MUSIC 670: Musicology Research Methods and Scholarly Writing

These notes draw on Richard Wingell and Patricia Herzog’s Introduction to Research in Music (3rd ed., 2009), Laurie J. Sampsel’s Music Research: A Handbook (2nd ed., 2013), Gregory Barz and Timothy Cooley (eds.) Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology (2008), D. Kern Holoman’s Writing about Music: A Style Sheet (3rd ed., 2014), and supplementary materials from Yale University MUSI 697 required doctoral proseminar and Indiana University M501 Introduction to Music Research.

Chapter 1: The Discipline of Musicology

1.1 What Musicology Is

Musicology is the systematic, scholarly study of music in all its dimensions: its history, its structures, its social contexts, its psychological effects, and its relationships to other human activities and disciplines.

The word itself — from the Greek mousike and logos — suggests both the breadth and the ambition of the field: knowledge of music, music as an object of knowledge.

In practice, musicology today names not one discipline but a family of related inquiry, bound by a commitment to evidence, rigorous argument, and the communication of findings to a scholarly community.

The major sub-disciplines of musicology as currently constituted are: historical musicology, music theory, ethnomusicology, music psychology, music sociology, and popular music studies.

Each brings its own methods, questions, and intellectual traditions, and each has a distinct home in the university curriculum, though the boundaries between them have grown considerably more porous in recent decades.

Historical musicology — the sub-discipline most often identified simply with “musicology” in older usage — studies music of the past through archival and philological research, biography, source criticism, style analysis, and the investigation of musical institutions and practices across time.

It asks: When was this work composed? By whom, under what circumstances, for what audience and occasion? How does it relate to other works, conventions, and cultural forces of its time?

Music theory addresses the structural properties of musical works and systems: the organization of pitch, rhythm, meter, harmony, counterpoint, form, and texture.

Although closely allied to historical musicology — much analytical work is historically situated — music theory is often understood as more synchronic, concerned with the internal logic of musical systems rather than their temporal development.

The formal tools of music theory include Roman-numeral harmonic analysis, Schenkerian voice-leading graphs, set-theoretical pitch-class analysis, and more recently neo-Riemannian transformational theory and formal theories of meter and hypermeter.

Ethnomusicology is the study of music as culture — the comparative and anthropologically informed investigation of musical practices in their social contexts, with particular emphasis on non-Western and folk traditions.

Ethnomusicologists conduct fieldwork, building relationships with musical communities and learning repertoires from the inside. They ask not only what music sounds like but what it does: how it constructs and maintains social identity, mediates ritual, encodes historical memory, and circulates through global economies of cultural exchange.

The relationship between the fieldworker and the community she studies raises ethical questions that have occupied the discipline since Bruno Nettl and Alan Merriam established its modern methodological foundations.

Music psychology investigates the cognitive and affective mechanisms by which human beings perceive, produce, remember, and respond emotionally to music.

It draws on experimental methodology — laboratory experiments, neuroimaging, computational modeling — and engages questions ranging from basic psychoacoustics to higher-level issues of musical expectation, aesthetic emotion, and musical development across the lifespan.

David Huron’s Sweet Anticipation (2006), which develops an evolutionary and cognitive account of musical emotion based on the ITPRA (Imagination, Tension, Prediction, Reaction, Appraisal) model, is among the most influential recent contributions to this literature.

Music sociology and popular music studies study music as a social institution, attending to the economic structures of the music industry, the construction of genre and authenticity, the politics of taste and cultural capital, and the relationship between music, class, race, gender, and technology.

Scholars like Simon Frith, Richard Middleton, and Susan McClary have been central to establishing the legitimacy and intellectual rigor of these fields. Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of cultural fields has been widely adopted as a framework for studying how musical taste is socially distributed and reproduced.

1.2 The History of Musicology as a Discipline

Modern musicology emerged in the German-speaking lands of the nineteenth century under the banner of Musikwissenschaft — the science of music.

Three figures are decisive for understanding this emergence: Friedrich Chrysander, Philipp Spitta, and Guido Adler.

Friedrich Chrysander (1826–1901) was a monument of positivist documentary scholarship. His edition of Handel’s complete works, the Händel-Gesellschaft Ausgabe (1858–1902), set the standard for what a critical edition should aspire to be: exhaustive, systematic, grounded in primary sources, stripped of editorial interpretation.

Chrysander’s approach exemplified the conviction that the musicologist’s first task is to establish the facts — to recover and present texts reliably before offering any interpretation of them.

His work was undertaken in remarkable isolation: for much of his career he edited and printed the Handel volumes at his own farmhouse, essentially single-handedly sustaining the most ambitious music-editorial project of the nineteenth century.

Philipp Spitta (1841–1894), whose two-volume biography Johann Sebastian Bach (1873–1880) remains a landmark of music-historical writing, combined Chrysander’s documentary impulse with a deeper commitment to analytical and aesthetic engagement.

Spitta did not merely chronicle Bach’s life and works; he sought to understand them as expressions of a particular historical and spiritual moment — the culmination of the German Lutheran church music tradition.

His work demonstrated that biography and document could be integrated with style analysis in a coherent scholarly argument, establishing a genre — the composer biography with embedded analytical commentary — that dominated musicology well into the twentieth century.

Guido Adler (1855–1941) provided the theoretical framework that would shape the discipline for much of the twentieth century.

His 1885 article “Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft” divided the field into historical and systematic branches and identified the subdisciplines that would define academic musicology: history, notation, harmony, melody, rhythm, aesthetics, pedagogy, and — crucially — comparative musicology, the predecessor of modern ethnomusicology.

Adler’s scheme was both a map of existing scholarly practice and a program for its future development. His Vienna seminar trained a generation of scholars who would carry the Musikwissenschaft tradition to England and the United States.

The institutionalization of musicology in American universities came primarily after 1930, as European scholars fleeing political upheaval brought the Musikwissenschaft tradition across the Atlantic.

The American Musicological Society was founded in 1934. By mid-century, doctoral programs had been established at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and the major state universities.

The Journal of the American Musicological Society (JAMS), founded in 1948, became the flagship venue for American music-historical scholarship.

1.3 Kerman’s Watershed and the New Musicology

The history of musicology as a self-reflective discipline cannot be told without Joseph Kerman’s Contemplating Music (1985; published in the United Kingdom as Musicology).

Kerman’s book was a sustained critique of what he saw as the excessive positivism and narrow formalism of mainstream musicology and music theory.

Musicologists, he argued, had spent too much energy on documentary work — establishing texts, dates, and attributions — without asking what those documents mean and why they matter.

Music theorists had retreated into ever-more-abstract analytical systems that described musical structures with technical precision while remaining silent on the aesthetic and cultural significance of those structures.

Kerman was particularly pointed in his critique of Schenkerian analysis, which he read as a formalism that achieved its analytical elegance by rigorously excluding everything that might count as musical meaning in a humanistic sense.

Kerman’s call was for interpretation alongside documentation — for a musicology that did not merely establish facts but evaluated the works and practices it studied, engaging them critically and aesthetically in the manner of literary criticism.

His advocacy for criticism as a legitimate and necessary mode of music scholarship opened a debate that reshaped the field in the subsequent two decades.

The response to Kerman’s call crystallized in what became known as the New Musicology — a movement of the late 1980s and 1990s associated with scholars such as Susan McClary, Lawrence Kramer, Rose Rosengard Subotnik, and Richard Taruskin.

Drawing on cultural theory, feminist criticism, postcolonial theory, and hermeneutics, the New Musicology insisted that musical works are not autonomous aesthetic objects but cultural artifacts embedded in systems of meaning that involve gender, race, class, sexuality, and political power.

Susan McClary’s Feminine Endings (1991) brought feminist and gender analysis to bear on the Western musical canon, hearing in standard tonal procedures evidence of deeply gendered structures of meaning.

Lawrence Kramer’s Music as Cultural Practice (1990) developed a hermeneutic methodology for reading musical works as cultural texts without collapsing musical specificity into mere illustration of social forces.

Richard Taruskin’s vast historical work — culminating in the Oxford History of Western Music (2005) — combined the documentary rigor of traditional musicology with the interpretive ambitions of the New Musicology.

The New Musicology was not without its critics. Debates about the politicization of music scholarship and the relationship between analytical precision and cultural interpretation remain alive in the field.

1.4 Musicology, Music Theory, and Their Convergence

The historical divergence between musicology and music theory in American universities reflects the institutional separation of these disciplines into distinct professional societies — the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory — and distinct journals.

This divergence was reinforced by methodological differences: historians emphasized archival evidence and historical context; theorists emphasized formal analysis, often treating historical context as secondary to internal musical logic.

In recent decades, however, the two fields have converged considerably. Historically informed analysis — paying close attention to both formal structure and historical circumstance — has become a methodological norm in the best current scholarship.

The increasing prominence of corpus studies — computational analyses of large musical datasets — has also drawn musicologists and music theorists together around shared methodological questions, even when their interpretive goals differ.

1.5 Digital Musicology

Digital musicology is among the newest and fastest-growing areas of the discipline, encompassing computational corpus studies, digital critical editions, searchable online archives, and music information retrieval (MIR) techniques.

The ability to analyze thousands of scores automatically has opened research questions previously inaccessible: how did harmonic practice change across the eighteenth century? What statistical regularities define the style of a particular composer?

Digital musicology raises questions about what can and cannot be learned from computational methods, and how quantitative findings relate to the interpretive claims of traditional music scholarship. These questions are addressed in depth in Chapter 6.

