Norman Cusick: The Scholarly Study Of Musicology

Write an informed essay on a distinguished musicologist of your choice. Illustrate your answer with reference to two important works they have written.

Musicology can be defined as ‘the scholarly study of music’ that spans over a number of sub disciplines to understand where and how music has moved to in time. Sub disciplines such as historical, music theory, criticism and aesthetics to mention a few are all principal theories for the exploration and understanding of music.

Music and musicology are both separate and related constructs. Music, as a practical, actively has its own history, but musicology, as a process of study, inquiry and reflection, while it forms its own context and employs distinct concepts, is clearly dependent upon the

She reminisce on her youth and how she was taught to attentively be “all ears” at a performance and that respect to both the performer and the memory of the original composer must be preserved. Cusick makes an interesting link between the performance of Norman Jessye and a performance from Pearl Jam and how the social rules and the temperament of the performer dictates how we as an audience are supposed to react to the act. She gives examples of this by an experiment with her students, to compare selected singers performing the same piece in order to engage the students that ‘singers might make choices of dynamics, phrasing, timbre and so on’ and that while still preserving the repertoire it could be changed significantly. Cusick that it is a life experience that we learn to be an audience to classical music. From firstly learning to play piano at a young age we simply learn to play the notes but as we get older we are encouraged to interpret feeling into the music, but not our own feeling but the feeling intended by the

She helps in the understanding of classical music and how we are not to class it as dated but to comprehend the emotion and context behind a piece and the composer is to relive it. From Cusick’s writings on the War on Terror, the issue of the use of music in conflict situations should be recognised and banned when it is used in contexts of cruel, inhuman treatment’ Her works vary greatly in topics that can appeal to all readers, she engages with themes of today’s world also as historic ones and the meaning musicology has to the practice and study of