Viewpoint: Beyond Musicology: Music and Humanistic Knowledge

What do we know when we know something about music? The answer to that question changes, or should change, as conceptions of knowledge change, something that has been happening rapidly in recent years. How, for example, can a fictional transcription for ukulele of a Chopin nocturne (the E minor, op. 72, no. 1) in Thomas Pynchon’s novel Against the Day tell us more than still-standard musicological protocols about both the music and the complex and troubled cultural history in which it is embedded? And what implications do answers to questions such as this have for knowledge in the increasingly beset sphere of the humanities?