1.6 Why Research Methods Matter

The study of research methods might seem, at first, merely procedural — a set of tools and conventions to master before doing the real work of music scholarship. But this view misunderstands what methods are.

Methods are not neutral containers for carrying preformed ideas to publication. They are the means by which claims become evidence-based, arguments become reproducible, and scholarship accumulates across generations of researchers.

Without methods, analysis floats free of evidence. A claim about what Beethoven intended in a particular passage, or what audiences heard in a seventeenth-century opera, cannot be a scholarly contribution unless it is grounded in sources — documents, recordings, fieldwork — and argued with logical rigor.

The relationship between method and idea is reciprocal: methods make it possible to develop ideas that are genuinely new, to test them against evidence, and to communicate them to a community that can evaluate, extend, or refute them.

1.7 The Ethical Dimensions of Music Research

Research in music carries ethical responsibilities that go beyond the professional obligations common to all scholarship. These responsibilities are most acute in ethnomusicological fieldwork, where the researcher enters into relationships with living communities whose music, cultural practices, and personal narratives she is studying. But ethical considerations arise in historical musicology as well — in decisions about which stories to tell and whose voices to amplify, in the use of correspondence and private documents, and in the political implications of canon formation and repertoire selection.

Ethnomusicological ethics has been formalized in guidelines developed by the Society for Ethnomusicology, which address: informed consent (the obligation to explain the research to participants and obtain their agreement to participate); reciprocity (the obligation to give back to the community in some form — through shared recordings, performances, documentation, or advocacy); confidentiality (the obligation to protect the identities of informants who request anonymity); and representation (the obligation to represent communities accurately and with respect for their own understandings of their practices).

Gregory Barz and Timothy Cooley’s edited collection Shadows in the Field (2008) gathers ethnomusicologists’ reflections on the ethical and personal dimensions of fieldwork — the power dynamics between researcher and community, the emotional intensity of long-term field relationships, the challenge of writing about communities in terms they might not recognize or endorse.

In historical musicology, the ethics of research are less formally codified but no less real. The choice to write about canonically overlooked composers — women, composers of color, non-Western practitioners — is itself an ethical and political choice, carrying obligations of care and accuracy. The use of private correspondence raises questions of the dignity of the individuals involved. The decision about how to handle evidence of a historical figure’s morally problematic behavior — racism, antisemitism, sexual violence — requires judgments that go beyond the purely evidential.

Chapter 2: Primary Sources and Archival Research

2.1 What Is a Primary Source?

In musicology, a primary source is a document that originates from the period or phenomenon under study — a direct trace of the historical event, person, work, or practice being investigated.

Primary sources contrast with secondary sources, which are scholarly accounts of primary sources written at a later time.

The distinction matters because the authority of a secondary source ultimately depends on the quality of its author’s engagement with primary sources; to trace an argument to its foundation, one must eventually confront the primary evidence.

Primary sources in musicology take many forms: manuscript scores; autograph manuscripts (scores in the composer’s own hand); first editions and early printed copies; correspondence between composers, performers, publishers, and patrons; diaries and memoirs; contemporary reviews; librettos; theoretical treatises; account books and institutional records; and, for more recent periods, recordings, sketches, and electronic files.

The evaluation of a primary source requires asking several questions simultaneously: Is it genuine (authentic)? Is it accurate (reliable)? What does it actually record — the composer’s final intentions, an early version, a performer’s adaptation, a scribe’s misreading? What does it not record — what aspects of musical practice does this document type systematically fail to capture?

2.2 Major Manuscript Collections

The world’s major research libraries hold collections of musical manuscripts irreplaceable for music-historical scholarship. Knowing where these collections are, how they are organized, and how to request access is an essential professional skill.

The British Library (London; RISM siglum GB-Lbl) holds one of the richest collections of musical manuscripts in the world, including Handel’s autographs, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English music, and important medieval and Renaissance sources.

The Bibliothèque nationale de France (Paris; F-Pn) is the home of important sources for French Baroque and Renaissance music, as well as the papers of many French composers. Its Département de la Musique maintains a dedicated reading room accessible to credentialed researchers.

The Library of Congress (Washington, DC; US-Wc) holds the largest music library in the United States, with extensive holdings in American music, distinguished European manuscript acquisitions, and the Gertrude Clarke Whittall Foundation collection.

The Österreichische Nationalbibliothek (Vienna; A-Wn) is essential for the study of Viennese Classical music, holding autographs and first editions of Haydn, Mozart, and Schubert, as well as important medieval manuscript sources.

The Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (D-B) is the most important repository for Bach materials outside of Leipzig, holding a large portion of the original performance parts and copies that circulated in Bach’s lifetime, as well as the significant Sing-Akademie collection returned from Kiev in 2001.

2.3 Finding Aids

Before visiting any archive, the researcher must consult its finding aids — the cataloguing tools that describe what the collection contains and how it is organized.

Finding aids vary considerably in detail: a collection guide provides a general overview; a box list describes each archival storage unit; a folder inventory lists individual items within a box; an item-level catalogue describes each document individually, with date, extent, condition notes, and provenance.

Many archives now provide finding aids online through the EAD (Encoded Archival Description) standard, making preliminary research possible before the physical visit.

2.4 RISM: The International Inventory of Musical Sources

RISM (Répertoire International des Sources Musicales) is the most important bibliographic tool for locating musical manuscripts and early printed music worldwide.

Founded in 1952 as an international collaborative project, RISM maintains a freely accessible online database at rism.info that currently catalogs more than one million musical sources held in libraries and archives across more than sixty countries.

RISM is organized in several series. Series A/I covers printed music from the fifteenth through early nineteenth centuries by individual composers. Series A/II — the main online database — covers musical manuscripts after 1600, with entries contributed by national working groups at libraries worldwide. Series B covers thematic bibliographies of specific repertoires, such as printed collections of the sixteenth century, theoretical treatises, or music for lute in tablature.

The online RISM catalog allows the researcher to search by composer name, title, text incipit, instrumentation, date, and source library — making it possible to discover previously unknown or poorly documented sources for a given work.

2.5 RILM Abstracts of Music Literature

RILM Abstracts of Music Literature (Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale) is the comprehensive bibliographic database for music scholarship.

RILM indexes books, journal articles, dissertations, Festschriften, conference proceedings, and other scholarly publications in music, with abstracts in English. Its coverage extends back to 1967, and retrospective indexing has extended earlier in many areas.

RILM is the first database to search when beginning a literature review; its coverage of international scholarship — including materials published in German, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, and many other languages — is unmatched by any other single resource.

Effective RILM searching requires multiple search terms combined with Boolean operators. Checking RILM’s controlled vocabulary (its thesaurus of subject headings) and using those headings alongside free-text keywords will ensure more complete coverage.

2.6 Grove Music Online and Major Journals

Grove Music Online (Oxford Music Online) is the standard encyclopedic reference for music scholarship: the digital successor to the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2nd ed., 2001).

Grove articles are written by specialists, peer reviewed, and accompanied by bibliographies that provide reliable entry points into the scholarly literature. Grove should be used as a starting point, not an ending point — the bibliographies it provides are the researcher’s gateway to primary and secondary scholarship.

Caution is appropriate: Grove articles vary in quality and currency. Some were last substantially revised in the 1990s or earlier and may not reflect current scholarly consensus. The researcher must always supplement Grove with a current RILM search to capture recent scholarship.

The leading journals in the discipline include: JAMS (Journal of the American Musicological Society); the Journal of the Royal Musical Association (JRMA); Music Theory Spectrum; the Journal of Musicology; Early Music; 19th-Century Music; Cambridge Opera Journal; and Ethnomusicology.

For digital access, JSTOR and Project MUSE provide access to back issues of most major humanities journals, while recent issues are available through publisher platforms (Oxford Academic, Cambridge Core) via institutional subscriptions.

2.7 Requesting Archival Access and Handling Rules

Most major research archives require advance arrangements for access. The researcher should write a formal letter of introduction explaining her institutional affiliation, the nature of the research project, and the specific materials she wishes to consult.

Many archives require a letter from a dissertation advisor or department chair, on institutional letterhead. Some archives restrict access to scholars at the doctoral level or above.

Once granted access, the researcher must observe the archive’s handling rules. Fragile manuscripts may not be touched without cotton gloves, which the archive typically provides. Photography may be permitted without flash only; pencils rather than pens must be used for notes.

Permission to reproduce images for publication typically requires a separate application and may involve fees. The researcher who violates handling rules risks losing access and damaging irreplaceable sources — a professional and ethical obligation, not merely a bureaucratic formality.

2.8 Transcribing and Citing Manuscript Sources

Citing a manuscript source accurately requires: the standardized RISM library siglum identifying the holding institution; the shelfmark (the call number assigned by the library); and a precise location within the document — folio number (with recto [r] and verso [v] distinguished) or page number.

A complete manuscript citation might read: Johann Sebastian Bach, Matthäus-Passion, BWV 244, autograph score, D-B, Mus. ms. Bach P 25, fol. 1r. This citation identifies the composer, work, catalogue number, document type, RISM siglum, shelfmark, and folio location.

Diplomatic transcription — the faithful reproduction of a manuscript’s contents without editorial emendation — requires recording exactly what is on the page, including apparent errors, unusual spellings, deletions, and interlinear additions, using established conventions.

2.9 Thematic Catalogues and Composer Catalogues

Alongside RISM, the musicologist must be familiar with the thematic catalogue — a systematic catalogue of a composer’s works organized by musical incipit (the opening measures of each work, notated in brief), catalogue number, sources, and bibliography.

