Musicology's Second Death(s)

Prompted by inflamed reactions to a variety of musicological events and publications, in recent years the role of music studies as a scholarly field within the humanities, and as an academic discipline with a specific historiographical tradition, has been put into question and even declared dead. Calls for a renewal of its theoretical apparatus, or for a return to its presumed origins, are not a new phenomenon, though. As this article shows by tracing the narratives about its history in the West, the discipline has always demonstrated a particular inclination for self-reflexivity, featuring cyclic instances of crisis and recovery which ultimately account for its very own state of being. By re-reading the history of the discipline in the United States and Europe (with a focus on the 'Italian difference' as case study) through the lens of Lacanian theory, this essay aims at redefining the intellectual coordinates of musicology's 'split identity, particularly in relation to the other fields within the humanities, and to understand its anxiety with language and critical theory.