Musicology is the scholarly study of music. Musicology research combines and intersects with many fields, including psychology, sociology, acoustics, neurology, natural sciences, formal sciences and computer science.
Susan Kaye McClary is an American musicologist associated with "new musicology". Noted for her work combining musicology with feminist music criticism, McClary is professor of musicology at Case Western Reserve University.
Manfred Fritz Bukofzer was a German-born American musicologist.
Carl Dahlhaus was a German musicologist who was among the leading postwar musicologists of the mid to late 20th-century. A prolific scholar, he had broad interests though his research focused on 19th- and 20th-century classical music, both areas in which he made significant advancements. However, he remains best known in the English-speaking world for his writings on Wagner. Dahlhaus wrote on many other composers, including Josquin, Gesualdo, Bach and Schoenberg.
In music cognition and musical analysis, the study of melodic expectation considers the engagement of the brain's predictive mechanisms in response to music. For example, if the ascending musical partial octave "do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-..." is heard, listeners familiar with Western music will have a strong expectation to hear or provide one more note, "do", to complete the octave.
The Magnus Liber or Magnus liber organi, written in Latin, is a repertory of medieval music known as organum. This collection of organum survives today in three major manuscripts. This repertoire was in use by the Notre-Dame school composers working in Paris around the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth centuries, though it is well agreed upon by scholars that Leonin contributed a bulk of the organum in the repertoire. This large body of repertoire is known from references to a "magnum volumen" by Johannes de Garlandia and to a "Magnus liber organi de graduali et antiphonario pro servitio divino" by the English music theorist known as Anonymous IV. Today it is known only from later manuscripts containing compositions named in Anonymous IV's description. The Magnus Liber is regarded as one of the earliest collections of polyphony.
Richard Filler Taruskin was an American musicologist and music critic who was among the leading and most prominent music historians of his generation. The breadth of his scrutiny into source material as well as musical analysis that combines sociological, cultural, and political perspectives has incited much discussion, debate and controversy. He regularly wrote music criticism for newspapers including The New York Times. He researched a wide variety of areas, but a central topic was Russian music from the 18th century to the present day. Other subjects he engaged with include the theory of performance, 15th-century music, 20th-century classical music, nationalism in music, the theory of modernism, and analysis. He is best known for his monumental survey of Western classical music, the six-volume Oxford History of Western Music. His awards include the first Noah Greenberg Award from the American Musicological Society in 1978 and the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy in 2017.
Giuseppe Francesco Gaspare Melchiorre Baldassare Sammartini was an Italian composer and oboist during the late Baroque and early Classical era. Although he was from Milan, most of his professional life was spent in London and with Frederick, the Prince of Wales. He also had a younger brother, Giovanni Battista Sammartini, who likewise became a renowned composer.
Miloš Milorad Velimirović was an American musicologist. Twice a recipient of a Fulbright fellowship, he was considered an international expert in the areas of Byzantine music, the history of Slavonic music, and the history of Italian opera in the 18th century.
Neo-Riemannian theory is a loose collection of ideas present in the writings of music theorists such as David Lewin, Brian Hyer, Richard Cohn, and Henry Klumpenhouwer. What binds these ideas is a central commitment to relating harmonies directly to each other, without necessary reference to a tonic. Initially, those harmonies were major and minor triads; subsequently, neo-Riemannian theory was extended to standard dissonant sonorities as well. Harmonic proximity is characteristically gauged by efficiency of voice leading. Thus, C major and E minor triads are close by virtue of requiring only a single semitonal shift to move from one to the other. Motion between proximate harmonies is described by simple transformations. For example, motion between a C major and E minor triad, in either direction, is executed by an "L" transformation. Extended progressions of harmonies are characteristically displayed on a geometric plane, or map, which portrays the entire system of harmonic relations. Where consensus is lacking is on the question of what is most central to the theory: smooth voice leading, transformations, or the system of relations that is mapped by the geometries. The theory is often invoked when analyzing harmonic practices within the Late Romantic period characterized by a high degree of chromaticism, including work of Schubert, Liszt, Wagner and Bruckner.
Music Analysis is a peer-reviewed academic journal specializing in music theory and analysis. It is based in England and published its first issue in 1982. Although the journal "is not produced on behalf of a society, it is closely associated with the Society for Music Analysis."
The Royal Musical Association (RMA) is a British scholarly society and charity. Founded in 1874, the Association claims to be the second oldest musicological society in the world, after that of the Netherlands. Activities include organizing and sponsoring academic conferences in the United Kingdom, and making awards for outstanding scholarship, notably the annual Dent Medal.
The Loire Valley chansonniers are a related group of songbooks copied in the Loire Valley region of central France c. 1465-c. 1475 and produced in the context of the French royal court. They consist of six chansonniers: Copenhagen, Dijon, Nivelle, Laborde, Leuven and Wolfenbüttel. The songbooks, smaller than a modern paperback, personalized and lavishly decorated, are the earliest surviving examples of a new genre which offered a combination of words, music, and illuminations.
Ingrid Monson is Quincy Jones Professor of African-American Music, supported by the Time Warner Endowment, and Professor of African and African American studies at Harvard University.
Elizabeth Eva Leach is a British musicologist and music theorist who specializes in medieval music, especially that of the fourteenth century. Much of her scholarship concerns the life and work of Guillaume de Machaut.
Queering The Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology is a 1994 book edited by Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, and Gary C. Thomas. It was published in the United States by Routledge and focuses on the impact of factors such as sexuality or race has on a musician's music.
Jonathan Mark Dunsby is a British classical pianist, musicologist, author and translator, particularly known for his research in musical analysis. His introductory textbook, Music Analysis in Theory and Practice (1988), co-authored with Arnold Whittall, is a standard work in the field. Dunsby has held professorships at the University of Reading (1985–2006) in the UK, and SUNY University at Buffalo (2006–7) and the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester in the United States, and was the founding editor-in-chief of the journal Music Analysis (1982–86).
Martha Feldman is an American musicologist and cultural historian. Since 1990 she has taught at the University of Chicago where she is Ferdinand Schevill Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Music and the College. Feldman also holds appointments to the faculty of Theater and Performance Studies and serves as affiliated faculty in Romance Languages and Literatures and at the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. Born in Philadelphia to a family of artists, she studied at the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned her doctorate in Music History and Theory in 1987. She is married to composer and jazz musician Patricia Barber.
Jeffrey Kallberg is an American musicologist, who specializes 19th and 20th-century classical music, as well as topics in critical theory and gender studies related to music. He has written numerous articles and studies the life and works of the composer Frédéric Chopin, who is the subject of much of his research.
Anthony John Leonard Pople was a British musicologist and writer. He is known for his technological approach to musicology and music analysis. During his career, Pople held professorships at Lancaster University, University of Southampton and University of Sheffield. He also served as the editor of Music Analysis for five years.
