In the fall of 2015, a collection of faculty at liberal arts colleges began a conversation about the challenges we faced as instructors: Why were there so few course materials accessible to undergraduates and lay readers that reflected current scholarly debate? How can we convey the relevance of studying music history to current and future generations of students? And how might we represent and reflect the myriad, often conflicting perspectives, positions, and identities that make up both music’s history and the writers of history? Here we offer one response to those questions. Open Access Musicology is a collection of essays, written in an accessible style and with a focus on modes of inquiry rather than content coverage. Our authors draw from their experience as scholars but also as teachers. They have been asked to describe why they became musicologists in the first place and how their individual paths led to the topics they explore and the questions they pose. Like most scholarly literature, the essays have all been reviewed by experts in the field. Unlike all scholarly literature, the essays have also been reviewed by students at a variety of institutions for clarity and relevance. These essays are intended for undergraduates, graduate students, and interested readers without any particular expertise. They can be incorporated into courses on a range of topics as standalone readings or used to supplement textbooks. The topics introduce and explore a variety of subjects, practices, and methods but, above all, seek to stimulate classroom discussion on music history’s relevance to performers, listeners, and citizens.

Open Access Musicology (OAM) publishes peer-reviewed, scholarly essays primarily intended to serve students and teachers of music history, ethno/musicology, and music studies. The constantly evolving collection ensures that recent research and scholarship inspires classroom practice. OAM essays provide diverse and methodologically transparent models for student research, and they introduce different modes of inquiry to inspire classroom discussion and varied assignments. Addressing a range of histories, methods, voices, and sounds, OAM embraces changes and tensions in the field to help students understand music scholarship. In service of our student- and access-centered mission, Open Access Musicology is a free collection of essays, written in an engaging style and with a focus on modes of inquiry rather than coverage of content. Our authors draw from their experience as scholars but also as teachers. They not only make arguments, but also describe why they became musicologists in the first place and explain how their individual paths led to the topics they explore. Like most scholarly literature, the essays have all been reviewed by experts in the field. Unlike most scholarly literature, the essays have also been reviewed by students at a variety of institutions for clarity and relevance. These essays are intended for undergraduates, graduate students, and interested readers without any particular expertise. They can be incorporated into courses on a range of topics as standalone readings, used to supplement textbooks, or read with an eye to new scholarly insights. The topics introduce and explore a variety of subjects, practices, and methods but, above all, seek to stimulate classroom discussion on music history’s relevance to performers, listeners, and citizens. Open Access Musicology will never pretend to present complete histories, cover all elements of a subject, or satisfy the agenda of every reader. Rather, each essay provides an opening to further contemplation and study. We invite readers to follow the thematic links between essays, pursue notes or other online resources provided by authors, or simply repurpose the essay’s questions into new and exciting forms of research and creativity. Volume 2 of OAM expands the disciplinary, topical, and geographical ranges of our endeavor, with essays that rely on ethnographic and music theoretical methods as well as historical ones. The essays in this volume touch on music from Europe, South America, and Asia, spanning the 16th century to the present. Throughout, the contributing authors situate music in political, religious, racial, economic, and other cultural and disciplinary contexts. This volume therefore expands what scholars generally mean when they refer to “musicology” and “music,” always with an eye toward relevance and accessibility.

This book examines the nature of musical performance. In it, Dorottya Fabian explores the contributions and limitations of some of these approaches to performance, be they theoretical, cultural, historical, perceptual, or analytical. Through a detailed investigation of recent recordings of J. S. Bach’s Six Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin, she demonstrates that music performance functions as a complex dynamical system. Only by crossing disciplinary boundaries, therefore, can we put the aural experience into words. A Musicology of Performance provides a model for such a method by adopting Deleuzian concepts and various empirical and interdisciplinary procedures. Fabian provides a case study in the repertoire, while presenting new insights into the state of baroque performance practice at the turn of the twenty-first century. Through its wealth of audio examples, tables, and graphs, the book offers both a sensory and a scholarly account of musical performance. These interactive elements map the connections between historically informed and mainstream performance styles, considering them in relation to broader cultural trends, violin schools, and individual artistic trajectories. A Musicology of Performance is a must read for academics and post-graduate students and an essential reference point for the study of music performance, the early music movement, and Bach’s opus.

Music moves through time; it is not static. In order to appreciate music wemust remember what sounds happened, and anticipate what sounds might comenext. This book takes you on a journey of music from past to present, from the Middle Ages to the Baroque Period to the 20th century and beyond!

Performing Antiquity: Ancient Greek Music and Dance from Paris to Delphi, 1890-1930 investigates collaborations between French and American scholars of Greek antiquity (archaeologists, philologists, classicists, and musicologists), and the performing artists (dancers, composers, choreographers and musicians) who brought their research to life at the birth of Modernism. The book tells the story of performances taking place at academic conferences, the Paris Op ra, ancient amphitheaters in Delphi, and private homes. These musical and dance collaborations are built on reciprocity: the performers gain new insight into their craft while learning new techniques or repertoire and the scholars gain an opportunity to bring theory into experimental practice, that is, they have a chance see/hear/experience what they have studied and imagined. The performers receive the imprimatur of scholarship, the stamp of authenticity, and validation for their creative activities. Drawing from methods and theory from musicology, dance studies, performance studies, queer studies, archaeology, classics and art history the book shows how new scholarly methods and technologies altered the performance, and, ultimately, the reception of music and dance of the past. Acknowledging and critically examining the complex relationships performers and scholars had with the pasts they studied does not undermine their work. Rather, understanding our own limits, biases, dreams, obsessions, desires, loves, and fears enriches the ways we perform the past.

Addressing Western and non-Western music, composers from Francesca Caccini to Charles Ives, and musical communities from twelfth-century monks to contemporary opera queens, these essays explore questions of gender and sexuality. Musicology and Difference brings together some of the freshest and most challenging voices in musicology today on a question of importance to all the humanistic disciplines.

Music and Historical Critique provides a definitive collection of Gary Tomlinson's influential studies on critical musicology, with the watchword throughout being history. This collection gathers his most innovative essays and lectures, some of them published here for the first time, along with an introduction outlining the context of the contributions and commenting on their aims and significance. Music and Historical Critique provides a retrospective view of the author's achievements in bringing to the heart of musicological discourse both deep-seated experiences of the past and meditations on the historian's ways of understanding them.