Musikonceit: a Postmodern Bravura Sans Footnotes

Abstract

Marshaling the so-called universal model of music, the authors examine the conceits of traditional discursive scholarship. One of the epistemological challenges of postmodernism is (con)textual: How do people re-form narrowly tailored, methodologically formalized textuality? How do people deploy postmodern playfulness, hybridity, and bricolage effectively to displace reified methodologies with new ways of knowing? In this article, the authors mingle ethnography, literary criticism, aesthetic hermeneutics, and cultural studies to examine the movements, riffs, and flows of music, from Puccini to hip-hop. By emulating the varied structures of music (their subject matter), the authors work to perform textually the cross-cultural aspects of musical flirtations and, in the process, rehearse how postmodern epistemologies might innovate cultural scholarship, improvising new strains of historical and analytical discursivity.