Musicology: History, Methods, and Reception

Posted on Jan 31, 2025 in Social sciences

**Different Approaches to Musicology**

Musicology has encompassed various interdependent conceptions:

  1. Activity: Emphasis on precise, rigorous, and scientific application of methods in historical musicology. Historical musicology has been included in the quadrivium, suggesting that musicological methods are quantitative and similar to scientific methodologies. As a science and recent discipline, musicology arises in connection with the modern spirit and with the emergence of scientific methods.
  2. Area of Knowledge: Interpretation of music as a physical, psychological, aesthetic, and cultural phenomenon.
  3. The Producer: The serious and thorough study of the human being as a producer of music, not the music itself. It shifts from product to producer. This pathway allows for interdisciplinary study, but it changes the perspective in which art is understood as a reflection of the society that produces it. Music would be a passive element.

In the 1980s, there was a growing interest in distinguishing musicology from the history of music. Different positions emerged. Adler, Riemann, and Kerman proposed that musicology has a more limited meaning, focusing on the aspect of Western music, with great appreciation for the sources of aesthetic experience. Therefore, musicology differs from ethnomusicology in its field of study, as it takes a different approach to various musical objects. Weber considered three aspects of the object of study of musicology:

  1. Music History
  2. Historical and Literary Science
  3. Multidisciplinary Science

Kramer, already in the 18th century, outlined different maps (each broken down into other materials) to organize the fields of musicological study:

  1. Acoustics: Metaphysics, physics, and mathematics
  2. Practice: Composition and performance
  3. History: History of music and musicians

Forkel, Bach’s first biographer, in 1777, divided it by systematic literature, historical theme, and musical theory and practice. He is the originator of the dichotomy between historical and systematic musicology, which is the basis of Guido Adler’s formulations in 1915. This dichotomy requires the study of the history of ideas, the theory of history, theoretical frameworks, and methodological models.

Carl Dahlhaus’s View on Musicology

Carl Dahlhaus’s musicology is founded on:

  1. Works, composers, institutions, and aesthetic ideas of the era. Having been concerned with authors and works has affected our vision.
  2. Assessing composers through the eyes of their time. This study is as important as musicology itself.
  3. Science made from sources, but do not confuse fact with source. It is the process that is derived and which presupposes a critical evaluation of the source.
  4. Conceptualize:
    • Source: It is often tangible but not only has material existence.
    • Data: It is extracted from the sources or an interpretation of several.
    • Work: He also argues that the fact-work is to be a functional complex of musical meanings, which has not identified a single factor. In addition, a score may depend on the editor, visions, and revisions. This range depends on the criteria of the historian, which creates a chain of events.

History of Reception

Historical facts include receptors in the thinking process in use, function, and meaning. The author-work-recipient relationship is seen from different types of relationships by watching the exchange of flows of cultural phenomena. Incorporating receptors implies that musical events are a complex of functional relationships between text, interpretation, and reception. The history of reception requires effort and precision. It shall take into account public dissemination, production, and chronological changes. History is not the past itself but what historians do with it; that power structure leaves its imprint on the objects it studies. Dahlhaus insists that historians produce chains of events that are not real but mental constructs.

Consequences:

  • Take into account the public, broadcasting, and production.
  • Consider timing changes.
  • Account for recordings that are called inauthentic.
  • The work no longer has an autonomous value.
  • Past events do not become facts.