Epistemologies

Abstract

Abstract Understanding how we might understand music confronts us with a number of challenges, not least the question of what we mean by the term “music.” Do we mean “music” as it manifests itself in our discourse, or the musical communication that we experience in making it and listening to it? While the normative frameworks provided by classical epistemology seem most consonant with the theories that we derive from and apply to music as historical practice, those theories are usually heuristic, local in scope, and difficult to reconcile with any systematic epistemology. The diversity of music’s manifestations across cultures further complicates matters; is there something that can legitimately be universally described as “music” across cultures or is music primarily—or even entirely—culture-specific? What music is and does in different cultures seems so widely variable that we are forced to situate our epistemologies in something like an emic, implicit understanding of cultural contexts, severely compromising their generalizability. This realization may force us towards a naturalistic, scientific epistemology, but here, we need to be aware of the fact that such an epistemology is most likely to reveal itself as a bundle of epistemologies rather than a unitary form of explanation. In the end, it seems that the means that we can use to understand music are necessarily plural. The task of the musical epistemologist is not so much to proclaim musical truths but rather to make clear just how their epistemology of choice relates to other possible ways of knowing music.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 2 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.