Beyond Human Musicology To Post-Human Musicology
Two Volume Set

Book Abstract
Is musicology really so important that, as Ludwig van Beethoven once positively said, “music is a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy”? This hyperbolic view on music can be contrasted with the opposing one by Kurt Cobain, who complained that “[m]y body is damaged from music in two ways. I have a red irritation in my stomach. It’s psychosomatic, caused by all the anger and the screaming. I have scoliosis, where the curvature of your spine is bent, and the weight of my guitar has made it worse. I’m always in pain, and that adds to the anger in our music.” (BQ 2017a)
Contrary to these opposing views (and other ones as will be discussed in the book), human musicology (in relation to positiveness and normativeness—as well as other dichotomies) is neither possible (or impossible) nor desirable (or undesirable) to the extent that the respective ideologues (on different sides) would like us to believe, such that there is no positiveness without normativeness (and vice versa), to be explained by the “cognitiveness-noncognitiveness principle,” the “empiricalness-nonempiricalness principle,” the “regression-progression principle,” and other ones in “existential dialectics” (in Chapter Four).
Of course, this challenge to the conventional debate does not mean that human musicology, as a field of study, is pointless, or that those diverse fields (related to human musicology)—such as aesthetics, anthropology, sociology, political science, mathematics, psychology, religion, economics, communications theory, history, linguistics studies, and so on—should be ignored. (WK 2017) Needless to say, neither of these extreme views is reasonable.
Instead, this book offers an alternative (better) way to understand the future of human musicology (and related fields) in regard to the dialectic relationship between positiveness and normativeness (and those in other dichotomies)—while learning from different approaches in the literature but without favoring any one of them (nor integrating them, since they are not necessarily compatible with each other). More specifically, this book offers a new theory (that is, the positive-normative theory of musicology) to go beyond the existing approaches in a novel way and is organized in four chapters.
This seminal project will fundamentally change the way that we think about human musicology (in relation to the dialectic relationship between positiveness and normativeness—as well as those in other dichotomies) from the combined perspectives of the mind, nature, society, and culture, with enormous implications for the human future and what I originally called its “post-human” fate.