Can American Music Studies Develop A Method?

Can American Music Studies Develop a Method?
Author(s): Dale Cockrell

Source: American Music, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Summer, 2004), pp. 272-283
Published by: University of Illinois Press
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DALE COCKRELL
Can American Music Studies

Develop a Method?
A few years back, a British ethnomusicologist presented some of his

research to colleagues and students at my university. During the que
tion-and-answer session that followed, a student asked, digressively,
about the music curriculum in British universities. The ethnomusi-
cologist replied that, typically, there were music theory courses on the
one hand and musicology and ethnomusicology on the other. Then
he added that he "understood that things were different in the Unit-
ed States-that there were courses in theory, musicology, ethnomusi-
cology, and, additionally, American Music!" I must admit to some
mirthful surprise at his notion that the study of American music was
somehow generically different from courses in musicology or ethno-
musicology, for I had always considered courses in American music
to be musicology courses devoted to American topics.... Or, on sec-
ond thought, that they were ethnomusicology courses devoted to
American topics.... Or, upon further reflection ... So I started to see
the point. In fact, it seems to me now that American music as it is
being studied and taught today is not really musicology, nor is it eth-
nomusicology. And as I have thought more on this issue and observed
the developing state of research in American music, I have come to
wonder if a new musical scholarship, with its own excitingly prob-
Dale Cockrell is director of the Program in American and Southern Studies

and professor of musicology and American and Southern studies at Vander-
bilt University. Among his publications are Demons of Disorder: Early Black-
face Minstrels and Their World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)
and Excelsior!: Journals of the Hutchinson Family Singers, 1842-1846 (Stuyve-
sant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1989). He is currently working on an edition of
the music referenced in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books, which will
be published in the MUSA series.
American Music Summer 2004
? 2004 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
Can American Music Studies Develop a Method? 273
lematic method and many of the characteristics of an academic dis-

cipline, is not in the process of being born.
But how, exactly, do new disciplines of knowledge come about and
earn membership in the world of learned societies? It appears that
there is remarkably little scholarship on discipline formation to guide
and inform any study of new methodological discourses.1 Instead, my
study has required me to analyze the birth and development of re-
lated humanistic disciplines (including musicology, ethnomusicology,
and American studies) and note some commonly held characteristics
that attended during their conception and development.2 From this
work, I have identified seven gestational stages that lead from gen-
eral-interest topic or subject to fully developed scholarly discipline.
1. Subject definition. Scholars define a large subject area and write
of it, defining (or grappling with) its domain, shape, and boundaries;
at this point a historiography is first evident. Canon formation is im-
plicit in this process: This is what we study, not that! With some (of-
ten few) histories and texts in hand, isolated university courses are
developed and taught.
2. Methodology development and expression. Methodologies-articu-
lations about what we want to know and how we go about produc-
ing answers-develop; book publications, which are expressions of
methodologies, follow in some significant number.
3. Scholarly society formation. In order to support and encourage
scholarship, learned societies are formed. Regular conferences are or-
ganized, which generally become a central feature of society life.
4. Scholarly publications. Peer-reviewed articles, published in schol-
arly journals, and other forms of scholarly publication issue from the
confluence of canons, societies, conferences, and methodologies.
5. Curriculum development. University courses of study are devel-
oped that rely upon new knowledge bases and are widely taught.
Curricula then produce yet more new knowledge, teach it, and train
a new generation in the scholarly method.
6. Specialist faculty. Curricular needs encourage the creation of spe-
cialist faculty tracks, which drive a new market for academic positions.
7. Doctoral programs. Doctoral degree programs are developed when
a certain maturity of subject matter and methodology occurs, and
when scholars come to the collective conclusion that the field is broad,
deep, and discrete enough to warrant a monument in the pantheon
of learned disciplines.3
Many developments in what I will call "American music studies"
have paralleled, often quite closely, the discipline-formation model
outlined here.
1. Subject definition. America's music has long been of concern to
Americans because of its important role in identity formation and
274 Cockrell
expression. Many of the seminal developments of the antebellum pe-

