Sharing uncertainty: Music in humanistic and scientific understandings

Abstract

The idea that science either can or does provide definitive ways of understanding music arose in the middle of the past century and almost immediately stimulated severe criticism, much of it from a perspective that came to elevate culture to the status to which science had been assumed to presume. It can be suggested that by the turn of the millennium the terms of this debate had begun to fragment. The idea of a positivistic science as the incremental accrual of a body of facts increasingly approximating to monadic truth was replaced by ideas of the sciences as multiple epistemologies that are mutually irreducible but somehow commensurable, as a set of related processes that result in highly instrumental yet still provisional bodies of knowledge. Simultaneously, the idea of culture as a stable and clearly identifiable set of features and practices was undermined by the realization of the political nature of the term and its applications—by a growing understanding of processes of cultural fluidity, hybridity, value, and identity formation—while the concept of the musical work was contested, as was the very idea of music as a discrete domain of thought and behavior. We have thus been left with a field of uncertainties that is too often used as an interdisciplinary battleground rather than as a meeting place to examine and negotiate the ideas and ontological commitments of our own and others’ disciplines. These uncertainties sometimes appear in plain sight but more often constitute implicit elements of disciplinary practice. We need to ensure that we negotiate encounters between disciplinary practices and commitments with our uncertainties in plain sight to develop mutual understanding across the broad worlds of humanistic and scientific research.

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