The Science of Musicology: Definition, Identity, Typologies and Evolutions
The Science of Musicology: Definition, Identity, Typologies and Evolutions

Summary/Abstract: As a science of music, musicology exists at the cross-points of at least two paradoxes. The first one presents it in an opposition between the scientific method (the German term Lehre science, teaching) and the artistic consequences of composition and performance. In this case, captatio (meaning translatio) is hardly at all benevolentiae, involving instead several mediation steps with an obvious distortion effect. But the problem of translation as "betrayal" is revealed in all its magnitude only by the second paradox: the (notional-discursive) philological substance of musicology in a blatant opposition to the sonic, acoustic and ontological substance of music as an (imaginative-intuitive and objective) act. In other words, a rational method focused on the understanding and notional discursive explicitation of the unrepresentable. The third and last paradox would refer to the necessary legitimacy of musicology as the only possibility for a rational and implicitly value based understanding and assumption of music as an identitary-cultural fact. An ultimate attempt towards the scientific validation of the artistic.

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