How much is the glitch? Das digitale Paradigma als Herausforderung und Chance für die historische Musikwissenschaft

Musicology has long since been established as central part of the so-called Digital Humanities. For many areas of music culture as a whole, digitization is considered the central paradigm of our time. But what exactly does this mean, and is it not unusual for technical and cultural developments to be thrown through and into each other? In literary studies as well as in cultural and contemporary history, a critical discussion has already begun on the multiple narratives and projections about „(post)digitality“, which are particularly common in science itself. Against this background, the article pleads for taking digitality seriously as an object of investigation in historical musicology (and possibly also in the history of musicology) and for initiating a corresponding field of research. For example, what promises and debates about loss associated with digitality can be observed within music culture at different times and in different contexts, but also what sources could provide information about this. The introduction of the CD in the 1980s and the emergence of the EDM sub-genre Glitch in the mid-1990s serve as starting examples for such a critical-historical view of and on digitality.