Musicology

The Research Master's programme in Musicology offers advanced research training and academic insight into the theoretical and artistic principles that underlie the manifestations of music in different historical periods and cultures, and into the contextual circumstances that shape and influence the production, distribution and reception of music.

Western Music from the Middle Ages to the Present

Musicology as practiced at Utrecht University today focuses on Western music from the Middle Ages to the present. Although the emphasis, in both teaching and research, is on historical rather than systematic musicology, there is a strong tendency to integrate the attainments of both approaches. Interdisciplinary work is a matter of course, with particularly notable input from the fields of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Media Studies, Gender Studies, Postcolonial Studies and Computational Humanities. This way, the programme actively strives to be at the forefront of intellectual innovation while maintaining its connexion to the tradition of musicological research at Utrecht University - a tradition that is able to look back on more than eighty years of academic achievement.

Hallmarks of Research

Current hallmarks of research include late medieval music from the 13th to the early 15th century, Dutch song culture from the Middle Ages to the present, Franco-Flemish polyphony of the Renaissance, music in the culture of the German Baroque and Empfindsamkeit, Dutch music from the 17th century onwards, music and its epistemologies from the late 18th century to the present, 20th-and 21st-century art and popular music, the interaction between music and media, and the evolution of music in colonial and post-colonial settings. These research fields, naturally, also stand at the heart of the teaching curriculum. Musicology also houses the Computerized Mensural Music Editing project (www.cmme.org).