Disciplinary scope

Diving into a discipline — Musicology

Etymologically, the Greek lógos (λόγος — “word, discourse”) coupled with the word music refers to any production of knowledge about music. Musicology, as an academic discipline within the humanities, can therefore be defined as the scientific study of music. A researcher engaged in this field is called a musicologist.

Choosing to study music rather than practice it invites us to engage with it in a different way — to appreciate it as an object of knowledge rather than as a purely experiential reality. Why seek to understand it rather than simply enjoy it? After all, beyond pleasure, why strive to understand?

“The more you know about music, its principles of organization, its historical context, the more you appreciate it. I’m not talking here about the original pleasure provoked by sound, but about the pleasure of adding information, layer by layer.” ¹

This quote from musicologist Nicholas COOK sheds light on our naïve question: there is indeed an interest in music beyond the desire to produce or perceive it. Alongside the interest in practicing music lies another — that of documenting it, questioning it, grasping its components and implications. This is the role of musicology.

What do we know about a piece of music? What forms that almost unconscious expectation of the listener? What has the listener acquired from music to desire a certain sequence? How does the composer work with this expectation? What processes does the composer envision in musical creation? How does the performer engage with their instrument? What manipulations are involved? What techniques (in the Greek sense of tekhnè) are incorporated for and with the instrument? The answers to these questions already constitute knowledge about music, yet for those actively engaged — composers, performers, listeners — such knowledge often remains implicit, embodied, and sometimes even unconscious.

From here emerges the distinction between the role of the musicologist and that of the composer or performer: the latter possess practical knowledge, whereas the musicologist formalizes it into academic, scientific knowledge — and thus into refutable data. Musicology then becomes the work of reconstructing the knowledge held by composers, performers, and listeners of a given time and place: what is this music made of, what purpose does it serve, within what social arrangements does it develop?

A first hypothesis for musicology might therefore be that no music exists without some form of knowledge.

“All peoples who can be said to possess a musical art also have a musical science.” ²

This statement by Guido ADLER comes from a foundational text for the discipline, published in 1885, in which ADLER describes the object of musicology as music itself. The first recorded instance of the French term musicologie appeared in Mélanges de musicologie critique by Pierre Aubry in 1900. ³

Today, the scope of research in musicology spans numerous fields, commonly grouped into two main categories since ADLER: historical musicology and systematic musicology. The former focuses on the history of music, its social and technical context. The latter deals more with understanding musical systems, and may draw upon the exact sciences — such as physics and mathematics — for the study of acoustics, rhythm, or harmony. Over the course of the 20th century, new sub-disciplines have emerged, including ethnomusicology, the study of musical institutions, the sociology of music, cognitive psychology, musical aesthetics, and digital musicology.