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From: lseltzer@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Linda Ann Seltzer)
Newsgroups: comp.music,rec.music.classical
Subject: Re: Categories of Musicological Analysis
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Date: 16 Aug 90 21:06:20 GMT
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>Now, my next question is What are the basic categories of musicological
>analysis?  In other words, in what few basic categories can all
>musico-analytic problems be understood?
>Here is my first stab at the problem:
>
>	1. Primary Sound (any sound or silence without rhythm, melody,
>harmony, or lyrics, but with choate musical value)
>
>	2. Rhythmics (the regularization of primary sound in
>alternation with silence)
>
>	3. Harmonics (musical reference to an articulated tonal field
>such as a scale, the overtone series, etc.)
>
>	4. Melodics (Logicial discursive overlays on 1, 2, and 3
>above)
>
>	5. Lyrics (Verbal and semantic overlay on 1, 2, or 3 above -
>includes song texts, but not vocalises - maybe includes the Teacher in
>Charlie Brown TV shows)
>
>	6. Corpographics (the staging and visual presentation in alles
>its aspects - i.e., is the music in a church, a stadium, in
>headphones, etc.)

The main problem with this categorization is that is has an inheretly
Western musical bias.  I.E., the category of "primary sound" seems
be a catch-all for any sound that doesn't follow traditional Western
musical procedures.  At the same time, there are categories which relate
to both Western and non-Western music which have been excluded here.

Musicological analysis usually starts with a reference to who produces
the music, rather than to the acoustics of individual phrases and
sounds.  Thus we have historical musicology ethnomusicology or comparative
musicology.  Systematic musicology moves away from this and you move
along the continuum until you reach disciplines which do analyze music
on the basis of acoustical properties of sound.  Musical acoustics,
as reported in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, is
such a discipline.  In acoustics we would normally talk about pitch
(rather than melody), timbre (rather than harmonics), temporal
properties (rhythm is probably an acceptable term, but one might wish to
analyze the temporal properties of a sound on a more microscopic level),
relationship of music to text (rather than "lyrics", a word which assumes
certain composition processes which might not occur in certain types
of music, such as improvised Indian ragas where syllables are
insterspersed with words).  If one desires to examine music in relation
to text, one may also cross interdisciplinary boundaries by examining
the relationship of music to visual art, theater, and dance.  Your
sixth category seemed to combine architectural acoustics and theater -
there are situations in which such matters should be treated together
and other situations where they are distinct disciplines.