What Is Musicology? Subfields, Methods, and Funding

Musicology is the scholarly study of music: how it is made, notated, performed, heard, understood, and valued, and how it relates to the people and societies that produce it. It is usually classed as a humanities discipline, but it borders the social and cognitive sciences, and some of its subfields use laboratory and computational methods. This guide explains what musicology is, how it is organized, its main subfields and methods, how the discipline developed, where scholars train, publish, and organize, who funds the work, what research ethics and copyright mean for music research, and what it means for research administrators who support it.

What Is Musicology?

The word has two senses, and it helps to separate them. In the broad sense, musicology (or music scholarship) names the whole family of fields that study music as an object of knowledge rather than as a practice to be performed or composed. In the narrow sense, common in North American universities, musicology means historical musicology, the study of Western art music and its history, and it sits beside ethnomusicology and music theory as a separate area within a music department. Reading a job advertisement or a funding call, it is worth checking which sense is meant.

Musicologists ask questions such as:

• What is the music? Its sources, notation, structure, style, and the conditions under which it was written down or recorded.
• Who makes and uses it, and why? Composers, performers, patrons, audiences, institutions, and communities, and the social, political, and economic settings they work in.
• How is it perceived and understood? The psychological, physiological, and cultural processes involved in listening, performing, and learning.

Musicology differs from music performance and composition, which are creative practices, and from music education, which studies teaching and learning. In practice the lines blur: many scholars are also performers, and practice-based and artistic research is a growing area. For the related question of how credit is assigned in creative research, see authorship credit in practice-based creative research.

Scope and Subfields

Musicology is commonly divided into several overlapping areas. Boundaries differ by country and by institution, and many scholars work across more than one.

• Historical musicology — the history of music, especially Western art music, through manuscripts, printed scores, documents, and performance practice.
• Ethnomusicology — the study of music in culture and society, often through fieldwork, and of musical traditions around the world, including the Western ones.
• Music theory and analysis — the study of how music is structured: harmony, rhythm, form, voice leading, and the systems used to describe them.
• Music cognition and psychology of music — the scientific study of how people perceive, remember, produce, and respond to music.
• Digital musicology and music information retrieval — computational methods, encoded scores, and large-scale analysis of musical sources and recordings.
• Other areas — including popular music studies, jazz studies, sound studies, organology (the study of instruments), music archaeology, music sociology, and music and health.

Neighboring fields include history, anthropology, psychology, cognitive science, linguistics, literary studies, cultural studies, and library science, which shares an interest in archives, catalogues, and the preservation of sources.

Historical Musicology

Historical musicology reconstructs and interprets the musical past. Its core activities include finding, dating, and authenticating sources; editing scores; tracing how works were composed, circulated, performed, and received; and placing music within wider political, religious, intellectual, and economic history. Typical objects of study are medieval chant manuscripts, Renaissance part-books, opera in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and twentieth-century modernism, though the field now includes much more.

The discipline has long been tied to source studies and philology. Documenting the surviving written sources is the work of the international inventory RISM (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales), which was founded in Paris in 1952 and records music manuscripts, printed editions, and writings on music held in libraries and archives worldwide. Critical and scholarly editions, which present a reliable text with commentary, are a main product of this strand, and the long-form scholarly monograph remains an important output.

From the 1980s, a movement often called the “new musicology” challenged an approach it saw as focused on canonical works and formal analysis, and brought in questions of gender, sexuality, race, politics, and the meaning of music in context. Its reception is still debated, and most current historical musicology combines archival rigor with critical and interpretive questions.

Ethnomusicology

Ethnomusicology studies music as a social and cultural activity. It grew from “comparative musicology,” an early-twentieth-century approach built partly on early sound recordings. The Dutch scholar Jaap Kunst is credited with coining the term “ethno-musicology” in the subtitle of his 1950 work Musicologica, and the unhyphenated form soon replaced “comparative musicology” as the field’s name. Ethnomusicologists often say the field is defined less by what it studies than by how: through sustained fieldwork, participation, interviews, recording, and attention to what music means to the people who make it.

Because its methods overlap with ethnography, the field is closely tied to anthropology, and many of its research-ethics questions are those of qualitative research with living communities. Ethnomusicologists study traditional and folk music, popular and urban music, religious and ritual music, music and migration, music and conflict, and the music industry, in every region of the world.

Music Theory and Analysis

Music theory describes and explains how music is organized. It includes the conventional training in harmony, counterpoint, and form familiar from conservatory curricula, and a research field that develops and tests ways of analyzing music. Well-known strands include the tonal-voice-leading approach associated with Heinrich Schenker, the pitch-class set theory developed for atonal music by Allen Forte, and later work on rhythm and meter, transformational and neo-Riemannian theory, popular-music analysis, and the historical study of theory itself. Theorists also work on the borders of cognition and computation, for example by testing whether an analytical model matches how listeners hear.

In North America, music theory is often a distinct graduate track with its own society, journals, and job market, separate from historical musicology. In other countries the same work may sit within a single musicology department.