riod-blackface minstrelsy, the singing families, parlor music, Stephen
Foster-were fueled by the nation's urge to express its sense of self
through music. Nineteenth-century critics and writers recognized this
compulsion and commented on it endlessly; Walt Whitman, by way
of example, called for a distinctively American musical voice, in both
his poetry and his prose: "With all honor and glory to the land of the
olive tree and the vine, fair-skied Italy-with no turning up of noses
at Germany, France, or England-we humbly demand whether we
have not run after their beauties long enough."4
2. Methodology development and expression. Toward the end of the
nineteenth century, the first comprehensive history of American mu-
sic, authored by Frederick Louis Ritter, was published.5 John Tasker
Howard, in Our American Music, the next milestone treatment, dealt
mainly with the American art music tradition, as had Ritter.6 Histo-
riographically, issues of identity and musical canon were problema-
tized in America's Music (1955) by Gilbert Chase; there Chase argued
that the most important American musics were from the vernacular
traditions-a line developed in all subsequent histories of American
music.7 Music in the United States by H. Wiley Hitchcock, published
first in 1969, sought a balanced approach to understanding what he
termed "cultivated" and vernacular" American musics.8 A pivotal
moment in canon formation and identity came in the nation's bicen-
tenary year of 1976 with the production of the Recorded Anthology
of American Music, a one-hundred-LP set of recordings that organized
and presented some of the rich diversity of the nation's music. Un-
derwritten by the Rockefeller Foundation, it was distributed without
cost to libraries and media centers across the nation, providing schol-
ars, students, teachers, radio stations, and others access to hundreds
of examples of American music, many for the first time. The canon-
forming nature of the foundation's gift to the nation was underscored
when W.W. Norton published Charles Hamm's Music in the New World
in 1983, a richly detailed history that made extensive use of the mu-
sic available in the Recorded Anthology.
3. Scholarly society formation. The period between Hitchcock's and
Hamm's books was one of increased activity in promoting, encourag-
ing, and supporting the study of American music. Hitchcock himself
marked the movement when he oversaw the establishment of the In-
stitute for Studies in American Music at Brooklyn College, City Uni-
versity of New York in 1971. The institute's programs and newsletter
bound far-flung scholars, teachers, performers, composers, and inter-
ested parties together at a time when there was little organization.
Scholars, in particular, expressed a need for yet stronger community
when they joined together in 1975 to form the Sonneck Society for
American Music, named in tribute to the path-finding work of Oscar

