Embracing Restlessness ― Cultural Musicology

The term “cultural musicology” has been around for more than half a century, and it has harbored a number of musicological visions which share one fundamental goal: broadly speaking, aspiring to better understand music and remaining eager to find ever-new ways to do so. Recent cultural musicology seeks to understand musical activities as cultural practices in a manner that aims to reach beyond the systematic analysis of verbal and musical—musicked—discourse and of the conditions in which it is enacted. Its primary interest is in exploring our primarily intellectual possibilities to comprise of musicking as epistemologies through which humans musically relate to, and make sense of, their surrounding world in a physical, social, and discursive sense. From this, a few key areas of inquiry emerge, and this edited volume presents a first-of-its-kind exploration of current critical thinking and research in and about cultural musicology. In exploring specific musical practices, the contributors discuss the (hi)stories, theoretical framework, and central concepts of current cultural musicology. In-between the lines, it becomes clear that cultural musicology is about looking for questions and perspectives rather than answers and presumed facts, about refusing to be content with anything that may be found along the way, and about remaining eager to discover new approaches and ways to think about music: about intellectual restlessness, and embracing it. This edited volume includes contributions from Birgit Abels, Charissa Granger, Lawrence Kramer, John Richardson, and Eva-Maria van Straaten.

Birgit Abels is the director of the department of musicology at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and the editor-in-chief of the journal The World of Music.