Scholars and Their Objects of Study; or, Loving Your Subject

Abstract

This concluding chapter directly addresses the relationship between scholars and their objects of study. In two parts, it looks at the relationship between the Parisian archaeologist and art historian Salomon Reinach and Natalie Clifford Barney before turning to analysis of contemporary collaborations between musicologists/dance historians and performers. To better understand ancient Greek artistic and social life, Reinach (the scholar) attached himself to Barney (the living embodiment of the past) and the queer women who performed pseudo-ancient Greek music and dance at her Parisian home (namely, the dancers Régina Badet and Liane de Pougy). Their correspondence reveals a complex system of reciprocity in the relationship among the scholar, his object of study, and the individuals with the power to embody the past through performance. The Barney-Reinach relationship reminds us to continually interrogate the ways musicologists perform scholarship today. As musicologists engage more in the creative realizations of their scholarly projects, and as musicological arguments find their way into performances, the negotiations between the performer and the scholar in the days when the discipline of musicology was forming will prove insightful. Recent calls for a reparative instead of a paranoid musicology emphasize the role of love in the work of music studies. The conclusion echoes calls for a reparative mode of scholarship, but one that doesn’t ignore the blinding power of that love.