Music Studies is a broad field, encompassing musicology, music theory, ethnomusicology, performance and composition. There is also a growing empirical division: cognition, which brings Music Studies into contact with psychology and neuroscience. For the purposes of the present report, we have largely focused on the first three areas; although there are significant differences between them, we have concluded that there are enough similarities in the issues to which they give rise to justify a common treatment. It should be emphasized, however, that we have not been as thorough or systematic in our review as in the case of other disciplines. We have, in particular, not devoted much attention to changes in the undergraduate curriculum away from the expectations of rudimentary musical literacy, nor to trends away from score reading, paleography, research methods, and primary source archival work. The ability to play an instrument has long been de-emphasized. It should also be noted that our report relates to music studies in the USA (and, to a lesser extent, in the U.K.), though trends in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand are similar. Matters differ in other countries. Throughout Eastern Europe, there is very little engagement with issues of social justice. Nor is this a point of focus in Russia, despite the foundational role of sociology in Russian Music Studies. Despite recent emphasis on decolonizing Music Studies, only elite institutions in the West — the colonial powers — have brought it into their curricula and field of study.
We begin by presenting some data in unmediated fashion. Details can be found in the appendices. We then draw some conclusions about the current state of the discipline based on this data and conversations we have had with people in the field. Our main conclusion is that, like other fields that the commission has considered, political pressure of various sorts has had a deleterious effect on the field, narrowing rather than expanding skill sets and knowledge of musics at all places and times.
Most of the data we have looked at dates from the last 25 years. This casting might suggest that the trends we have uncovered also trace back to the last 25 years. But such is not the case. They trace back much earlier and can even be seen to have their origins in the “new musicology” movement of the 1980s, which was partly a return to the hermeneutic practices of nineteenth-century music criticism, but also focused on gender and sexuality, race, and disability in the exploration of musical narrative. The only reason we did not go back that far is that the data, of the kind used for the more recent period, did not then exist.
THE DATA
We focused on two areas: the presence of a cancel culture within the field and shift in focus away from more traditional topics to ones with a more presentist political orientation. We examine how this shift has been manifested in data on dissertations, talks and appointments.