Musiblogogy / Musiblogogía

Phil at the musicology blog Dial 'M' for Musicology writes that "I've gone all meta and blogged about blogging." And then Ryan Banagale and Drew Massey at another musicology blog, Amusicology: Musicology in 1,000 Words or Less takes it meta-meta and writes about that post. So me writing about it is meta-meta-meta I guess, but I guess that's the nature of this weird economy of hyperlinked quotations that the blogging is built on.

Anyhow, the meat of it is the following, from Phil:

I started this blog thinking that the strange absence of music-scholarly blogs was a temporary condition, and that musicologists, once they had learned about academic blogging by example and could see what could be done in the medium, would start writing their own blogs and a hundred musicoloblogospheric flowers would bloom. Well, that didn't happen. Look at the academic blog wiki list of music-scholarly blogs. Now look at the one for history. Or linguistics and philosophy. Or even Classics and Ancient Languages, for Chrissake. We're getting our asses kicked by Latin.

And more provocatively:

I can't help but think that this is a cultural thing. Just as different parts of the orchestra each have their own micro-cultures, different disciplines within the humanities do too, and the culture of musicology is marked by its almost insane degree of caution and self-limitation. Sorry to be so blunt, but there it is: the other humanities, when they think of us at all (which isn't very often) tend to think of musicologists as something like stamp collectors, fanatically collecting and sorting and classifying stamps without caring about what they're attached to . . .

I usually dismiss this characterization, because it doesn't describe the musicologists whose work I admire. But I don't know. The point and challenge of blogging is to make connections with other parts of the intellectual world, and inasmuch as that challenge has hardly been taken up in the two-and-a-half years since I started this blog, I have to ask if we as a discipline are not actually just happier staying in our corner, playing with our stamps.

The Amusicology folks, for their part, write:

It is true that there are relatively few blogs on that list [the one Phil mentions] (there are a few more here), but I’m not entirely sure the problem is a lack of blogs as much as much as a problem of collating / unifying those blogs that are out there.

They then, very helpfully provide a list, which I'll synthesize here:

• academic blog wiki list of music-scholarly blogs
• AMS bloglist
• Ryan Raul Bañagale and Drew Massey: Amusicology: Musicology in 1,000 Words or Less
• Roger Bourland
• Avior Byron
• Jonathan Bellman, Phil Ford: Dial 'M' for Musicology
• Mark Connor: Contrasting Periods
• Kyle Gann: PostClassic
• Victor Grauer: Music 000001
• Philip Gentry: 2'23
• Nicol Hammond: Singing South African-ness
• Linda Kernohan (Miss Music Nerd)
• Heebie McJeebie: Classical Pontifications
• Michael Monroe: MMmusing
• musicology / matters
• Brent Reidy: musikwissenbloggenschaft
• Alex Ross: The Rest is Noise
• Tim Rutherford-Johnson: The Ramble
• Greg Sandow
• Scott Spiegelberg: Musical Perceptions
• Evan Tobias: Catalysts & Connections (expanding dialogue in music education)
• "People Listen to It" Gabriel Solis and company
• Coyotebanjo: Music, education, history, culture studies
• ionarts Charles T. Downey
• Interesting Music Stuff Colin Homiski
• Popular Songs and Breakfast Foods John Paul Meyers
• Postclassic Kyle Gann
• Renewable Music Daniel Wolf
• SmarterMusic Yuri Broze, Jeff Fowler, Andrew DiMartino, Catherine Cheng Jones
• Zeitschichten is a blog about music in Berlin and elsewhere Matthias Röder
• Wayne Marshall: http://wayneandwax.com/
• Laura E. Cayer: http://songcatchergirl.blogspot.com/
• Kraig Grady: http://anaphoriasouth.blogspot.com/
• Alexandre Enkerli: http://enkerli.wordpress.com/
• Liam McGranahan: http://mashupresearch.blogspot.com
• Victor Grauer: http://music000001.blogspot.com/
• Michael Bakan: http://mailer.fsu.edu/~mbakan/index.html
• Max Peter Baumann: http://maxpeterbaumann-ethnomusicology.blogspot.com/
• Jonathan H. Harwell: http://mesoj.edublogs.org
• Lee Bidgood: Http://blidgood.wordpress.com
• Eliot Bates: http://www.eliotbates.com/blog/
• Maria Ljungdahl (Sweedish): http://maljmusic.blogspot.com/

Plus I figured I'd add some more from (or about) Latin America (esp. Colombia), of, by, or for ethno/musicologists:

• Grupo Independiente de Etnomusicología México (Mexico, Spanish)
• Los Sonidos Invisibles - Ana María Arango (Colombia, Spanish)
• Puro Revolú (Colombia, Spanish)
• Asociación para las Investigaciones Culturales del Chocó (Colombia, Spanish)
• Egberto Bermúdez (Colombia, Spanish)
• Raquel Z. Rivera - Reggaetónica (US/Puerto Rico, English)
• Sydney Hutchinson - Accordion Girl (US/Germany/Dominican Republic, English)
• Ieda's Blog (Brazil, Portuguese)
• Eliécer Arenas Monsalve - El Oído que Seremos
• John Murphy - Music in Brazil (US, English/Portuguese) and John Murphy's Blog (US, English
  

After all that, I want to post one last thought from Amusicology, which seems like a great idea:

Musicology blogs take all shapes and forms, some focus on longer posts, others a tidbit here or there, others still as a place to air research ideas. Perhaps what we need is a meta-blogger willing to spend their days combing other blogs and pulling together all the interesting posts/subjects. The Perez Hilton of musicology, though less profitable and fashionable (in many senses of the word).

Don't look at me, I'm going to be in the boondocks of Colombia for the next few months working, and probably without much internet. But maybe starting to make these lists is the first step...