Epistemological Stagflation and the Crisis of Democracy in Contemporary Music Research

This chapter uses the discourse of musicological lateness as an index of the changing capacity of contemporary music production in European universities to function as a source of institutional critique, and then stakes out a dissenting perspective on the political economy of music research today to show how historiographical and epistemological feelings have changed since musicology began to lag. Critique is framed in a ‘non-modern’ perspective emphasising the actions of institutions and governments as machines drifting closer or farther from states of equilibrium, rather than a modernist perspective privileging dialectical, subject-centred struggle against a ‘static’ past. The point is not to dismiss the ways that contemporary music theory has changed, but to show that musicological difference today is still actively produced around an entrenched set of institutional fractures, and to identify new critical questions about the political economy of music research today.