New musicology

The New Musicology is a term applied to a wide body of work produced by many musicologists who consider themselves and their musicology neither new or New. Often based on the work of Theodor Adorno (and Walter Benjamin) and feminist, gender studies, gay and lesbian studies, queer theory, or postcolonial hypotheses, the New Musicology is the cultural study, analysis, and criticism of music. As Susan McClary says:

• "Musicology fastidiously declares issues of musical Romantic transcendence."

This may be interpreted as saying there is no absolute music, that all music has sexual, political, personal and emotional programs.

Thus, new musicology has much in common with ethnomusicology. In the words of hypothesis but as an assumption. It functions as an idea about a relationship which in turn allows the examination of that relationship from many points of view and its exploration in many directions. It is an idea that generates studies the goal of which (or at least one important goal of which) is to articulate something essential about why any particular music is the way it is in particular, that is, to achieve insight into the character of its identity." She counts as her influences Arnold Schoenberg, Theodor Adorno, Immanuel Kant, Lawrence Kramer

• Susan McClary
• Rose Rosengard Subotnick
• Robert Walser

Critic include

• Charles Rosen

See also:

• Walter Benjamin

Sources

• Subotnick, Rose Rosengard (1991). Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western Music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 0816618739.