[Smt-talk] Degree terminology (was Re: Princeton and Theory)

[art samplaski]

Dear list,
 
Christopher Doll's post brings up an interesting
issue re our discipline and U.S. academic history.
He writes,

> The [Columbia] music department always referred to
> their PhD major as "Musicology," under which students
> were admitted to separate streams: theory, historical
> musicology, and ethnomusicology.
 
These three streams correspond to the three subareas
described by Guido Adler when he first defined the
scholarly discipline of _Musikwissenschaft_, i.e.,
"musical science," in 1885: historical, systematic,
and comparative musicology. By that historical criterion,
Columbia sounds like it's still following Adler's
nomenclature--no problemo. However, it crashes into
the wall of, somehow in U.S. academic history the word
"musicology" had its meaning restricted solely to
Adler's historical musicology.
 
I have never heard any explanation (much less a good
one:) why this happened. I for one would be most eager
to read such, if anyone knows.:)
 
BTW, I think this is not just idle curiosity--some
other comments in this thread seem to suggest to me
potential for undercurrents of non-collegiality and
other problems (witness Jane Clendinning's 2 recent
posts) because of the variability of degree labels
vs. the job duties and scholarly interests of people.
(On the CMS website there's a several-page history
of the events surrounding how it calved off from AMS,
which reads like there was some bit of unpleasantness
to the birth; and in more recent times we've had more
splintering of _Musikwissenschaft_, what with SMT,
SMPC, SEM, etc. Shouldn't those of us in the U.S. work
to make sure our field is less fractious than the
Congress?:)
 
Art Samplaski
Ithaca, NY
 
p.p.s: Oh, and folks: can everyone ___PLEASE___ edit
replies so as to not have multiple levels of included
prior posts? Thank you.