What be this "musicology"?
To inaugurate the Music 101 series, my friend asks, "What is musicology and what does a musicologist do?"
This is question I get frequently, and unfortunately there's no neat way to answer it. Musicology is simply, infuriatingly, the study of music. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson writes in the conclusion of The Modern Invention of Medieval Music that (and I'm paraphrasing), "Musicology is whatever musicologists do, interestingly." Truly, we make it up as we go.
When you apply to a graduate program for music, you have several courses of study to choose from. You can apply for performance, composition, music theory, musicology, or ethnomusicology, typically. Performance, composition, and music theory, you can see, are fairly specific. You must study all areas of music, to some extent, in any program. Even non-composers must compose as exercises for theory classes. But your primary purpose is relatively clear cut. A music theorist analyzes music--is primarily occupied with seeking out and describing its internal mechanisms.
(Ethno)musicology, though, is much more nebulous. While we certainly must know and perform some music analysis, our domain is effectively everything else. This can be the lives of composers, the process by which a piece was written, a survey of a composer's body of work in a particular place or time. It can be an examination of the relationship of a song's music to its lyrics, a reading of sexual or cultural violence in music, contemplation on the ability for music to imitate some aspect of life (mimesis).
Can we tell if Schubert was gay by looking at the way he wrote music? One musicologist thinks you can. What importance did arabesque motifs (as in, the visual motive) play in Stravinsky's Rite of Spring? What can the depiction of motherhood in late 18th century opera tell us about attitudes toward the sexes in that era? Why do certain books of English lute tablature from the early 16th century contain much heavier ornamentation than was typical of musical style in those decades? These are all papers I've heard recently.
Ethnomusicology is interested with much the same questions, but it focuses on music outside of Western art music. It examines world music, folk music, rock music, jazz, and so on. Because Ethnomusicology is often concerned with indigenous musics (which includes those of 21st century North America), it involves a lot more anthropological training, and it is for this reason that it's treated as a separate program of study. But as perspective continues to develop, we are now considering that we can even look at European history through an ethnographic lens--after all, 16th century Germany is a society that is very foreign to 21st century America. So at times the line between musicologists and ethnomusicologists is quite clear (the writing of my Enlightenment-era specialist teachers have little in common with my teacher who studies Albanian weddings), and others it's completely indistinct.
As for my own work, I'm still finding my way, but I am interested in historical musicology, especially medieval history. I'm currently seeking out ways to integrate early music and social theories. (One easy way is through Marxism--how do feudal versus free market economies affect musicianship and compositional output?) Perhaps ironically, current Medievalism typically focuses on using the past in order to facilitate tolerance and acceptance in the present. If we can treat medieval Europeans as Other in a constructive way, to stop conceiving of the present as the inevitable outcome of the monolith of history ("the church is against homosexuality now as it always has been"), then we can deconstruct our biases and obstacles.
I am also interested in pop music, particularly industrial music. Industrial music attracts me not just as a fan, but because it is musically and culturally unique. Its music is a hybrid of electronic and rock elements, so it defies conventional definitions of "rock" music, and at its most experimental, it defies all formal analysis. When does it stop being pop music and turn into art music? Does this line actually exist? How can music that sounds so different--experimental noise on one end, and techno on another--be cataloged as the same genre? How do industrial artists enact their politics? It's fascinating because the politics don't exist only in the lyrics, but in the performance, the presentation, and even in the structure of the music itself. Throbbing Gristle performed their music as a form of psychological and cultural warfare. What kind of dialog did they open?
The great struggle of musicology is that it can be whatever you want it to be. Sometimes it asks the Platonically big questions: what is music, and how can we know? Other times, it must concern itself with the gritty, boring details: how many singers were employed at the Papal chapel in the 1550s, and how much were they paid? Both schools of question are valid, and they need each other.
This is question I get frequently, and unfortunately there's no neat way to answer it. Musicology is simply, infuriatingly, the study of music. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson writes in the conclusion of The Modern Invention of Medieval Music that (and I'm paraphrasing), "Musicology is whatever musicologists do, interestingly." Truly, we make it up as we go.
When you apply to a graduate program for music, you have several courses of study to choose from. You can apply for performance, composition, music theory, musicology, or ethnomusicology, typically. Performance, composition, and music theory, you can see, are fairly specific. You must study all areas of music, to some extent, in any program. Even non-composers must compose as exercises for theory classes. But your primary purpose is relatively clear cut. A music theorist analyzes music--is primarily occupied with seeking out and describing its internal mechanisms.
(Ethno)musicology, though, is much more nebulous. While we certainly must know and perform some music analysis, our domain is effectively everything else. This can be the lives of composers, the process by which a piece was written, a survey of a composer's body of work in a particular place or time. It can be an examination of the relationship of a song's music to its lyrics, a reading of sexual or cultural violence in music, contemplation on the ability for music to imitate some aspect of life (mimesis).
Can we tell if Schubert was gay by looking at the way he wrote music? One musicologist thinks you can. What importance did arabesque motifs (as in, the visual motive) play in Stravinsky's Rite of Spring? What can the depiction of motherhood in late 18th century opera tell us about attitudes toward the sexes in that era? Why do certain books of English lute tablature from the early 16th century contain much heavier ornamentation than was typical of musical style in those decades? These are all papers I've heard recently.
Ethnomusicology is interested with much the same questions, but it focuses on music outside of Western art music. It examines world music, folk music, rock music, jazz, and so on. Because Ethnomusicology is often concerned with indigenous musics (which includes those of 21st century North America), it involves a lot more anthropological training, and it is for this reason that it's treated as a separate program of study. But as perspective continues to develop, we are now considering that we can even look at European history through an ethnographic lens--after all, 16th century Germany is a society that is very foreign to 21st century America. So at times the line between musicologists and ethnomusicologists is quite clear (the writing of my Enlightenment-era specialist teachers have little in common with my teacher who studies Albanian weddings), and others it's completely indistinct.
As for my own work, I'm still finding my way, but I am interested in historical musicology, especially medieval history. I'm currently seeking out ways to integrate early music and social theories. (One easy way is through Marxism--how do feudal versus free market economies affect musicianship and compositional output?) Perhaps ironically, current Medievalism typically focuses on using the past in order to facilitate tolerance and acceptance in the present. If we can treat medieval Europeans as Other in a constructive way, to stop conceiving of the present as the inevitable outcome of the monolith of history ("the church is against homosexuality now as it always has been"), then we can deconstruct our biases and obstacles.
I am also interested in pop music, particularly industrial music. Industrial music attracts me not just as a fan, but because it is musically and culturally unique. Its music is a hybrid of electronic and rock elements, so it defies conventional definitions of "rock" music, and at its most experimental, it defies all formal analysis. When does it stop being pop music and turn into art music? Does this line actually exist? How can music that sounds so different--experimental noise on one end, and techno on another--be cataloged as the same genre? How do industrial artists enact their politics? It's fascinating because the politics don't exist only in the lyrics, but in the performance, the presentation, and even in the structure of the music itself. Throbbing Gristle performed their music as a form of psychological and cultural warfare. What kind of dialog did they open?
The great struggle of musicology is that it can be whatever you want it to be. Sometimes it asks the Platonically big questions: what is music, and how can we know? Other times, it must concern itself with the gritty, boring details: how many singers were employed at the Papal chapel in the 1550s, and how much were they paid? Both schools of question are valid, and they need each other.
Comments