Although contemporary study of music is rarely hermetic, in the wider academic sphere and in the popular media it is often taken to be so, such that music is sometimes ‘forced’ into interdisciplinary links with medicine, or physics, etc. in order to justify its existence and attract scarce research funding. The prime value of this series will be to help to dispel this prior image, to demonstrate that the study of music has only very rarely been about nothing other than ‘the music itself’. But barely less important, it will demonstrate, particularly for students and emerging faculty, how this interdisciplinary nature is manifested, in both the past and the present.
This series will provide a range of self-aware considerations of music's critical practices, with the intention being to intervene, in a small way, in the development of the study of music. No artificial limitations will be imposed, as to geography, history or the culture of the music being addressed.
Themes addressed by the series will include, but are not restricted to:
