When asked “What is a musicologist?,” the composer Dmitri Shostakovich purportedly said:
I’ll tell you. Our cook, Pasha, prepared the scrambled eggs for us and we are eating them. Now imagine a person who did not cook the eggs and does not eat them, but talks about them – that is a musicologist.
(Fanning 1995: 1)
Shostakovich distinguishes musicologists from musicians and composers (who cook the eggs), as well as audiences (who eat the eggs), and, by implication, music teachers (who train the cooks). Of course, one might extend this analogy in a more sympathetic fashion, and note there may be gourmands interested in the history of cuisine (historical musicologists), or food chemistry (music theorists), or cultural traditions of cooking and eating (ethnomusicologists). But Shostakovich’s parable captures a widely held point of view, namely, that true musical understanding is shown by one’s ability to make or perform music, not by one’s ability to talk about it.
It was not always thus. In De Institutione Musica (early sixth century), Boethius defines “the true musician (musicus) as the scholar who can judge poetic compositions and instrumental performances by the application of pure knowledge; this scholar is to be distinguished from the poet, who composes songs more by instinct than by knowledge, and the instrumentalist, who is little more than a skilled craftsman” (Bower 2001: 785).
Even if popular sentiment, captured by Shostakovich’s complaint, lies more with the instrumentalists and poets (i.e. composers), musicology presses on. Musicology encompasses Historical Musicology, Music Theory and Analysis, and Ethnomusicology. The evolution of these sub-disciplines is sketched out in the next section of this chapter. It is then followed by a discussion of the practices of historical musicology and music theory, and the philosophical entanglements those practices involve. (Ethnomusicology is given its own treatment in Chapter 49 in this volume.)
Two general observations, however, are useful at the outset. First, musicology is tied to a canon; for the most part, this has been Western art music from the Middle Ages through the present. While the musicological canon has broadened considerably in the last quarter-century, music outside the Western art tradition has long been the province of other scholars. Non-Western music has been (until recently) the domain of ethnomusicology while jazz and popular musics were investigated by scholars in fields ranging from English Literature to Sociology. With Western art music as its paradigmatic practice, certain presumptions – a written tradition which fixes a work in tangible form, a strong distinction between composers and performers, an emphasis on the primary parameters of pitch and rhythm – become normative for the discipline. Second, musicology is grounded in and on the study of artifacts, since these form the evidentiary basis for the discipline as musicologists scrutinize manuscripts and printed scores, letters, diaries, concert reviews, and so forth. The focus on these materials (and the lives and activities that generate them) necessarily colors the ontological and epistemic commitments of the discipline. It is telling that historical musicologists and music theorists often refer to these artifacts as the musical “work,” even though most, if asked what a musical work is, are likely to espouse to something like the “simple view” of musical ontology proposed by Julian Dodd (2009), a combination of type/token theory and sonicism.
Musicology in its modern sense began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While there were important music dictionaries and encyclopedias published earlier in the eighteenth century, the turn of the nineteenth century saw another advance in music scholarship with works such as Heinrich Koch’s Musikalisches Lexikon (1802), Johann Forkel’s biography of Bach (1802), and F.-J. Fétis’s Biographie Universelle des Musiciens (1835). There was a parallel advance in musical performance, as exemplified by Mendelssohn’s revival of Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion in 1829. Events such as these were the impetus for both the birth of the art music canon and a broader sense of the musical past as concert repertoires extended well beyond the current generation of composers and their immediate forebears.
With the interest in both the compositions of earlier figures, and regional and national musical traditions (part and parcel of rising nationalism), the mid-nineteenth century saw the birth of modern critical editions of complete works of individual composers (e.g. the Bach-Gesellschaft edition began in 1851; Beethoven in 1862; Mozart in 1877). At the end of the century, government-sponsored anthologies of Austrian, German, and Bavarian music were begun. All of these projects took decades to complete; many are still in use today.
Guido Adler’s seminal text on “the origin, method, and aims of Musikwis-senschaft” (1885) encapsulated the disciplinary distinctions for the next century. His “scientific musicology” was divided into two broad areas: historical and systematic. The historical area included paleography (notation), the taxonomy of forms, the laws or rules of particular practices and style, and the history of musical instruments. Adler’s systematic area was far broader, as it encompassed music theory, aesthetics and psychology, music education and musicianship training, and ethnomusicology (which he termed “comparative musicology”).
