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Approaches to Musicology is intended to give students an introduction to the many different ways in which music and its artistic, cultural and social contexts can be analysed and understood, and to provide a solid foundation for students’ own application of these methods and approaches to their study of music. The first block of lectures examines fundamental musicological and ethnomusicological issues in the study of music and culture, followed by a second part that introduces study skills required at University. Two further blocks of lectures apply those approaches and study skills to two discrete aspects of music history or culture. The precise content of the latter two blocks changes from year to year, but previous topics have included the impact of music printing on music and society in the 16th century, Puccini’s La bohème, jazz and recording, minimalism before 1980, jazz and recording, the post-war avant-garde, and divas from Blues queens to Beyoncé.

Available as a free choice, but note prerequisite of A Level Music or Grade VIII Theory or equivalent.

• To promote active and critical engagement with different musics and cultures;
• To introduce a range of skills relating to researching, thinking and writing about music and its artistic, cultural and social contexts;
• To provide a foundation for further study in the fields of musicology and/or ethnomusicology.

Lectures

Seminars

Workshops

Course documentation and bibliographies online, together with a wide range of other resources on Canvas (scores, librettos, arrticles, eBooks, links to Box of Broadcasts, Kanopy, YouTube clips and appropriate websites) fundamental to studying music and musicology.

Use of electronic databases such as Naxos and Classical Music Online.

By the end of this course students will be able to:

• Demonstrate an understanding of a range of different ways of approaching musicological study, and of the inherent problems in constructing a historical narrative;
• Discuss a range of musics and cultures and the critical issues relevant to them.
• Define and apply the appropriate skills required for University-level study, including research gathering, note-taking, critical reading and writing.

By the end of this course students will be able to:

• Show a developing ability to engage critically with methodological problems in musicology;
• Demonstrate an ability to evaluate historical methods as used in musicological discourse;
• Analyse and evaluate written arguments in music scholarship.

By the end of this course students will be able to: 

• Show that they can access scholarly writings and resources in a range of media, including electronic resources.
• Draw together ideas from a range of sources, with developing skills in the organization, interpretation and synthesis of information.
• Develop and sustain a coherent argument in both written and verbal forms.

By the end of this course students will be able to:

• Show a burgeoning ability to produce good-quality work independently with developing critical self-awareness;
• Demonstrate a growing ability to communicate ideas and information clearly in written and verbal form.
• Demonstrate increasing levels of intellectual curiosity and the potential to approach tasks in a systematic and creative way.

Each block of the course unit has its own reading and listening lists.  The following titles provide overall support for all three blocks: 

• Beard, David and Kenneth Gloag, Musicology: The Key Concepts, 2nd edition (London: Routledge, 2016. 
• Citron, Marcia, Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. 
• Clayton, Martin, Trevor Herbert and Richard Middleton (eds.), The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, second edition (London: Routledge, 2012).
• Cook, Nicholas, Beyond the Score:Music as Performance (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2013)
• Harper-Scott, J.P.E. and Jim Samson (eds.), An Introduction to Music Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 
• Herbert, Trevor, Music in Words: A Guide to Researching and Writing about Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 
• Irving, David and Alexander Rehding (anthology editors), A Cultural History of Western Music, 6 vols. (London: Bloomsbury, 2023)
• Kerman, Joseph, Musicology (London: Fontana, 1985).
• Rice, Timothy. Ethnomusicology: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
• Treitler, Leo, ‘The Historiography of Music: Issues of Past and Present’, in Nicolas Cook and Mark Everist (eds.), Rethinking Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 356–377.