Thematic catalogues serve several purposes simultaneously: they establish a standard numbering system for a composer’s works (the K numbers for Mozart from Ludwig von Köchel’s catalogue, the BWV numbers for Bach from Wolfgang Schmieder’s Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis, the D numbers for Schubert from Otto Erich Deutsch); they survey the sources for each work; and they provide a bibliographic point of departure for research.

The thematic catalogue is also a historical document in its own right. The Köchel-Verzeichnis (1862), in its successive revisions, encapsulates the history of Mozart scholarship: additions, deletions, reattributions, and renumberings reflect changing assessments of attribution and chronology. A researcher working on Mozart should consult not only the most recent edition of Köchel but also the history of the catalogue’s revisions.

Chapter 3: Source Criticism and Philology

3.1 Source Criticism: Foundations

Source criticism — in German, Quellenkritik — is the systematic evaluation of sources for their authenticity, date, provenance, and reliability. It is the foundational philological method of historical musicology.

Before a source can be used as evidence, it must be understood as a historical artifact — where it came from, when it was made, by whom, under what circumstances, and with what degree of faithfulness to an earlier original.

Source criticism in musicology draws heavily on the methods developed in classical philology and biblical scholarship, where the problem of reconstructing lost originals from a plurality of copies had been refined over centuries.

The musicologist’s application of these methods is shaped by the peculiarities of musical sources: musical notation is more technical and conventionalized than verbal text, and notational conventions have changed dramatically across historical periods.

The fundamental insight of source criticism is that no source is self-interpreting. Every source requires contextual knowledge — of the notation system in use, the scribal conventions of the period and region, the transmission history of the repertoire, and the likely purposes for which the document was made.

3.2 Authenticity, Authority, and Reliability

Three concepts — authenticity, authority, and reliability — are often conflated but must be distinguished carefully. Failure to maintain these distinctions leads to logical errors in source-critical argument.

3.3 Stemma Codicum

The stemma codicum — Latin for “family tree of sources” — is a diagram representing the genealogical relationships among the surviving sources for a given work.

Constructing a stemma is the central task of source criticism: it allows the researcher to determine which sources are copies of other surviving sources (and can be set aside when the archetype is available), which share a common lost ancestor, and which may reflect independent transmission.

The stemma is constructed by identifying variant readings — places where sources disagree — and grouping sources that share the same variants, since shared error is the most reliable evidence of common descent.

Applying stemmatics to musical sources is more complex than to verbal texts because musical sources are often copied for performance rather than documentary preservation, and performers routinely introduced adaptations — transpositions, ornamentation, text underlay changes — that can be mistaken for transmission variants.

3.4 Diplomatic and Editorial Transcription

Diplomatic transcription reproduces a source exactly as it appears, preserving all features of the original including abbreviations, variant spellings, deletions, and interlinear additions. A diplomatic transcription serves as a surrogate for the original document.

Editorial transcription (also called a reading text) silently normalizes the source for readability: expanding abbreviations, standardizing spelling, correcting obvious scribal errors, and adapting the notation to modern conventions.

Editorial transcriptions are appropriate for making repertoires accessible to performers and general readers, but they sacrifice the philological precision required for source-critical work.

A critical edition combines an editorial transcription of the text with a critical commentary or critical report that records the sources used, the editor’s choices at each point of variance, and the reasoning behind those decisions.

Critical editions are the standard format for the scholarly publication of musical works surviving in multiple sources. The apparatus of a critical edition allows any reader to reconstruct the evidence behind each editorial decision.

3.5 Case Study: Bach’s Goldberg Variations

The sources for Bach’s Goldberg Variations (BWV 988) provide an instructive case study in the complexity of source relationships.

The work was published in 1741 as part of Bach’s Clavier-Übung IV — the first edition (Nuremberg: Balthasar Schmid) is an engraved print that represents the work as Bach authorized it for public dissemination. For most of the twentieth century, this first edition served as the primary source for performances and editions.

In 1974 a copy of the Goldberg Variations was discovered at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (source P 226 in RISM): a manuscript copy in the hand of a Bach pupil, containing an additional fourteen canons at the end and — most significantly — handwritten ornaments added by Bach himself to the first variation and several others.

These annotations, clearly in Bach’s late handwriting, represent the composer’s own performance markings added to a printed copy of the work, presumably in the final years of his life.

3.6 Dating Manuscripts

When a manuscript lacks an explicit date, the researcher must infer it from physical and internal evidence, typically using multiple converging lines of argument rather than any single method alone.

Watermark analysis — studying the marks embedded in paper during manufacture, which changed as paper moulds were made and replaced — is one of the most reliable methods for dating manuscripts within a decade or so.

The work of Alan Tyson on Mozart manuscripts, and of Yoshitake Kobayashi on Bach manuscripts, demonstrated how systematic watermark study could transform the chronology of a composer’s output.

Handwriting analysis (paleography) can narrow dating further: a composer’s or scribe’s handwriting changes over time in identifiable ways, and comparison with dated specimens allows a researcher to place undated manuscripts in sequence.

Ink analysis using spectroscopic and chemical techniques can distinguish different inks within a single manuscript, revealing layers of revision added at different times.

Internal stylistic evidence can corroborate but rarely alone establish a date; stylistic judgment is prone to circularity and should be used with particular caution.

3.7 Reading Critical Editions

The student who opens a volume of the Neue Bach-Ausgabe (NBA), the Neue Mozart Ausgabe (NMA), or the Neue Schubert Ausgabe for the first time will encounter a musical text accompanied by a Kritischer Bericht (critical report).

Learning to read this apparatus is a professional necessity. The critical report lists the sources consulted, identifies the principal source (the Hauptquelle), records all departures from the principal source adopted in the edition, and explains the editor’s reasoning for disputed readings.

A scholar who uses a critical edition without reading its critical report is like a reader who consults a translation without considering that the original might say something different.

The critical edition is not the text; it is an editor’s best reconstruction of the text based on the available evidence. That reconstruction may subsequently be overturned by new source discoveries, as the Goldberg example illustrates.

3.8 Attribution and Authenticity Problems

A recurring challenge in musicology is the question of attribution: is a given work genuinely by the composer to whom it is assigned, or is it a misattribution, a work by a student or imitator, or an outright forgery?

Attribution problems arise in every historical period, but they are particularly common in repertoires transmitted through institutional collections — monastery archives, court libraries, publishing house catalogues — where works were sometimes assigned to famous names to enhance their marketability or prestige, and in repertoires where a composer’s style was widely imitated.

The principal methods for investigating attribution are: stylometric analysis (systematic comparison of the work’s musical features with dated, securely attributed works by the putative composer); source-critical investigation (examining the earliest sources for the work and their relationship to documented sources for the composer’s authentic output); documentary investigation (searching for contemporary mentions of the work in correspondence, account books, concert programmes, or reviews); and handwriting analysis of manuscript sources attributed to the composer.

Computational stylometry — using corpus analysis to compare an anonymously attributed work against a large corpus of authenticated works by candidate composers — has become an increasingly important tool in attribution studies, though its results must be interpreted cautiously, particularly when the corpus is small.

Chapter 4: Bibliographic Tools and Literature Review

4.1 Conducting a Thorough Literature Review

The literature review is not a formality to be dispatched before the real research begins. It is a substantive intellectual task: the process of determining what scholars have already said about your topic, where consensus exists, where controversy persists, and where gaps remain for new research.

A literature review that misses major contributions undermines the validity of any argument built on it. A literature review that accurately maps the field positions the researcher to make a genuine contribution.

The standard workflow for a musicology literature review proceeds in several stages. Begin with Grove Music Online: locate the relevant composer, genre, or topic article, read it carefully, and follow its bibliography to the key secondary sources.

Next, search RILM with a range of search terms — composer name, work title, genre, period, relevant theoretical concepts — and collect all relevant items, casting the net broadly before narrowing.

Supplement RILM searches with JSTOR and Project MUSE full-text searches, which may return relevant articles not indexed in RILM or that contain relevant passages without being primarily about your topic.

Finally, conduct forward citation searches using Google Scholar or Web of Science: identify the most important sources and find all later works that cite them.

4.2 Citation Chaining

Citation chaining — sometimes called pearl growing — is the process of following chains of citations backward and forward through the scholarly literature.

Backward chaining: when you find a relevant article, check its footnotes and bibliography for earlier sources on the same topic.

Forward chaining: when you find a key article, check who has cited it in subsequent scholarship, using Google Scholar’s “Cited by” feature or Web of Science.

Citation chaining reveals the citation network of a topic — the structure of scholarly conversation around a set of questions. Sources that appear repeatedly in multiple authors’ bibliographies are likely foundational. Sources cited by only one author, or cited primarily to be refuted, occupy a different place in the scholarly conversation.

4.3 Managing References: Zotero and Other Tools

Graduate students in musicology are strongly advised to begin using reference management software from the start of their program and to maintain a single, comprehensive database throughout their career.

Zotero is the standard choice: it is free, open-source, integrates with web browsers for one-click import of bibliographic records from JSTOR, RILM, Grove, and library catalogues, and generates footnotes and bibliographies in Chicago style automatically.

Zotero allows the researcher to attach PDFs, write notes tagged to specific pages, create collections organized by project, and tag items with keywords for later retrieval. This transforms the reference manager into a genuine research tool rather than merely a citation generator.

EndNote and Mendeley are widely used alternatives. The choice among these tools matters less than the discipline of maintaining a carefully curated, consistently updated research database.

