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This chapter begins with a discussion of the crisis confronting musical scholarship. Musical research is described as becoming like a Tower of Babel, where members of opposing groups seem to be speaking different languages or playing different language games. When individuals stake their identities on particular language games, they regard each other's work with indifference or even with contempt. The Ministry of Truth — a pyramid of “glittering white concrete” seen in George Orwell's 1984 — is also used to symbolize the current state of musical research. In this building, a vast bureaucracy toils relentlessly to serve Big Brother, propagandizing the entire population to produce an absolute political orthodoxy. One of their tasks is to transform all discourse into Newspeak, an artificial language intended not only to replace standard English but also to render politically deviant thought impossible. When individuals are compelled to measure themselves against quantitative standards, when they must address administrators who are remote from the work itself, when they are forced to objectify themselves, to police their own thought, they come to resemble the inhabitants of Orwell's dystopia.

This chapter argues that the present crisis confronting musical scholarship needs something like an antimethod that will ask how current methods work by examining their enabling conditions. Given the deadlock between opposing groups, and the impasses at which debates repeatedly seem to stall, it recommends starting at the impasses to see how they arise. Rather than build another tower, or another pyramid of truth, it seeks to occupy the space between existing structures, to inhabit the shadows, to map the labyrinth. An overview of the succeeding chapters is presented.

This chapter explores how disciplinary identities emerge through so-called narratives of disciplinary legitimation. It focuses on six authors whose work seems to provide imaginative solutions to the problems of disciplinary identity: Lawrence Kramer, Kay Kaufman Shelemay, Manuel Peña, Nicholas Cook, Joseph Kerman, and Kofi Agawu. The cultural dilemmas to which they respond are examined. If the musicological subject is split, then its discourse is also divided; the narrative level may contradict the explicit assertions in the text. By exploding the narrative closure of these texts, we can open discourse to the strategic exclusions that make closure possible.

This chapter begins with a discussion of what constitutes the identity of composition. It then examines four ways of construing the issue of unity in the Preludes: the Preludes a monads, the Preludes as nomads, the Preludes as cryptocycle, and the Preludes as an ironic or paradoxical cycle. Metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony are discussed.

This chapter examines the disciplinary objects of musical research from the side of context. This movement from two directions, however, questions rather than celebrates the text/context divide, by suggesting a certain Moebiusstrip logic through which inside and outside, content and frame, mutually determine each other. The books Noise: The Political Economy of Music by Jacques Attali and Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality by Susan McClary are analyzed. The correspondences noted between the patterns Attali and McClary find in history and the rhetorical models that pre-exist their work raise questions about the interplay between invention and discovery in the writing of history. By analyzing other works of musical scholarship in terms of their narrative and rhetorical strategies, readers can move toward answering these questions for themselves.