Interdisciplinarity and Musicology in Higher Degree Research

My time as a Higher Degree Research (HDR) student was typical of twenty-first-century arts and humanities research training, in the sense that I was surrounded by students and faculty who celebrated interdisciplinarity. The naming of our school’s annual HDR conference, Intersections and Interventions, captured the ideals towards which we emerging researchers were encouraged—to seek new forms of dialogue across disciplinary boundaries and to disrupt outmoded praxical habits. There is great merit in this kind of interdisciplinarity, which would synthesise disparate knowledges to create frameworks for understanding and responding to the complex problems of our time. However, some aspects of my HDR experience remain troubling. There was a pervasive sense that interdisciplinarity was prized in opposition to disciplinarity, the latter denigrated as an archaic, parochial form of epistemological siloing. In this vein, musicology became an appealing scapegoat for my peers engaged in research creation, which has been promoted in recent decades as an ‘interdiscipline’ at the nexus of scholarly knowledge and artistic practice. Through the reminiscences I share in this chapter, I ask what it means for interdisciplinarity to ascend at the expense of disciplinarity, and for research creation to displace musicology in HDR programmes. At its best, interdisciplinarity enriches the disciplines it synthesises, and gives rise to new disciplines. At its worst, it may be better understood as discipline erasure—a mask for political jostling between faculty, an excuse for creative artists to valorise their identities as objects of scholarship, and an invitation for administrators to liquidate discursively undermined research disciplines.