With a few exceptions, including the recent formation of a musical semiotics, official discourse on music in the twentieth century has largely resisted discussion of music as it might be related to language or meaning. Composers and theorists from Webern to Babbitt have sought to place the art of musical composition in an autonomous space adjacent to mathematics where, as in the Middle Ages, it would be exclusively concerned with carefully controlled pattern-making, according to rules that are particular to music. Thus the meaning of music has generally been restricted to intramusical formal relations, considered independent of any verbal content and free of ideological influence. Discussing the widespread reluctance to link music to meaning or ideology, Rose Rosengard Subotnik gives the example of Stravinksy, for whom composition was “ a specimen of purely autonomous craft”. The academic discipline of musicology appears largely complicitous with this view. First, musicology as an academic discipline arose during a particular moment in the history of Western aesthetics when theorists reacted against eighteenth-century mimetic principles and placed great emphasis on music as an “absolute” art which was by nature free from the constraints of determinate meaning, and detached from the contingencies of life and history. The study of music today carries with it the heritage of its early history.