Research in Musicology
Staff at ICMUS engage in radical and wide-ranging research on music’s textual forms and their relations to broader cultural, social and political patterns. This research is always cognizant of the fact that music has always been a key part of the everyday, has shaped our lives (sometimes imperceptibly) and has had (and continues to have) a profound impact on our sense of self and our ability to understand that self's relation to our environment. Scholars at ICMuS have published widely in this area, but have particular strengths in music history and historiography (medieval, early modern, nineteenth- and twentieth-century musics), music and gender, music analysis, music and politics, music and psychoanalysis, listening ecologies of modernity and postmodernity, and popular and vernacular musics of all kinds. Our staff undertake research in musics from Western Europe (Britain, Ireland, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy), North America, Latin America, Africa (Tunisia, South Africa and the Congos) and the Caribbean and do so from a range of methodological perspectives drawn from ethnomusicology, cultural history, music analysis, continental philosophy and cultural studies. In line with this methodological diversity, ICMuS hosts the online journal Radical Musicology the mission of which is to 'democratise the field of the permissible' within musicology as a discipline.
Recent research activity in musicology has focused on the following topics (see also the projects page):
- Performance analysis, developing models to understand how different performance traditions shape musical cultures
- Music and recordings, drawing on developments in the fields of media studies, material histories and theories of technology
- Folk and traditional musics of Britain and Ireland
- Folk and traditional musics of Italy, Spain and Portugal (Neapolitan song, flamenco and fado)
- Music and ritual
- Music and Postmodernism, in particular music and globalisation
- Music and masculinity
- Music and memory
- Music, empathy and children
- Music and historiography, especially of late medieval and early modern European musics
Other recent research activities have also included work in the following areas:
- Music and psychoanalysis, drawing especially on Lacanian psychoanalysis and its recent articulations by members of the so-called Ljubljana school
- Music and sexuality, including work on music and AIDS, music and the politics of sexual identity
- Music and space/place, especially in terms of listening ecology
- Music and technology, drawing on theoretical models from Heidegger, Virillio and others
- Semiotics and the study of musical meaning, drawing on North American and French semiotics/semiology