Volume 32, Number 12 · July 18, 1985
A Musicological Offering
By Robert Winter
Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology
by Joseph Kerman
Harvard University Press, 255 pp., $15.00
By some etymological quirk music is the only art that adds the suffix '-ologist' to identify some of its professional students. We encounter biologists, physiologists, and entomologists in the sciences, but no corresponding 'dramatologists,' 'sculptologists,' or 'choreologists.' There is a certain irony in this, especially for those who view music as the least cerebral of the arts. Universities have nevertheless settled upon that portentous and curiously abstract label for professional students of music history. As disseminated in America since the First World War, the term 'musicology'[1] borrows directly from musicologie, coined by the French during the last third of the nineteenth century as a less-than-scintillating translation of the more encompassing German Musikwissenschaft.
Review, 4884 words
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