Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship

Two decades after the publication of several landmark scholarly collections on music and difference, musicology has largely accepted difference-based scholarship. This collection of essays by distinguished contributors is a major contribution to this field, covering the key issues and offering an array of individual case studies and methodologies. It also grapples with the changed intellectual landscape since the 1990s. Criticism of difference-based knowledge has emerged from within and outside the discipline, and musicology has had to confront new configurations of difference in a changing world. This book addresses these and other such challenges in a wide-ranging theoretical introduction that situates difference within broader debates over recognition and explores alternative frameworks, such as redistribution and freedom. Voicing a range of perspectives on these issues, this collection reveals why differences and similarities among people matter for music and musical thought.

Olivia Bloechl is an Associate Professor in the Department of Musicology at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Native American Song at the Frontiers of Early Modern Music (Cambridge, 2008) and Opera and the Political Imaginary in Old Regime France (2018), which was supported by an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship.

Melanie Lowe is Associate Professor of Musicology at the Blair School of Music at Vanderbilt University, Tennessee. The author of Pleasure and Meaning in the Classical Symphony (2007), she is widely published on Haydn and other eighteenth-century subjects, topic theory, music in American media, teen-pop culture, and music history pedagogy.

Jeffrey Kallberg is Professor of Music History and Associate Dean for Arts and Letters at the University of Pennsylvania. The author of Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre, he has published also on Verdi, Sibelius, and on the intersections between music and the history of sexuality. He has served as Vice President of the American Musicological Society, and earned National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and Guggenheim Fellowships.