This document discusses the history and development of musicology. It notes that traditionally, musicology focused on 19th century European art music and reflected the social constructs of that era. However, music has diversified and musicology was in a state of crisis by the late 20th century for failing to account for this. The document examines how thinking about music was shaped by figures like Beethoven and explores efforts to reposition musicology through historical performance, ethnomusicology, gender studies, and recognizing music as a cultural construct rather than natural phenomenon.

1. What is Musicology?
l What is your definition?

2. What is it for?
l And why study it?

3. Cook’s Very Short
Introduction to Musicology
A book about thinking about music.
Buy it and read.

4. This Lecture
l About the history of musicology.
l Questions of what it is for.
l Introduces Nicholas Cook’s book. A Very
Short Introduction to Musicology.

5. What is musicology
l • A search for a common all embracing way
of thinking and talking about music.
l • An investigation of the credibility gap
between music and how we think about it.
l • but - Most musicology writing reflects the
way music was in 19th century Europe.

6. Words and Music:
l We have inherited from the past a way of thinking
about music that cannot do justice to the diversity
of practices and experiences which that small
word `music' signifies in today's world.
l 100 years ago ‘music’ meant European art music
- all the Bs – an approved corpus of musical
works, specific to time and place.
l Comparison with 19th-century production of
goods, musical culture a process of creating,
distributing, and consuming works of music -
concept of aesthetic capital.

7. Quote from Cook
l The language of music assumes that
musicianship is the preserve of specialists:
that innovation is central; that the key
players are composers; that performers are
middlemen, apart from the exceptionally
innovative, and listeners are consumers and
passive. All these assumptions are
unnatural constructs of culture and vary
from time to time and place to place.

8. Beethoven

9. Back to Beethoven
l 19th-century saw the capitalist model of society in
full swing - a construct of bourgeois society.
l Artistic movements were dedicated to personal
expression. Privileged role of music within
Romanticism as seen in the writings of Carl
Dahlhouse.
l Finding your voice as a composer meant defining
yourself in relation to Beethoven.
l The role model – Beethoven refused to take a
salaried position, and wrote music he wanted to
write – his music is experienced as speaking
directly to listener as an individual.

10. More on Beethoven
l His deafness - acknowledged in his day as the
greatest living composer.
l Heroic Plot - critics sought to explain Beethoven's
music as demonstrating some kind of heroic plot -
a self-portrait in music - to overcome the blow of
his deafness.
The model artist- Romain Rolland book La vie de
Beethoven (1907) held up Beethoven as a model
for less heroic age. Concept of : Joy through
suffering.

11. The Beethoven Myth
l The Beethoven cult - ideas embedded in thinking about
music came out of ferment of ideas that surrounded the
reception of Bee's music.
l Ideas of authenticity - power of music to transcend time
and space.
l Centrality of composer - performer and listener given a
minor role.
l Appreciation of music - something taught as the basis of
class teaching in music at school level - strong in
American liberal arts courses until the 1980s.
l How to listen - attentively, respectful detached manner,
informed with knowledge. Today listening is linked back
into composing and performing.

12. State of Crisis by the end of the 20th century
l Musical culture of early 20th cent had moved
on - but our ways of thinking about music had
not.
l Music now a Global resource - internet.
l In the 19th century piano and sheet music were
still central to the learning of art music – by late
20th the recording increasingly becomes where
‘music’ resides.
l Difference between 19th and 20th century
mindsets on what represents high and low art.

13. Crisis by 1980s
l According to 19th century mind-set high equals all
the Bs and low everything else.
l Most music history books tell the story of Western
art music with possibly a chapter or two on
popular music (Jazz?), and non-western music
gets a mention at beginning.
l Old thinking thought that Western music equals
progress.
l But a sea change since 1980s

14. Death and Transfiguration.
l Audience statistics for many art music concerts are now
very low – especially for early 20th century music
l The new language of 12-tone music – the new tonality – of
modern music became ghettoized. Schoenberg thought
people would eventually learn to like it.
l Failure of modern music of early 20th century. Plurality
of subcultures that has replaced the monolithic.
l Modern music a niche product that flourishes on fringes.
l Classical music also a niche but a much larger one. E.g.
Classic FM.
l If there is a crisis in classical music it is not in music itself,
but in ways of thinking about it.

