Musicology researches music without needing to perform it
Musicology is the research-based academic study of music, as opposed to composing or performing it. It draws on psychology, sociology, acoustics, neurology and computer science, and it has traditionally split into three branches: music history, systematic musicology and ethnomusicology.
The name joins the Greek mousikē, music, to -logia, a field of study. Historical musicologists follow traditions over time, trace where works came from and write composers' lives. Systematic musicology gathers theory, aesthetics, teaching, acoustics and organology, the science of instruments, along with what physiology, psychology, philosophy and computing reveal about music. Cognitive musicology models how minds handle music, computer-based work falls under computational musicology, and music therapy sits uneasily between health care and the discipline proper.
Formal musicology teaching was re-founded in nineteenth-century German and Austrian universities under ideas that mixed classification with evolution. Influenced by Hegel, scholars ranked phenomena from simple to complex, primitive to developed and ancient to modern, and comparative methods spread from around 1880. Historians use manuscript study, palaeography, textual criticism, style criticism and iconography, and write anything from new editions to biographies. In practice historical musicology usually means Western art music, while Indian music or rock tends to fall to ethnomusicology.
Since the late 1980s New Musicology has read music through cultural criticism, drawing on feminism, gender studies, queer and postcolonial theory and Theodor Adorno. Susan McClary accused the old guard of ruling musical meaning off-limits; Charles Rosen retorted that she had invented a straw man. Many scholars now drop the word new, since those concerns had already entered the mainstream.
Ethnomusicology, once called comparative musicology, studies music in its cultural setting and is often treated as the anthropology of music; Jeff Todd Titon calls it the study of people making music. Most practitioners rely on long-term participant observation, often living for extended periods in the community they study.
Source: Musicology
