What is New Musicology?

New Musicology is a movement that started around 1980 with a series of influential articles published by musicologist Joseph Kerman among others. It criticised the current discipline for being too focused on formalism, and not enough on hermeneutics. Formalism is where analyst academics take a piece of music at face value and try to root out a deeper meaning from that one piece of music alone, and ignores the rest of the composer's works, life, or their cultural context. It was rooted in a type of musicology that sought out organicism (where one small cell of music informs the rest of the piece), and was linked with Schenkerian analysis. Kerman, however, argued for a change. In his article, he examined song in particular. For many years, when analysing a Schubert song, for example, analysts may have completely ignored the words and poet, as well as what was happening in Schubert's life at the time he wrote it. The study of hermeneutics is the search for meaning that might be extra-musical - outside just the notes on the page.This movement eventually came to dominate the discipline of musicology. The narrative goes that those academics that were trained in the old ways would either convert or alter their methods, or instead continue the same work without seeking to publish it. About twenty years later, other musicologists began to complain that New Musicology was being a bit hypocritical in saying that their way was the only way, and celebrated some of their old ways of doing things. They then returned to doing some of the older analysis arguing that both areas of the discipline could exist within the broader title of musicology.