Introduction - Music, Politics, Society: The Role of Analysis

Abstract

Analitica dedicates a significant part of its tenth volume (2017) to the investigation of music theory and analysis as practices grounded in political and pragmatic choices and deeply informed by ideological and social contexts. Recent debates around the scope and purposes of musicology as a social practice have indeed led to a new awareness of the ideological and political implications related to music analysis [Broman-Engebretsen 2007; Buch-Donin-Feneyrou 2013], and to the historicization of the contrasting approaches introduced by New Musicology in the last two decades of the twentieth century [Agawu 2004, MacCutcheon 2014]. At the same time, the progressive convergence of the methodologies employed in different fields of music research – from art music to traditional music, from popular music to music in audiovisual communication, from the use of sound in new media to non-musical sound cultures – has revealed the close relationship between various practices of music analysis and their different epistemological foundations, the latter resting also on specific cultural policies [van den Toorn 1996; Scherzinger 2001; Schuijer 2008, Campos-Donin 2009; Guilbault 2014; Earle 2015].