A timely companion
Studying musicology in the digital age also looks very different than it used to. Now there is a suitable study guide.
When I started studying musicology at the beginning of the nineties, we students were faced with the DTV Atlas of Music as well as the introductions of the Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft Darmstadt. (I can still remember Feders Music philology and Reidemeisters Historical performance practice remember) We did not (yet) know of a comprehensive vade mecum as an introduction to the subject. In 1992, however, Nicole Schwindt-Gross published such an introduction for Bärenreiter with the title Musicological workwhich became a bestseller after several new editions with more than 20,000 copies sold. Since then, further books have been published with the aim of providing a practical study guide and reference work for budding musicologists, such as the anthology edited by Kordula Knaus and Andrea Zeder Study musicology (Herbert Utz Verlag, Munich 2012). Bärenreiter is now publishing a successor to Schwindt-Gross's book.
It was only towards the end of my student days that I heard somewhat sceptically from my older brother that he used a news program called "Email" almost every day. It is primarily the profound changes that the Internet has brought to research and study since 1992 that make a follow-up work necessary. Almost every chapter in the table of contents contains sections that do justice to the digital age: "Wikipedia - suitable for an initial overview?", "The Internet as an information medium", "Basics of online research". The limits and advantages of Wikipedia, Google Books & Co. are presented soberly and without prejudice. The examples given from the digital world are taken from current research, such as the Edirom software (www.edirom.de) and the Opera project (www.opera.adwmainz.de) in the chapter "Digital and digitized sheet music editions".
In addition to the comprehensive and contemporary presentation of the digital possibilities of academic work, other chapters are also worth mentioning that refrain from an old-fashioned fixation on the written word: Sections on sound carriers and audiovisual media, pictures, musical instruments, even buildings and rooms as objects of musicological observation. The chapter on oral lecturing and performance is also welcome. However, the discussion of the career prospects of studying musicology is somewhat neglected; for this, reference is made to relevant literature.
The content is presented clearly. Boxes with a gray background set off tips and summaries from the continuous text. Each section is followed by helpful self-check questions and brief bibliographical references. A detailed list of references and an index can be found at the end of the book. The two authors, Matthew Gardner and Sara Springfeld, thus live up to their claim of providing students with a practical teaching and reference book. However, the book will also be useful for lecturers: it helps them to visualize the starting position of young people who have already learned to surf the www in the cradle.
Matthew Gardner and Sara Springfeld, Musikwissenschaftliches Arbeiten. An introduction,292 p., € 24.95, Bärenreiter, Kassel 2014, ISBN 978-3-7618-2249-4