Sonneck, a former head of the music division of the Library of Con-
gress and strong proponent of scholarship in American music. This
Society-which now calls itself simply "The Society for American Mu-
sic"-began organizing annual national conferences in 1976.
4. Scholarly publications. In the spring of 1983 the Sonneck Society
issued the first number of the journal American Music, wrapped in a
bright blue cover and adorned with photographs of Oscar Sonneck
and an unidentified African American guitarist, an image of a signa-
ture by Scott Joplin, and a reproduction of the shape-note hymn "Gos-
pel Waves." The first paragraph in the new journal, penned by edi-
tor Allen P. Britton, articulated the journal's scope and challenge:
American Music is a quarterly journal of scholarship that will deal
with all aspects of American music and music in America: genres
and forms; geographical and historical patterns; composers, per-
formers, and audiences; sacred and secular traditions; cultural,
social, and ethnic diversity; the impact and role of the media; the
reflection of social, political, and economic issues; problems of
research, analysis, and archiving; education; criticism and aesthet-
ics; and more.9
The journal, like the Society, was born out of a degree of dissatisfac-
tion with the (perceived?) mission of the American Musicological So-
ciety and its journal, both of which were thought by some to be too
concerned with Western art music and too bound by rigid, even old-
fashioned, methodologies and approaches. As if to point up that the
Sonneck Society, while stubbornly insisting on its own mission and
identity, in fact grew from a rib of the AMS, the first article in Ameri-
can Music, which concludes with a broad discussion of America's
musical traditions, legacies, and roots, and encourages more inten-
sive scholarly engagement with them, was written by Richard Craw-
ford, identified on page one as "president of the American Musico-
logical Society"!10 At very nearly the same time, the AMS, with strong
encouragement and support from President Crawford and Past-Pres-
idents Hitchcock and Hamm, established a Committee on the Publi-
cation of American Music. COPAM, with significant long-term com-
mitment and support from the National Endowment for the
Humanities, laid plans for an American Denkmiler, which has become
the grandly and appropriately titled Music of the United States of Amer-
ica. At its completion, still some years away, it will be a forty-volume
(minimum) set of critically edited publications that represents the
span and depth of American music.
5. Curriculum development. The hard evidence for the wide-scale
teaching of courses in American musics is not easy to come by. Up
276 Cockrell
through the 1960s, only isolated courses were offered, with the one
taught by Ross Lee Finney at Smith College in the mid-1930s the first
I can document.1 My impression is that courses in American musics
became much more common in the 1970s and burgeoned in number
during the 1980s.12 Time magazine reported that although twenty-five
colleges offered jazz courses in 1965 that number had grown to over
five hundred by 1971.13 During the 1990s, offerings in rock and pop-
ular music courses exploded as faculty, chairs, and deans learned that
such courses, with their typically large enrollments, worked to their
budgetary advantage in the academic economy. The most important
music program accrediting organization, the National Association of
Schools of Music (NASM), has recently taken up formally the place
and function of American music studies in the American university
curriculum.14 Even the current edition of the venerable History of West-
ern Music by Grout/Palisca (arguably the standard text for majors tak-
ing music history courses in the United States) has recognized the
maturity of American music as a subject by including a full chapter
on "The American Twentieth Century," although it is ghettoized at
the end of the book. The chapter treats topics from Billings to shape-
note singing to spirituals, from Moravians to ragtime and jazz, from
Foster to "Rock-and-Roll" (a whole paragraph!). By far, though, the
text is most concerned with the art music tradition in the United
States, from Ives to Copland to Cage and beyond (and to the flanks).15
6. Specialistfaculty. With curriculum development in American mu-
sic has come jobs in American music. My memory is that when I ap-
plied for a musicology position at the College of William and Mary
in 1984 my hat went into the only ring that year reserved for an Amer-
icanist. Today one regularly sees notice of a faculty search for a spe-
cialist in American music. To determine the relative degree of mar-
ket interest in positions in American music studies, I turned to a
dissection of all the job ads in the "Music History/Musicology/Eth-
nomusicology" category of the College Music Society's Faculty Vacan-
cy List for the calendar year 2001. I was only interested in vacancy
announcements from an American institution that listed a preference
for candidate specialization(s). Tabulated, there were fifty-nine such
searches announced during the year. Many of these proclaimed a pref-
erence for applicants from a range of listed specializations (e.g., ba-
roque, women's music, jazz, and world music), any one of which
would enhance a candidate's dossier. If you were a candidate with a
specialization in nineteenth-century Western art music you received
four special invitations from institutions to apply for their jobs in 2001;
for those working in twentieth-century art music, there were eight
highlighted jobs, the same number as for those in baroque music stud-
ies.16 If, however, you had specialist skills in American music (or its
subfields, such as popular music, jazz, African American music), you

were singled out by the ad writers thirty-five times: nearly six out of
every ten faculty vacancies privileged expertise in American music!
Moreover, twenty-two of the fifty-nine jobs were reserved for special-
ists in American music studies.17 And my seat-of-pants sense is that
the trend toward searches in American music has not abated in the
job markets since 2001.
There is further evidence of the coming of age of American music
studies. In 1995 the Society for American Music became a constitu-
ent member in full standing of the American Council of Learned So-
cieties, joining with the American Musicological Society and the So-
ciety for Ethnomusicology as the only scholarly music societies on the
council.18 Today, conferences devoted to American music studies typ-
ically attract several hundred scholars. The competition for the Soci-
ety for American Music's Dissertation Prize is fierce, largely because
of the number of outstanding dissertations that must be considered.
(Graduate students saw early where the job market was going and
have flocked to American dissertation topics.) The committee that re-
views books for the annual Irving Lowens Book Award is each year
burdened with more and better books. And W. W. Norton (certainly
a bellwether publisher in music texts) has recently published-to
Sousa-like fanfares!-Richard Crawford's monumental America's Mu-
sical Life: A History, another somewhat shorter Introduction by Craw-
ford for use in American music courses (with accompanying CD an-
thology), and J. Heywood Alexander's collection of source readings
in American music.19
American Music as a subject worthy of interest, study, and career

