Border Crossings: A Commentary on Henkjan Honing's "On the Growing Role of Observation, Formalization and Experimental Method in Musicology"

In the early twentieth century systematic musicology, which was based on the comparative method, played a prominent role in the discipline: however it was appropriated by the Nazis and fell out of favour after the war. It was replaced by ethnomusicology and structuralist music theory, both of which emphasized the individual context (cultural or structural) and eschewed comparison between contexts. Both also developed an epistemology based on the generation of meaning through the act of "experiencing and understanding music" (Titon 1997: 87): this epistemology, characteristic of cultural musicology and theory (CMT) in general, is quite distinct from that of the cognitive sciences of music (CSM). The otherwise confusing variety of musicological practices subsumed under the category "systematic musicology", as set out in Honing's article on which this is a commentary, can be usefully seen in terms of two distinct dimensions, those of method and of epistemology. It follows from this that empirical methods are as consistent with, and as potentially valuable to, CMT as they are to CSM, and that EMR has the potential to reach both constituencies.