Musicology’s applied foundations (Or, how music was musealised)

Acts of musealisation have been apparent since ancient times across all areas of culture, including music. Musealisation is the effort to extract certain cultural elements in which value is recognised in order to preserve and use them further in new ways, including presenting them as evidence. In modern times, music’s musealisation has principally taken place at the service of cultural preservation, for example by museums, libraries, archives, and private collections. Yet, neither music museology, nor its practice of musealisation, have been examined or codified in any great detail in music or cultural studies. This volume’s aim to chronicle the true breadth of applied musicologies today is a timely opportunity to acknowledge music museology’s contemporary place as well as its rich history. To these ends, this chapter identifies two dominant, largely independent lines of development: the musealisation of musical instruments, which assumed a specific, international form during the nineteenth century when museums of musical instruments were founded; and the musealisation of musicalia, that is, musical texts in specific material forms. Musicologically, the first line of development is an auxiliary to organology, which is now safely established as a discipline in its own right. Indeed, the same can be said of the second line, which developed rapidly from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century and, being closely tied to developments in music historiography, serves as this chapter’s principal focus.