Noter til musikken: Premisser og konstruksjoner

Abstract

What is music and how do we go about researching it? Obviously, these are important questions, and the backbone of further developments within the discipline of musicology. As far as empirical fields and contextualization goes, this text initially claims that studies within ethnomusicology and musicology today portray a blurring of borders. The making of text as such and the analysis of a musical phenomenon, be it more or less focused on contexts primarily understood as external to the sound itself or the actual production of it, cannot escape the sediments of academic traditions and a multitude of challenges translating "music" to Music. What music is will always permeate academic texts on the matter whether it is an explicit theme or not. Without offering a final solution, nor excluding any takes on the matter, this article offers some critical comments funded primarily on a text by Michael Tanner (Understanding Music) that more or less explicitly treats this question.