Musicology refers to the scholarly study of music. At the narrowest level, musicology refers to the music history of Western cultural elites. In a slightly wider lever, it includes all styles, genres, and traditions of music. In the broadest sense, it includes all musically relevant disciplines and all manifestations of music in all cultures. The various disciplines that come within the scope of musicology include history; cultural studies and gender studies; philosophy, aesthetics and semiotics; ethnology and cultural anthropology; archeology and prehistory; psychology and sociology; physiology and the neurosciences; acoustics and psychoacoustics; and computer/information sciences and mathematics. Historical musicology is a branch of musicology that studies the composition, performance, reception, and criticism of music over time. It includes the study of a composer’s life and works, the developments of styles and genres, the social function of music for a particular group of people, or modes of performance at a particular place and time. Ethnomusicology refers to the study of music in its cultural context and it includes a study of Western music from an anthropological or sociological perspective. Closely related to ethnomusicology is the emerging branch of sociomusicology. Historical Musicology and Ethnomusicology
New musicology is a term applied since the late 1980s to a wide collection of works that focus on cultural study, analysis, and criticism of music. Such work may be based on feminist, gender studies, queer theory, or postcolonial theory, or the work of Theodor Adorno. Although New Musicology emerged from within historical musicology, the emphasis on cultural study within the Western art music tradition places New Musicology at the junction between historical, ethnological, and sociological research in music. New musicology was a reaction against traditional historical musicology. Today, many musicologists no longer distinguish between musicology and New Musicology, since many of the scholarly concerns that used to be associated with New Musicology have now become mainstream, and the term “new” clearly no longer applies.
New Musicology is considered to have had its origins in Joseph Kerman’s book “Contemplating Music” (1985). Kerman’s text tried to consolidate the image of an older conservative discipline, defined by musicological positivism and an analytical formalism – and the need for a newer critical progressive direction (Hooper 6). According to Kofi Agawu (Agawu, 1997, p. 299), “Contemplating Music” enabled a crystallization of the offending categories as positivism and formalism (Hooper 6). Kerman’s texts recommended a type of criticism similar to mainstream literary criticism – a patchwork of analysis, criticism, history, and aesthetics that would link music to underlying human values. Apart from Joseph Kerman’s texts, New Musicology began to take shape with a cluster of influential texts such as Lawrence Kramer’s Music as Cultural Practice (1990), Susan McClary’s Feminine Endings (1991), and Carolyn Abbate’s Unsung Voices (1991) (Hooper 5). The early 1990s marked the appearance of “new” musicological writings and also by a marked increase in self-reflective discourses such as “Approaches to the Discipline” edition of Current Musicology (53, 1993) and the special edition of The Journal of Musicology (1997).
The new musicologists have called into question the separation of historical issues and musical form. They have focused instead on music’s role as a social medium (DeNora and Adorna 35). This move allows the study of the interrelation between musical works and categories and hierarchies of social structure – identity, power, and practices of the ruling.
New Musicology holds that musical works are historically conditioned social constructions and that scores do not fully specify the works they are of. The New Musicology has generated exciting, innovative results through musicological analysis. The analysis is a branch of musicology that is concerned with a search for internal coherence within a musical work (Street 1989). Analysis often engages in the evaluation of abstract, conceptual levels in music, describing features that are not obvious in a score but arise from consideration of theoretical ideas that have been developed in history and cultural contexts. Throughout history, analytical methods and questions have changed according to the prevailing cultural and aesthetic modes of the time. Thus in the early part of the nineteenth century, analysts were concerned with the concept of “greatness” of work whereas seventeenth and eighteenth-century analytical approaches were based on modal systems and interest in rhetoric or language.
Later nineteenth and twentieth-century analysis were heavily influenced by organicism. Organicism reflects the idea that the musical work is an organism in which parts combine as a functioning whole, appropriating the body as a metaphor for the musical work (Beard and Gloag 125). This concept was promoted by music theorists such as Heinrich Schenker, Rudolph Reti, and Arnold Schoenberg. Evidence of a paradigm shift that occurred between 1980 and 1990 was noted by Joseph Kerman in “American Musicology in the 1990s,” Journal of Musicology (1991). Joseph Kerman noticed how organicism and the search for unity in musical composition have become synonymous with music analysis. Since Joseph Kerman’s book Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology in 1985, analytic musicology has undergone a thorough critique of the philosophical and epistemological assumptions that provide its basis for constructing knowledge and understanding. Additionally, the analytic influence of disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, and psychology has led to a significant review and improvement of the aims and methods of empirical musicology.
Works of New Musicology frequently begin with a detailed, technical discussion of a composer’s music or notations (Davies 92). Conclusions are drawn from these about the nature of the pieces in question and, in some cases, these conclusions are extrapolated into universal claims about the nature of musical works. A different position offered in support of the New Musicology appears to have a basis that is more philosophical than historical (Davies 92). Boorman(1999) claims that the search for authoritative sources (that fully represent the composer’s intentions) is futile because, according to him, such authoritative sources cannot exist. He feels composers can’t give all the detail of what they want. Boorman (1999: 422) concludes: ‘The text, as it appears in sources, is not… a simple definer of the work.’
Today, there is no such division as musicology and new musicology. New Musicology today is the same as musicology, a scholarly study of music and its meanings.
Bibliography
DeNora, Tia and Adorno, W. Theodor (2003). After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology. Cambridge University Press. 2003.
Davies, Stephen (2001). Musical Works and Performances: A Philosophical Exploration. Clarendon Press. Oxford. 2001. Page Number: 94.
Hooper, Giles (2006). The Discourse of Musicology. Ashgate Publishing Ltd. 2006.
Agawu, Kofi (1997). Analyzing music under the new musicological regime. Journal of musicology. 1997. Volume 15. Issue 3.
Beard, David and Gloag, Kenneth (2005). Musicology: The Key Concepts. Routledge Publishers. 2005.
Kerman, J. (1985). Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press).