planning has arrived!
But has it come too as a discipline? The fact that the one last step
toward traditional disciplinehood is as yet untaken-the development
of doctoral programs-is of a magnitude of significance not to be un-
derestimated. Ph.D. programs encode the genetics of a discipline.
Here is where the strongest, most vital scholars construct a double
helix stranded together from programmatic curriculum and scholar-
ly method and pass it on to the next generation, where beneficial
mutation (new knowledge, insight, and method) does its vivifying
work and strengthens the organism's scholarly constitution... and
passes it on to the next generation.... Without Ph.D. programs of
standing, fields of scholarly interest are subjects; with them, they are
disciplines.20
That there is not yet an American music studies Ph.D. does not
mean, willy-nilly, that there will not be one. In fact, there are some
still small signs that a new knowledge form is being born. A small
handful of American universities are engaged in preliminary, often
278 Cockrell
tentative, discussions that could lead someday to the establishment

of Ph.D. programs in American music studies. Many colleagues (even
non-American music specialists) seem not to be taken aback by the
prospect of such a Ph.D. Graduate students often express to me great
interest in matriculating in these programs, if and when they come
to pass. This then appears to be an expeditious moment to enter into
a wider conversation on what such program in American music stud-
ies would look like, for our discussions, parsings, and measurings
might just reveal to a scholarly field its methods and give dimension
to a yet-unborn discipline.
Toward a dialogue on the organic shape of a discipline-that-might-
yet-be, I offer some bulletpoint speculations about a hypothetical ge-
nome: The Ph.D. program in American music studies.
* Grounding in the basic methodologies of both musicology and eth-
nomusicology. American music studies would be different from
traditional musicology for its emphasis on ethnographies and
contexts, and unlike ethnomusicology because of its fundamen-
tally historical nature.
* Interdisciplinarity. Graduate students in an American music
studies program would receive deep training in American his-
tory, society, and culture. They might be as likely to maintain
a collegial and intellectual cohort relationship with students
in history, English, American studies, sociology, art history,
religion, communications, philosophy, law, and/or business as
with fellow students in music-related disciplines.
* Self-reflexivity as a scholarly strategy. A personal and intellectu-
al regard for one's own place in American music would be a
strength, not a weakness. Self-experienced musical worlds
would frequently constitute the primary subject of study: cases
studies of inevitably complex musical selves. From this prin-
ciple, the more the "community of scholars" in an American
music studies discipline looks like "America" (broadly, even
globally defined), the more "American" will be the scholarship
that issues. Notions of American diversity and pluralism are
intertwined with the identities of those studying those issues.
From this, too, would naturally follow a serious scholarly re-
gard for a popular musical culture and for church music, both
important and rich parts of America's musical experiences.
Some have argued that American music is just another vari-
ety of world music.21 And in a global sense, I suppose that's
true (as it is also true of Western art music). To say this, though,
so abstracts the thing studied from the one doing the study-
ing that the human point of the scholarly enterprise is missed.
Neither I nor any of my students really believe that "my"

