"[3] Susan McClary suggests that new musicology defines music as "a medium that participates in social formation by influencing the ways we perceive our feelings, our bodies, our desires, our very subjectivities—even if it does so surreptitiously, without most of us knowing how".
This has caused many musicologists to question previously held views of authenticity and to make assessments based on critical methods "concerned with finding some kind of synthesis between [musical] analysis and a consideration of social meaning".
Gary Tomlinson suggests that meaning be searched out in a "series of interrelated historical narratives that surround the musical subject"[7] – a "web of culture"[8] For example, the work of Beethoven has been examined from new perspectives by studying his reception and influence in terms of hegemonic masculinity, the development of the modern concert, and the politics of his era, among other concerns.
[citation needed] New musicology, on the other hand, often overlaps with postmodern aesthetics; various new musicologists are highly sympathetic towards musical minimalism.
[11][12] Vincent Duckles writes, "As musicology has grown more pluralistic, its practitioners have increasingly adopted methods and theories deemed by observers to mark the academy as irrelevant, out of touch with 'mainstream values', unwelcoming of Western canonic traditions or simply incomprehensible.
In response to an early essay of McClary,[14] Rosen says that "she sets up, like so many of the 'new musicologists', a straw man to knock down, the dogma that music has no meaning, and no political or social significance.