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Call for participation – International colloquium – February 27th and 28th 2025 – Montreal
Public musicology: a « serious study » with a public vocation
French musicology from the 19th century distinguished itself from German musicology, among other things, by its main mode of dissemination: conferences generally aimed at a very large public. At the time, French musicologists, and many musicians, considered that the access to music should not depend on social class but rather on artistic affinities: a fundamental principle, associated with the notion of civic education specific to the regime of the Republic. The French are not the only ones to pave the way for the rise of musicology within a more universal growth of musical knowledge all along the 20th century. From its foundation, musicology established itself as a science with a public vocation. In Europe, and later in North America, musicologists made the scientific study of music adhere to a dual dynamic: establishing musicology as “a serious study […] subject to scientific education” (Rolland, 1908) while contributing to the recognition and appreciation of music by a very large audience. During the opening of the international congress of the American Musicological Society (AMS) in 1939, the president Carleton Sprague Smith declared that “musicologists should ‘impart [their findings] to others’” (Hess, 2013).
Since this declaration and the establishment of musicology as a discipline, a whole terminology as emerged to designate the practice of sharing musical knowledge with non-experts. Depending on the languages, countries and eras, public musicology has been called “music appreciation” (Guthrie, 2021; Bennett, 2013), “musicologie partagée” (Badol-Bertrand, 2011), “outreach” (Gordon, 2016; Allen, 2014; Greif, 2015), “public musicology” (Robin, 2020 ; Dorf, 2020 ; Jordanova, 2020 ; Natvig, 2020), “vulgarisation” (Bernard, 2019 ; Bordeaux et Chambru, 2020), “music education” (Guthrie, 2021 ; Bernard, 2019 ; Kopfstein-Penk, 2015), etc. A variety of terms that each implies a specific relationship with the audiences and the musical knowledge, that are linked with different practices and devices, and executed by professionals with a wide variety of curricula (musicologists, performers, composers, journalists, etc.). This international colloquium on public musicology aims to foster a dialogue between the academic community and the practitioners. It will result in the publication of a journal issue in the Revue musicale de l’OICRM (RMO) in 2026. The communications submitted for this colloquium can fall into the following three areas of research or explore another theme:
1. Relationships with the publics
For François-Joseph Fétis, one of the figureheads of the francophone musical press, music must be “made accessible to everyone” (Fétis, 1830). For Henri Prunières, musicology’s calling is to “dissipate the public’s ignorance and its absurd prejudices, to make them love the unsuspected art from the past and the art from the present that they abhor at first” (Lefèvre, 1929). If some have kept this elitist position by calling their audience laymen, non-publics or profanes, the recent development of what the French and German speakers call music mediation has brought a new perception of public musicology, where the goal is to share an aesthetic experience by focussing on the collaborative construction of knowledge and the sharing of sensibility (Christoffel, 2020 : Kirchberg and Pébrier to be published).Either today or in the past, what attitudes toward audiences do people adopt during acts of public musicology?
2. Relationships with the knowledge and devices
While music education had essentially been the work of institutions producing professional musicians, music education had a hard time to find its place in the school curriculum. Disagreements and differences of opinion came along with the movement for the democratization of musical knowledge. The art historian and critic Camille Mauclair (1872-1945) saw the public work of musicologists as a way to “help [the audience] in their search for joy, ” to inspire “a desire and curiosity,” as opposed to the “pedantic intellectual teachings” of the critics unable to “make [art] lovable” (Mauclair, 1914). For Virgil Thomson, music appreciation was not a way to teach or share, but rather a way of “preaching,” a type of “unreflected and pseudo-technical proselytizing” that he didn’t believe to “be any aid in the dissemination of real musical culture” (Thomson, 1941). As for Max d’Ollone (1875-1959), he worried such a democratic movement could lead to a “levelling towards mediocrity” (d’Ollone, 1933). Today, David Christoffel underlines that the changes in the conditions in which public musicologists are asked to speak affect the interpretative work at the heart of the discipline by questioning the relationship with the sources: analyzing these sources no longer means to only elaborate a question, but also to put “the scale of what is analyzed into perspective” with the needs or preoccupations of the eventual public (Christoffel, 2020). Therefore, we can reflect on the ways and means used to share knowledge and the way these conditions influence the musicological information that is shared.
Professional profiles and disciplinary legitimacy
At the beginning of the 20th century, musicologists worked hard to justify the existence of their field of study in academia, beside the humanities and natural sciences. In the context of this need for disciplinary legitimacy, the job to translate musical knowledge for the general public belonged to musicologists. The “elite” and only group “capable [of teaching] what goes beyond words” (d’Ollone, 1933). The campaign to discredit certain approaches to “vulgarization” started in academia as soon as the beginning of the 20th century. This effort provoked, for example, the disappearance of the term “music appreciation,” even if it represented an important industry that produced books, discs, radio shows, and even college classes supposed to elevate culturally their listeners (Rubin, 1992 Guthrie, 2021 ; Taruskin, 2020). Simultaneously, musicians and musicologists worked for newspapers, musical institutions, record companies, publishers and community organizations to translate and share musicological knowledge to the general public. Today, this model of implication in the community is transforming in reaction to the rise of music mediation or outreach, opening the way for a participative musicology, aiming to empower participants considered as full-fledged actors in the production of the discourse on music. It is in this transformation that the question of the social and intellectual credit of “public musicologists” rises, linked with the fact that their many professional profiles is as varied as the devices they use to pass on their knowledge (pre-concert talks, concert lectures, program notes, podcasts, videos, “médiations ambulantes” which we could translate to “walking mediation,” etc.).
The colloquium will be held on the 27th and 28th of February 2025 in Montreal.