(American) music should be treated as no different from that
stuff "over there" (wherever and whatever "over" is). Ameri-
can music studies should make a virtue of scholarship and its
multivalent methodologies that are about, by, and for those
who do the work and employ the methods. Through a schol-
arly engagement with our collective private musics should
come public expressions of understanding.22
* The audience: music's third estate. The notion of self-reflexivity as
a scholarly strategy harmonizes with a salient characteristic of
much American music. Traditionally, musicologists have priv-
ileged the composer's place in the musical environment. Late-
ly, important work on American music has broadened and
deepened the view by engaging music and music-making from
a performance and performer's perspective.23 I'd like to propose
a third perspective: that there is also an audience's music. Fur-
ther, I would like to suggest that that perspective underlies the
experience of much of the most vital American music, both to-
day and in our common past: whether it is listening to Top 40
radio, being involved in a Sunday morning church service (in
many churches, it is hard to know where the performers stop
and the audience begins), hearing a Charles Ives symphony
(with its layers of intertextual meanings and resonances that
make the experience very nearly unique to each member of the
audience), or being in the swirl of a performance at the Grand
Ole Opry or the Bowery Theatre in antebellum New York. A
scholarship that engages these and many other examples of
"music-living" would follow along some of the lines articulat-
ed by scholars like Christopher Small, where many different
perspectives are viable, because they issue from autonomous-
ly viable selves.24 The method for an American music studies
program would not metaphorically resemble the two-dimen-
sional narrative and its straight line that must be traversed
point by point; it would rather appear more like a sphere, with
its infinities of perspectives, complexities, and lines of connec-
tion. It would, thus, look more like the world itself.25
* Hermeneutics. A program in American music studies, with its
emphasis on self-reflexivity, would almost inevitably generate
inquiry into the hermeneutics of music experience. It might
well be that from the articulation of the "new musicology" in
the 1980s and 1990s, with its bracing emphasis on meaning, has
issued, not a new form of the "old musicology," but Ameri-
can music studies. My impression is that many of the best
graduate students in the new musicology methodology are
280 Cockrell
pursuing dissertations in American music only in part because

that is where the jobs are; at least as important is the belief that
the study of "our" music has special personal immediacy and
meaningful impact.
* The dialogic. If this is looking like a postmodernist enterprise,
it is only because American music itself has so often been such
an enterprise: Anthony Philip Heinrich, Stephen Foster, fiddle
tunes, Ives, Irving Berlin, blues, bluegrass, Elvis, John Cage,
Hank Williams, Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix, and examples on
and on were all "postmodern" before we knew what postmod-
ern was. As this music issued unashamedly from social, polit-
ical, and musical dialogue and expressed itself dialogically, so
too should its study, intrinsically, be of forms of dialogue
I find it comforting to know that kindred spirits have trod somewhat

parallel paths in a search for a method and a discipline. In particu-
lar, American studies has been this way before, as it sought a means
that would enable its students to find meaning in American culture
through an engagement with the contexts out of which the scholars
and the scholarship were both born.26
Henry Nash Smith, in perhaps the most influential essay ever
penned in the field-"Can 'American Studies' Develop a Method?"
(and now you know the homage implied by my title!)-wrote in 1957
of how he believed
that the desire to study American culture as a whole, which un-

derlies the nascent movement toward American Studies, has valid
motives behind it, and that without disturbing sociologists or lit-
erary critics in their important undertakings we can properly ask
whether a method can not be found for investigating the whole
of the culture.27
And I understand. For one of the joys of studying and teaching

American music is that I get to treat a world of music that is as big
as my experience and knowledge, without categorical exclusions, and
from a perspective that Smith called "principled opportunism."
Lawrence Buell noticed how American studies has become "a com-
bination of home base, contact zone, and debating ground for an in-
creasingly complex, politicized, and centrifugal array of revision-
isms-gender and sexuality studies, race and ethnicity studies, and
(trans) national theory in particular."28
And I understand. For American music studies too has this quality
of being many things to many people, with a wide range of perspec-
tives and agendas. More than a speech from the official's dais, Amer-
ican music studies is like a town meeting, characterized by the wild,
impassioned, idiosyncratic outpourings from its citizenry.
Stanley Bailis observed that American studies "has thus emerged