4.4 Evaluating Sources

Not all sources carry equal evidential weight. The hierarchy of reliability — from most to least reliable for supporting scholarly claims — runs from peer-reviewed journal articles and peer-reviewed monographs at the top, through edited book chapters, conference proceedings, dissertations, liner notes and program notes, down to Wikipedia and other open-edited reference works.

The researcher must also evaluate sources for currency: a source that has been superseded by subsequent archival discoveries or critical reappraisals cannot be cited as current scholarship without acknowledging that it represents an older view.

4.4a Evaluating Translations and Editions

A specific evaluative challenge in musicology is the assessment of translations of foreign-language scholarly texts and performing editions used as analytical sources.

Translations of major scholarship — Spitta’s Bach biography in English (1884), Adler’s theoretical writings, or more recent German, French, and Italian musicological monographs — vary enormously in quality. A poor translation can systematically misrepresent the original argument. Before citing a translated source as evidence for a specific claim, the musicologist should check whether the original is accessible and whether the translation has been noted for errors in the secondary literature.

Performing editions — the commercially published scores that most performers and many analysts use — are editorial constructions that typically lack the critical apparatus of scholarly editions. They may incorporate editorial fingerings, dynamic markings, slurs, and tempo suggestions that have no basis in any primary source. Citing a performing edition in analytical work without noting that it is an editorial construction rather than a primary source is a methodological error.

4.5 Monographs vs. Journal Articles

The monograph — a book-length scholarly argument — and the journal article serve different functions in music scholarship.

A monograph allows for sustained development of a complex argument across hundreds of pages, with extensive archival documentation, detailed analysis of multiple works, and thorough engagement with the secondary literature.

The journal article, typically between 8,000 and 15,000 words, makes a single focused argument with evidence marshaled specifically in its support. Both formats are essential to the discipline.

When citing, the researcher should match the scale of the citation to the scale of the claim. A broad claim about the development of Classical style in Vienna calls for citation of relevant monographs; a narrow claim about a specific analytical detail calls for the specific article or chapter that addresses it most precisely.

4.6 The Scholarly Apparatus

Scholarly apparatus refers to the totality of citation and documentation machinery that supports a scholarly text: footnotes or endnotes, bibliography, and — in book-length work — index.

Footnotes serve three primary purposes: (1) citation — identifying the source of a claim; (2) substantive elaboration — developing a point too detailed for the main text without breaking the flow of argument; and (3) acknowledgment of contrary views — noting that a different interpretation exists without pursuing it at length.

Bibliographies provide a comprehensive list of all works cited, formatted consistently, allowing readers to verify and locate sources independently.

Indexes — essential in monographs — make the work usable as a reference tool by scholars who need to locate specific information without reading the entire book.

4.7 Chicago Manual of Style in Musicology

Musicology follows the Chicago Manual of Style — specifically, the footnote-bibliography system (sometimes called “notes and bibliography” or NB).

In this system, citations appear as numbered footnotes at the bottom of the page, with full bibliographic details on first citation and a short form (Author, Short Title, page) on subsequent citations within the same chapter.

A comprehensive bibliography is provided at the end of the work, formatted differently from the footnote citation (last name first, details organized differently) to serve as an alphabetical reference list.

The Chicago author-date system (used in the social sciences) appears occasionally in ethnomusicology and music psychology, where the conventions align more closely with social-scientific practice. Students should know both systems and apply them correctly to the genre in which they are writing.

4.8 Holoman’s Style Guide for Music Writing

D. Kern Holoman’s Writing about Music: A Style Sheet provides essential guidance for the mechanics of scholarly music writing: how to cite musical works with opus numbers, key designations, and catalogue numbers; how to abbreviate source libraries and editions; how to indicate pitch by Helmholtz or MIDI notation conventions; and how to format musical examples.

Holoman’s system for pitch designation — using italicized capital letters for octave designations — is widely followed in North American music scholarship and should be learned and applied consistently.

His conventions for abbreviating instrument names, tempo markings, and dynamic levels in analytical prose reduce ambiguity and align the researcher’s writing with the professional standards expected by major journals. Students are expected to master these conventions and apply them consistently from the first seminar paper onward.

Chapter 5: Historiography and Critical Methodology

5.1 What Is Historiography?

Historiography is the study of how history has been written — not merely what happened in the past, but how historians have selected, interpreted, and presented events; whose perspectives have been centered and whose marginalized; what frameworks of explanation have been employed.

The musicologist who ignores historiography is doomed to repeat it. If she uncritically adopts the categories and judgments of earlier scholarship — the standard periodization of “Baroque,” “Classical,” “Romantic,” the canon of great composers, the separation of “serious” and “popular” music — she risks building her argument on foundations that are not transparent facts but historical constructs with their own ideological histories.

5.2 Positivist Historiography

The dominant mode of nineteenth and early twentieth-century musicology was positivist historiography: the conviction that music history could be written objectively, by collecting and organizing the documentary evidence and establishing the facts.

This ideal of objective, documentary history was aligned with the broader ambitions of nineteenth-century science: just as natural science aimed at value-free description of the natural world, historical science aimed at value-free description of the historical world.

Chrysander’s editions, Spitta’s Bach biography, and the great biographical dictionaries of the nineteenth century all reflect this positivist ambition. Questions of aesthetic value, cultural meaning, or ideological significance were regarded as subjective and therefore unscholarly.

The positivist tradition produced enormous and lasting scholarly achievements. The great critical editions of the nineteenth century made the major repertoires of Western music available in reliable, documented texts for the first time. Whatever its limitations, positivism gave musicology its documentary foundations.

5.3 The Critique of Positivism and Canon Formation

The New Musicology’s critique of positivism rested on the argument that all historical accounts are constructed. The selection of evidence is not neutral: every choice of what to include and what to omit reflects assumptions about what matters.

The very concepts used to organize historical narration — “masterwork,” “style period,” “influence,” “genius” — are not natural kinds but historical and cultural constructions that carry ideological freight.

Canon formation — the process by which certain works are selected for sustained study, performance, and preservation while others are neglected or forgotten — is a particularly important target of historiographical critique.

Feminist musicologists identified the systematic exclusion of women composers from the canon; ethnomusicologists pointed to the exclusion of non-Western traditions; popular music scholars pointed to the exclusion of jazz, blues, and other vernacular repertoires.

These critiques did not mean that the canonical composers were unimportant; they meant that the canon’s composition was the result of historical processes that deserved study, not a neutral reflection of aesthetic excellence.

5.4 Hermeneutics in Musicology

Hermeneutics — from Hermes, the Greek messenger between gods and humans — is the art of interpretation: the theory and practice of understanding the meaning of texts, artifacts, and human actions.

Applied to musicology, hermeneutics asks how musical works carry meaning: how they encode cultural values, emotional states, historical experiences, and social relationships, and how that meaning can be read by a trained interpreter.

Lawrence Kramer’s hermeneutic approach involves what he calls hermeneutic windows: formal or structural features of a piece — a recurrent harmonic anomaly, a dramatically unexpected silence, a textural shift — that open onto cultural significance.

The interpreter uses musical analysis to identify the structural feature and then moves outward to the cultural context, asking what frameworks of meaning would have made this feature significant to its original audience and what it means for us now.

Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method (1960) provides the philosophical foundation: understanding a human artifact requires entering into a cultural horizon — learning to hear what the work’s original audience heard — and then reflecting on how our own historical distance shapes our hearing. This is what Gadamer called the “fusion of horizons” (Horizontverschmelzung).

5.5 Contextualism and Formalism

The tension between contextualism and formalism is one of the persistent structuring debates of musicology, and students should understand both positions and their respective strengths and limitations.

Contextualism holds that musical works are intelligible only in relation to their contexts: the social, economic, political, and biographical circumstances in which they were composed, performed, and received.

A thorough contextualist analysis of a Beethoven symphony might address his patron relationships, the public concert culture of early nineteenth-century Vienna, the political reverberations of the Napoleonic era, and the biographical circumstances of his progressive deafness.

Formalism holds that musical works have meanings immanent in their structures — that the relationship between a dominant and a tonic, or between a motivic cell and its transformations, carries meaning that can be understood through analytical engagement without reference to external contexts.

Eduard Hanslick’s famous claim that music’s content is “tonally moving forms” (tönend bewegte Formen) is the classic formalist position; in the twentieth century, it was elaborated by the Schenkerian tradition.

Most sophisticated music scholarship today avoids the extremes of either position. Pure contextualism without structural engagement risks reducing music to mere illustration of its social environment. Pure formalism without historical context risks treating music as a self-sufficient formal game disconnected from human life.

5.6 Reception History

Reception history (German: Rezeptionsgeschichte) studies how a musical work has been heard, performed, interpreted, and evaluated by different audiences in different historical periods.

Reception history shifts attention from the work as a fixed object to the work as a site of ongoing, historically variable meaning-making.

The reception history of Beethoven’s symphonies — tracked through reviews, program notes, philosophical essays, parody, arrangement, and concert programming decisions — shows how dramatically the meaning attributed to these works has changed across two centuries.

What the Romantic nineteenth century heard as evidence of the composer’s heroic struggle with fate, the Brahmsian tradition took as formal monuments of absolute music; the politicized twentieth century found in the symphonies a site of ideological contest; contemporary reception sees them as globally performed repertoire carrying different meanings in different cultural contexts.

5.7 Social History of Music

The social history of music attends to musical institutions — patronage systems, publishing houses, concert series, academies, conservatories — rather than individual composers and works.

Drawing on social history methodology, it asks how music is produced, distributed, consumed, and valued within particular social formations, and how changes in those formations reshape musical practice.

