/place, the Othering of peoples within and outside the US, Indigeneity, racial politics, slavery, imperialism, colonialism, militarism, and entrepreneurialism. These essays also involve elements of surprise, which take a variety of forms to which I will now turn.In her book The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny, anthropologist Susan Lepselter describes resonance as “the intensification produced by the overlapping, back and forth call of signs from various discourses” and as “just-glimpsed connections and hidden structures that are felt to shimmer below the surface of things.”2 This conception of resonance, grounded in linguistic-anthropological approaches to poetics, underpins how both she and her interlocutors connect and make sense of things that, absent the storyteller’s interventions, would appear to be unrelated.3 When reading the primary essays and drafting my notes for this piece, the word “unexpected” kept coming to mind: It was my response to objects of analysis I hadn’t anticipated, sounds that took listeners by surprise, new discoveries made in the course of research, and how connections to other stories and overarching themes were drawn. The narrative construction of each essay necessarily emerges from the instances of resonance that authors both recognize “out there” and fabricate through their own processes of writing. When Wells notes that “every piece of this ad offers its own we are that such stories not and for the are from of the object in and its we seek to these a sense of that of sense of resonance to the sense of that an the back to what Nicholas a sense of and how and such it is to be with an of the of the essays in this colloquy toward the of and that emerges through the resonance narrative and of but two in as the with its of and narrative describes the in as a of with of the it to and what appears to be the to this is the word in the by people and by of the was about the the of and a of and other for on of these were as or and for this or to these and as how (and the people and how the of both informed and the of peoples by the the and and music with the to for the “an of the to and thus At the as might a not to these to as and a by an of and serve to the of but it also an to their an even of the in account of The which as a of on its an or the in a its the This is the not only for the of the but also its quickly that it is not or but of what of and The the with its of and and in the moment of and are the by the that the also to a The of this to its in part from the its and a it to about a within “the of and to by any felt sense of Lepselter that the object of the or a that “the to be as to but felt and When how to something that I and . . . like the awareness of and that may to the of of the is its other are other The in essay take up with and UFOs and it into the for a the draw of the to on their the in the narrative the in the of musical The of a the is in a kind of and for its offers a to the of this with of the and the authors in this colloquy recognize in their a that their own that is within an of The in her a a of a and a and the music and to which would be of the that people for from the in which people in music forms were as or the that for the in by that and like that in to that the of the into a the musical of the to of its in a that the of the of and the and the can serve not only as a to the at but also as a of as both a of analysis and an to writing offers such as in essay she notes that the of and that is that both and the of taken how to their own as its she to are in on the the and would this of is also a central part of essay on for It this within of the that, with the and the by the of how the and of with the of the and the the of in such a listeners and of a like these have of a kind of a that a sense of felt the of that essay into the of that I in a variety of in this the of and music is in a of these but are other of The object of to for her “the and each the the of each the in and the of each the not only the but also the and that to that might otherwise go hidden or The can be of for and Wells the and of The and a attention to the by both to in new and to a into the of as as that of the of a that is with “the of the of in the violence of and also the of and that through the and the If we are to of “values” central to music 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