Millennial Musicology

Ryan Raul Bañagale introduces a new term for the discipline and considers a generational jump from X to Y.

One of the hot topics (other than race and gender) surrounding this year’s democratic primaries is separating support by generation.  Hillary supposedly has the “Baby Boomers” and Barrack has the “Youth Vote.”  In trying to learn more about what is meant by youth vote, I encountered a term new to me: Millennial.  According to wikipedia, this and the more market-driven “iGen” (Internet Generation) are “attempts to give the Gen Y cohort more independent names.”  I’ve long considered myself at the tail end of Generation X—I usually offer “growing up with grunge in the Pacific Northwest” as my evidence.  However, my brother, who grew up in the same environment and is less than two years younger than I, is distinctly Generation Y—Millennial. 

Bringing this all to the world of musicology, I’m considering a generation jump. 

The so-called “new musicology” was ushered in by the first Gen X PhDs—the move towards critical approaches to traditional subjects eventually opened up the floodgates for what was considered musicologically worthy, which in turn opened up even more approaches to scholarship.  Over the past decade (and the rise of iGen technologies) the resources of the “information superhighway” [a term used here tongue in cheek] have completely changed the rules of research and scholarship—and pedagogy.  We’ve securely entered a new phase which I think should be called “Millennial Musicology.”

Type “Millennials” into google and after the seemingly obligatory initial result link to wikipedia, is a page on “Managing Millennials” in the workplace—increasingly a concern in academia as well. 

As the iGen label implies, digital and web-based information is an overriding characteristic of members of the Millennial generation.  Last week on the AMS listserv was a series of emails which began with a practical question of how someone’s student should properly cite a YouTube video in a paper.  This quickly followed the arc of most threads related to web-based scholarship, calling into question the same old questions about the reliability of sources, copyright issues, and the dangers of wikipedia—all adversarial responses to the internet.  As such, I followed the thread with only limited interest.  I would, however, like to mention that one message offered an even better site for capturing streaming video than the one I had been using before: www.vixy.net.

And while I don’t have a problem with making a personal archival copy of YouTube video (from a VHS recording) of a television broadcast from 1984, it becomes an awkward source to recognize in footnote form.  This was ultimately why the question was first posed to the listserv.  Due to the instability of YouTube clips, referencing the original web link is impractical—my aforementioned clip from 1984 is now “unavailable.”  Ultimately, I’m not that concerned about it.  I have a copy on my desktop and when it comes time to make the proper citation in the dissertation, I’ll do it the old/traditional way: by tracking down the original broadcast information and formatting it as dictated by Turabian.

My current students would (almost certainly) never take the time to do this.  Not only is it the case that many web clips carry no indication of the original source, but I also don’t get the sense that many Millennials feel that the tracking down of such information is necessary, despite our insistence on proper footnotes.  A growing assumption is that if you found something once, you can find it again.  Another assumption (supported by last week’s listserv emails) is that many professors don’t accept such material as legitimate research data.  Telling students not to use web-based resources goes against their internet-fueled worldview—one that I find provides very interesting and current attitudes to historically based discussion.

The reality of “googling” it is that it more and more frequently leads to the best information out there.  It used to be the case that the search bar would lead you to misinformation hosted on amateur websites.  Now some of the first google results are academic articles (via JSTOR), full/partial scans of serious musicological studies (via google books), and free high-quality streaming audio (via Rhapsody).  At the same time, fed into the mix are items such as streaming video and blog entries—items Millennials see as reasonable and valuable data.

I too consider it reasonable and valuable, which is why I’m considering this generation jump.  My biggest reason for embracing non-standard sources is the simple fact that I use them all the time myself.  Like my students, I often begin research on a new subject by typing it into Google.  Yesterday, a single search yielded sources like those above as well as other valuable bits of data for my dissertation.  That said, I did have to trek uphill in the snow (serious) to get to the library for some non-virtual sources.  I also planned a research trip to an archive.  While the internet will never make every manuscript, royalty statement, or interview available, resources continue to surface which provide easy access to such information.  Aaron Copland oral history podcast, anyone?

I began my higher education amidst the flurry New Musicology, but as I approach the end of my PhD, we’re clearly in a new phase.  My research methods and ways of thinking are greatly shaped by the internet, aligning me more with Millennial Musicology—a mode of scholarship that also fuses the critique of the New Musicology with the data-driven approach of the so-called positivists (and a healthy serving of ethnography).  There are certainly important aspects of millennial musicology beyond these.  However, the change in access to and the dissemination of information will clearly be the strongest markers of the current generation of scholarship.

Saturday, February 23, 2008  | Permalink |  Comments (8)