In the first half of the twentieth century, with the preparation of complete editions and other archival projects in full swing, musicology concerned itself primarily with completing its map of the past. This was an era of positivism, and musicological practice reflected the intellectual tenor of the times. The principal tasks were (a) preparing authoritative editions of scores, including transcriptions of medieval and renaissance music in modern notation, (b) establishing accurate composer biographies and work chronologies, and (c) unearthing the works of secondary composers and thus “connecting the dots” between the recognized masters. The wider access to historical sources also informed the first phases of the authentic performance practice movement, with its emphasis on the use of “original” instruments, smaller ensembles, proper ornamentation, and other aspects of performance practice.
Musicology in the second half of the twentieth century can be regarded as a reaction to the first. To be sure, archival and codicological work continued, especially as new techniques in print and sketch studies refined the chronology and authentication of works. But now the dots were un-connected, as the works of lesser known composers came to be understood in their own right, rather than as precursors to (or derivations from) those of their better known contemporaries. The authenticity movement matured, with strong reactions to the pedantry of the first generation of its practitioners, while at the same time expanding its remit from Renaissance and Baroque music into eighteenth- and nineteenth-century repertoire. (For a fuller discussion of early music and issues of authenticity see Chapter 9, “Authentic performance practice,” in this volume.) Perhaps the most significant development in post-Second World War musicology was its hermeneutic turn. Musicology today most often aims to provide a thicker discursive context for musical works and genres by applying the methods and frameworks of reception history, feminist theory and gender studies, Marxist theory, post-colonial theory, and other forms of textual criticism.
The latter half of the twentieth century also saw a number of disciplinary fissures, due to a combination of the growing number of musicologists and their growing sub-specializations, as well as tensions between structuralist and post-structuralist approaches. The Society for Music Theory split from the American Musicological Society in 1977; other notable foundings were those of the Sonneck Society/Society for American Music (1975), the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (1981), and the Center for Black Music Research (1983), and in the UK, the Society for Music Analysis (1992).
As Glenn Stanley notes in his essay in the New Grove Dictionary, historical musicology currently falls into two basic categories: (1) an empirical-positivistic practice, “with an emphasis on locating and studying documents and establishing objective (or would-be objective) facts about and from them,” and (2) a theoretical-philosophical practice that (a) “addresses general historiographical problems such as change and causality, periodization, and biography, or (b) that addresses art-historical/musically-specific issues such as forms, styles, and the historical context of works and repertoires” (2001: 492). In both practices the objects of study/evidence employed may be autograph manuscripts, first printings, as well as subsequent editions of scores (documenting how a work was received and transmitted, including historical accretions); composers’ personal documents such as letters, diaries, and (especially) work sketches; contemporaneous reviews and essays; musical instruments and descriptions; and pictures, photographs, and other iconographic materials. In addition the “theoretical-philosophical practice” may include secondary sources such as contemporaneous writings on philosophy, language, and culture, as well as more recent critical and meta-critical discourse.
The Summer 2009 issue of the Journal of the American Musicological Society is a telling sample. “The Allure of Dissolution: Bodies, Forces, and Cyclicity in Schubert’s Final Mayrhofer Songs” by Blake Howe is an interpretive analysis of those songs in light of theories of embodiment and disability; “Lessons with Stravinsky: The Notebook of Earnest Andersson (1878–1943)” by H. Colin Slim examines both Stravinsky as pedagogue and the work of Andersson, a little known American composer; and “Alfred Schnittke’s Nagasaki: Soviet Nuclear Culture, Radio Moscow, and the Global Cold War” by Peter J. Schmelz is an examination of Schnittke’s piece as propaganda and as a window into Soviet culture. As is evident here, the bulk of current historical musicology is engaged not in empirical-positivistic practice, but in the critical interpretation of musical works: what they mean (or meant); why they were composed; and how they may inform a larger historical, intellectual, or aesthetic discourse.
As they pursue such projects, historical musicologists are necessarily entangled in a number of philosophical thickets. Four will be considered here. The first may be termed “the problem of the elusive object,” related to the ontology of the musical work. Are works, in fact, determinable? For example, if we define musical works in Levinsonian terms as historically indexed sound structures together with their performance means (Levinson 1980), can we actually determine what that structure is and what its performance means are? Much of the empirical-positivistic tradition has concerned itself with nailing down these particulars – getting the notes and instruments right, in other words. Hence the efforts to produce definitive editions, which use source comparisons and other means of codicological sleuthing to provide the modern performer with an “urtext.”
