Music History Quiz

Overview of Music History

• Music history is a subfield of musicology that studies music from a historical point of view.
• Music history usually refers to the history of notated music of Western elites, sometimes called "art music."
• Methods of music history include source studies, paleography, philology, style criticism, historiography, musical analysis, and iconography.
• Music history produces peer-reviewed articles, university press-published music history books, university textbooks, new editions of musical works, biographies of composers and other musicians, studies of the relationship between words and music, and reflections upon the role of music in society.
• Music history courses are offered at the post-secondary level and vary in length, breadth, and depth.
• The methods and tools of music history are nearly as many as its subjects and therefore make a strict categorization impossible.
• Archival work may be conducted to find connections to music or musicians in a collection of documents of broader interests or to more systematically study a collection of documents related to a musician.
• Performance practice draws on many of the tools of historical musicology to answer the specific question of how music was performed in various places at various times in the past.
• Biographical studies of composers can give us a better sense of the chronology of compositions, influences on style and works, and provide important background to the interpretation of works.
• Sociological studies focus on the function of music in society as well as its meaning for individuals and society as a whole.
• Historical musicology has been criticized for its exclusion of disciplines and musics, as well as its exclusion of popular music.
• Terminology, methodology, and ideology problems affect even works sympathetic to popular music.