Gary Tomlinson is one of the fundamental figures in the development of the so-called new musicology, the cultural turn experienced by the field in the 1980s. As an exploration of vocal expression in relation to larger cultural constructions and epistemological transformations in Western civilization, Tomlinson’s work remains one of the most successful efforts in musicology to establish a fruitful intellectual dialogue with the humanities and social sciences. Arguing that Western thought has misrepresented pre-Columbian and colonial indigenous song within the dichotomy music/poetry, he sets out to examine from a postcolonial perspective these sounds and their performance practices in terms of their location within larger non-Western epistemological frameworks. Tomlinson approaches this task from the perspective of performance studies, asking “what music does” as opposed to the more orthodox musicological question of “what music is.”
By adding song into the speech/writing dichotomy of the Derrida-Rousseau grammatology discussion, Tomlinson challenges Eurocentric epistemology and...
