“Musicology: §I.The nature of musicology:§5.New Trends”， The N ew Grove D ictionary of Music and Musicians ,
Second edition. Vol.17.London: Macmillan, 2001.
(Fr. musicologie; Ger. Musikwissenschaft, Musikforschung; It. musicologia).
I. The nature of musicology
5. New trends.
In the last two decades of the 20th century, there was an explosion in the field of musicology as scholars, sought to give
voice to a broader range of concerns. Some have interrogated the fundamental assumptions of historical musicology.
Like their colleagues in history, they have questioned the focus on history as the product of great men, great works,
great traditions or great innovations. This has led to the study of music as a social force and to histories of musics previously excluded by scholars,
many of whom have tended to concentrate on the art music of social élites. Dahlhaus (1977) proposed that musicology should encompass not just stylistic history,
‘a history whose subject matter is art and not biography or social contingencies’, but also structural history,
reception history and cultural history. Others, critical of traditional science and traditional historiography,
have gone further, questioning the possibility of scientific objectivity and exploring the extent to which subjective
elements inform any historical discourse. Some have even questioned the idea that history implies causality,
preferring to define it by the mutability in anything that changes over time.
Another important trend has been in the focus on musicology as a form of criticism, or what Kerman (1985) has called ‘the study of music as aesthetic experience’. In this, musicology resembles the humanistic disciplines, especially literature, and may borrow from literary or cultural theory and new fields such as gender studies. This interest has provoked debate over whether music has its own meaning, independent of the context in which it is created, performed and heard, or whether it is inevitably socially embedded and cannot be fully understood outside these contexts, whether its meaning results from a certain kind of intentionality mutually understood by the creator and perceiver, and whether it is principally an attribute of the mind, a product of cognitive responses to sound and/or bodily ones. Underlying the manner in which these questions are explored are certain fundamental issues – assumptions about the nature of knowledge, the source of that knowledge, and how scholars should relate to the inquiry. From these differences come the enormous range of subjects and methodologies that musicology has come to comprehend.
Some, working out of the humanist tradition, continue to believe that truth is something coherent and intentional: the goal is to unveil it. They may use close analytical and critical readings of scores to reinforce or question conventional truths or, like historians embracing the theory of mentalités or Zeitgeist, to suggest specific relationships of music to the other arts and society. Those influenced by structuralist anthropologists, semioticians and/or sociologists understand truth as a product of a system of signs and music, like any language, as a ‘play of signifiers’. In Claude Lévi-Strauss’s words, ‘knowledge can be objective and subjective at the same time’ and ‘history is never history, but history-for. It is partial in the sense of being biased when it claims not to be, for … one must choose, select, give up … it consists entirely in its method’. Scholars embracing this perspective understand meaning as a product of interpretation. In their studies of music, they seek to understand what its structure or narrative may represent. Some, sympathetic to Marxist ideas or Theodor Adorno, believe that music is a dialectical discourse that both reveals and conceals its relationship to language and society.
Musicologists following poststructuralist thinking tend to agree with Michel Foucault that ‘truth is linked in a circular relation with systems of power’. Sensing a crisis of authority, patriarchy, identity and ethics, they question the validity of the so-called master narratives, stories that we have come to regard as central to our understanding of Western music and musical progress – for example, the function of tonality and the importance of the narrative curve in music. Using deconstructive methods, they seek to unveil the operations of power in music, especially those related to articulations of gender, race and class, or point out how music helps to construct social identities and social spaces.
Postmodernist notions have begun to inspire questions about the validity of global, universalizing perspectives and to shift attention to the truths embedded in the local, everyday, variable and contingent aspects of music and music-making. Scholars engaged in this work see truth as always relative and subjectivity as multi-layered, contradictory and performative, as influenced by the body as well as the mind and sometimes spiritual concerns. They seek to break down hierarchies and show the multiple meanings that any music can have. They are often concerned with the physical impact of sound on the listener and with music as evoking a process, not just a presence that refers to an absence (i.e. what is represented). Sometimes the goal of their inquiry is not so much to increase knowledge of music as to restructure experience of it.
Postmodernists also tend to concentrate more on the role of the performer and listener in determining the meaning of a musical work. They analyse what is specific to individual performances, including Roland Barthes’ ‘grain of the voice’, rather than the structure of written scores. They seek to understand musical expression independent from the structure, and some, music that is not written down. For postmodern scholars, the musical experience is essentially cooperative, collaborative and contingent. Listeners bring or attach meanings to music regardless of composers’ intentions, often as part of a dialectics of desire that helps shape how they define what is outside themselves. The listening process is an activity that in turn shapes the personal, social and cultural identity of the listener. The desire to explore the experience of music and to understand what underlies the meanings people ascribe to it has motivated an interest in applying psychoanalytic methodologies to the study of music.
These different approaches to knowledge are reflected in different relationships to the scholarly process. A scholar can play the role of a transcendent observer, applying rigorous reason and research to a chosen study and remaining unimplicated in the results of what is learnt. This relationship involves a strict separation of the observer from the observed and a trust of the ‘other’, be it the composer or the work, and a sense that the facts provided are what is needed. Or a scholar can be self-critical, acknowledging the power of language and the interdependence of language and meaning in musicological work. This may lead the scholar to ask not only theoretical questions but also political and ethical ones which may in turn shed light on some aspect of the larger world as reflected in music. Alternatively, a scholar can focus on personal insight, considering one’s personal experience of music as a source of knowledge. Taking personal relevance or one’s own perspective as the point of departure makes it clear that the scholar plays an important role in producing musical meaning. At the same time, such a perspective may have limitations as to the general relevance of the insights produced.
A number of important new subfields within musicology have arisen as a result of these different perspectives. Some, such as Kerman , Taruskin and Dreyfus, have used them to criticize the historical performance movement, throwing into question the notion of an ‘authoritative’ or ‘authentic’ performance of early music. Others, following the lead of McClary and Brett, have used them to explore how gender and sexuality may influence the creation and reception of music. More and more musicologists are crossing borders and reconsidering the boundaries of their research, not only that which has separated classical and popular music, written and oral traditions, but also historical musicology from other disciplines including ethnomusicology and music theory.