At the same time, musicologists have always been aware of the “openness” of works they seek to capture in a critical edition. These range from the compositional accretions in the Middle Ages and Renaissance – in the motet tradition alone one finds a veritable menagerie of musical transmogrifications – to the practice of ornamentation in Baroque instrumental music to substitute arias in Mozart operas to differing arrangements of Duke Ellington. The early music movement has especially had to confront the under-determined nature of musical scores in considering questions such as instrumentation (often unspecified), size of performance forces (also unspecified), text placement (often vague), and chromatic alterations (“musica ficta”). What musicological research has shown is that in many traditions, neither the sound structure nor the performance means can be fixed by the tangible form of music notation, both because (a) in some cases there was no determinate sound structure or performance means to be fixed, and/or (b) all notational systems under-specify the sonic and performance particulars of the music.
In worrying about getting the notes right, musicologists also have had to confront problems of authorial intention – call this the “Bassoons in Beethoven” problem. In Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, the French horn famously intones the second theme of the first movement; in the recapitulation, since the key has changed the horn call is written for bassoon, presumably because the natural horns in E-flat could not play the theme in C (or at least not as resoundingly, even if they re-crooked). In the later nineteenth-century performance tradition, when valved horns became commonplace, the bassoon call was taken back by the horns. The presumption here is that had such French horns been available, Beethoven would have used them. Note that this takes the conception of the musical work to a level beyond what is given by the score. For even if the problems of notational specificity and accuracy could be solved, it may not really indicate what sound-structure and performance means are constitutive of the work; to determine that, one must imagine what the composer would have intended to write down in musical notation if ideal performance resources had been available to him or her.
From composer intentions relative to the musical utterance – what sounds should be made, and how – we move to problems related to the meaning of those sounds. Musicologists work hard to provide an accurate contextualization of older music, allowing us to understand the conditions under which a work was written and first heard. This includes topical references (both musical and nonmusical), the background of its initial audience, its subsequent reception, and so forth. All which, hopefully, allows us to have a full and proper understanding of works from times and places different from our own. But consider Mozart’s Serenade in D (K. 320), which uses a theme based on a Viennese posthorn call, hence the work’s nickname. Musicologists can tell us what posthorns were, what they sounded like, and so on, so modern audiences can understand this nonmusical reference. But this understanding falls short of providing the experience of an eighteenth-century listener, who had first-hand knowledge of the posthorn’s call in everyday life. No matter how detailed the program notes, they cannot restore the familiar and perhaps humorous effect Mozart intended in using this sonic quotation. This is akin to the difference between getting a joke (which the musicologist’s work allows me to do) and finding it funny (which it cannot – see Cohen 1999).
Perhaps even more musicological effort is spent trying to uncover (or at least propose) what a composer intended his or her composition to mean. This can be thought of as the Shostakovich version of the Humpty-Dumpty problem. As is known to philosophers of language, just because a speaker S intends utterance U to mean M it does not entail that listeners will grasp M. And likewise, just because listeners grasp some meaning M*, even if warranted, it does not follow that M* is what the speaker intended. In other words, meaning is multiply defeasible. Moreover, one can also ask whether U has the grammatical resources, both syntactically and semantically, to convey M. Thus even if S intends M, and listeners grasp M, this grasp may not be in virtue of U, but simply the fact that S says anything at all in a given context. Consider, then, the considerable debates over the meaning of much of Shostakovich’s music – is it wry satire and criticism of the Stalinist regime which denounced him, or is just derivative bombast? Much hinges here on what Shostakovich intended to mean, what listeners (both then and now) believed Shostakovich to mean, and the extent to which those intentions might be encoded in the music. Musicological investigations have focused mostly the first point, presumed the second, and tended to ignore the last. Cases such as Shostakovich show, however, how a thick discursive/cultural context can allow instrumental music to do some fairly heavy semantic lifting, especially when one acknowledges a communicative intent on the part of the composer above and beyond conveying a particular musical structure to the listener (see, for example, Davies 2007 on intentions, or at least our “uptake” of those intentions, as constitutive properties of works).
