Rethinking Difference in Music Scholarship ed. by Olivia Bloechl, Melanie Lowe, Jeffrey Kallberg (review)

Addressing a criticism lobbed at emerging trends of the recent past, Gary Tomlinson pithily notes that “[t]he scholarship of difference, carefully distinguishing one tree from the next, has not attended to larger groves, let alone the forest” (p. 368). Our focus on seeing unique particularities and drawing out that which had been ignored by patriarchal, colonial hegemony has been necessary and persuasive, but perhaps it is time to take a “fresh look” and aim not for mere recognition of difference (argued here as reductive), but also frameworks of “redistribution, representation, and freedom” (pp. 3–4). Dedicated to Ruth Solie, the fourteen essays indeed reflect her 1993 collection, Musicology and Difference (Berkeley: University of California Press); some authors invoke the new musicology archetype directly, and all nonetheless respond to the lessons learned about music and gender, class, and race. Unremarked in the book, but certainly worthy of mention, is the title mashup with Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist’s 1999 Rethinking Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Perhaps the Bloechl/Lowe/Kallberg collection is their inevitable scholarly progeny. Each collection engages a variety of scholars, epochs, genres, and approaches; each emphasizes the literal and metaphorical crossing of boundaries; and each challenges notions of what it means to critique musical happenings. Of the represented pantheon of scholarly heavyweights, Suzanne Cusick has the unique distinction of contributing to all three volumes.

The collection at hand offers a range of topics from the early modern to the very modern (although there is a notable gap between Rossini and Puccini), new looks at the well-known, and first looks at the previously unknown. Primarily musicological, some essays make a nod to ethnomusicology and music theory and many rely heavily on the standard interdisciplinary humanities with a brave foray into evolutionary biology. Gender, race, and ethnicity are prominent, as are class, sexuality, and religion to a lesser extent. I am surprised that disability studies warranted only the barest passing glance in the introduction and no representative chapter, given that it is a rising subfield within difference studies. I would also have liked to see scholars from beyond the discipline contribute an outside-looking-in perspective, lest we become myopic. Arranged chronologically, it opens with a hefty introduction by Bloechl with Lowe and closes with what I expected to be companion bookend piece, “Difference un-thought,” by Jairo Moreno; the latter is instead an excessively dense amble through geopolitical modernity, loosely tied to what was otherwise an interesting case study of identity in international jazz. If the essay titles do not always give away much of their contents, browsing scholars are sure to find enough familiar cues to guess which chapters might be in their purview. I would suggest beginning with chapter 13, Gary Tomlinson’s “Beneath difference; or, humanistic evolutionism.” Not strictly tied to any time, genre, or composer, the “biological turn” is considered in this thought-provoking essay; it pairs well with many other articles and approaches because of its emphasis on the dichotomy of difference and universality.

This thread is one of three that I tracked as defining this new model for difference scholarship and holding this collection together. The introduction by Olivia Bloechl, with Melanie Lowe, certainly provides a wide swath on which to lay the essays, but as no central mandate or methodology for analysis—or even a single definition—of difference is given, the essay authors do not align their case studies under unifying parameters. On one hand, this is a strength of the collection; there are many ways to understand and define difference, with each author balancing older notions of post-modernism with newer models for understanding difference in twenty-first-century scholarship. As I read the collection straight through, I was able to see links among philosophies, methodologies, and discursive arguments, but I doubt a more casual reader would discern...