William Weber’s Music and the Middle Class (1975) investigates the emergence of the public concert as a bourgeois institution in nineteenth-century London, Paris, and Vienna, arguing that changes in concert programming and audience composition reflect broader social transformations in European class society.

Tia DeNora’s Beethoven and the Construction of Genius (1995) applies social-historical methods to the specific question of how Beethoven’s reputation was constructed through the active work of Viennese aristocratic patrons, publishers, and critics — demonstrating that genius is not simply recognized but actively produced through social processes.

5.8 Choosing a Methodology

A methodological choice is not primarily an ideological allegiance. Methodology should be chosen instrumentally: what approach best illuminates the evidence I have assembled and the question I am asking?

A large archival discovery about a work’s compositional genesis calls for philological and source-critical methods. A question about how a work constructs gender calls for feminist theory. A question about audience response across centuries calls for reception history. A question about the statistical regularities of a composer’s harmonic language calls for corpus analysis.

Imposing a preselected theoretical framework on evidence that does not fit it is a methodological error as serious as ignoring relevant theory altogether. The best music scholarship is methodologically nimble — aware of multiple approaches and able to deploy them where the evidence and the question call for them.

5.9 Postcolonial Musicology and Global Perspectives

The postcolonial turn in musicology — emerging from the 1990s onward and drawing on postcolonial theory from scholars like Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Spivak — has raised fundamental questions about the discipline’s Eurocentric foundations and the relationship between music scholarship and the politics of empire.

Said’s Orientalism (1978), though not primarily about music, provided a model for analyzing how Western representations of non-Western cultures project fantasies, anxieties, and power relations onto the cultures being represented. His Musical Elaborations (1991) and the posthumous Music at the Limits (2008) applied related frameworks to musical culture. Jonathan Bellman’s edited collection The Exotic in Western Music (1998) documented how European composers from the eighteenth century onward constructed musical representations of the Orient, the Middle East, and folk traditions at the margins of European culture — representations that tell us more about European imaginative projections than about the cultures supposedly being depicted.

The postcolonial critique extends to the institutional structure of musicology itself: the canon of “great works” that forms the curriculum of Western music programs is a canon of primarily European art music; the ethnomusicological tradition of studying non-Western music as a separate field from “musicology proper” has historically reinscribed the distinction between a universal (European) high culture and particular (non-Western) folk cultures.

The practical implications for music research methods include: attention to the positionality of the researcher — who is doing the research, from what cultural position, with what access to the communities being studied; attention to the politics of representation — who speaks in the scholarship, and who is spoken about; and attention to the material conditions of knowledge production — which archives are accessible, which languages are required, which scholarly communities are empowered to define the questions of the field.

Chapter 6: Digital Musicology

6.1 What Digital Musicology Is

Digital musicology encompasses a range of scholarly practices that apply computational methods to musical questions: corpus studies that analyze large datasets of encoded musical scores; digital critical editions that present multiple sources simultaneously in interactive format; music information retrieval (MIR) that applies signal-processing and machine-learning techniques to audio recordings; and the development of online archives making primary sources accessible remotely.

Digital musicology does not replace traditional humanistic scholarship; it extends it by making certain kinds of questions answerable that were previously intractable. But identifying a statistical pattern is not the same as interpreting its musical or cultural significance — and that interpretive work remains the province of humanistic scholarship.

6.2 Music21

Music21 is a Python library for computational music analysis developed at MIT by Michael Cuthbert and colleagues. It allows the researcher to load musical scores encoded in MusicXML, Humdrum kern, MIDI, or other formats; parse them into hierarchical data structures representing parts, measures, notes, chords, and annotations; and apply analytical algorithms.

Music21’s most powerful feature is its integration of computational query with score visualization: the researcher can render any passage from the corpus in standard notation, display analytical annotations directly on the score, and export results as MusicXML for further editing. The library is extensively documented and is now the standard tool for introductory computational musicology courses at many universities.

6.3 Humdrum and Kern Syntax

Humdrum is an older command-line toolkit for music analysis developed by David Huron at Ohio State University. The **kern data representation encodes musical scores as plain text: each spine (column) represents a voice or instrument, rows represent timesteps, and notes are encoded with pitch, duration, and articulation markers.

Humdrum includes dozens of specialized tools — mint for melodic interval analysis, harm for harmonic analysis, census for counting basic features — all accessible through Unix shell commands and pipelines.

Huron’s foundational work in empirical musicology, Sweet Anticipation (2006), built much of its empirical evidence using Humdrum analysis of the **kern corpus. Though music21 has largely superseded Humdrum for new research, the Humdrum repertoire — extensive encodings of Bach chorales, Renaissance polyphony, Josquin masses, and other standard repertoires — remains a valuable and extensively validated data resource.

6.4 MIDI vs. MusicXML

For computational research, the choice of data format has significant methodological consequences.

MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) encodes music as a sequence of note-on and note-off events with timing information. It captures when notes are played and at what velocity, but it does not encode enharmonic spelling, beam groupings, slurs, or other notational distinctions that carry analytical significance. A MIDI encoding cannot distinguish C-sharp from D-flat — a distinction crucial for harmonic analysis.

MusicXML is a structured XML format that encodes music at the notational level, capturing every detail that a conventional score represents, including enharmonic spelling, articulation marks, dynamics, lyrics, and rehearsal marks. For most analytical purposes in musicology, MusicXML is the preferred format.

6.5 Corpus Studies

Several large musical corpora have become standard resources for computational research.

The iRb corpus (the Weimar Jazz Database) encodes several thousand jazz improvisations with detailed melodic and harmonic annotation, enabling statistical study of jazz melody, phrase structure, scale usage, and the relationship between improvisation and chord changes.

The McGill Billboard Dataset provides harmonic annotations of a random sample of the American popular music charts from 1958 to 1991, enabling systematic study of pop harmonic syntax over several decades.

The Bach chorales corpus — 371 four-voice harmonizations by Bach, widely available in Humdrum and MusicXML formats — has been used in hundreds of studies of harmonic syntax, voice leading, and melodic construction. It is one of the most heavily analyzed musical corpora in existence.

6.6 SIMSSA and the Digital Humanities Turn

The SIMSSA project (Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis) at McGill University’s Schulich School of Music has pursued the ambitious goal of creating a unified searchable database of digitized musical scores, enabling researchers to query musical content across repertoires and periods.

SIMSSA’s Optical Music Recognition (OMR) technology uses machine learning to convert images of printed and handwritten scores into editable digital encodings, potentially opening archival collections to computational analysis without the labor-intensive hand-encoding that current corpus building requires.

The broader digital humanities (DH) turn in musicology reflects a discipline-wide reckoning: computational methods are powerful tools for pattern-finding and hypothesis generation, but they cannot substitute for the contextual knowledge, interpretive sophistication, and aesthetic engagement that characterize the best humanistic scholarship.

6.7 Online Critical Editions and Score Resources

Several important online editions have transformed access to specific repertoires.

The Josquin Research Project (josquin.stanford.edu) provides a searchable database of all works attributed to Josquin des Prez, encoded in Humdrum with analytical tools for exploring questions of attribution, style, and transmission.

MuseData, maintained at Stanford’s Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities, provides high-quality encodings of major works from the Renaissance through the Classical period.

Verovio is a music notation engraving library that renders MusicXML and Humdrum **kern data directly in web browsers as typeset musical score, enabling the construction of interactive digital editions with linked text and music.

The International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP, imslp.org) provides free access to public-domain scores as PDFs and, increasingly, as MusicXML files — a resource that has transformed the accessibility of historical repertoires for both performance and research.

6.8 Limitations of Computational Approaches

The enthusiasm for digital methods must be balanced against a clear-eyed account of their limitations. Encoding is slow, expensive, and error-prone; the corpora currently available represent a small and systematically biased fraction of the total musical output of any period.

Western tonal music is massively over-represented relative to its actual historical diversity; non-Western repertoires, non-notated musics, oral traditions, and historically marginalized repertoires remain largely inaccessible to computational study.

More fundamentally, the identification of a statistical pattern is not the same as an interpretive claim. If corpus analysis reveals that a particular harmonic progression appears with significantly greater frequency in compositions written after 1750 than before it, this finding poses a question that corpus statistics cannot answer: what changed, why, and what does it mean?

Answering that question requires close reading of specific works, archival research into compositional and reception history, and interpretive argument — the traditional tools of humanistic musicology. The corpus statistic is a beginning, not an end.

6.8a Data Ethics in Computational Musicology

The construction and use of musical corpora raises ethical questions that the field is only beginning to address systematically.

Intellectual property is the most immediate concern: many corpora encode music from copyrighted scores or recordings, and the legality of corpus-based research under copyright law remains unsettled in many jurisdictions. Research use of encoded scores may qualify as fair use in some countries, but encoding copyrighted works for redistribution is legally more problematic. The researcher should understand the copyright status of the materials in any corpus she uses and should be transparent about these issues in publication.

Representation and diversity raise a related set of ethical concerns. A corpus that systematically excludes the music of particular communities — women composers, non-Western practitioners, folk musicians, composers of color — will generate findings that naturalize the exclusion. If a corpus study of “harmonic syntax in tonal music” analyzes only works by European male composers, its findings apply only to that corpus; claiming broader applicability is both methodologically and ethically problematic.

Data provenance — knowing where the encodings in a corpus came from, who made them, under what conditions, and with what quality control — is as important in digital musicology as source provenance is in archival research. A corpus whose encoding errors have not been systematically identified and corrected will generate findings that reflect those errors as well as genuine musical features. Transparency about data quality is a scholarly obligation.