Music Cognition and Psychology of Music

Music cognition applies experimental methods from psychology and neuroscience to music. Research questions include how listeners perceive pitch, rhythm, and timbre; how expectation and emotion work; how memory and learning operate in performers; how musical ability develops; and how music relates to language and movement. Typical methods are behavioral experiments, psychophysics, surveys, brain imaging and electrophysiology, and computational modeling. The field draws on psychology and cognitive science, and its research often involves human participants, which brings it under the ordinary rules for human-subjects research. The Society for Music Perception and Cognition describes itself as a not-for-profit scholarly organization dedicated to the study of music cognition, spanning disciplines from music theory and psychology to neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and physics.

Digital Musicology

Digital musicology uses computing in music research, and it overlaps with the digital humanities and with a technical field called music information retrieval (MIR). Typical activities are:

• Encoding scores and sources in machine-readable form. The Music Encoding Initiative (MEI) is a community-driven, open-source effort to define an XML-based system for encoding musical documents, bringing together scholars, librarians, and technologists.
• Building databases and catalogues of sources, works, and performances, often as linked data.
• Computational analysis of style, harmony, or form across large corpora of scores or recordings.
• Music information retrieval: developing tools to search, classify, and process music data. The International Society for Music Information Retrieval (ISMIR) began as an informal group that established a yearly symposium in 2000 and was incorporated in Canada in 2008.

The same questions that arise in other digital humanities work apply here: long-term hosting, sustainable formats, and the rights attached to the underlying scores and recordings. For a European example of shared infrastructure in this area, see DARIAH-EU.

Methods

Archival and Source Research

Historical work depends on locating and reading primary sources: manuscripts, printed music, letters, concert programs, institutional records, and early recordings. This includes paleography (reading historical handwriting and notation), dating by paper and ink, and comparing copies to establish how a work changed.

Editing and Textual Criticism

Editors compare sources to produce a reliable score and document their choices. The tradition is shared with textual scholarship in literary studies.

Analysis

Score-based analysis examines pitch, rhythm, harmony, form, and texture, using a range of theoretical frameworks. Performance analysis applies similar attention to recordings, including acoustic measurement of timing and dynamics.

Fieldwork and Ethnography

Ethnomusicologists collect data by observation, participation, interviews, and recording. A frequently cited idea in the field is learning to perform the music being studied as a way of understanding it, an approach sometimes called bi-musicality. Findings are usually reported in narrative form, supported by audio and video.

Experimental and Statistical Methods

Music cognition uses controlled experiments, statistics, and modeling. Standard research-design issues such as sampling, replication, and measurement apply.

Computational Methods

Digital musicology uses encoding, corpus analysis, signal processing, and machine learning. Computational results are generally treated as evidence to be interpreted alongside, not in place of, historical and analytical judgment.

A Short History of the Discipline

• Before the nineteenth century — writing about music was largely theoretical and practical: treatises on tuning, counterpoint, and performance, and early histories and biographies.
• 1885 — Guido Adler published “Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft” (“The Scope, Method, and Aim of Musicology”) in the first issue of the Vierteljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft. It is regarded as the first comprehensive description of the field, and it divided the discipline into historical and systematic musicology, with comparative musicology placed under the latter.
• Early twentieth century — the invention of sound recording made it possible to study the music of oral traditions, producing the comparative musicology that became ethnomusicology.
• 1934 — the American Musicological Society was formed.
• 1950 — Jaap Kunst used the term “ethno-musicology” in the subtitle of Musicologica.
• 1955 — the Society for Ethnomusicology was officially founded.
• 1977 — the Society for Music Theory was founded, with its first conference in 1978.
• 1980s onward — critical and cultural approaches reshaped historical musicology, while cognitive, computational, and digital approaches grew in parallel.

Professional Societies

• American Musicological Society (AMS) — formed in 1934; its journal is the Journal of the American Musicological Society, established in 1948.
• Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) — officially founded on November 18, 1955, after informal beginnings at a 1953 meeting of the American Anthropological Association; it publishes the journal Ethnomusicology.
• Society for Music Theory (SMT) — founded in 1977; its official journal is Music Theory Spectrum, first published in 1979 and now published by Oxford University Press.
• Society for Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC) — a scholarly organization for music cognition research that holds a biennial conference.
• ISMIR and the Music Encoding Initiative — communities for music information retrieval and for music encoding.

The AMS, SEM, and SMT are all member societies of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). Outside the United States there are national and regional bodies, such as the British Forum for Ethnomusicology, whose journal is Ethnomusicology Forum, and many national musicological societies.

Journals and Publishing

Musicology publishes in a mix of journals, edited collections, and scholarly monographs, with books carrying particular weight in historical musicology and ethnomusicology. Scholarly editions of music are a separate genre. Music cognition and music information retrieval publish mostly in journal articles and peer-reviewed conference papers, as in other sciences and computing fields. Besides the society journals named above, the field has numerous specialist and regional journals. Humanities article conventions differ from the IMRaD structure of the sciences; see humanities article structure vs. IMRaD. Open access and embargo rules affect all of these outputs; see embargo.

How Musicology Research Is Funded

Funding depends on the subfield.

