On Not Losing Heart: A Response to Savage and Brown's "toward a New Comparative Musicology"

ion of music and people into data. To characterize that ethos as a recapitulation of Lomax, only without the heart, might be an unfair caricature. For the various statistical representations and correlations emerging from their research may well be sublimating a lot of passion, and Savage and Brown’s own day-to-day dealings with musicians and musicking may be no less affective than anyone else’s (it’s just that they exclude this from their research). And, in fairness, the empirical and the metric have as much potential as any other paradigm to work to humanistic ends—“measurement began our might,” as Yeats put it. But the question is whether in anthropology, of all disciplines, the heart doesn’t have a crucial role to play, whether it can ever be left out. Of course, I’m using the term “heart” rhetorically—not as a call to naive sentimentalism, but as a cipher for all the contingent, particular, sometimes seemingly irrational, emotive, feeling-centered elements of human engagement that elude metrics, but demand interpretation and perhaps compel ethics. Equally, it would be erroneous to dismiss the complementary role of the head in fieldwork-centered anthropology—the need for a measure of detachment and self-reflexivity, for vigilance with regard to one’s own motives. I suspect that the aporia in Savage and Brown’s position—which on the one hand presents “the new comparative musicology” as in some way exemplary, and on the other wants to stake a claim for it as only one aspect of a bigger musicological umbrella— is symptomatic of their sensitivities around what their approach leaves out. Their call for a synthesis or integration of anthropological models would seem to be an unconscious recognition of the need to factor back in the matters of the heart—for an approach in which empiricism and hermeneutics conjoin. But one question here would be whether Savage and Brown envisage sub-contracting that element of the intellectual labor to other kinds of (ethno)musicologists (which would be one form of interdisciplinary relationship), or whether this movement towards synthesis might involve a personal journey—an inner interdisciplinarity. Another question is whether these different models can be integrated even in principle, or whether they represent values and ideologies whose fundamental premises are less than compatible—a matter no doubt requiring further research. It is arguably only when these questions around the relationship between these different sides of the disciplinary equation are broached in earnest that we will know whether we are indeed experiencing an epistemic sea change within musicology. For now, more modestly, Savage and Brown have at least issued an invitation to have the conversation, and we should be grateful to them for that.