Practical Musicology

What could musicology be in the 21st century? In his book, Simon Zagorski-Thomas outlines a practical musicology that wholeheartedly embraces all contemporary forms of sound and music production between streaming audio, game sounds, EDM and engineering a record production. The future of musicology, as Zagorski-Thomas envisions it, is a musicology that provides historical and technological knowledge and critique of how music and sound are actually produced, presented, experienced and consumed: a comprehensive musicology of aesthetic practices, which is indeed urgently needed. --Holger Schulze, Professor of Musicology at the University of Copenhagen and Principal Investigator at the Sound Studies Lab, Denmark, and editor of The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound (2021) Practical Musicology is a brave and brilliant exploration of ways to explore and research 21st-century music practices anew. Drawing on his own exemplary research practice, Simon Zagorski-Thomas critically and eloquently advances and applies new ideas to Practical Musicology, ones which lay out a new theoretical framework, harnessing models of knowledge, capacity, power, identity, and technology anew, to illustrate, not only how 'to do' music, but also how 'to do music better'. A new and provocative Practical Musicology is put to work to explain how aesthetics emerge, develop and become embodied in practice. This is a must-read for all of us whose wanting a new 'way in' for thinking critically and differently about 21st-century music practices. --Pamela Burnard, Professor of Arts, Creativities and Educations, University of Cambridge, UK Practical Musicologyis just that - a practical introduction to the study of music making as a thing we do, consciously or unconsciously, separately or together, according to deeply embedded conceptual schemata that can give rise to powerful aesthetic judgments embedded in diverse and non-linguistic forms of human communication. It also provides a very sophisticated theoretical introduction to an embodied and practice-based musical epistemology: how what we do with music influences what we can think, know and say about it. Zagorski-Thomas brings his own aesthetic sensibility as a composer, engineer, and teacher to bear, persuasively making the case that a practical musicology will concern itself not just with what musicians have done, or why - but how they can do what they do, better. As a statement of musicological purpose, this volume is thus both practical and visionary in the same breath, much like that complex, ineffable group activity we have come to call music, wherever, whenever, and however we engage in it. --Robert Fink, Professor of Musicology and Chair of Music Industry Programs, UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music, USA