Familiarity, information and musicological efficiency

Part of the larger Music and familiarity project (see original conference paper here).

Chapter abstract:

A mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar being characteristic of ‘successful’ music, is a concept permeating areas in musicology whose approaches and subjects often seem distant such as Ethnomusicology and Popular Music Studies. Applying this concept to musicological texts, regardless of the specific area, balancing familiar and unfamiliar elements can be seen as a general feature enabling effective and efficient participation in contemporary musicological discourse.

The concept of information is frequently used in science to assess the effectiveness of a theory in terms of knowledge generation. In ongoing musicological research, as in the process of music-historical style-development, the interaction of familiar and unfamiliar elements (in various contexts) can be studied and used to describe and predict the ‘shape’ of research. This paper uses the concept of information to examine specific musicological research in these terms. It also explores the potential usefulness of generating models of musicology for its development.