Rethinking Music

'Music may be what we think it is'. Philip Bohlman writes at the beginning of the first chapter; 'it may not be'. That catches the tone of this book very well.
The history of musicology and music theory in our generation is one of loss of confidence; we no longer know what we know. And this immediately throws into doubt the comfortable distinction between the objective description of fact and the subjective judgement of value--an assumption whose power can hardly be underestimated. It underlies many of the day-to-day activities with which the discipline of musicology is concerned, from the choice of concert programmes to the marking of student assignments, from the selection of research topics to the refereeing of journal articles. It is only to be expected, then, that musicologists will recoil at the implications of Bohlman's statement: they may feel that they know what music is, that they can recognize a worthwhile research proposal when they see one, and that they do not need someone else to expose their own ideological positions. Indeed, they may not consider that they occupy any ideological positions at all.