15. Old habits that are ingrained and
inform the way we think about music:
Old Habits:
l • to explain away time and think of music as
an imaginary object - something which is in time
but not of time.
l • to think of language and other forms of
cultural representation, including music, as if they
depicted some kind of external reality.

16. Music as an imaginary
object.
You cannot grasp music.
l What are crotchet's and quavers for?
l 1. conservation
l 2. communication
l 3. conception - the way composers,
performers and all others imagine or think
about music.
l But notation is not ‘music’

17. Notation
l Egyptian example of wanting to preserve
everything.
l
l 1. Old notation does not tell all.
l 2. Problems of nuematic notation.
l 3. Example of castrati recording.
l
l If we don't know how music sounded at beginning
of century, how can we for much earlier music.
l Notation conserves music but it conceals as music
as it reveals. It is a form of code only readable to
those that understand its conventions.

18. Two ways of notating music:
l 1. representing sounds
l 2. representing things performers do to get sounds
l
l 1. is Western notation - but it only has meaning if
you know the conventions. Many elements not
included.
l 2. is tablature - you don't have to understand you
just do. But it is limited to just one instrument.
l Problem of sheet music for popular music - written
by non-literate musicians.

19. Music between the notes
l • Musical notations are highly selective in what they
record - contrast with DAT recorders and samplers.
l • Staff notation treats all music as though it was
producing distinct separate notes - it's not.
l • But staff notation distorts all music - including western
music - you have to know the tradition and context for it
to work.
l • Notations have to simplify - melograph of Charles
Seeger - not used.
l • Tablature of chinese qin does not notate rhythm.
l • It is in the realm of communication that western notation
really scores (pun) transmits a way of thinking about
music.

20. The paradox of music
l Hermeneutics - developing illuminating metaphors
to describe individual compositions - implying it
sought out meaning in music.
l When music moves (up or down on stave) what
moves – nothing - thus an imaginary object.
l We experience music in time, but to manipulate it or
to understand it, we pull it out of time and falsify it.
l The musical museum is built out of a confusion of
imaginary objects and temporal experiences.

21. Music and the Academy
l Kerman's book of 1985
Contemplating Music - a social
history of musicology was an
attack on current state of
musicology. He advocated a
critical approach to the
discipline - not the prevailingly
unreflective or positivist
approach.

22. Academies, Universities and
conservatories
l Difference between what musicology means
in Am and Brit/Aust. Problems of authority
in music the preserve of Academies -
producing authoritative versions - but did
not go on to critically engage with work.
Historical contextualising needed to connect
with the music as music.

23. And how to get out of the crisis
l 1. Historical performance movement - musicologist had a
real contribution. What authenticity meant to them. But
then historical performance referred to the approach you
brought to music - how composer intended it? But it put
performance at centre of activity.
l 2. Contribution of ethnomusicologists was `to get real’ -
had to be self-critical - political situations of real
importance. e.g. Beta Israel communities of Africa/
Ethiopia. Looking at use of folk music in Balkan Wars.

24. Music and Gender
Part of the repositioning of Academies and critical
theory. Used to placing theory above practice.
Music education a battle ground. The key area in
the repositioning was gender studies. Study of
music (composer dominated) appeared to be
without women. New ways of writing on music
had to be developed that recognize the activities of
women.

25. Conclusion
l Music not a phenomenon of the natural world
but a human construction - artifice disguised as
nature.
l • Music has unique powers as an agent of
ideology.
l • We need to understand its workings, not just to
hear music.
l • Read it for its significance as an intrinsic part of
culture - of society - of you and me.