Empirical Musicology Aims, Methods, Prospects [Hardcover]

The study of music is always, to some extent, empirical, in that it involves testing ideas and interpretations against some kind of external reality. But in musicology, the kind of empirical approaches familiar in the social sciences have played a relatively marginal role, being generally restricted to inter-disciplinary areas such as psychology and sociology of music. Rather than advocating a new kind of musicology,Empirical Musicologyprovides a guide to empirical approaches that are ready for incorporation into the contemporary musicologist's toolkit. Its nine chapters cover perspectives from music theory, computational musicology, ethnomusicology, and the psychology and sociology of music, as well as an introduction to musical data analysis and statistics. This book shows that such approaches could play an important role in the further development of the discipline as a whole, not only through the application of statistical and modeling methods to musical scores but also--and perhaps more importantly--in terms of understanding music as a complex social practice.

With Cook's emphasis on humanist values and DeNora's emphasis on social conscience, this book goes a long way to exposing the fallacy of this presumed association. In distinguishing empirical methods from positivist philosophy, this volume makes an essential and welcome contribution to the development of music scholarship. WhileEmpirical Musicologyis not without its seams, editors Eric Clarke and Nicholas Cook have succeeded in assembling a whole cloth. Given the increasing interest in systematic and observation-based musical research, this book has appeared at just the right moment in time. --Notes