Mats%Arvidson Music and Musicology in the Light of Intermediality and Intermedial Studies Mats

This article has been a long time in the making. It began as a comment on the ongoing debate about the contemporary importance and status of musicology within the humanities. In attempting to navigate between the various contributions to this debate, primarily published in STM-Online, and in order to position myself as both a musicologist and non-musicologist (intermedialist) in relation to it, I discovered a number of potential directions and indirections which musicology could follow which became increasingly difficult to gain an overall and coherent picture of. The original article became increasingly complex and difficult to grasp with regard to both aims and issues, and led rather into a cul-de-sac than to anything fruitful or constructive for either myself or for those also contributing to the debate. Instead, in the article you are now reading, I shall try to show how the aesthetic disciplines, to which musicology belongs, have suffered from a crisis of creativity for the past decade or so. By crisis of creativity I mean the development of new theories, which can contribute to new knowledge about music, from both historical an