not as a discipline, but as an arena for disciplinary encounter and stag-
ing ground for fresh topical pursuits. It embraces America in a Whit-
manish hug, excluding nothing and always beginning."29
And I understand. It was Walt Whitman, after all, who claimed
to hear Americans "Singing, with open mouths, their strong melo-
dious songs," all "singing what belongs to [them], to none else."30
On the one hand I feel a sense of insecurity and anxiety, for I doubt
that American music studies will ever be as comfortable with its
place and mission as, for example, musicology and ethnomusicology.
Yet its virtue is that with a new scholar, a new perspective, a new
idea, a new dialogue, or a new song we have the ongoing promise
of a new beginning.
And Gene Wise characterized American studies by its willingness
to let "people be people." "Given the institutional malaise of the acad-
emy, of the scholarly professions, and of the larger society these days,
we might dream of, but we can hardly in fact hope for, more."31
And, again, I understand. Those involved in American music stud-
ies have an (enviable, I believe) reputation for being a lively bunch,
given to caring deeply both about the music studied and the people
doing the studying. Joy, passion, a reverence for the pleasure music
and its understanding can bring are all characteristics of American
music scholarship. Americanists tend to take themselves and each
other quite seriously-but insist upon having great fun doing it.
Can American music studies move beyond its status as a "scholar-

ly culture" and develop a scholarly method? In a traditional sense,
probably not. One suspects that the grand, good old days of singu-
lar method-and-monument discipline building are gone, especially
in the humanities. Along with the belief that there ever was an all-
encompassing American myth, American symbol, American histo-
ry, American people, or American music: Why should we expect
more from our methods and disciplines than we expect from our-
selves? There are "only" (!) pluralities in a multi-dimensional world.
In the place of an Enlightenment-project methodology designed to
capture and preserve American music, I suggest that we are even
now in the "new method" (or, perhaps, the "anti-method") business
of reflecting seriously on our joyous musics, while participating in
a dialogue with the past toward understanding, and in a dialogue
with the present toward meaning. Through the glass darkly, project-
ing into the future, I believe I can barely make out the image of a
playful but somewhat insecure and disheveled beat called Ameri-
can music studies. It appears, unsurprisingly, to look a lot like me
and you.
282 Cockrell
NOTES
1. I am interested here in the formation of new humanistic disciplines after t

ditional" pantheon (history, English/philology, philosophy, classics, and foreign
guages) was set in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the sub
humanistic disciplines generally see Laurence Veysey, "The Plural Organized W
of the Humanities," in The Organization of Knowledge in Modern America, 1860-
Alexandra Oleson and John Voss (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
51-106; the "Introduction" to that volume (vii-xxi) is also informative.
2. Case studies of specialized methodologies and disciplines, somewhat akin to
American Music Studies in scope and nature, have also guided me in my thinking.
Among the most useful of these are: David R. Russell, Writing in the Academic Disci-
plines, 1870-1990 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991); and Jacob Neu-
sner, ed., New Humanities and Academic Disciplines: The Case of Jewish Studies (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1984).
3. Although I present these seven markers as discrete and consecutive, few disciplines
march along them in perfect cadence; inevitably, curricula are sometimes developed be-
fore there are conferences; or journals drive the organization of societies; or ...
4. Quoted in Dale Cockrell, ed., Excelsior: Journals of the Hutchinson Family Singers,
1842-1846 (Stuyvesant, N.Y.: Pendragon Press, 1989), 287.
5. Frederick Louis Ritter, Music in America (New York: Scribner's, 1883).
6. John Tasker Howard, Our American Music: Three Hundred Years of It (New York:
Crowell, 1931).
7. Gilbert Chase, America's Music, from the Pilgrims to the Present (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1955).
8. H. Wiley Hitchcock, Music in the United States (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1969). For
a full treatment of the historiography of American music see the chapter titled "Cos-
mopolitan and Provincial: American Musical Historiography" in Richard Crawford,
The American Musical Landscape (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 3-37.
9. Allen P. Britton, "A Note from the Editor," American Music 1, no. 1 (Spring 1983):
v.
10. Richard Crawford, "Musical Learning in Nineteenth-Century America," Ameri-

