Musicology

:For the album by Prince, see Musicology (album).

Criticism

Richard Middleton asserts that musicology, "with a few exceptions (mostly recent)" has not studied popular music. "As a general rule works of musicology, theoretical or historical, act as though popular music did not exist." Musicologists who are "both contemptuous and condescending are looking for types of production, musical form, and listening which they associate with a different kind of music...'classical music'...and they generally find popular music lacking" (Middleton 1990, p.103).

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He cites (p.104-6) "three main aspects of this problem":

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• "a terminology slanted by the needs and history of a particular music ('classical music')."
• "on one hand, there is a rich vocabulary for certain areas , important in musicology's typical corpus, and an impoverished vocabulary for others , which are less well developed there"
• "on the other hand, terms are ideologically loaded...these connotations are ideological because they always involve selective, and often unconsciously formulated, conceptions of what music is."
• "a methodology slanted by the characteristics of notation," 'notational centricity' (Tagg 1979, p.28-32)
• "musicological methods tend to foreground those musical parameters which can be easily notated...they tend to neglect or have difficulty with parameters which are not easily notated", such as Fred Lerdahl. "notation-centric training induces particular forms of listening, and these then tend to be applied to all sorts of music, appropriately or not."
• Notational centricity also encourages "reification: the score comes to be seen as 'the music', or perhaps the music in an ideal form."
• "an ideology slanted by the origins and development of a particular body of music and its aesthetic...It arose at a specific moment, in a specific context - nineteenth-century Europe, especially Germany - and in close association with that movement in the musical practice of the period which was codifying the very repertory then taken by musicology as the centre of its attention."

These terminological, methodological, and ideological problems affect even works symphathetic to popular music. However, it is not "that musicology cannot understand popular music, or that students of popular music should abandon musicology" (p.104).

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Middleton's views may be contrasted with a more nuanced perspective that takes into account the fact that musicology has long studied a wide variety of music over large time spans. Thus, e.g., one can find discussions of 15th-century Spanish popular song in 19th-century musicological work; and discussions of 16th-century popular song in the recent past (Brooks 2000, ISBN 0226075877). This is to say nothing about the concept popular, which subsumes Michael Jackson's Thriller (the best-selling album of all time) and Verdi operas.

Related Topics:
Popular - Michael Jackson - Thriller - Verdi

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