Abstract

The discipline of musicology, like the word itself which the Oxford English Dictionary dates only back to 1909 (or even 1915), is a twentieth-century, specifically Anglo-American, institution echoing the tradition of French musicologie and with analogies to German Musikwissenschaft. As a modern and ineluctably postmodern project, musicology derives from a predominantly Austro-German generation of scholars who translated a continentally European tradition of analysis (Heinrich Schenker and, in London, Donald Francis Tovey and Hans Keller) and formal music theory (routinely articulated by then-contemporary new composers: Arnold Schoenberg, Rudolf Réti, and Theodor Adorno, as well as Karl-Heinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez) into English language university contexts.