Getting to know you: information, familiarity and the musicological cliché

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.

Summary from conference review by Anthony Fountain (University of Hull):

Since perhaps the early 1980s, musicology has been in a state of constant flux. Since that time an increasing number of scholars have examined, challenged, re- considered, and reflected upon established methods, approaches, ideologies, models and foundational concepts in order to gain fresh perspectives and new motivations for research. In the process, musicology has become ever more interdisciplinary and the search for connections, interactions and the need for communication between the disciplines has become a major concern. This concern was addressed by Vanessa Hawes (University of East Anglia), who proposed various ways of thinking about musicology as a systemal process. Hawes called for a greater connectivity and communication between the often divided and divergent branches of humanitarian-based and systematic, or science-based, music research. She argued that familiarity with other disciplines, in terms of the similarities and differences between methods, approaches, types of discourse and modes of thought, is vital if scholars are to become more aware of their place within musicology and if original and useful work is to be achieved. According to Hawes, if the somewhat amorphous state of musicology can be mapped out or described in simpler terms, then musicology as a discipline will more easily be able to engage with, and influence, the work of other disciplines. For Hawes, this can be achieved via a consideration of the “connection-driven” perspective of the processes of musicology, such as the structures and functionality of the various strands of musicological discourse. Looking more generally at the subject of connections and their examination, Hawes made use of Goertzel’s criteria for theory assessment, whereby the success of a theory can be judged according to its scope of applicability, simplicity and predictability, and then applied those criteria to examine specific texts. The findings were then mapped onto musicology in an attempt to “identify points of connection between sub-disciplines”. Such points of connection, Hawes explained, can then be used as a reference, a “starting point” for music research before pursuing the research itself. Hawes likened this to “coming out of something, going over the top of it, looking down upon bits of it, the bits that can be seen, and using those to pull yourself back down again into the work”.

See the full conference review here.