23 The lmpact and Ethics of Musical Scholarship Kay Kaufman Shelemay If the discussionof music in context has becomean increasingly important part of the musicological conversation in the late twentieth century, discourseabout the broader implications of musicological research emphatically has not.t This chapter will deal with the potential impact of music scholarship outside acade- mia and, in particular, upon its ostensiblesubjects.Though instances of such impact may be infrequent, I will suggest that they raise a host of important ethical and practical issues both during the researchprocess and afterwards. A concern with the implications of music scholarship presupposes a commit- ment to approach music in a broader cultural context. Indeed, the conviction that music has a long and deeprelationship to other cultural arenas has driven ethnomusicological research for most of the twentieth century.2 As historical musicologists have begun to enter into a more nuanced considerationof the rela- tionship between music and society,3 they have frequently found themselves on the same slippery ground that ethnomusicologists have long trod, raising admit- tedly important questions for which some answers are more convincing than others. Yet, if charting the relationship between music and context remains a challenging and not always fully realizable goal for scholarship, its theoretical frameworks and working methods have at least begun to be widely debated.a The broader impact of musicological scholarship, however,has not generally been a t I use the term'musicology' in the most general senseto incorporate historical, systematic, and ethnomusico- logical aspects of the field. 'z While the seach for homologies between music and extra-musical domains has been an increasingly promi- nent goal of more recent ethnomusicological enquiry, the successful outcome of such research is by no means assured. In some caseshomologies appeu to be present and quite well marked; a notable example is the striking correlation between musical cycles and calendrical cycles in Java (Judith Becker, 'Time and T\rne in Java', in A. L. Becker and Aram A. Yengoyan (eds,), Thelmagination ol Realita (Norwood, NJ, 1979), 197-210). However, all too frequently, the seach for homologies has moved simplistically between the musical surface and m aspect of social structure. The classica.lexample of such an interpretative process is that of Alan Lomu's cantometrics, which ana$- ses song in vilious social settings through a methodology that interrogates the social structure of music, travelling a circuln path to ilrive at the hypothesis with which it began (Folk Song Style and Culture (Washington, 1968). See Don Michael Randel, 'Crossing Over with Ruben Blades', /AMS 44 (1991), 3 19-20, for a similar critlque), 3 See Richud Leppert and Susan McCfuy, Mttsic and. Society. The Politics of Composition, Pedormanceand Rileption (Cambridge,1987). { See e.g. the essays in Ruth A. Solie (ed.), Musicologg and,Afference, Gender arul Sexualit1 in Music Scholarship (Berkeley,1993).