Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The historical and scientific study of music.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun music the scholarly or scientific study of music, as in historical research, musical theory, or the physical nature of sound.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun the scholarly and scientific study of music

Etymologies

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

music +‎ -logy

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Examples

  • He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in musicology in 1963.

    Monsignor Schuler as Practitioner and Prophet 2009

  • Reisnour is a doctoral student in musicology at Cornell University.

    American Stars With An Indonesian Sound 2010

  • The Rambler: The Rambler is a PhD candidate in musicology and a music teacher who blogs about music, music research, and the state of affairs of music.

    PhD Bloggers « Lorelle on WordPress 2006

  • Of seminal importance for so-called political readings of Romanticism, as well as for the recent, intense debate over new hermeneutic developments in musicology (to name only two discourses), the question may also be formulated thus: is the telos of aesthetic pleasure that of its critical articulation, its redemption by some kind of discursive intelligence? [

    The Voice of Critique: Aesthetic Cognition After Kant, 1999

  • During the twentieth century there was a return to the area of research and science of music, forming the concept of musicology, which is researched and taught in institutions of higher education throughout the world.

    Music: Palestine and Israel. 2009

  • I am researching this thing such as musicology of Arpeggione sonata which

    The ultimate consoling music Jessica 2005

  • 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.

    A Musicological Offering Winter, Robert 1985

  • One of the first pieces of academic work on Eurovision was Swedish musicology professor Alf Björnberg's doctoral thesis from 1987, which analyzed his country's song selection.

    Scholars Sing the Praises of Eurovision Daniel Michaels 2011

  • After graduating from the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts in Dharamasala in 1993, Choephel received a Fulbright scholarship to study musicology and filmmaking at Vermont's Middlebury College.

    Filmmaker Preserves Dying Tibetan Folk Music 2010

  • After graduating from the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts in Dharamasala in 1993, Choephel received a Fulbright scholarship to study musicology and filmmaking at Vermont's Middlebury College.

    Filmmaker Preserves Dying Tibetan Folk Music 2010

Comments

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  • ending in -ology are often good, this being a particulalry fine example IMHO.

    June 3, 2008

  • Shorter Oxford: The branch of knowledge that deals with music as a subject of study rather than as a skill or performing art; esp. academic research in music.

    I get very uncomfortable when people call me a musicologist. Perhaps I shouldn't: I have a musicology and performance degree, I write and speak about music for a living. But it's that "esp." that gets me every time. I'm not an academic (no wish to be) and I don't carry out original research or analytical study, so in my mind I'm not a musicologist. Problem is, what do I call myself then? Wordies to the rescue…?

    (In Germany musicology is musikwissenschaft. The musicologist is in some way a "music scientist". This doesn't really help, though.)

    October 25, 2008