Musicology

Historical musicology deals with the history of music as a whole. Traditionally, the focus is on European musical cultures from antiquity to the present. While the subject was initially primarily philological and biographical in orientation, its range of methods has recently expanded considerably, among other things through cultural studies issues. New perspectives, for example from gender studies, the history of mentalities, intercultural studies, postcolonial studies and media studies, contribute to a comprehensive historical understanding and question the historical consciousness of the present. At the same time, historical musicology is based on basic musical subjects such as harmony, formal theory and composition, as well as notation, source studies, performance practice and other historical auxiliary sciences.

Systematic musicology is an interdisciplinary field of research that combines psychological, sociological, biological, physical, aesthetic and communication science questions and forms of work. Music is regarded as a specifically human form of expression and experience, which is linked to conditions from all these areas. As an experiential discipline, systematic musicology works with empirical methods (experimentation, questioning, observation) and conducts research and theory-building directed at general and regular processes. It is practice-oriented: the aim is to understand some central conditions of musical behavior and to provide a conceptual framework with which recurring questions and problems of music-related action can be meaningfully structured and one's own positions on them can be supported with arguments.

The history and theory of popular music aims at understanding popular music: its techniques and technologies, its virtuosity, aesthetic differentiation, and its mode of action in the context of its social use. The starting point for a theoretical examination is usually the description and analysis of concrete phenomena. Such an investigation does not remain reduced to the level of the musical material. Rather, it is expanded by media-specific viewpoints such as audiovisuality, staging, and performance, but also by various (meta-)discourses on popular music in pop feuilleton and literature, and undergoes further contextualization by means of the approaches to cultural analysis developed in English and American cultural studies.