As Robert Gjerdingen has pointed out, “a cynic might conclude that [music theory] has often provided little more than a technical apparatus in support of the current aesthetic doctrine” (Gjerdingen 1999: 166). While music theories and analyses may make claims to broad generality, especially if they are cast in naturalistic terms (Cook 2002), they are not value neutral, and always reflect the context of a time, place, and musical practice. In addition, it is often difficult to tell whether a given music-theoretic assertion is the tail or the dog, relative to the aesthetic doctrine, let alone who is doing the wagging. This depends on the interest of the theorist (and perhaps her reader): whether the aim is to use a composition (or compositions) to promote a particular aesthetic doctrine, or vice-versa.
Just as there is a distinction between “doing music” (performance, composition), and “talking about music” (musicology), as noted at the beginning of this chapter, within music theory there are similar fissures. This is reflected in the distinction between “theory,” a consideration of the nature of musical sounds and their general principles of organization, and “analysis,” the explication of the structure and “meaning” of particular musical works. Somewhat ironically, just as Shostakovich valorized doing over talking, in music theory analysis is often valorized over more abstract theories, as evidenced by the weight and authority given to musical examples and the broadly held tenet that speculative theories are only as good as the analytical insights they may generate.
Another way of mapping the music theory terrain has been proposed by Carl Dalhaus: a three-fold division of speculative, regulative, and analytic traditions (Dalhaus 1984). As Thomas Christensen notes, these three are often intertwined (Christensen 2001, 2002). The speculative tradition is perhaps the oldest, going back to Pythagoras. It is concerned with the nature and being of music. The regulative addresses practical problems of notation, grammar, and pedagogy; here we find prescriptions regarding chord progressions, the construction of counterpoint, and so on. The analytic tradition is the youngest of the three, exemplified by E. T. A. Hoffman’s landmark review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in 1810. In analyses we find most clearly Gjerdingen’s “technical apparatus in support of the current aesthetic doctrine” (1999: 166). Analyses may also document or dissect compositional method; this was especially typical of composer-theorists in the second half of the twentieth century such as Stockhausen and Babbitt. Analysis may extend beyond single works to consider entire repertories; William Caplin’s taxonomy of thematic types and their functions in Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven is a good example of this (Caplin 1998). Such taxonomic analysis is an important element in the historical documentation of a compositional style, genre, or oeuvre, and hence there is an important relationship between historical musicology and music theory in the analytic tradition.
In the analytic branch, the objects of study and evidence employed are musical scores, composer sketches, other analyses, and hearing ascriptions, that is, claims about the relative importance of musical events and the connections between them, based on the analyst’s experience of the music. The analyses of Heinrich Schenker and his many students exemplify this approach. In the regulative branch, the objects of studies and evidence are one and the same: one is presented with exemplars, or sets of exemplars, that are thought to be typical of a style or practice. These exemplars serve as models for well formedness within that style, and are to be emulated in subsequent compositions. Lastly, in the speculative branch of music theory the objects of study can be basic formal types (e.g. lists of all possible five-note scales or chords; all possible rhythmic permutations within an eight-beat measure, etc.) as well as examples from a particular literature. Speculative theories proceed by making arguments regarding the kinds and nature of the relationships between them. Examples of recent speculative theory include the group-theoretic approach of David Lewin (1987) or recent models of harmony cast in terms of geometric spaces (Callender, Quinn, and Tymoczko 2008).
Just as with historical musicology, music theorists often stumble into philosophical thickets of their own. The first thicket is the music theorist’s version of the “problem with musical notation,” for musical notation is the music theorist’s stock-in-trade. Most musical analyses are analyses of musical scores, and score elements, rather than sounds or sound-structures. This is analogous to basing one’s theories and analyses of architecture on the study of blueprints and site plans, rather than actual buildings. Given the difficulties involved in capturing the details of musical performances, at least until very recently, this reliance on musical scores was inevitable. Yet music notation evolved to capture what Leonard B. Meyer termed the “primary parameters” of pitch (melody and harmony) and time (rhythm and meter) (1989: 14); the familiar five-line musical staff is a stylized plot of pitch and time on the vertical and horizontal dimensions of a continuing coordinate system. Notational traditions from the Middle Ages to the present day do not capture the “secondary parameters” of timbre, texture, and loudness. There are, of course, valid practical reasons for this, as musical notation serves to tell performers what to do in order to produce the sounds needed to instantiate a particular piece. Moreover, we usually regard the primary parameters as work-determinative: a certain pattern of note intervals and rhythmic durations is precisely what makes something an instance of “Happy Birthday.” Change those intervals and/or rhythms and one no longer has that tune. But play “Happy Birthday” loud or soft, or on a trumpet or on a flute, and one still has “Happy Birthday.” So far, so good. However, as psycho-acousticians have shown, musical parameters are not perceptually/ epistemically discrete. For example, timbre and harmony are not distinct aspects of auditory perception: tones fuse into complex spectral blends, and most instruments produce fairly rich, chord-like spectra. Thus manipulations of “harmony” (i.e. chord voicing) may be experienced as variations in timbre, and vice-versa, and this is indicative of the gap between the structures that musical scores represent versus the structures that we hear.