6.9 Combining Computational and Hermeneutic Approaches

The most productive current direction in digital musicology integrates computational pattern-finding with humanistic interpretation.

The corpus statistician identifies an anomaly — an unexpected frequency distribution, a departure from stylistic norms, a clustering of features in a particular sub-corpus — and then hands the finding to the close reader, who investigates its musical meaning and historical context.

Chapter 7: Scholarly Writing in Musicology

7.1 The Structure of a Musicological Argument

Every work of music scholarship — whether a journal article, book chapter, or dissertation — rests on a three-part foundation: thesis, evidence, and significance. Understanding each component and how they interact is the prerequisite for effective scholarly writing.

The thesis is the scholar’s central claim: a specific, contestable proposition about a musical work, practice, composer, historical period, or analytical question.

A thesis is not a topic (“Bach’s cantatas”) nor a description (“this article analyzes Bach’s cantatas”) but a claim that could in principle be disputed and that the argument aims to demonstrate. A strong thesis makes a reader want to know whether it is true.

Evidence is the material from primary and secondary sources that supports the thesis. Evidence must be specific, properly cited, and relevant: it must do logical work in the argument, not merely create an impression of scholarly thoroughness.

Citing twenty sources where three would suffice does not strengthen an argument; it obscures it. The relationship between evidence and thesis must be explicit: the reader should never have to guess why a piece of evidence is being cited.

Significance answers the implicit question every reader asks: why does this matter? Why should a scholarly community care whether this thesis is true?

Significance may be intellectual (the argument resolves a long-standing debate or opens new research questions), historical (it changes our understanding of an important period or figure), methodological (it demonstrates the productive application of a new analytical approach), or cultural (it illuminates music’s role in social or political history in ways that matter beyond the academy).

7.2 The Journal Article Format

A musicology journal article typically follows a recognizable structure: an abstract (150–250 words summarizing the thesis, method, evidence, and conclusion); an introduction that establishes the scholarly context and states the thesis; a body organized into titled sections; a conclusion that synthesizes the argument’s implications; footnotes throughout; and a bibliography.

The introduction is the most important section to get right. It must establish the scholarly conversation the article enters; demonstrate familiarity with existing scholarship; identify precisely what the article does that existing scholarship does not; and state the thesis clearly enough that a knowledgeable reader understands the article’s claim before reading the body.

An introduction that buries the thesis in the fourth paragraph, or that gestures at a general topic without committing to a specific argument, loses the reader before the argument begins.

7.3 The Conference Paper

The conference paper is a specialized genre: a self-contained 20-minute presentation of a focused argument, designed for oral delivery and followed by a question period.

Conference papers are typically 2,500–3,500 words when written out in full — short enough to be delivered clearly at a measured pace, long enough to develop a genuine argument that merits 20 minutes of sustained attention.

Writing for oral delivery is a distinct skill. The prose must be clear enough to be followed on first hearing; dense analytical passages that require rereading may work in a journal article but fail in the conference room. Musical examples must be large enough to read from the back of the room.

The argument must be trimmed to its essential moves, with secondary elaboration cut rather than squeezed in. The final minute should orient the audience toward the Q&A by summarizing the central argument and posing an open question that invites substantive response.

The discipline of pacing is frequently underestimated: a paper that runs long leaves no time for questions, frustrates the audience, and creates a negative impression regardless of the scholarly quality of the work. Rehearsing aloud, with a timer, is not optional.

7.4 Writing about Music in Words

Writing precisely about music is harder than it looks. The temptation toward purple prose — vague emotional description that tells the reader how the music makes the writer feel without describing what the music actually does — is strong and must be resisted.

Holoman’s style guide describes this failure memorably: passages like “the music floats on a cloud of ineffable beauty” communicate nothing analytically and earn nothing argumentatively.

Precision requires mastering and consistently applying the technical vocabulary of music: intervals, chord types, formal labels, rhythmic patterns, textural descriptions.

A sentence like “the melodic peak on the flattened sixth degree at the end of the consequent phrase creates an unexpected harmonic implication that delays cadential closure” is more information-dense and more useful than any amount of atmospheric adjectives.

The technical vocabulary of music is not jargon for its own sake; it is the language that makes precise communication about sound possible. But technical precision should serve musical understanding, not substitute for it.

The best music-analytical prose — exemplified in Kerman’s Opera as Drama, in Donald Tovey’s Essays in Musical Analysis, in Charles Rosen’s The Classical Style — integrates precise technical observation with aesthetic engagement, showing the reader both what is in the music and why it matters.

7.5 Integrating Musical Examples

A musical example is an extract of musical notation, reproduced in the body of a scholarly text to illustrate an analytical claim.

Musical examples should be used when the argument depends on specific notational details that cannot be adequately conveyed in prose — when the reader needs to see the score to follow the argument. They should not be used as decoration or as demonstrations of the author’s analytical activity.

Every musical example must be explicitly and specifically discussed in the surrounding text. A figure that floats without prose commentary is not doing scholarly work.

Captions for musical examples follow a standard format: Example N. Composer, Title, movement or section, measure numbers, and (often) a brief description of what the example illustrates.

In published work, reproducing music from copyrighted editions requires permission from the publisher, which must be obtained in advance and acknowledged in the figure caption. Using music from editions in the public domain avoids permission fees but may sacrifice notational quality.

7.6 Footnotes and Their Uses

The footnote is among the most sophisticated tools in the scholarly writer’s kit, and its misuse is common.

A citation footnote is purely informational: it identifies the source of a claim made in the text. It should be as short as necessary to identify the source unambiguously, using the short form after first citation (Author, Short Title, page).

A substantive footnote develops a point that would interrupt the flow of the main argument if placed there: the elaboration of a technical detail, a longer quotation, a brief survey of a related secondary literature.

A contrary-view footnote acknowledges that a different interpretation exists: “For a contrasting view, see Smith, Title, pp. X–Y, who argues…” This footnote demonstrates scholarly good faith without requiring the author to pursue every alternative at length in the main text.

7.7 Avoiding Plagiarism in Music Scholarship

Plagiarism in music scholarship takes forms that may not be immediately obvious to students accustomed to thinking of plagiarism only as copying prose without quotation marks. Three additional forms require particular vigilance in musicology.

Transcription plagiarism: using another scholar’s transcription of a manuscript or foreign-language document without acknowledgment. A transcription is an act of scholarly labor and intellectual interpretation; if you use it, you cite it.

Translation plagiarism: using another scholar’s translation of a foreign-language text as if it were your own. Every translation involves interpretive choices; you must cite the translator, and if you disagree with a translation choice, provide your own version and explain the difference in a footnote.

Analytical plagiarism: presenting another scholar’s analytical observation — that a particular passage uses a specific formal strategy, or that a harmonic anomaly serves a particular expressive function — as if it were your own discovery. Analytical insights are intellectual property; they require citation like any other scholarly claim.

The fact that you arrived at the same observation independently does not release you from the obligation to cite an earlier scholar who published it first.

7.8 Prose Style and Models of Good Writing

The ideal of scholarly prose in musicology is clear, precise, evidence-grounded argument accessible to any intelligent reader with musical training.

The standard set by Holoman’s style guide, and modeled in the best work of the field, is writing that is neither jargon-laden performance of theoretical allegiance nor breezy journalistic impressionism, but sustained, rigorous engagement with musical evidence.

Joseph Kerman’s essays remain models of engaged scholarly prose: he writes with personal conviction, aesthetic discrimination, and evident pleasure in musical experience, while maintaining the evidential standards of serious scholarship.

Charles Rosen’s The Classical Style (1971) demonstrates how a large synthetic argument can be built through the accumulation of precisely observed analytical details.

Richard Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music (2005) shows how historical breadth and stylistic range can be sustained across thousands of pages without sacrificing argumentative coherence or prose clarity.

These are standards to aspire to, not to be intimidated by. The graduate student who reads these works alongside a pile of technically correct but lifeless dissertation chapters will immediately understand the difference between writing that fulfills a scholarly function and writing that constitutes a genuine intellectual contribution.

7.8a Writing in a Second Language

Many graduate students in musicology work in a second or third language — completing degrees in English while having grown up speaking German, French, Chinese, Korean, or other languages. The challenge of academic writing in a second language is real and should be addressed directly rather than minimized.

The most common difficulties for second-language writers of academic English are not grammatical but rhetorical: the conventions for organizing an argument, the appropriate register for scholarly prose, and the idiomatic phrases that signal scholarly moves (“this article argues,” “I turn now to,” “the evidence suggests”) vary across languages and academic traditions. German academic prose, for instance, tolerates longer sentences, heavier subordination, and longer delays before the main point than English academic prose does.

The single most effective strategy for improving academic writing in a second language is extensive reading in the target language — specifically, reading the academic prose that models the conventions you need to master. Reading ten major articles in JAMS, paying attention not only to the arguments but to the prose style, sentence structures, transitions, and footnote conventions, will teach more about English musicological prose than any style guide alone.

Many universities offer writing support for graduate students in the humanities, including specialized support for second-language writers. Making use of these resources is not an admission of weakness but a professional investment.

7.9 The Dissertation Prospectus

The dissertation prospectus — sometimes called the dissertation proposal — is the document that, when approved by a doctoral committee, authorizes the candidate to proceed with dissertation research.

It serves simultaneously as a research plan, a methodological statement, and a demonstration of scholarly readiness. A strong prospectus makes a case that the project is worth doing, that the candidate has the training to do it, and that the evidence exists to support it.