• The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) funds humanities research in the United States, including music scholarship in its fellowships and project grants. See NEH Summer Stipends and the NEH data management plan for digital humanities grants.
• The American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), founded in 1919, is a federation of learned societies, including the three music societies named above, and runs fellowship programs for humanities scholars.
• The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation is a major private funder of the humanities, including digital and infrastructure projects. See Mellon Foundation humanities and arts funding.
• Research councils and national bodies elsewhere fund musicology within their arts and humanities programs, and science councils may fund music cognition. Check the current program rules.
• Universities, libraries, and societies provide travel, fieldwork, and publication support, and archives and libraries offer research fellowships.

Humanities awards are usually modest and centered on release time, archive visits, fieldwork, research assistance, and digital project costs. Programs, deadlines, and eligibility change, so confirm the details in the funder’s current announcement.

Research Ethics, Permissions, and Copyright

Music research raises specific ethics and rights questions, and several arise from the nature of recordings.

• Human participants. Fieldwork interviews, observation, and recording of living people, and cognition experiments, may require review by an ethics committee. Whether review applies is determined by the institution’s ethics office. The Society for Ethnomusicology has issued position statements on ethical considerations (approved in 1998, with an ethics statement in 2018) and on ethnographic research and institutional review boards (2008). See informed consent.
• Community consent and cultural ownership. Recording and publishing music from a community raises questions about who is entitled to authorize use, how performers are credited, and whether some material is restricted by custom. These are not covered fully by consent to be interviewed, and may need agreements with the performers or community.
• Layered copyright. A single recording can involve several separate rights: in the musical work (composition and lyrics), in the sound recording, and in any images, notation, or published editions. The rights holders may differ, and the rules differ by country. The SEM has issued statements on music and fair use (2005) and on copyright and sound recording (2011). See copyright.
• Permissions in publication. Quoting score excerpts, embedding audio or video, or reproducing manuscript images in a book, article, or digital edition normally needs a permissions plan, and clearance can be a significant cost and a cause of delay. Seek advice from your library or copyright office rather than assuming an exception applies.
• Archiving field recordings. Deposit in an archive requires a decision about access, restrictions, and the terms agreed with the people recorded. Include this in your data management plan.

None of this is legal advice. Specific situations should be referred to the institution’s counsel or copyright specialist.

Training and Career Paths

Undergraduate study usually combines music history, theory, aural skills, and performance, and may be offered in a music department, a conservatory, or a humanities program. Graduate training is the usual route to research careers, ordinarily a master’s degree and a doctorate with a dissertation (see What Is a Dissertation?). Applicants typically need reading knowledge of research languages and, for ethnomusicology, field languages; cognition and computational routes may sit within psychology, computer science, or interdisciplinary programs. Careers include university teaching and research, library and archive work, editing and publishing, arts administration, orchestral and festival programming, broadcasting, and, for those with cognitive or computational training, work in industry and clinical or technology settings. The academic job market is competitive, and graduates often move into related roles.

Research Administration and Musicology

Administrators who support music scholars will meet several recurring issues.

• Proposal budgets — the main costs are usually salary or release time, travel to archives and field sites, equipment for recording, transcription and translation, and permissions fees. Music cognition may also need laboratory and participant costs.
• Ethics review — fieldwork and experiments often need review, and the timing should be planned before the award starts.
• Rights and permissions — clearance costs should be budgeted early, and the grant terms may restrict publication of copyrighted material.
• International travel and fieldwork — research permits, visas, and safety planning can affect timelines.
• Data and preservation — audio, video, and encoded scores need sustainable storage, and funders increasingly ask for a plan.
• Evaluation — books, editions, recordings, and compositions-as-research are poorly captured by journal citation metrics, so assessment usually relies on peer judgment.

For the wider map of fields, see Branches of Science.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is musicology in simple terms?

It is the scholarly study of music: its history, structure, cultural meaning, and perception.

What is the difference between musicology and music theory?

Music theory studies how music is structured and how to describe it, while historical musicology studies music’s history and context. In the broad sense of the word, music theory is part of musicology; in North American usage they are usually separate areas.

What is the difference between musicology and ethnomusicology?

In the narrow sense, musicology means the historical study of Western art music, while ethnomusicology studies music in its cultural setting through fieldwork. The two have increasingly shared methods and topics.

What do musicologists do?

They research and write about music, teach, edit scores, work in libraries and archives, and in some subfields conduct experiments or build computational tools.

Is musicology a science or a humanities field?

Mostly a humanities field. Music cognition and some computational work follow scientific methods, and the discipline spans both.

What is digital musicology?

It is the use of computing in music research, including encoding scores, building databases, and analyzing large collections of music.

What are the AMS, SEM, and SMT?

The American Musicological Society (1934), the Society for Ethnomusicology (1955), and the Society for Music Theory (1977), the main US scholarly societies for their respective areas.

Who funds musicology research?

Principally the NEH, ACLS, and private foundations such as the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation in the United States, research councils elsewhere, and universities.

Do I need permission to publish field recordings?

Often yes. You may need agreement from performers or communities, and clearance from holders of rights in the composition and recording. Consult your ethics office and copyright specialist.