Border Crossings: A Commentary on Henkjan Honing's "On the Growing Role of Observation, Formalization and Experimental Method in Musicology"
Loading...
Date
2006-01
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Empirical Musicology Review
Abstract
In the early twentieth century systematic musicology, which was based on the comparative method, played a prominent role in the discipline: however it was appropriated by the Nazis and fell out of favour after the war. It was replaced by ethnomusicology and structuralist music theory, both of which emphasized the individual context (cultural or structural) and eschewed comparison between contexts. Both also developed an epistemology based on the generation of meaning through the act of "experiencing and understanding music" (Titon 1997: 87): this epistemology, characteristic of cultural musicology and theory (CMT) in general, is quite distinct from that of the cognitive sciences of music (CSM). The otherwise confusing variety of musicological practices subsumed under the category "systematic musicology", as set out in Honing's article on which this is a commentary, can be usefully seen in terms of two distinct dimensions, those of method and of epistemology. It follows from this that empirical methods are as consistent with, and as potentially valuable to, CMT as they are to CSM, and that EMR has the potential to reach both constituencies.
Description
Keywords
systematic, musicology, method, epistemology
Citation
Empirical Musicology Review, v1 n1 (January 2006), 7-11