If it were not bad enough to find out that the Australian government has over recent years been redistributing Australian Research Council funds away from the humanities (and in particular the creative arts and writing) by a factor of almost two-thirds towards areas it described as being of ‘immediate and critical importance’, we now know that at least two music research projects that were approved in the 2019 grant round were subsequently denied support at the whim of former Federal education minister Simon Birmingham. I doubt many of us were surprised, however. The annual chore of grant writing has felt for some time now to be a Sisyphean one, more a ritual of disciplinary self-abasement rather than self-affirmation given the already dismally low chances of success. Nevertheless there now seems to be clear grounds for Australian Vice-Chancellors and learned academies to protest vigorously about such open prejudice against our discipline. Musicologists should protest too, of course, but perhaps we could also consider how we might better present the case for public support. To that end, the appearance of a book like William Cheng’s Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good seems both timely and welcome, for in it Cheng sets himself the task of examining how musicology might ‘renegotiate the means and purposes of careful labor, intellectual inquiry, and living soundly’ (p. 5). Cheng’s endeavour parallels recent work done by a consortium of conservatoire heads (of which I was one) who explored how tertiary music education could be more explicitly understood in terms of its benefits to wider society. Just Vibrations stands out, however, for focusing specifically on musicology and has quickly generated a good deal of online

中文翻译：

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只是振动：听起来不错的目的

如果还不至于发现澳大利亚政府最近几年一直在将澳大利亚研究委员会的资金从人文科学（尤其是创意艺术和写作）中重新分配近三分之二，用于它所描述的领域作为``紧迫且至关重要的''，我们现在知道，在前联邦教育部长西蒙·伯明翰（Simon Birmingham）一时兴起的情况下，至少有两个在2019年拨款回合中获得批准的音乐研究项目随后遭到支持。我怀疑我们当中的许多人感到惊讶。考虑到成功的机会已经很少，现在一年一度的赠款写作已经变成了西西弗斯时代的事，更多是一种纪律性的自欺欺人而不是自我肯定的仪式。尽管如此，现在澳大利亚副校长和学到的学院似乎有明确的理由强烈抗议这种对我们学科的公开偏见。音乐学家当然也应该提出抗议，但也许我们也可以考虑如何更好地向公众表示支持。为此，像威廉·郑（William Cheng）的《振动》（Just Vibrations）：听起来不错的目的这本书的出现似乎是及时且受欢迎的，因为在此过程中，郑（Cheng）为自己设定了研究音乐学如何“重新协商谨慎劳动，知识分子的手段和目的”的任务。探究，过上健康的生活”（第5页）。程的努力与一个音乐学院团长（我是其中一个）最近所做的工作相类似，他们探索了如何从其对更广泛的社会的好处方面更明确地理解高等音乐教育。