Page "Music history" Paragraph 17

Within historical musicology, scholars have been reluctant to adopt postmodern and critical approaches that are common elsewhere in the humanities.

According to Susan McClary ( 2000, p. 1285 ) the discipline of " music lags behind the other arts ; it picks up ideas from other media just when they have become outmoded.

" Only in the 1990s did historical musicologists, preceded by feminist musicologists in the late 1980s, begin to address issues such as gender, sexualities, bodies, emotions, and subjectivities which dominated the humanities for twenty years before ( ibid, p. 10 ).

In McClary's words ( 1991, p. 5 ), " It almost seems that musicology managed miraculously to pass directly from pre-to postfeminism without ever having to change-or even examine-its ways.

" Furthermore, in their discussion on musicology and rock music, Susan McClary and Robert Walser also address a key struggle within the discipline: how musicology has often " dismisse questions of socio-musical interaction out of hand, that part of classical music's greatness is ascribed to its autonomy from society.

" ( 1988, p. 283 )