can Music 1, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 1-11.
11. See Ross Lee Finney, Profile of a Lifetime: A Musical Autobiography (New York: C.
F. Peters, 1992), 86-87. My thanks to Wiley Hitchcock for directing me to this source.
12. This impression is supported by the twenty-one responses generated by a query
I posted on the Society for American Music list in May 2002: "Where, when, by whom
were early courses in American music taught?"
13. Cited in Robert Walser, ed., Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1999), 195.
14. "American Music," National Association of Schools of Music Proceedings 86 (June
1998): 27-63.
15. Donald Jay Grout and Claude V. Palisca, A History of Western Music, 6th ed. (New
York: W.W. Norton, 2001).
16. These numbers are not quite so despairing as they may seem, for many adver-
tisements for musicology vacancies did not name a specialization; the intent is that
anyone working in the general field of Western art music should feel qualified to ap-
ply.
17. Including such representative institutions as the University of Alabama, the Col-
lege of William and Mary, SUNY-Stony Brook, Bowdoin College, University of Penn-
sylvania, North Texas University, University of Richmond, Rhodes College, University
of California-Davis, Carleton College, Middle Tennessee State University, and Brandeis.
18. A fourth music society, the Society for Music Theory, was welcomed into the
ACLS in 2000.
19. Richard Crawford, America's Musical Life: A History (New York: W.W. Nort
2001); Richard Crawford, An Introduction to America's Music (New York: W.W. Nort
2001); J. Heywood Alexander, To Stretch Our Ears: Readings in American Music (N
York: W.W. Norton, 2000).
20. Take, for example, the study of medieval music. Medievalists have historical n
ratives, canons, societies, conferences, methodologies, publications, university cou
es, and faculty tracks devoted to their specialty. To my knowledge, though, no univ
sity offers a Ph.D. in medieval music. Scholars appear to agree collectively t
"medieval music" is more a subject within musicology than a discipline unto itself
21. See Lester P. Monts, "American Music and World Music: Curricular Issues in Hi
er Education," National Association of Schools of Music Proceedings 86 (June 1998): 29.
22. There is, potentially, a negative side to this urge. Self-reflexivity has sometim
tended toward narcissism and self-indulgence. License to engage the spiritualistic,
static, or hedonic qualities of American music has led some to celebrate anti-intel
tualism, a whiff of which I sometimes think I detect at, for example, the meetings
the Society for American Music.
23. See, most prominently, Crawford, America's Musical Life, ix and passim.
24. On this concept, see Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing an
Listening (Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, University Press of New Engla
1998).
25. I explore the concept of the musical "world" somewhat in my Demons of Disor-
der: Early Blackface Minstrels and Their World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), ix and passim.
26. One of the best narratives of the early years of American studies is to be found
in Robert E. Spiller, "American Studies, Past, Present, and Future," in Studies in Amer-
ican Culture: Dominant Ideas and Images, ed. Joseph J. Kwiat and Mary C. Turpie (Min-
neapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1960), 207-20.
27. In Lucy Maddox, ed., Locating American Studies: The Evolution of a Discipline (Bal-
timore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 10.
28. Lawrence Buell, "Commentary" to Henry Nash Smith, "Can 'American Studies'
Develop a Method?," in Locating American Studies, ed. Maddox, 14.
29. Stanley Bailis, "The Social Sciences in American Studies: An Integrative Concep-
tion," American Quarterly 26, no. 3 (August 1974): 203.
30. From "I Hear America Singing" (1860).
31. Gene Wise, "'Paradigm Dramas' in American Studies: A Cultural and Institutional
History of the Movement," in Locating American Studies, ed. Maddox, 210.

Can American Music Studies Develop A Method?

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Can American Music Studies Develop a Method?

Author(s): Dale Cockrell

Can American Music Studies

A few years back, a British ethnomusicologist presented some of his

Dale Cockrell is director of the Program in American and Southern Studies

lematic method and many of the characteristics of an academic dis-

expression. Many of the seminal developments of the antebellum pe-

American Music, named in tribute to the path-finding work of Oscar

subfields, such as popular music, jazz, African American music), you

American Music as a subject worthy of interest, study, and career

tentative, discussions that could lead someday to the establishment

Neither I nor any of my students really believe that "my"

pursuing dissertations in American music only in part because

I find it comforting to know that kindred spirits have trod somewhat

that the desire to study American culture as a whole, which un-

And I understand. For one of the joys of studying and teaching

Stanley Bailis observed that American studies "has thus emerged

Can American music studies move beyond its status as a "scholar-

1. I am interested here in the formation of new humanistic disciplines after t

10. Richard Crawford, "Musical Learning in Nineteenth-Century America," Ameri-

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