Retooling the Technique

Abstract

Recent debates about new directions in music scholarship
 have sometimes focused on technical language and its use in musical
 analysis. This essay puts some perspective on that debate from the
 vantage of the philosophy of technology. Following the ideas of
 Martin Heidegger and Don Ihde about the “ontological priority” of
 technology with respect to science, the essay argues that the
 technical language of music has a basis in “making” music and must be
 “retooled” to apply to the more experiential concerns of recent
 musicological and theoretical research.