Recent Music History Scholarship: Pleasures and Drawbacks

Extract

We academics who write about music, something often eminently enjoyable, are privileged people. It doesn't mean that we sit around spending an inordinate amount of time grooving to various recordings, although this kind of activity is not unknown to exist. Many historians fall in love with their subject matter to some extent, while keeping a sense of impartiality in their work, but perhaps with music this affection is easier to cultivate compared to other subjects. During my two decades in academia, I have noticed that some seem to want to justify their working in such a field by infusing their writing with impenetrable jargon and theory known only to a few hundred fellow travellers, making the research they publish largely indecipherable to the general reading public. It's as if they're intimating that there must be an existential price to pay for daring to write about a subject that some (incorrectly) see as only pleasurable, that obfuscation needs to be applied to make work about music seem sufficiently serious for academics to justify doing it.