It is now more than twenty years since Joseph Kerman published his much-cited essay "How we got into analysis, and how to get out" (Kerman 1980). Significantly enough, it appeared in the US journal Critical Inquiry, which adopted as one of its principal aims the encouragement of inter-disciplinary exchange across the more usual, professionally defined boundaries of academic discourse. The emphasis was on textual-hermeneutic approaches that derived chiefly from post-1970 literary theory, but whose influence was then being felt in other fields, among them art-criticism, cultural history, and the social sciences. Kerman took up this challenge on behalf of the musicological profession, and in the process declared himself squarely at odds with most of its predominant values, priorities, and working methods.