Against History: Defining, and Defending, Systematic Musicologies
When first defined by Guido Adler in 1885 in his pioneering article on the new discipline of musicology, systematic musicology appeared simply to be a good idea: after all, since music operates and is created across a range of different contexts, an articulated awareness of the various methods that...
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| In: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/filigrane, |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Language: | Anglais |
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Filigrane
2024
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| Online Access: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Summary: | When first defined by Guido Adler in 1885 in his pioneering article on the new discipline of musicology, systematic musicology appeared simply to be a good idea: after all, since music operates and is created across a range of different contexts, an articulated awareness of the various methods that could be applied to its study seemed necessary to any definition of musicology. But humanistic tradition and institutional politics intervened, and musicological studies became increasingly divided into the historical and the ethnological, with no room left for anything else. The limits of Anglophone musicology as established in the 1930s, and the unfortunate tendency of academic institutions to reproduce their own methodological patterns, created a situation where entire areas of musical study are now considered peripheral or even dubious by most musicologists.This presentation will consider various definitions and studies of systematic musicology in the context of a number of related disciplines as they have been constituted in academe, as well as in the light of Kerman’s 1985 critique of the possibilities and limitations of our field. After examining some of the charts presenting the possible fields of musical scholarship, I offer my own chart of the potential disciplines of systematic musicology. All of these methodological divisions are invoked to recall those aspects of music that are denied by an exclusive focus on history and ethnology, as it reaches into the realms of the physical, the psychosocial, and the abstract. |
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