The Structure of Russian Music Scholarship: Historical Musicology

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.