Erich Moritz von Hornbostel was an Austrian ethnomusicologist and scholar of music. He is remembered for his pioneering work in the field of ethnomusicology, and for the Sachs–Hornbostel system of musical instrument classification which he co-authored with Curt Sachs.
Guido Adler was a Moravian-Austrian musicologist and writer.
Edwin Seroussi is an Israeli musicologist of Uruguayan origin. He is the Emanuel Alexandre Professor Emeritus of Musicology, chair of the Academic Committee of the Jewish Music Research Centre at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a visiting scholar in Jewish studies at Dartmouth College. He is the 2018 Israel Prize laureate in the field of Musicology. In 2024 he became a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
Jaap Kunst was a Dutch musicologist. He is credited with coining the term "ethnomusicology" as a more accurate name for the field then known as comparative musicology. Kunst studied the folk music of the Netherlands and of Indonesia. His published work totals more than 70 texts.
Josef Tal was an Israeli composer. He wrote three Hebrew operas; four German operas, dramatic scenes; six symphonies; 13 concerti; chamber music, including three string quartets; instrumental works; and electronic compositions. He is considered one of the founding fathers of Israeli art music.
Friedrich Blume was professor of musicology at the University of Kiel from 1938 to 1958. He was a student in Munich, Berlin and Leipzig, and taught in the last two of these for some years before being called to the chair in Kiel. His early studies were on Lutheran church music, including several books on J.S. Bach, but broadened his interests considerably later. Among his prominent works were chief editor of the collected Praetorius edition, and he also edited the important Eulenburg scores of the major Mozart Piano Concertos. From 1949 he was involved in the planning and writing of Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart.
Sociomusicology, also called music sociology or the sociology of music, refers to both an academic subfield of sociology that is concerned with music, as well as a subfield of musicology that ocuses on social aspects of musical behavior and the role of music in society.
Systematic musicology is an umbrella term, used mainly in Central Europe, for several subdisciplines and paradigms of musicology. "Systematic musicology has traditionally been conceived of as an interdisciplinary science, whose aim it is to explore the foundations of music from different points of view, such as acoustics, physiology, psychology, anthropology, music theory, sociology, and aesthetics." The most important subdisciplines today are music psychology, sociomusicology, philosophy of music, music acoustics, cognitive neuroscience of music, and the computer sciences of music. These subdisciplines and paradigms tend to address questions about music in general, rather than specific manifestations of music. In the Springer Handbook of Systematic Musicology, "(the) sections follow the main topics in the field, Musical Acoustics, Signal Processing, Music Psychology, Psychophysics/Psychoacoustics, and Music Ethnology while also taking recent research trends into consideration, like Embodied Music Cognition and Media Applications. Other topics, like Music Theory or Philosophy of Music are incorporated in the respective sections."
Philip Vilas Bohlman is an American ethnomusicologist.
Ruth Katz is an Israeli musicologist, a pioneer of academic musicology in Israel, professor emerita at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She has been a corresponding Member of the American Musicological Society since 2011. She was named laureate of the Israel State Prize in 2012.
Bracha Zefira was a pioneering Israeli folk singer, songwriter, musicologist, and actress of Yemenite Jewish origin. She is credited with bringing Yemenite and other Middle Eastern Jewish music into the mix of ethnic music in Palestine to create a new "Israeli style", and opening the way for other Yemenite singers to succeed on the Israeli music scene. Her repertoire, which she estimated at more than 400 songs, included Yemenite, Bukharan, Persian, Ladino, and North African Jewish folk songs, and Arabic and Bedouin folk songs and melodies.
Anselm Gerhard is a German musicologist and opera scholar.
Klaus Hortschansky was a German musicologist.
Hermann Danuser is a Swiss-German musicologist.
Helga de la Motte-Haber is a German musicologist focusing on the study of systematic musicology.
Tiburtius Tibor Kneif was a German-Hungarian lawyer and musicologist.
Wilhelm Heinitz was a German musicologist.
Wolfgang Suppan was an Austrian musicologist. He is the father of the wind musician and composer Armin Suppan.
Ethnomusicology is the study of music from the cultural and social aspects of the people who make it. It encompasses distinct theoretical and methodical approaches that emphasize cultural, social, material, cognitive, biological, and other dimensions or contexts of musical behavior, in addition to the sound component. While the traditional subject of musicology has been the history and literature of Western art music, ethnomusicology was developed as the study of all music as a human social and cultural phenomenon. Oskar Kolberg is regarded as one of the earliest European ethnomusicologists as he first began collecting Polish folk songs in 1839. Comparative musicology, the primary precursor to ethnomusicology, emerged in the late 19th century and early 20th century. The International Musical Society in Berlin in 1899 acted as one of the first centers for ethnomusicology. Comparative musicology and early ethnomusicology tended to focus on non-Western music, but in more recent years, the field has expanded to embrace the study of Western music from an ethnographic standpoint.
Professor Ruth HaCohen is an Israeli musicologist and a cultural historian. She holds the Artur Rubinstein Chair of Musicology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Ruth HaCohen is the recipient of the 2022 Rothschild Prize in the Humanities. In 2017, she was elected as Corresponding member by the American Musicological Society (AMS) "for outstanding contributions to the advancement of scholarship in music."
