Abstract

This is an historical and critical study of the discipline of musicology. The study is divided into two major sections: a retrospective of musicology, and a critique of musicology. The retrospective is an historical-chronological survey of selected writers on music beginning with the ancient Greeks and ending at the close of the 19th century. The writings of these musicologists are scrutinized for content, methodology and continuity of ideas and concepts. ;The critical part of the study is in the Kantian mode using a methodology derived from the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. This part is a critical study of the sources, scope and limits of musicology as delineated in the retrospective and as found in the 20th century through phenomenological critique of the sub-regions within the discipline. From the critical study it is demonstrated that the field of musicology exhibits one fundamental characteristic: an attempt to be a systematic study of musical phenomena. Within this field there are many sub-regions which share the above-mentioned common musicological characteristic but which are different from each other in essential ways; these differentia are fully described in the critique. ;Finally, the study may be read in two ways: as a critique of musicology as described above; or as an example of applied phenomenology.