musicology

Musicology is the scholarly study of music as an art, cultural practice, and social institution. It seeks to understand music through critical analysis of works, performance traditions, and the contexts in which music is created and received. The field encompasses historical musicology, which investigates music of the past through sources such as manuscripts and printed editions; systematic musicology, which includes areas like music cognition, acoustics, and philosophy of music; and ethnomusicology, the study of music in its social and cultural dimensions across different societies. Other subfields include music theory, organology (the study of musical instruments), and musicology of performance practice.

Methodologies range from archival research, source criticism, and formal analysis to ethnography and fieldwork. Increasingly, musicology employs digital humanities methods, corpus linguistics, and computational analysis of large repertoires. It often addresses questions of authorship, transmission, reception, ritual use, and the social functions of music, as well as stylistic change over time. The discipline has historically centered on Western classical traditions but has broadened to include non-Western musics and global music histories.

Historically, musicology emerged in European learned culture during the 18th and 19th centuries and expanded in the 20th century to incorporate interdisciplinary approaches. Today it contributes to music education, preservation of musical heritage, performance practice, and scholarly editions of repertoires. While the term is sometimes used differently across institutions, musicology generally denotes scholarly study aimed at understanding music's meanings, contexts, and structures beyond mere appreciation.