ICREA Colloquium - Beyond Musicology

Speakers: ICREA Research Professor Tess Knighton, from CSIC-IMF, and Patricia Caicedo, director of the Barcelona Festival of Song.

Musicology is a relatively young discipline, which gained recognition only towards the end of the nineteenth century and a debate over its focus of scientific inquiry has its roots in its early philological roots based on the study of musical sources and concordances. This thread continues within the weave of present-day musicology, intertwined with other strands of pure analysis of musical text from an aesthetic viewpoint and a more contextualized approach addressing broader social and cultural questions which have vied for pre-eminence since the 1970s. The era of the digital humanities has opened up new directions, from big data analysis to neuro scientific approaches, the impact of which is beginning to make itself felt in the most recent research. In this presentation, we consider the challenge of going beyond musicology to explore performative and dynamic issues of the quintessentially ephemeral art of music-making in the historical past using the technology of the present in order to open the way for a richer understanding of it as an embodied experience.