All books, monographs, editions, periodicals, and other materials considered necessary for successfully completing the degree had been collected in a large study-seminar room.… The word “canon” was never used then, but the ideology, though never articulated, could not have been clearer. The corpus of music and literature on music necessary for the pursuit of musicology was finite; it was all here in this room; and once our apprenticeship was completed and we moved out into the hard world of academia, our success would be measured by whether or not our own work would one day be brought into this room.

The [general] stacks were situated just outside the door of our sanctuary, and occasionally, when none of my professors or fellow students was about, I would sneak a look at a score by John Cage or Charles Ives, or at a book about southern folk hymnody, or a bound collection of nineteenth-century sheet music. I felt like a teenager browsing through a collection of pornography.