Pro(vocation) Seminar in Musicology, part I

My Tuesday morning class is Pro Seminar in Musicology, and it's all about "the business and practice of musicology." We've had classes on various techniques of research as well as the more fundamental question of what the heck musicology is anyway. Up until the last two weeks, I enjoyed this class. Sure, it was an excuse for musicologists to get together and egg each other on in some sense, but that's an inevitable and actually quite useful part of academic professional development. Without those sessions, it's much more difficult to expand one's personal and professional horizons, to engage face to face with people in your field, and to bounce your own ideas off of people who both care and have similar background knowledge. Unfortunately, while some people are open-minded, there are many others who claim to be and aren't, and still others who make no such pretenses. These past two class sessions have given some "insight" into all of the above. A certain opera scholar (a "theorist") came into to guest lecture last week. This is a person who is widely respected and published, although is known to be a bit caustic in criticism of others. Now, the thing that bothered me most about this particular class session was the completely irrelevant and illogical (I believe) divide between "musicologists," meaning those who deal in history, and "theorists," those who deal in theory. Why there should be this distinction is a complicated issue, that goes back a couple decades, and is fully understandable and perhaps even necessary in its own time. Quite frankly, I think this distinction should stay in the past where it was spawned. I wasn't around, I don't know what it was like when theorists were ignored in favor of purely "circumstantial" discussion of music's history to the detriment of studying the work for itself. Yeah, yeah. I wasn't there. But I am HERE, and I see that it doesn't matter any more. Or, more realistically, I see that we, the music-studiers (to translate "musicologists" literally, and in the way I would like to see it taken) have reached a point in our collective development where we can begin to reconcile the divides of the past. More and more music historians incorporate theoretical analysis into their writings. More and more theorists keep sociohistorical concerns in mind when analyzing music. I really, truly, honestly do not understand why we are "musicologists" (in the traditional HISTORY way) and "theorists" and "ethnomusicologists" and not "musicologists" in the literal sense of studiers of music who specialize in history, theory, gender studies, musical anthropology, etc. All researchers need an identity, perhaps even a label to feel legitimate, or for purposes of tenure, publishing, conferences and the like. But when it comes down to it, when it comes to relating to others who, in the end are really only interested in the same thing we ourselves are which is namely a deeper understanding of music, do we really have to behave as though we fit only into one small box? How very counterproductive is this us-them mentality that I had thought was already waning! Perhaps it is waning and those who still follow it are just particularly vocal. I really don't know. If anyone out there has two or more cents on this issue, I'd appreciate a discussion.