Music and the Wor(l)d – Musicology and Mankind How we Got Out of Analysis, and How to Get Back In

In this article we discuss various aspects of the discipline of musicology, particularly in Scandinavia: the notion of its broad subject matter, its strong dependency on other disciplines and what we conceive of as a lack of theoretical foundation proper to the discipline itself. Despite the broad scope of the discipline, we argue that what is unique for musi-cology is the analysis and interpretation of music. The elaboration of this basic prop-osition involves a sketch of a theory of musical meaning, and a reevalutation of the distinction between ‘functional ’ and ‘aesthetic ’ music. Musicology Today ‘Musicology beyond 1999 – by who, for whom, about what and by which methods’, was the thought-provoking title of the colloquium arranged by the Department of musicology, Göteborg University, in August 1999. To concretize the questions, we took a look at how the discipline presents itself today. The musicology department at the University of Oslo gives this description of themselves and their object of study: Music in some form or another is an element of all known cultures, and in our time mass media have given music a scope and an impact like no other art form. The breadth of musical life reveals itself, among other things, through very different [uensartede] musical forms of expression and subcultures, from genres where the aes-thetic qualities represent the dominant value scale, to genres where function and use perhaps mean more.1 This description continues with an enumeration of what musicology is supposed to do with the material: ‘Musicology aims at an increased knowledge about and a deeper understanding of the development, particularities and functions of music in 1. ‘Musikk i en eller annen form inngår i alle kjente kulturer, og i vår tid har massemedia gitt musikken en rekkevidde og gjennomslagskraft som knapt noen annen kunstart. Bredden i musikklivet kom