A standard musicology dissertation prospectus includes: a title and introductory statement of the project’s argument and contribution; a literature review situating the project in existing scholarship; a statement of methodology; a chapter outline with summaries; a discussion of primary sources and how access will be obtained; an annotated bibliography; and a timeline.

The prospectus is not a binding contract — the dissertation will inevitably evolve — but it establishes a scholarly framework within which the research can develop coherently.

Chapter 8: Dissertation and Publication

8.1 The PhD Dissertation in Musicology

The doctoral dissertation is the culminating work of graduate training: a book-length original contribution to music scholarship that demonstrates the candidate’s command of primary and secondary sources, methodological sophistication, and capacity for sustained independent argument.

Dissertations in musicology typically run between 200 and 400 pages of text, with additional pages for bibliography, appendices, and musical examples.

The standard structure includes an introduction that states the project’s thesis and contribution, reviews the relevant literature, and describes the methodology and chapter organization; body chapters (typically four to six) that develop the argument through detailed research and analysis; a conclusion that synthesizes the argument’s implications; a comprehensive bibliography; and appendices presenting primary source material.

8.2 Writing and Revising in Stages

Doctoral dissertations are not written in a single sustained effort; they are built through multiple overlapping cycles of research, drafting, revision, and further research.

The standard workflow involves: completing archival or library research for a chapter; drafting a full chapter (even if the draft is rough); submitting the draft to the advisor for feedback; revising in response to that feedback; and then proceeding to the next chapter.

The most common mistake among beginning dissertation writers is waiting until they feel they have “enough” research before beginning to write. Writing is itself a form of thinking: the act of drafting an argument reveals where the evidence is insufficient, where the logic is circular, and where new research questions arise.

A rough draft, written before all the research is complete, functions as a map of what remains to be done.

Receiving feedback from an advisor is a skill that must be learned. The first response to critical feedback is often emotional: defensiveness, discouragement, or a sense that the project is fundamentally flawed. These responses are normal and should be allowed to pass before the researcher engages analytically with the feedback.

Return to the feedback after a day or two with the question: what specific revision would address this concern? Most substantive feedback is actionable; the task is to identify the action and take it.

8.3 Turning Dissertation Chapters into Articles

The dissertation-to-article conversion is one of the most important skills a junior scholar must develop, and it is harder than it looks.

A dissertation chapter is written for a committee — it must demonstrate thoroughness, command of the literature, and methodological self-consciousness in ways that a journal article need not.

A journal article is written for a general scholarly audience and must make its contribution immediately legible: within the first few paragraphs, the reader must understand what the article argues and why it matters.

Converting a dissertation chapter to an article typically requires: cutting the literature review to the minimum necessary; sharpening the thesis so it is unmistakable from the first page; condensing or eliminating the methodology section; updating the secondary literature; and reconceiving the prose for a reader with different background knowledge than the dissertation committee.

The most significant structural change is typically at the beginning: dissertation chapters often begin with extended contextual overture before arriving at the specific argument; journal articles must state the argument immediately.

8.4 Submitting to Journals

Selecting the right journal is the first decision in the submission process. The researcher should consider: the scope and specialization of the journal; its prestige and readership within the sub-field; its format requirements and article length limits; and the estimated wait time from submission to decision.

Most music journals use double-blind peer review: neither the author’s identity is disclosed to reviewers nor reviewers’ identities to the author. Preparing a manuscript for double-blind review requires removing all identifying information from the submitted document.

Responding to peer-review reports requires intellectual honesty and strategic judgment. The author must respond to every significant point raised by the reviewers in a detailed response letter that accompanies the revision. Dismissing reviewer concerns as irrelevant is almost never the right strategy; even unhelpful reviews identify where a potential reader was confused or unconvinced, which is itself actionable information.

8.5 The Path from Dissertation to Book

In historical musicology and cultural musicology, the first book — typically a substantially revised version of the dissertation — remains the primary criterion for tenure at research universities.

The revision process is more extensive than many junior scholars expect: a good acquisitions editor will request reconceptualization of the argument’s framing, expansion of some chapters, elimination of others, updated engagement with recent scholarship, and substantial prose revision throughout.

The major university presses publishing in musicology include the University of Chicago Press, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and — in the American Musicological Society’s own series — the AMS Studies in Music.

Finding a press involves writing a book proposal: an account of the project’s argument, its scholarly contribution, its intended audience, a chapter-by-chapter summary, a comparison with existing related books in the market, and a sample chapter. The acquisitions editor forwards the proposal to peer reviewers and, if review is positive, takes it to the press’s editorial board for approval.

8.6 Grant Applications in Musicology

Archival research requires travel; fieldwork requires extended time in the field; language training and professional development require institutional support; time to write requires relief from teaching duties.

Musicologists at every career stage regularly apply for external funding, and learning to write competitive grant applications is a professional skill of the first order.

The major funding sources include: the ACLS (American Council of Learned Societies) fellowships, among the most competitive and prestigious in the humanities; NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities) fellowships for university teachers; the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) for research in Germany; the Fulbright program for research abroad; and numerous university-specific and foundation awards (Mellon, Guggenheim, AMS awards, Society for Music Theory grants).

Grant writing differs from scholarly writing in its orientation toward persuasion of a non-specialist audience. The project must be explained from the ground up; technical terminology must be defined or avoided; the significance must be stated in terms legible to a humanities scholar without specialized musical training.

These constraints are useful discipline: if a project cannot be explained clearly to a knowledgeable non-specialist, it is likely that its argument has not been sufficiently clarified even for specialist readers.

8.6a Managing Time as a Scholar

Time management is among the most undertheorized aspects of scholarly life and among the most practically consequential. The habits of productive scholarship must be built deliberately.

The most important single habit is regular writing: setting aside protected time each day or each week for writing, and protecting that time against administrative demands, teaching preparation, and social obligations. Many productive scholars write for two to three hours every morning before engaging with email or teaching; others prefer a fixed writing day each week. The specific schedule matters less than its regularity.

Project management — maintaining awareness of multiple projects at different stages of completion simultaneously — is a skill that must be developed as the scholar moves from dissertation (typically one project at a time) to independent research career (typically several projects at various stages). The junior faculty member who is simultaneously completing revisions on a journal article, planning a conference presentation, beginning research for a new project, and responding to peer-review requests must develop systems for organizing and tracking all of these.

8.7 Conference Presentations and Proposals

The conference abstract is the gateway to participation in major music scholarship conferences: the annual meetings of the AMS, the Society for Music Theory, the Society for Ethnomusicology, the International Musicological Society, and their regional affiliates.

Abstracts are typically 250–500 words and are reviewed blind by a program committee of experts. A strong abstract states the thesis in the first two sentences, describes the evidence and methodology concisely, and establishes the contribution’s significance — all within severe length constraints.

Presenting effectively at a conference involves skills distinct from writing: clear diction and measured pace, confident engagement with the audience, effective use of projected musical examples and slides, and the ability to cut material in real time if the presentation runs long.

Surviving the Q&A requires listening carefully to questions, pausing before responding, and engaging honestly with both challenging and elementary questions. The most challenging question deserves a genuine attempt to engage the challenge rather than a defensive redirection. If you do not know the answer, say so, and explain what research would be needed to find it.

Chairing a conference session — organizing the panel, managing time, moderating the question period — is a professional responsibility that junior scholars are often invited to take on early in their careers. Effective chairing requires keeping presenters to their allotted time (a task that requires diplomatic firmness), framing the opening question for the Q&A if the audience is slow to engage, and ensuring that questions are distributed equitably across audience members rather than monopolized by a few senior voices.

Regional conferences — organized by the chapters of the AMS and the Society for Music Theory, and by regional ethnomusicology societies — provide important opportunities for junior scholars to develop their conference presentation skills in more intimate, lower-stakes environments before presenting at the major national meetings. Participating actively in regional scholarship builds professional relationships and collegial support that national meetings, with their larger and more anonymous format, cannot replicate.

8.8 Building a Scholarly Identity

The research agenda — the set of connected intellectual questions that defines a scholar’s project across her career — is built gradually, through a series of choices about what to study, which methods to employ, and which scholarly communities to engage.

Early-career decisions have disproportionate influence: the dissertation topic establishes a primary field of expertise; the first published articles signal methodological allegiance and interpretive style; the first book defines one’s primary scholarly identity for the following decade.

A productive research agenda is neither too narrow (committed to a single work forever) nor too broad (dispersed across so many topics that no real expertise accumulates). The ideal is coherence: each project relates to the others in ways that allow expertise to build and arguments to develop across multiple publications.

Scholarly networking — developing professional relationships with peers, senior scholars, and graduate students — is not separate from intellectual work but continuous with it. The conversations at conference receptions, the exchanges in response to papers, the collaborations that develop from shared interests: these are the social medium in which scholarship grows.

The researcher who presents rigorously, engages honestly, and treats colleagues at all career stages with intellectual generosity will find that a scholarly community is a resource as well as an audience.

The ultimate goal of graduate training in musicology — and of a course in research methods — is not mastery of a set of procedures but the formation of a scholarly sensibility: the habit of tracing claims to evidence, the pleasure of archival discovery, the discipline of sustained argument, and the conviction that the study of music, pursued with rigor and imagination, constitutes a contribution worth making to human understanding.

Methods are the vehicle. Music — in all its historical depth, cultural complexity, and formal richness — is the destination.

