On the Concept of Interdisciplinarity in the Study of Music

Abstract

In all western cultures from ancient Greece onwards, the theory of music was based on what each culture considered its main philosophical and scientific knowledge. This happened, for example, in the epoch of Boethius and, after more than a thousand years, in that of the Baroque Affektenlehre and subsequently in that of the Romantic Musikwissenschaft. The differences among such theories of music depended on the changed structures of music itself but basically on the general structures of thinking in each of such epochs. Therefore, according to Guido Adler in 1885, the “science of music” (Musikwissenschaft or Musicology) had to be considered not only a historical, but also a “systematic” knowledge, in which the study of non-European music or the analytical study of music as a language, or its social applications such as therapy, education, and criticism were included. During the 20th century musical events tended to be replaced by a diffusion based on means of mass communication such as the disk and radio, and technology radically transformed traditional music and the conception of music itself. Musicology became a multidisciplinary area with contributions from physics, anatomy, sociology and linguistics, and with biological extensions to animal hearing, and the origins of music considered both in phylogenetic and ontogenetic terms. In the present Conference many aspects of this complex aggregation of knowledge will be described and discussed.