Musicology is the scholarly analysis and research-based study of music. Musicology departments traditionally belong to the humanities, although some music research is scientific in focus. Some geographers and anthropoloigsts have an interest in musicology so the social sciences also have an academic interest. A scholar who participates in musical research is a musicologist.
Robert Lachmann was a German ethnomusicologist, polyglot, orientalist and librarian. He was an expert in the musical traditions of the Middle East, a member of the Berlin School of Comparative Musicology and one of its founding fathers. After having been forced to leave Germany under the Nazis in 1935 because of his Jewish background, he emigrated to Palestine and established a rich archive of ethnomusicological recordings for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
The Répertoire International des Sources Musicales is an international non-profit organization, founded in Paris in 1952, with the aim of comprehensively documenting extant historical sources of music all over the world. It is the largest organization of its kind and the only entity operating globally to document written musical sources. RISM is one of the four bibliographic projects sponsored by the International Musicological Society and the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives and Documentation Centres, the others being Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale, Répertoire international d'iconographie musicale, and Répertoire international de la presse musicale.
Friedrich Blume was professor of musicology at the University of Kiel from 1938–1958. 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. Coincidentally he died within a few weeks of another prominent Mozart musicologist, Cuthbert Girdlestone, and was thus almost his exact contemporary.
The Handel Reference Database (HRD) is the largest documentary collection on George Frideric Handel (1685–1759) and his times. It was launched in January 2008 on the server of the Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities (CCARH) at Stanford University. Originally assembled by Ilias Chrissochoidis to support his PhD dissertation "Early Reception of Handel's Oratorios, 1732–1784: Narrative-Studies-Documents", it now includes about 4,000 items and 800,000 words. HRD is organized chronologically, covering the period from 1685 to 1784 and focusing on Handel's British career and reception. It includes transcriptions of printed and manuscript sources, some of which remain unpublished and external links to early secondary literature on the composer. The project received financial support from Houghton Library, Harvard University (2010–11) and UCLA's William Andrews Clark Memorial Library (2011–12).
The Bibliography of Music Literature, also known as BMS or BMS online, is an international bibliography of literature on music. It considers all kind of music and includes both current and older literature. Since 1968, the BMS editorial staff has been working as the German committee for RILM, too. The bibliography includes monographs, master’s theses and doctoral dissertations, articles and reviews from journals, Festschriften, conference proceedings, yearbooks, anthologies, and essays from critical reports. It contains printed media as well as online resources, data media, sound recordings, audiovisual media, and microforms. Each record provides the title in the original language, full bibliographic data, a keyword index, and mostly an abstract. Currently, BMS online has more than 315,000 records of literature on music. It is supplemented by the OLC-SSG Musicology, which incorporates the contents of some more 150 music journals from 1993 onward. BMS online participates actively on ViFaMusik, the central gateway for music and musicology in Germany.
Ludwig Finscher was a German musicologist. He was a professor of music history at the University of Heidelberg from 1981 to 1995 and editor of the encyclopedia Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. He is respected internationally as an authority on the history of Western Classical music from the 16th century to contemporary classical music, with a view on music in cultural, social, historical and philosophical context, in a clear language for both specialists and lay readers.
Albrecht Riethmüller is a German musicologist.
Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen has been holding the chair for musicology at the University of Zurich since 1999.
Kurt von Fischer was a Swiss musicologist and classical pianist.
Christoph von Blumröder is 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.
Walter Karl August Serauky was a German musicologist and Handel scholar.
Helmut Schultz was a German musicologist at the University of Leipzig.
Jobst Peter Fricke is a German musicologist and professor at the musicological institute of the University of Cologne.
Bernd Enders is a German musicologist and from 1994 until his Emeritus in 2015, University Professor for Systematic Musicology at the University of Osnabrück.
Daniela Philippi is a German musicologist with a research focus on Christoph Willibald Gluck, Antonín Dvořák and Czech music history and music of the 20th century.
Josef Kloppenburg is a German musicologist and music educator.
