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From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology.

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From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology. By Derek B. Scott, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. [258 p. ISBN 0-19-515195-X. $65 (hbk.); 0-19-515196-8. $35 (pbk.).] Music examples, illustrations, index.

It does not seem all that long ago that Susan McClary said "when cultural-studies methods first appeared in musicology fifteen years ago, they triggered a storm of polemics that sometimes overshadowed the important issues being raised. As the canon wars recede, however, scholars are finding it possible to focus on the concerns that led them to cultural criticism in the first place: the study of music and its political meanings" (Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, ed. Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000], back cover). In her forward to the volumes in the Routledge series Critical and Cultural Musicology, Martha Feldman claimed that "Musicology has undergone a sea change in recent years." Indeed, Derek Scott's book can be seen as a continuation of a growing body of critical musicology dedicated to examining issues that have been marginalized by musicologists such as ideology, identity, gender, and racial representation in Western music. To this end, Scott asserts that musicology is no longer an autonomous field of academic inquiry, but has entered a phase of "postdisciplinarity" (p. 4), and a vibrant intellectual movement in the interdisciplinary field of the arts, sciences, and humanities.

Scott embraces the notion that the rise of critical musicology was...

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