Ethnomusicology and historical musicology are experiencing a moment, if not of convergence, than of a kind of leaning into one another. While ethnomusicology seems to be reassessing the centrality of the ethnographic present, historical musicology has turned toward studying non-European repertories and their global transmission, particularly in the Early Modern period, and has become increasingly oriented towards the notion of a global music history. In short, the traditional binary distinction that ethnomusicology studies the music of living people outside the West and musicology the music of dead people within it, seems to have eroded.

​

What we face in the current moment, however, is not merely the inclusion of new objects of study into the disciplines’ traditional methods of study. Instead, methodologies, structuring philosophies, and underlying ideological principles are all being increasingly called into question. For example, what impact does historical research have on the accepted role of ethnography in ethnomusicology?  And how does historical musicology include unnotated (and possibly unrecorded) traditions in the historical record? Behind these questions lurk specters of colonialism and cultural hierarchies. While these issues have been increasingly acknowledged and debated in recent years, different understandings of how to work in (and out of) the shadow of our traditional research and institutional orientations have put the subdisciplines under intense pressure, both in scholarship and in the classroom.

​

The increasing alignment between the disciplines notwithstanding, the emergence of a new methodological and philosophical orthodoxy is unlikely – and perhaps also undesirable. Perhaps the next convergence, as current trends suggest, will map new networks of dynamic heterogeneity, multiplicity, and flexibility — plural, unruly, but still in dialogue.

In this conference, we seek to discover the horizons of this new disciplinary formation — what we are calling “the critical musicologies.” Where do they end? What is their relationship, for example, with performance, with music theory? How do the affordances and obstacles of the academy affect the concrete activities and the material basis of the doing of the critical musicologies, in pedagogy, in curriculum, in music performance, and in the employment of academic musicologists? How is the institution itself an object of critical inquiry?