8.9 Peer Mentorship and the Scholarly Community

The transition from graduate student to junior faculty member involves not only the completion of the dissertation and publication of the first book but a more subtle shift in professional self-understanding: from someone who is learning how scholarship is done to someone who is doing it and, increasingly, teaching others how to do it.

Peer mentorship — the relationship between more advanced and less advanced graduate students within the same program — is among the most undervalued forms of scholarly formation. The student who has just passed her oral examinations can teach the incoming student more practically about how to prepare for those examinations than any faculty member can. The student who has returned from her first archival visit can describe the actual experience of requesting materials, navigating finding aids, and dealing with unexpected source complexities in ways that no textbook — including this one — can fully anticipate.

Active participation in the scholarly community — reviewing manuscripts for journals, organizing conference panels, participating in seminars outside one’s home department, engaging with scholars at other institutions — develops the judgment that is the mark of a mature scholar. The scholar who reads only in her own sub-field, who attends only her home institution’s colloquia, who presents only in venues where she is already known, will develop more slowly than the scholar who exposes her work to a range of critical perspectives.

Reading widely outside musicology — in literary theory, anthropology, history, philosophy of art, cognitive science — is not a distraction from the discipline but a source of the conceptual frameworks and cross-disciplinary comparisons that often generate the most interesting questions in music scholarship. The historian of music who has read widely in social history, the music theorist who has engaged with cognitive linguistics, the ethnomusicologist who knows anthropological theory: these scholars bring resources to their sub-field that enrich not only their own work but the field’s collective capacity.

The life of a music scholar is sustained not by the mechanisms of professional advancement alone but by the ongoing pleasure of the discipline itself: the pleasure of a difficult source yielding to patient reading, of an analytical observation illuminating something previously opaque, of a well-turned argument conveying a musical insight clearly to a reader who did not previously hear what the scholar hears. These pleasures are real, and they are available only to those who pursue the work with both rigor and love.

8.10 A Note on the Changing Landscape of Academic Publishing

The landscape of academic publishing in musicology is changing rapidly, and scholars at the beginning of their careers should understand the forces shaping it.

Open access publishing — making scholarship freely available online rather than behind journal or book paywalls — is an increasingly powerful force in academic publishing. Many funding agencies now require that research they fund be made openly available within a specified period after publication. Many universities have established institutional repositories where faculty can deposit preprints or post-prints of their publications. Several musicology journals (including Music Theory Online and the Journal of the Society for American Music) are fully open access. Understanding the open-access landscape — and the distinction between “gold” open access (publication in an open-access journal) and “green” open access (self-archiving of a version of an article already published in a subscription journal) — is part of the professional literacy expected of today’s scholars.

Digital-first publication — the publication of scholarship in formats designed primarily for online reading rather than print — is becoming more common, particularly in digital humanities. Interactive editions, data-supplemented articles, and multimedia scholarly publications challenge the conventions of traditional print scholarship and raise new questions about long-term archival stability, citation practices, and the review of non-textual scholarly contributions.

The changing economics of academic publishing — particularly the financial pressure on university presses and the consolidation of journal publishing in a small number of large commercial entities — affects where scholarship is published, who can access it, and what kinds of projects receive support. The junior scholar who understands these economics will make better decisions about where to submit her work and will be a more informed participant in the professional conversations about the future of scholarly communication.

Appendix: Reference Summary

Glossary of Core Terms

Musicology: the systematic scholarly study of music in all its dimensions.

Historical musicology: the sub-discipline studying music of the past through archival research, biography, source criticism, and style analysis.

Ethnomusicology: the anthropologically informed study of musical practices in social context, with emphasis on fieldwork and non-Western repertoires.

Musikwissenschaft: the German tradition of music science from which modern musicology descends, associated with Chrysander, Spitta, and Adler.

Primary source: a document contemporaneous with the phenomenon under study, produced by a participant in or direct observer of that phenomenon.

Secondary source: a scholarly account of primary sources written at a later time.

RISM: Répertoire International des Sources Musicales, the international inventory of musical manuscripts and early printed music, accessible online at rism.info.

RILM: Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale, the comprehensive bibliographic database of music scholarship with abstracts in English.

Source criticism (Quellenkritik): systematic evaluation of sources for authenticity, date, provenance, and reliability.

Stemma codicum: the family tree of sources for a musical work, representing genealogical relationships among surviving copies.

Diplomatic transcription: faithful reproduction of a source without editorial emendation, preserving all original features.

Critical edition: a scholarly edition based on all available sources, accompanied by a critical report documenting editorial decisions.

Variant reading: any place in a transmitted text where two or more sources disagree.

Conjunctive error: a shared variant indicating common descent among sources; the primary evidence for grouping sources in a stemma.

Historiography: the study of how history has been written, including the methods, assumptions, and ideological frameworks that shape historical knowledge.

Hermeneutics: the art and theory of interpretation; in musicology, the practice of reading cultural and social meanings in musical works and documents.

Contextualism: the methodological approach that situates musical works in their social, political, and biographical contexts.

Formalism: the methodological approach that interprets musical works as autonomous structures with meanings immanent in their formal properties.

Reception history (Rezeptionsgeschichte): the study of how works have been heard, performed, and evaluated across different historical periods and communities.

Digital musicology: the application of computational methods — corpus analysis, MIR, digital editions — to musical scholarship.

Music21: the Python library for computational music analysis developed at MIT.

MusicXML: the structured XML format for encoding musical notation at a level rich enough to support computational analysis.

SIMSSA: the Single Interface for Music Score Searching and Analysis, a McGill project developing computational tools for large-scale musical corpora.

Chicago Manual of Style: the standard citation guide for the humanities; the footnote-bibliography system is standard for musicological writing.

Peer review: evaluation of scholarly submissions by expert readers; double-blind peer review is standard at major musicology journals.

Scholarly apparatus: the footnotes, endnotes, bibliography, and index that document and support a scholarly argument.

Dissertation prospectus: the research proposal that, when approved by a doctoral committee, authorizes the candidate to proceed with dissertation research.

Research agenda: the set of connected intellectual questions that defines a scholar’s project across her career.

Thematic catalogue: a systematic catalogue of a composer’s works organized by musical incipit and catalogue number, serving as the standard reference for identifying and citing works. Examples include the Köchel catalogue for Mozart (K numbers), the Bach-Werke-Verzeichnis for Bach (BWV numbers), and the Deutsch catalogue for Schubert (D numbers).

Urtext edition: a commercially published score edition claiming proximity to the composer’s original intentions; not necessarily equivalent to a critical edition with full scholarly apparatus — always check the editorial preface.

Open access: the principle and practice of making scholarly publications freely available online, without subscription barriers; increasingly required by funding agencies and adopted by individual journals and publishers.

Postcolonial musicology: an approach that examines how European colonial history and power relations have shaped the discipline’s assumptions, canons, and methods, drawing on postcolonial theory (Said, Bhabha, Spivak) to analyze representations of non-Western music and to critique the Eurocentrism of standard music-historical narratives.

Stylometry: the statistical analysis of stylistic features — melodic contour, harmonic vocabulary, rhythmic patterns, formal conventions — for the purposes of attribution, dating, or characterizing a composer’s style. Computational stylometry applies statistical and machine-learning methods to large encoded corpora.

Informed consent: in ethnomusicological fieldwork, the ethical requirement to explain the research to participants and obtain their agreement to participate before collecting data or recordings; part of the broader ethical framework of the Society for Ethnomusicology’s guidelines for fieldwork.

Recommended Core Reading

Wingell, Richard, and Patricia Herzog. Introduction to Research in Music. 3rd ed. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2009.

Sampsel, Laurie J. Music Research: A Handbook. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

Holoman, D. Kern. Writing about Music: A Style Sheet. 3rd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.

Kerman, Joseph. Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985.

Barz, Gregory, and Timothy Cooley, eds. Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Kramer, Lawrence. Music as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Taruskin, Richard. Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.

Rosen, Charles. The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven. Expanded ed. New York: Norton, 1997.

Bonds, Mark Evan. Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

DeNora, Tia. Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna, 1792–1803. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Huron, David. Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

McClary, Susan. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

Tymoczko, Dmitri. A Geometry of Music: Harmony and Counterpoint in the Extended Common Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Weber, William. Music and the Middle Class: The Social Structure of Concert Life in London, Paris and Vienna. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1975.

Said, Edward W. Musical Elaborations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991.

Bellman, Jonathan, ed. The Exotic in Western Music. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998.

Taruskin, Richard. Oxford History of Western Music. 6 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Bonds, Mark Evan. Absolute Music: The History of an Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Nettl, Bruno. The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-Three Discussions. 3rd ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015.

Frith, Simon. Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.

Kramer, Lawrence. Interpreting Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

A Final Word

These notes have surveyed the research methods of musicology across eight chapters and an appendix, moving from the disciplinary foundations of the field through archival research, source criticism, bibliographic tools, historiography, digital methods, scholarly writing, and the professional dimensions of a music-scholarly career.

The depth of any single topic treated here — source criticism, hermeneutics, corpus analysis, grant writing — is greater than any course of one semester can do justice to. The purpose of MUSIC 670 is not to provide complete mastery of any of these areas but to give the entering doctoral student a reliable map of the terrain and the vocabulary to navigate it. Mastery comes from practice, from sustained engagement with the primary evidence of music’s history and present, and from the long conversation with other scholars that is the life of the discipline.

The student who leaves this course knowing what RISM is, how to read a critical edition, why historiography matters, what music21 does, how to structure a journal article, and how to respond to a peer-review report will be equipped to begin that conversation. The rest will follow from the work itself.