The Structure of Russian Music Scholarship: Historical Musicology

Abstract

Music scholarship is a discipline which studies the art of music, its regular laws
and particularities, as well as its relationship with other types of culture and with reality in general.
Music scholarship (musicology) is the one of the most important elements of art studies, along
with literature studies (philology), art criticism as the discipline about the plastic arts (architecture,
painting, graphics, sculpture), theater studies and cinema studies. It plays an indispensable role
in the system of functioning of music – here its creation, performance and perception, music
instruction and organization of musical life, the realization of the aims of the art of music and
the understanding of the paths of their actualization. In Russian music scholarship the division
into historical and theoretical music studies has been firmly established. This differentiation is
conditional, since the methods of historical and theoretical music scholarship are seldom applied
in pure form, and during the course of study of various different phenomena their interaction is a
natural occurrence. Close interaction between them becomes absolutely inevitable in such cases as,
for instance, examination any particular style or separate genres and their combination (in genre
systems). Moreover, there exist such areas in music scholarship which cannot be relayed either to
historical or theoretical musicology, since they are situated at the confluence of contiguous fields
of knowledge and contemporary interdisciplinary research. The article examines various areas of
historical music scholarship and their connection with educational activities.

Keywords: historical musicology, history of musicology, structure of music scholarship