How to Study Music History

Introduction

In this article I would like to give you a key to study for a first approach to the History of Music. I will try not to fill you with historical notions that you could find anywhere online, and to provide you more than anything else with the coordinates to contextualize this subject in the context of your musical studies.

Below I also want to leave you some of the manuals on which I have trained and that I am sure will be very useful to you: if you finalize the purchase of one of them through the banners below, a small share of your purchase will go to support this blog.

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Musicology VS History Of Music

When we approach the History of Music for the first time, we often lose sight of the fact that it is a branch of Musicology. If we want to study it so that we can use it in the interpretation of a piece, during a musical analysis, we must always put it in dialogue with the other forms of musical research that have been configured as sections, subcategories of the broader discourse on Musicology. The latter was established in the Academies only at the end of the nineteenth century, and has taken hold in very recent times, starting from the last century. It is therefore a very young subject: it stands as a Science that rigorously investigates Music. The scientific character of Musicology embraces historical investigations, such as those on Organology, but also technical-systematic, of which Musical Acoustics is an example.

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History VS History Of Music

Another premise necessary to face the study of the History of Music is History: with the latter, the first substantially shares the method of investigation, of research. One could find infinite parallels between these two subjects: they dialogue continuously and one cannot give one without the other. Just think of the infinite historical contexts that are necessary to understand a musical phenomenon, a historical source such as a composer’s private letter, and so on. Thinking about the musical phenomenon in this historical evolution that we have just described, many of us can imagine a certain volatility of the sources of investigation. Think of all those songs that have been handed down in the past orally by people who did not have a musical writing ability but sang during work, in wheat fields, in rice fields, in factories and so on. Of those voices we can still hear precise legacies, think for example of their influences in contemporary popular music. And yet with the whole oral universe of Music, unwritten, the History of Music has very little to do. The field of investigation of this subject is limited to music handed down through writing: the oral tradition is dealt with by Ethnomusicology. Even this distinction, which provides for precise historical contextualizations, is very important to define the precise boundary within which to organize one’s study, but it should not be radicalized as Ethnomusicology is also, together with the History of Music, part of the same, broader discourse of Musicology.

Past VS History

The music historian Carl Dahlhaus, a fascinating figure of which in this blog we will have the opportunity to talk in subsequent articles, had already identified the difference between the historical datum and the past as such. When we approach the History of Music, we must not think that we are faced with a series of objective data of a past that happened as we find it written on paper or on a screen. This approach is superficial and misleading, because behind the historiographical data there is always the historian of Music, the historian. He shifts the emphasis of the discourse to the material he considers most relevant, and lays the foundations of his own historical thesis, to which he will confer scientific character. If this double passage does not happen, we are not faced with a historian: in other words, he does not describe the past as it is nor does he give a questionable personal opinion on data without historical verifiability. On the contrary, by the simple fact that he decides to deal with a certain area of the past and not another, he illuminates a fragment of the latter. We call this fragment historical fact, but we must not forget that it represents only a part, very often contradictory, of the totality of the past as it actually took place. The demonstration is the fact that that fragment, put in dialogue with others, therefore with other historiographical perspectives, perhaps written by different historiographers, reveals characters of the past that without this comparison between different perspectives we could never have defined.

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Conclusions

For this article is everything, more in-depth considerations on the History of Music will be integrated into the articles on Practical Analysis and in the section dedicated to the History of Music. We will investigate closely the historiographical events of the protagonists of the musical tradition, of which below I leave you a short video-taste. See you in tomorrow’s daily post!

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