The Importance Of Musicology

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Write an informed essay on a distinguished musicologist of your choice. Illustrate your answer with reference to two important works they have written.
‘Most people have music in the centre of their lives. I believe my work sheds light on how music affects us and why it is so influential’. Musicology is one of the subjects at the centre in helping in the understanding of music and changes music as a product to a process. Musicology can be defined as ‘the scholarly study of music’ and delves into different sub disciplines such as gender studies, politics and cultural theory to name a few in order to understand where and how music has moved over time. Musicology helps music listeners to recognise the need of certain music forms within disciplines. …show more content…

These books are centre to what her opinions and ideas are in relation to musicology. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality written in 1991 is the book that made her internationally recognised within the music world. The ground breaking book drew on feminist strategies to reveal the ways in which gender identity is encoded musically in repertories ranging from the canonical to the contemporary . This book added much controversy to the gender argument within music. While published in 2000, Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form another print by Susan McClary re-examines the concept of musical convention in this fast-moving and refreshingly accessible book while exploring the ways that shared musical practices transmit social knowledge . Throughout the next few paragraphs, the key points within the two books mentioned above will be …show more content…

The book is broken down into essays that discuss areas in which she felt was relevant to this change. In the end of the first chapter, McClary discusses the five key components to the feminist critique of music (1) musical constructions of gender and sexuality (2) gendered aspects of traditional music theory (3) gendered sexuality in musical narrative (4) music as a gendered discourse (5) discursive strategies of women musicians . For example, she talks in relation to gendered aspects of traditional music theory where cadences or themes for insistence were ranked by either being masculine (strong and normal) and feminine (weak and abnormal). While the discursive strategies of women portrayed the absence and lack of musicians from the music scene as they were seen to not be able to produce enough creative works and when they did it was downplayed that the by female composers created pretty

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