1. Musicology

Introduction

Musicology may be described as the pursuit of musical knowledge and insight by accurate, objective, and critical methods of fact-finding, analysis, and interpretation. While musical scholarship has existed in most highly developed cultures of the past, the principles and techniques used in the 20th century were formulated only in the late 19th and have remained in a process of refinement and transformation. Musicology has known two main approaches: the historical (the history of western art music) and the systematic (the study of universal principles underlying the vocabulary of music - scales, rhythms, melodies, etc - and of acoustics, aesthetics, psychology, sociology, and other disciplines in their relationship to music). This division is no longer accepted by some practitioners. Stanley Fogel's statement about the academic study of literature may well apply to music: 'What we have come to accept as the traditional division of English departments into historical periods, major figures and genres (poems, plays, novels), with their attendant faculty specialists, may not be the best framework for the study of a cultural product such as literature' (Books in Canada, vol 20, May 1991).

Musicology is complemented by ethnomusicology, traditionally defined as the study of folk music and of non-western art music, but increasingly seen as an anthropological approach to music of any kind. It has become harder to define where musicology with its traditionally Eurocentric approach ends and ethnomusicology with its all-embracing outlook begins. The time may come when a differentiation between the two fields will have lost any meaning.

Meanwhile the subject areas and methods of investigation of musicology have begun to shift, merge or fade, as scholars seek to comprehend changes in the world at large. Changing class and power structures, vast migrations of people from continent to continent, new technologies of dissemination, the levelling influence of commercial marketing and, last but not least, internal musical developments, all have blurred or realigned the borders between cultivated and vernacular, western and non-western, homegrown and international music. The very terminologies are in flux. More and more, music is understood in its intimate connections with human society at large, its cultural traditions, specific locations, dissemination technologies, commercial interests, and economic situations.

An academic degree or position, though advantageous, is not essential in the accomplishment of musicological work, and many Canadians whose specialty is performance or composition have applied expert skill in the interpretation and editing of scores in obsolete notations or in the study of exotic tonal systems. However, in Canada at least, the label musicologist is often applied too freely to broadcaster-commentators, journalists, and other popularizers, in fact to any well-read musician or music lover. Perhaps the mark of the model musicologist is the possession of the techniques to do original research and the ability to generalize, ie, to place individual facts and observations into larger patterns of relationships and historical dynamics.