"Speculative Ethnomusicology?"

If I'm remembering this correctly, the conversation began with a stupid question of mine: is the demolition of Chávez Ravine a story that the man on the street would recognize? Noah said that it might or might not be, but that it was the go-to example for anyone making the argument that urban renewal is, at the end of the day, about not liking brown people. Then (and this is why I mention all of this) we marveled at the Ry Cooder album Chávez Ravine and tried to come up with a name for the bizarre idea behind it. "He imagines an alternate universe in which there are still housing projects there, and then tries to create the music that the residents would have made. What do you call that?" I think we settled on "speculative ethnomusicology," because it makes the whole concept sound almost as strange as it is.

It seems that Neal Stephenson is engaging in a little speculative ethnomusicology of his own:

Most of my music listening happens while I’m working, and so the music has to be compatible with the book I’m writing. Lately I’ve been working on Anathem, which is all about cloistered monks. I needed to get my head into a medieval/monastic frame of mind. At first blush this would seem to call for Gregorian chant. But a little of that goes a long way. Moreover, the monks I’ve been writing about are scientific monks in the distant future of an alternate world. There’s no reason to assume they’d sound like Gregorians.

Reading on, I was disappointed to discover that the music of "scientific monks in the distant future of an alternate world " is not, as I would have expected, Nina Simone and Bryan Ferry.