MUSICOLOGY AS AN EVOLUTIONARY SYSTEM OF THE MUSICAL THINKING CATEGORIES (Proposal for a Methodological Hermeneutical Approach)
MUSICOLOGY AS AN EVOLUTIONARY SYSTEM OF THE MUSICAL THINKING CATEGORIES (Proposal for a Methodological Hermeneutical Approach)

Summary/Abstract: The analytical-narrative purpose of this paper is manifold and proportionally distributed among several directions of methodological and hermeneutical interrogation. A first idea refers to the year 1885, when Guido Adler published the text Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft, considered to be the “birth certificate” of musicology as a science and, later, as an academic discipline. However, while taking in consideration the Adler moment, one cannot overlook the equally important Riemann moment, whence it clearly results that European musicology had at least two generative moments in terms of methodology. A second interrogation refers to the object of musicology, or, in other words, to an answer to the question: what is historicized and, at the same time, systematized in Adler's project? We define the object of musicology as a conceptual corpus structured as a hierarchy, which, in turn, consists of two triads: (a) a first, internal, technical one – musical sound, sonorous organization systems and musical forms and (b) a second, higher, sociological one – genre, style and musical canon. The ideational arc launched by Adler finds, among many other things, a methodological relevance in the system of musicological disciplines formulated by Manfred Bukofzer. The corollary of this entire paper is the understanding that musicology as a project, discourse and science becomes possible only in so far as in the context of post-Renaissance modernity music is no longer part of the Quadrivium of mathematical sciences, but of the trivium of verbal arts. To paraphrase the title of Adler's text, we can say that this has defined its purpose, method and objective.

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