Music analysis tends to be composer-centric, and this centricity is manifest in a number of ways. First, analyses of musical structure(s) are often couched in terms of how the composer (presumably) thought about the musical materials used and the relations she thought obtained amongst them. The presumption is that an understanding of compositional method is necessary for an understanding of the work so composed. Yet this does not follow. Just as one need not know the details of impasto technique to understand and appreciate a Van Gogh painting – as their effect is clear to the viewer – one need not know the details of a clever chromatic modulation to experience the effect of hearing a melody transformed from one harmonic landscape to another, as if by magic. In a similar fashion, analyses will often focus on a piece as a solution to some compositional puzzle or problem – a “composing out” of a particular contrapuntal framework, or tracing the way in which the composer may have/must have conceived of the relations between various harmonic pillars in a piece, for example. This is not surprising, given the close ties between music theory and composition noted above. Yet this parallels the musicological problem of determining the meaning of a piece through an examination of the composer’s intentions: how a composer composed may remain opaque (absent first-hand testimonials), and, just as in the Shostakovich example, such accounts may miss the mark as to how the piece actually works for most listeners. This reveals a confusion between understanding and appreciating of the process by which a work is created versus understanding and appreciating the end product of that process.
The goal of much music analysis, if not most, is to highlight the features of a work whose aesthetic value is never in doubt; music analysis almost never examines a bad work to dissect its flaws (Littlefield and Neumeyer 1992 is an exception), though at times it may be marshaled to make the case for a relatively unknown piece or composer. Mostly, however, one sees discussions of the usual suspects, the most prominent works by the canonical composers of the Western Art Music tradition. While some analyses purport to demonstrate the “unity and coherence” of masterworks (something that would seem to require no demonstration), others, more promisingly, aim to get the reader to hear or notice certain features or relationships that she had not done on previous listenings. In so doing, they make their case for the value of the music, and may deepen our experience of it. Yet there is a problem lurking here, the “I just don’t hear it that way” problem.
Suppose an analysis claims that a certain piece starts with a melody, and ends with the same melody in inversion, such that it is now “upside down” (i.e. with all its intervals reversed, going down where it initially went up and vice versa). If I have already noticed this fact, the analysis does not add to change my experience or understanding of the piece; rather, my experience confirms the analysis – in which case the analysis is of little value. If I had not noticed this before, I may have an “aha” moment, but does this change my experience of the piece? Knowing that a given relationship is present may not make it aesthetically salient (see Levinson 1997 regarding large-scale form). Moreover, Mark DeBellis (1995) has pointed out that the efficacy of such analyses depends on whether our listening experience is, in his terms, “weakly” or “strongly non-conceptual.” If our hearing is weakly non-conceptual, then both analytically informed and analytically “naive” listeners recognize the melodic inversion, but the naive listeners cannot articulate their recognition in terms of an analytic ascription; they “know but cannot say.” If our hearing is strongly non-conceptual, however, the inability of naive listeners to articulate something like “the ending is the beginning upside down” means that they do not grasp the relationship at all. Thus if listening is strongly non-conceptual, then the analysis can change both how and what I hear, and though the analysis may be true, it also may generate the very evidence claimed to support its thesis. Moreover, what happens when the analysis fails to convince in the strongly non-conceptual case – if I “just don’t hear it that way.” We have no way of adjudicating the truth-claims of the analysis, as the analyst and the reader simply are not hearing the same music. For the analyst hearing “the ending as an upside-down beginning” entails the belief that “the ending is an upside-down beginning.” For the analytically informed listener, hearing is believing, and believing is hearing (London 1996).
See also Analysis (Chapter 48), Authentic performance practice (Chapter 9), Ethnomusicology (Chapter 49), Music theory and philosophy (Chapter 46), Notations (Chapter 7), Ontology (Chapter 4), and Understanding music (Chapter 12).
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