Before graduate school (and even now), defining musicology to many non-musicians led to a troublesome problem of limiting it to “music history” or “studying the history of music.” The frustration of explaining what my research interests are or what I am focusing on at the time only left my audience or peers confused. To avoid long, drawn out conversations explaining my studies I quickly ran to “music history” as a quick fix to define the term. Unfortunately, I did not realize that I was excluding myself from my own profession by using such a strict definition. I mean…my research interests (can be found on UNC’s website or in my biography on here :P) only make me 25% musicologist, possibly less than that, and 75%… other.
That is why I use the LITERAL translation of the word “the study of music,” to INCLUDE myself in my own profession. It’s crazy how a minor misconception can cause a little discrepancy between the term and what I do.
I’ll just give a small scenario as to how absurd using that definition (“music history”) would be in my case and many other musicologists of the “new generation.”
Let’s just say (not factual at all) “music history” was the literal definition of musicology…
Picture this:
I’m at a conference —for comedic purposes I’ll just say it’s AMS (American Musicological Society) — and I waltz up to a musicologist who is an Early Renaissance Scholar and discuss my current research on a living Anime Music composer.
- “What are you?”
- “Why are you here?”
- “Are you an imposter?”
- “Are you sure you’re in the right place?”
The list of questions could go on and on…ok so the last two questions are a bit dramatic, but the first two are legitimate in this case. I hope that you see where I’m going with this and why defining musicology is such a slippery subject.
Thus, taking me to my next topic, of this lovely “filler post,” the “new generation.” All of my colleagues and peers (myself included) are in fact a part of what I’d like to call the “new generation” of musicologists. We are no longer centering our research topics on one or two areas. We are, in fact, dealing with multiple (about 3-5) areas at a time. These areas tend to be one of five things:
- Broad
- Completely unrelated or (in my case) eccentric
- That’s a thing?
- How come I didn’t think of that?
- You can do that? (in a voice of amazement)
I must admit that within my department, I see all of us making huge contributions to the field. Some of our interests are so obscure we may end up being one of the first or the TOP scholar in that area. 
Now for any readers who may be considering musicology do not be discouraged, there are things from western music that have yet to be discovered. “There is always more to find…more to be discovered/researched,” as one of my awe-
inspiring seminar professors would say.
Originally, this post was going to be a dull, monotonous post “defining” musicology and going through all the different areas blah, blah, blah. I decided to take a turn and formulate a post on a discussion from my seminar, Resources and Methods of Musicology, afte
r reading various articles (Adler and Kerman specifically) on the topic.
Digging deeper into the history of the profession is very interesting and as a scholar I decided to learn even more outside of my seminar.
Please leave comments or send an email to theleadingtoneblog@gmail.com if you’d like! This is an interesting issue and some of these “eccentric” research topics proposed by the “new generation” aren’t even considered as important to many older and seasoned scholars raised under a particular musicologist who will remain anonymous until a later date…
Thanks for reading!
A/N: If you’re really interested in how musicology is defined and the different areas I highly recommend reading Musicology: The Key Concepts by David Beard and Kenneth Gloag. There are two editions of the book. The second was released this year and I do plan on reading it myself just out of curiosity to see what has been added or removed. The first edition is available as a pdf online…for free (email me for more information…also the author posted it so no legal issues here 😀 ).
The Leading Tone 