M401 History and Literature of Music I

The research presented in this volume is very recent, and the general approach is that of rethinking popular musicology: its purpose, its aims, and its methods. Contributors to the volume were asked to write something original and, at the same time, to provide an instructive example of a particular way of working and thinking. The essays have been written with a view to helping graduate students with research methodology and the application of relevant theoretical models. The team of contributors is an exceptionally strong one: it contains many of the pre-eminent academic figures involved in popular musicological research, and there is a spread of European, American, Asian, and Australasian scholars. The volume covers seven main themes: Film, Video and Multimedia; Technology and Studio Production; Gender and Sexuality; Identity and Ethnicity; Performance and Gesture; Reception and Scenes and The Music Industry and Globalization. The Ashgate Research Companion is designed to offer scholars and graduate students a comprehensive and authoritative state-of-the-art review of current research in a particular area. The companion's editor brings together a team of respected and experienced experts to write chapters on the key issues in their speciality, providing a comprehensive reference to the field.

The study of music is always, to some extent, "empirical," in that it involves testing ideas and interpretations against some kind of external reality. But in musicology, the kind of empirical approaches familiar in the social sciences have played a relatively marginal role, being generally restricted to inter-disciplinary areas such as psychology and sociology of music. Rather than advocating a new kind of musicology, Empirical Musicology provides a guide to empirical approaches that are ready for incorporation into the contemporary musicologist's toolkit. Its nine chapters cover perspectives from music theory, computational musicology, ethnomusicology, and the psychology and sociology of music, as well as an introduction to musical data analysis and statistics. This book shows that such approaches could play an important role in the further development of the discipline as a whole, not only through the application of statistical and modeling methods to musical scores but also--and perhaps more importantly--in terms of understanding music as a complex social practice.

How do we know what notes a composer intended in a given piece? -- how those notes should be played and sung? -- the nature of musical life in Bach's Leipzig, Schubert's Vienna? -- how music related to literature and other arts and social currents in different times and places? -- what attitudes musicians and music lovers had toward the music that they heard and made? We know all this from musical manuscripts and prints, opera libretti, composers' letters, reviews in newspapers and magazines, archival data, contemporary pedagogical writings, essays on aesthetics, and much else. Some of these categories of sources are the bedrock of music history and musicology. Others have begun to be examined only in recent years. Furthermore, musicologists -- including biographers of famous composers -- now explore these various kinds of sources in a variety of ways, some of them richly traditional and others exciting and novel. These seventeen essays, all newly written, use a wide array of source materials to probe issues pertaining to a cross section of musical works and musical life from the sixteenth through the twentieth centuries. The resulting, pluralistic profile of current musicology will prove welcome to anyone fascinated by the problems of reconstructing -- reimagining, sometimes -- the evanescent musical art of the past and pondering its implications for musical life today and in the future. Roberta Montemorra Marvin is Director of Research and Development for International Programs, University of Iowa; Stephen A. Crist is Associate Professor and Chair of the Music Department at Emory University.

This volume presents essays on the theory, methodology, and disciplinary history of Systematic and Comparative Musicology as well as on concepts of current empirical research. Part 1 is devoted to Systematic Musicology which is viewed as a transdisciplinary approach to fundamental music research, on the one hand, and as a field of learning which is offered as an academic subject in universities, on the other. Part 1 also includes articles which illustrate modern research concepts many of which are based on experimental and other empirical methods as well as on computational and modelling approaches. The articles concern problems which range from acoustics and psychoacoustics to neuromusicology and music cognition. Part 2 addresses issues in Comparative Musicology and Ethnomusicology, for instance the relevance of comparative methods as applied to the study of non-western musical phenomena. Further, sound analysis combined with fieldwork as well as modelling based on ethnomathematical considerations are given special notice. Aspects of theory and disciplinary history are also covered in this section which moreover includes findings obtained from actual fieldwork.

When the first edition of Queering the Pitch was published in early 1994, it was immediately hailed as a landmark and defining work in the new field of Gay Musicology. In light of the explosion of Gay Musicology since 1994, a new edition of Queering the Pitch is timely and needed. In this new work, the editors are including a landmark essay by Philip Brett on Gay Musicology, its history and scope. The essay itself has become a cause celebre, and this will be its first full appearance in print. Along with this new historical essay, the editors are contributing a new introduction that outlines the changes that have occurred over the last decade as Gay Musicology has grown.

First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.