I know musicology matters to musicologists, but what is its role for performers and composers?

I have heard a couple of horror stories recently about how the current lack of higher education funding is going to wipe out the discipline forever. If musicology, and I’m thinking particularly of analytical musicology, were to disappear, who or what would suffer?

I subscribe to the quaint notion that you can’t perform the 1st prelude of the 48 with real structural insight unless you know Schenker’s analysis, but I’ve never met a pianist who agrees. Do you?

I have never read Schenker's analysis of the 48, though I am aware of it. When I first encountered the works, my piano teacher insisted that I learnt and analysed the structure of Bachian fugue, and I firmly believe that an appreciation of the "architecture" of the music, gained through an analysis of it, is essential to understanding and performing it. Having said that, analysis can sometimes get in the way of what is important: the music! I was trained to analyse music, and now tend to do it automatically as I go along with a piece, so to speak. And it ensures that I will never mistake a Neapolitan Second for a Picardy Third!!

Joking apart, I think it would be a great pity if the discipline of musicology were to disappear completely. We need scholars who can highlight the more esoteric or hidden areas of music. And what would happen to programme notes if musicologists were to die out completely? Even the most simple programme note requires a degree of analysis to introduce the work to the audience properly.

I have read a number of excellent analyses of various composers' works, my particular favourites being:

Mozart and the Pianist (Davidson)
Beethoven and the Creative Impulse (Drake)
Returning Cycles [on Schubert's Impromptus and other late works] (Fisk)

I am wary, however, of writers who masquerade as musicologists but who are really pursuing another agenda, or who are trying to second-guess the composer's intentions/state of mind/personality etc, such as the author (who will remain nameless) who tries to suggest that Chopin was gay through an analysis of his miniatures. Aaarrggh!!

When I give a course in music analysis, I start by annoucing a challenge to myself, and an undertaking to my students, that what I teach should enrich, if not alter, their approach to playing (and listening) music.  If not, then I suggest to them that the problem lies with my teaching. It is not a problem with the discipline of analysis per se.

I do agree, however, that there is musicology out there which is in effect musically illiterate.  Having met some of the music academics who write such stuff, I fear that this is because that some of our practising musicologists are themselvs musically illiterate, who would not know the '48', let alone be able to analyse a fugue from one.  For this we have to blame two things, I think, firstly the growing 'professionalisation' of the academy, where Universities encourage paper-publishers over performer-scholars, and the second is the decline in music education itself.  That is, students now arrive at University knowing next to no basic music theory, and Universities are increasingly lacking either the resources or the qualified staff (for the first reason, above) to rectify the problem.  Some of these students end up being the next generation of musicologists, and so on....

It is no surprise to me, then that there is more and more musicology coming from within Universities these days that has little to say to, or relevance for, the practice of making or listening to music.  We need sites like this one to become repositories of learning which is not beholded to fate of our academies....

One could look at the issue from two perspectives. On the one hand, musicologists seem to be essential for providing citical editions, thus forming a basis for performers (which they may very well ignore). They also provide the expertise which is necessary for formulating acceptable texts contained in progamme notes (although it is sometimes a long way from these notes to the bulky tomes found in university libraries). And quite a few performers do actually rely on musicological research.
On the other hand, one could argue that many performers and composers can very well do without the 48th analysis of Bach's Well-tempered piano (perhaps there are even more), because nobody seems to notice it.
So I think musicology does matter - to a certain extent. And I don't think musicology as a university subject will die out.
But perhaps we should reformulate the question: Does musicology pay?

To me, musicology is about striving for a greater understanding of the measurable (and as yet immeasurable) aspects of organised sound or the language of music. It is a form of pure knowledge, without any greater reward than that of a supposition proved possible.  I find it astonishing that one can in principle question its importance (do literature studies pay? are they just waffle?) but also admit that there is much discourse which is subjective at best. The fact that some universities seem to be prioritising the craft of music (the Protestant work-ethic has been assimilated by market forces) is (and has been for decades) underlining the perception (both amongst the initiated and the untrained) that musicology is a dscipline which has reached its nemesis. I strongly disagree. Much remains to be done all the while new works are being written; otherwise, music psychology and cross-current methodologies are, for example, underexplored.

All fair points. Ironically, I'd say, of course, that it is precisely the fact that a certain kind of musicology does pay (that written within the modern academy) which is the problem. The ideals (and idealism) that David expresses get swept aside by crude careerism. It is less important that a "professional" musicologist love music, and be able to explain that love to others in an articulate, historically and humanistically informed way, than s/he get published in the right 'trade' journals--which, by and large, are not even read by performing musicians, only by other 'career' musicologists.

Of course musicology does not need to serve a crudely "practical" function--just as, arguably, art criticism or art history doesn't exist teach someone how to paint. But such scholarship should nevertheless 'justify' itself by helping us to understand why it is important that people play(ed) or paint(ed).

Does that kind of 'humanistic' scholarship still flourish in the modern University? I have grave fears...

I think there is a problem with the role of music analysis in university curricula. It is as if students are subjected to rigorous analytical approaches simply to give the study of music the appearance of scientific rigour, whether it makes them better musicians or not.
I wonder if musicians still have the stomach for the structuralism that underpins rigorous analytical approaches. It is certainly unfashionable these days to abstract art works from their cultural contexts for the sake of detailed study. But I think there is a value in it nonetheless.
Perhaps medieval scholarship has the answer. If we take the ‘music of the spheres’ approach to musical ontology (that it is simultaneously an art, a science and a reflection of the universe in microcosm), then we need not look beyond the score for significance or justification, enabling music analysis to provide artistic insights through scientific methodology.

Surely scientific rigour is at the basis of all things, be it art, physics or music, and without it, there is no structure on which to hang the creativity. I remember hearing the guitarist John Williams interviewed on R4 awhile back: he was talking about jazz and said that even the most inspired jazz improvisation has to be underpinned by a sound knowledge of harmony and structure in music. Without the architecture and design there can be no Sistine Chapel, Taj Mahal, Monteverdi Vespers, Brandenburg Concertos, or John Adams' 'China Gates'.

It is important to place art works in their cultural context but it is equally important to understand the science and design that brought them into being. At a seminar I attended with Barry Cooper, editor of the new ABRSM edition of the Beethoven Piano Sonatas, someone had the temerity to ask "whether it would ever be possible to read Beethoven's mind"! Prof Cooper sensibly directed the questioner back to the score for the answers....

The Medievals definitely had it right - and created some of the most finely-wrought, ethereal and magical works of art, architecture, literature and music.

An interesting, if slightly unfocussed, column in today's Guardian about the demise of the classical record industry:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jun/06/microbes-mozart-sewage
Guy Dammann doesn't seem to agree with my idea of resurrecting the music of the spheres to make musicology more relevant to music practice: "One of the interesting things about such doctrine is that it allowed numerous scholars and philosophers to spend huge amounts of time studying music without ever having to yield to the temptation to hear any. Indeed, according to the ancient and scholastic division of musical learning, the two higher spheres of music – musica mundana and musica humana – had absolutely nothing to do with music as it was actually practised. The third and lowliest, musica instrumentalis, which concerned the kind of music you could actually play, was by and large beneath consideration."

Jazz musicians rely on an intuitive kind of music analysis - in order to improvise on a tune, we need to have already done something like a Schenkerian reduction. We need to know the overall tonal structure, as well as the specific harmonic movements in the chord sequence, how they relate to the melody, and what tonal possibilities are then available to us to maintain reference to the original piece.