History of Music

This article is about the academic field of music history. For an overview of music, see history of music. For the album, see Musical History.

A famous Tang Dynasty guqin "Jiu Xiao Huan Pei". The guqin has been played since ancient times, and has traditionally been favored by scholars and literati as an instrument of great subtlety and refinement.

Music history, sometimes called historical musicology, is the highly diverse subfield of the broader discipline of musicology that studies the composition In theory, "music history" could refer to the study of the history of any type or genre of music (e.g., the history of Indian music or the history of rock). In practice, these research topics are nearly always categorized as part of ethnomusicology or cultural studies, whether or not they are ethnographically based.

The methods of music history include source studies (esp. manuscript studies), paleography, philology (especially textual criticism), style criticism, historiography (the choice of historical method), musical analysis, and iconography. The application of musical analysis to further these goals is often a part of music history, though pure analysis or the development of new tools of music analysis is more likely to be seen in the field of music theory. (For a more detailed discussion of the methods see the section on "Research in Music History" below) Some of the intellectual products of music historians include editions of musical works, biography of composers and other musicians, studies of the relationship between words and music, and the reflections upon the place of music in society. To read more click here