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# 1.1 Exploring Western musicology

In this section you are going to look at one definition of ‘musicology’, and how this might work in practice.

## Activity 2 Asking questions about music

Timing: Allow around 30 minutes to complete this activity.

#### Part 1

Read the following definition of musicology, taken from the article on ‘Musicology’ in Grove Music Online, an important resource for music studies.

As you read, make a note of the influences from other disciplines listed in the extract.

#### Extract 1 Vincent Duckles and Jann Pasler, ‘The nature of musicology’

The term ‘musicology’ has been defined in many different ways. As a method, it is a form of scholarship characterized by the procedures of research. A simple definition in these terms would be ‘the scholarly study of music’. Traditionally, musicology has borrowed from ‘art history for its historiographic paradigms and literary studies for its paleographic and philological principles’ (Treitler, 1995). A committee of the American Musicological Society (AMS) in 1955 also defined musicology as ‘a field of knowledge having as its object the investigation of the art of music as a physical, psychological, aesthetic, and cultural phenomenon’ (JAMS, viii, p.153). The last of these four attributes gives the definition considerable breadth, although music, and music as an ‘art’, remains at the centre of the investigation.

A third view, which neither of these definitions fully implies, is based on the belief that the advanced study of music should be centred not just on music but also on musicians acting within a social and cultural environment. This shift from music as a product (which tends to imply fixity) to music as a process involving composer, performer, and consumer (i.e. listeners) has involved new methods, some of them borrowed from the social sciences, particularly anthropology, ethnology, linguistics, sociology, and more recently politics, gender studies, and cultural theory. This type of inquiry is also associated with ethnomusicology. Harrison (1963) and other ethnomusicologists have suggested that ‘It is the function of all musicology to be in fact ethnomusicology; that is, to take its range of research to include material that is termed ‘sociological’ (see also Ethnomusicology).

(Duckles and Pasler, 2020)

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### Discussion

I made the following list: art history; literary studies; anthropology; ethnology (I had to look this one up); linguistics; sociology; politics; gender studies; and cultural theory.

#### Part 2

Return to your list of musical sounds from Activity 1. Choosing one sound, think about the ways in which you could frame scholarly research around it. Use the framework in the American Musicological Society definition in Extract 1 as a starting point to consider the following questions:

- What is the physical nature of the sound? How was it made and transmitted?
- What is the psychological impact of the sound?
- What can be said about the aesthetic nature of the sound? Can you analyse its musical content?
- What are the social and cultural contexts of the sound? Does it have a particular purpose or meaning within these contexts?

Make a note of these ideas below.

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### Discussion

Your responses will depend on the sounds you noted. I undertook some of this listening myself and became interested in the music that accompanied children’s television programmes. I noticed that, at times, extracts of classical music were included, and I began to make notes about the particular ways this was used with particular effects or meanings. I was particularly interested in the way music from one context was translated into another context, which added to, and changed, its meaning and impact.

Keeping an ear out and thinking critically about the music you encounter on a day-to-day basis can lead to new areas of research and investigation. The broader framework of sounds you experience is also of interest to scholars, and forms the basis of a discipline called ‘sound studies’, which intersects in many ways with musicology. Sound studies, a relatively recent area of research, encompasses studies of the technologies, environments and cultural contexts of sound of all kinds, from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Other influences, many of them from specialised areas such as sociology or ethnography, have also changed the scope of music studies to go beyond music that is notated or which is performed in concert halls.

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OpenLearn - Introducing music research
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