Here are my own comments:
The Littlefield & Neumeyer article came near the end of the era of deconstruction (in literary theory, anyway), and the radicalisms of which Buhler accuses us certainly inhered in the article's argument. Our claim that "value has 'everything to do with the expertise of the professional interpreter' and nothing to do with the work" is simply a reworking for music of the "empty page" notion of reader response theory, where there is no text until the reader constructs it.
Jim's objections to our position in the article are very similar to objections raised against reader-response theory in the 1980s and early 1990s, and in my view they are consistent with claims I make about self-conscious analytic practice in the MTS article (in that article, I back away a bit from the Littlefield & Neumeyer stance -- see fn10). Whether it's a distinction between "rationalist systems" and "values" (derived from Lewin) or between material and discursive dimensions, the goal is self-conscious practice.
The progress of literary analysis and interpretation across the twentieth century may be charted roughly as the move from author to text to reader to (what we hope is ) a comfortable pluralism of viewpoints and approaches. The nineteenth-century focus on the author, on biography, on history as the deeds of heroic individuals, was still strong in the 1920s. The modernist reaction against that view turned to the text as an organic entity (or, in a different metaphor, an efficient system) -- in effect, the text became independent of the author in the criticism of T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, William Empson, and the several American New Critics. This view seemed at first to merge nicely with the structuralist/semiotic program in the 1950s and early 1960s, but the latter (especially when it became linked with psychoanalytic theory, mainly through Julia Kristeva, in the late 1960s) turned more and more toward the reader's response rather than the text's effects. By the 1990s, this had played itself out, and approaches such as the New Historicism tried to resuscitate and rethink biographical/contextual studies in the form of an (anti-analytical) "thick description." Textual analysis was either reshaped as "hermeneutics" (analysis sensitive to context) or was linked ever more tightly to political ideologies. And reader response was either limited to contemporary forms of semiotic analysis or shunted off to the empirical sciences as an aspect of human cognition studies.
That's where we are -- or that seems to me to be the current consensus of where we think we are (!). For more on how thematic criticism and musical analytic practice fit into this, see the Conclusion section of the MTS article.
References:
Littlefield, Richard, and David Neumeyer. "Rewriting Schenker–History, Ideology, Narrative." In Adam Krims, , ed. Music/Ideology: Resisting the Aesthetic, 138-146. Amsterdam: G + B Arts International, 1998. Originally published in Music Theory Spectrum 14/1 (1992): 38-65.
Neumeyer, David. "Thematic Reading, Proto-backgrounds, and Transformations." Music Theory Spectrum 31/2: 284-324.
Bhaskar, Roy. Scientific Realism and Human Emancipation. London: Verso, 1987.
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 3d ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Earlier editions: 2d (1970), 1st (1962).
