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In what direction is musicology moving during the last quarter of the twentieth century? Do its practitioners concentrate upon the description of the immanent structures of music, or are they trying to integrate the psychological, sociological, and anthropological aspects of music into their theoretical descriptions? Nattiez thinks that musicology (the term always used in the broad sense, in which it comprises ethnomusicology) cannot be restricted to the description of immanent structures (p. 75), and that music must be viewed as a fait social total, thus as a semiotic, not a purely structural, phenomenon.* Nattiez's Fondements has the rare distinction that it presents a conception of musicology within which the musicological enterprise becomes itself an object of explication; in his work, Nattiez defines a critical musicology, exemplifying his notion of music analysis by dealing with works of Brahms, Debussy, and Varese. I see no possibility for musicology to develop into a comprehensive as well as cognitive science of music if it does not assimilate Nattiez's reflections and methods. While Nattiez's methods (of which below) have their clear limitation, as all methods do, his critical reflections upon the nature of the musicological discourse cannot be repudiated; no more refined a definition of musicology than his has ever been stated. Nattiez's book comprises three parts. In the first part (pp. 1-127), he puts forth the semiotic (= transstructuralist) framework in which alone music analysis makes sense; in the second part (pp. 128-238), there follows a comparative semiotics of music and (natural) language that introduces the reader to the problems of the validity of linguistic models in musicology. (The relevance of linguistic hypotheses for models of music
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