Colloquy: Studying U.S. Music in the Twenty-First Century - Americanist Musicology and Nomadic Noise

As Penny Von Eschen and Amy Beal, among others, have shown, American musical subjects and Americanist cultural policies are articulated for beyond America's shores, even when no "Americans" are present. Because "American life" and "American musical history" happen all over the world, those very notions inevitably become bound up with new and trenchant questions about American identity that musical scholars are in a unique position to pursue. It is suggested that perhaps these questions could be used to animate a "nomadic" Americanist musicology that challenges political tendencies toward "fixed paths in well-defined directions, which restrict speed, regulate circulation, relativize movement, and measure in detail the relative movements of subjects and objects" (Deleuze and Guattari).