I like musicologists. I like books and journals of musicology, musicology conferences and symposia, dinners with musicological colleagues near and far, musicological gossip and chit-chat. I like the concrete manifestations of musicology in the world. But I do not love that abstraction, “the discipline of musicology.” Like every academic discipline, musicology is nice in the concrete but lousy in the abstract.

A discipline is the claim of the general against the particular, the many against the one. It represents a limit placed on individual intellectual autonomy. For this reason alone I would not cross the street to save “the discipline” if were being attacked by a giant octopus.

Let’s face it, I only wrote that last sentence so I could use this image.

When you come upon a piece of scholarship that looks relevant to something you’re working on and yet also looks like it will take a tiresome lot…