This piece
is part memoir, part fiction, part expository.
It asks: Are music and musicology necessarily anthropocentric? Or is it possible to get away from ourselves,
the human, as the ultimate “point” (launching point and end point) of
music? I’m not out to champion some kind
of scientistic “objectivity” as a musicological perspective, only to ask if
humanity is really all that music is and all that it is for. Since most of my experience with humanity is
my experience as myself, I’ve tried to approach the question of
anthropocentrism via that experience, turning a spotlight on myself as a
musicking representative of anthropos. The result is a story told in fragments, with
the aid of certain tropes, that is also a critique of my earlier musicological
work, in which I deconstructed the musical-aesthetic category “sound
object.” Though this work centered on
musical terminology that both encourages and gives the lie to
anthropocentricism as the “essence” of musical practice, the perspective from
which this work was done, my perspective,
is anthropocentric and necessarily
so, since the work constitutes part of my attempt to survive in the world of
academia. This perspective is therefore
stubborn, thin-skinned, mercurial, arbitrary, and absurd. I consider this piece experimental in the
sense that it poses a question to which there may be no solution: How can we
set ourselves aside? The style of the
piece attempts to enact rather than argue, and as such incurs the risk of not
saying anything at all.
This essay is currently under review by Current Musicology.
