Systematic musicology

Systematic musicology is an umbrella term, used mainly in Central Europe, for several subdisciplines and paradigms of musicology. These subdisciplines and paradigms tend to address questions about music in general, rather than specific manifestations of music.

In the European tripartite model of musicology, musicology is regarded as a combination of three broad subdisciplines: ethnomusicology, historical musicology and systematic musicology. Ethnomusicology and historical musicology are primarily concerned with specific manifestations of music such as performances, works, traditions, genres, and the people who produce and engage with them (musicians, composers, social groups). Systematic musicology is different in that it tends not to put these specific manifestations in the foreground, although it of course refers to them. Instead, more general questions are asked about music. These questions tend to be answered either by analysing empirical data (based on observation) or by developing theory - or better, by a combination of both. The 19th-century positivist dream of discovering "laws" of music (by analogy to "laws" in other disciplines such as physics; cf. Adler, 1885), and of defining the discipline of systematic musicology in terms of such laws, slowly evaporated with the rise of modernism and atonality in the 20th century.

Systematic musicology is a mixture of sciences and humanities. The scientific side is primarily empirical and data-oriented; it involves disciplines such as empirical psychology and sociology, acoustics, physiology, neurosciences, cognitive sciences, and computing and technology. The humanities side involves disciplines and paradigms such as philosophical aesthetics, theoretical sociology, semiotics, hermeneutics, music criticism, and cultural and gender studies. Since systematic musicology brings together several parent disciplines, it is often regarded as being intrinsically interdisciplinary, or as a system of interacting subdisciplines (hence the alternative name "systemic"). Hoqwever, most systematic musicologists focus on just one or a select few of those subdisciplines.

Systematic musicology is epistemologically less unified than its sister disciplines historical musicology and ethnomusicology. Its contents and methods are more diverse and tend to be more closely related to parent disciplines, both academic and practical, outside of musicology. The diversity of systematic musicology is to some extent compensated for by interdisciplinary interactions within the system of subdisciplines that make it up.

The origins of systematic musicology in Europe can be traced to ancient Greece. Historical musicology and ethnomusicology are much younger disciplines, and the relative importance of the three has fluctuated considerably during the past few centuries. Today, musicology's three broad subdisciplines are about equally important in terms of the volume of research activity.

References

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