MU5500 MMus Skills in Advanced Musical Studies

1. Course Introduction and Content

2. Some Big Questions:

2.1 Why are you here (I)?
2.2 Why are you here (II)? Or: How did you get here?

3. Bruno Nettl’s possible answers to the above

- looking at Western Art Music and the institution of musicology from the outside-in

3.1 Who are Musicologists? What do the DO?

“The fact that musicologists are themselves musicians, but perhaps not among the best, may have
something to do with attitudes among performers and composers: musicologists, they believe, should
be supporting their efforts, but in practice act as a kind of police requiring them to toe the line in their
knowledge of insignificant music and in their adherence to authentic performance practice.”

Musicologists take “measure of what is good and not, extension of history, sociology, anthropology,
physics in musical version, how one should or not perform a work, one moment irrelevant to creation
and practice of music; another moment completely worked into it.”

Musicologists often “see themselves as advocates of certain musics – the best, or their own, or the
neglected.”

3.2 1885: Guido Adler’s Musikwissenschaft (The Science of Music) in 1885

3.3 Problems with the Canon

- Dead White Male Composers
- The ‘Work’
- The search for ‘The Truth’
 all modernist phenomena?

4. Reactions to Great Man Canon

4a. Americans in 1950s reacting against German-centrism
AMS: ‘musicology is a field of knowledge, having as its object the investigation of the art of music as
a physical, psychological, aesthetic, and cultural phenomenon. The musicologist is a research scholar
and he aims primarily at knowledge about music. With this in mind he differs from the composer and
the performer.’

4b. The rise of Ethnomusicologists

- not the study of ‘World Music’ or ‘World Musics’
- socio-political reflexivity; ethnography
- applied music studies?

4c. New Musicologists; Feminists in the 1990s

- Joseph Kerman’s Contemplating Music on de-objectifying music and getting out of positivist
discourse making (1985)
- Susan McClary and the feminists  reactionary?

Kay Kaufman Shelemay in 1996: ‘While I applaud its efforts, the new musicology; seems not so
startlingly new, at least not to someone familiar with the last half century of ethnomgy research, not to
mention considerable earlier work in historical mgy itself that negaged fully with issues relating to
culture, society and politics. I am delighted hat new mgy has moved full force to considerations of
music and culture, but I marvel at the oversight of decades of emgy scholarship long concerned with
the same themes.’
4d. Triaging of Musicology with Ethnomusicology today?
- Nicholas Cook: marriage broker?
- Jonathan Stock: musicologists still a different people; not ready yet to join ethno ranks
- Nettl: Historian feels scholar’s own aesthetic judgment of musical composition and performance are
central concerns, ethnomusicologist feels evaluation has no place in musicology.

Self, Identity, Otherness of the study/ quest/ community

Insiders and outsiders; multiple identities

If the White man studying Indian raag is an ethnomusicologist, what of Japanese performer of Chopin?

Ethnomusicology as answer to Musicology’s mid-life crisis?

- Cook, via Nathan Glazer’s ideas on additive vs transformative multiculturalism; the need to
recalibrate the field

- Georgina Born on relational musicology: we’re all too different; keep the multiple spaces alive via 3
relationships: integrative-synthesizing; subordination; antagonistic-agnostic
- four cornerstones: 1. Social 2. Technological 3. temporal 4. ontological

 So where does this leave us now?

5. The Performative Turn

- can we be reflexive about the act of making music?
- Howard Becker: understand it as an event that has come together not necessarily from a Composer 
Work  Performance model, but an entire industry/ ecosystem of different players moving towards an
ephemeral and transformative point
- Christopher Small on musicking – the lived experience of people making music
- rituals, customs and contexts that we take for granted
- visuality vs sound
- why we don't improvise
- Mihaly Czikszentmihay: flow
- how we train
- meta-communication; layers of meaning/ messages: performance of class and gender
- reception theory
- performance studies
- embodiment

6. Returning to Analysis then: how to make it relevant?

- Jim Samson’s postmodern relativist take on the ‘Interpretive Turn’
- Kofi Agawu: ‘Analyses are performances, they don't reveal the truth, but they help us make
meaning.’
- Robert Fink: analysts don’t like superficiality, but perhaps surface texture is something that we need
to look at
- John Rink: How is analysis relevant to performance or listening?
- Gabriel Solis on World Music Analysis – how do we get round to looking at intercultural and cross-
cultural analysis of music?
 Agawu: ‘First came the early, naïve explorers who found African music at once complex and
incomprehensible; then came the first generation of analysts and theorists who tried to write it down in
order to unveil its metrical and rhythmic structures, and who did so using questionable concepts (like
polymeter and cross rhythm); then came another group of analysts determined to rid the field of the
conceptual contamination introduced by earlier analysts; now come . . . others who think the corrective
efforts of recent theorizing have gone too far, and that some of African music’s complexity ought to be
restored’
7. How do Composers today fit in and out of the Canon?
- Joseph Dubiel: composers don't just manipulate sound but frames of mind in terms of which sounds
are experienced.
- look beyond the ‘Work’ , look beyond the Canon  realistically, how will you find a job?
- consider a different models for creativity

8. The ‘alternative’ Others to Musicology:

8a. What about Pop Music?
- IASPM founded in 1981 in reaction to stultifying approaches of WAM, but has it not repeated all of
WAM’s emphases in terms of text-centred approaches (linguistic, semiotic, structural – says Cohen)
and ignoring of the non-Anglophone world? (even worse than Euro-centric?)
- is there a pop music canon too?
- not enough ethnography, socio-historical or political understandings of pop?
- need to beef up on recording tech and discuss this aspect in meaningful, mainstreamed way
- Philip Tagg’s criticisms of WAM analytic methods in terms of their inability to address pop music
analysis; suggests musematic approach
 what do composers think here?

8b. Musicology of Film or Study of Music in Film?

- who owns the (sub) field? Musicologists or film scholars?
- Film scholars criticise musicologists as too tunnel-visioned and stuck in ‘Beethoven analyses’,
don't consider film technique, drama, cultural theory etc; Musicologists say film scholars are
not equipped with tools and skills to understand music and analyse it
- Is there a canon? Who decides? Oscars? Music scholars? Fans? Film Scholars? Concert Halls?

Michelle Lekas: 'Any efforts to transform a relatively new discipline into an august and accepted field -
a field suggestive of, say, musicology - risks instantiation that effecively depoliticizes, and thus erases,
both our hope for and our suspicion of the object of study itself.'

Problems of interdisciplinarity: use sexy terms without knowing what they mean, de Certeau on ‘soft
interdisciplinarity’

8c. Music, Cognition, Psychology, Biomusicology

Sub-disicpline, neglected area of research/ focus, or brand new thing in itself?
Rise of music therapy in age of mental health concerns/ and neoliberal marketisation of the
opportunities these societal crises bring.

8d. Soudscape and Sound Studies?

9. Clearing the decks and recalibrating from the position of a naif - Phil Bohlman
1. My Musc/ Your Music
2. Our Music/ Their Music
3. Music Out There/ Music in the Numbers
4. Music in Nature/ The Naturalness of Music
5. Music as Science
6. Music as a Language/ Embedded in Language?
7. Die Musik/ Musics
8. The Voice of God/ The Struggle of Everyday
9. In the Notes Outside the Notes
10. In Time/ Outside Time
11. Authentic Sound/ Recorded Sound
12. In the Body/ Beyond the Body

10. What Next? Where do YOU go from here? Where do WE go from here?