Confronting a topic that has sparked considerable debate in recent years: how do musicians and music scholars discipline music in their efforts to confer order and meaning on it?, this collection of essays addresses this issue by formulating questions about music's canons - rules that measure and order, negotiate cultural constraints, reconstruct the past, and shape the future. Written by scholars representing the fields of historical musicology, ethnomusicology, and music theory, many of the essays seek to push at the very boundaries of these traditional divisions within the study of music.