Disciplining Music ─ Musicology and Its Canons

Provocative and timely, Disciplining Music confronts a topic that has sparked considerable debate in recent years: how do musicians and music scholars "discipline" music in their efforts to confer order and meaning on it? This collection of essays addresses this issue by formulating questions about music's canons - rules that measure and order, negotiate cultural constraints, reconstruct the past, and shape the future. Written by scholars representing the fields of historical musicology, ethnomusicology and music theory, many of the essays tug and push at the very boundaries of these traditional divisions within the study of music.
These essays, taken together, suggest that music's canons need to proliferate to broaden our discourse about music to include, for example, women, non-Western cultures, or even repertories of music that seemingly resist canons.