Did you say ‘music’? Exploring the relationship between narratives on musicology and ontological assumptions of music

Narratives about musicology are often determined by the definition of what music scholars consider music is and what kind of music is worth studying. Furthermore, as Philippe Bohlman asserts, a certain vision of the history of music is shaped by beliefs that «the music of the West, at least as it is imagined, performed, ordered, taught, and inherited by the generations, is a music that is inherently historical» (Bohlman 2013, 1). These beliefs have shaped narratives on musicology as a discipline. Howe- ver, in recent years a growing number of researchers have fostered self-reflecting and interdisciplinary dialogues between musicology, ethnomusicology and popular music studies. One of the results of these efforts has been the exploration of our own auditory cultures and ontological assumptions about music, revealing both me- taphysical conditions of music and its possibilities to act as a symbolic order in the social field (Bohlman 1999; 2013; Born 2010; Kane 2015). While these questions have been central issues in ethnomusicology since the establishment of the discipline (Nettl 2015, 19–30), recent interest in multiple ontologies of music can significantly challenge how musicology conceives its objects and historiography. This paper ex- plores the interaction between self-reflecting scholarly practices in musicology and its objects, such as music and auditory cultures. Analysing ontological assumptions about the music and compositional practices from composers from the twentieth and twentieth-first centuries, this paper examines the role of these interactions in shaping and evolving narratives about contemporary music, musicology and scho- lars themselves.