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Home > Blog > Articles > “Surveying the field of historical musicology in conservatories and arts academies” by Adam Whittaker, Aleksandra Pister, Lyra Kastrati, Guillaume Avocat

“Surveying the field of historical musicology in conservatories and arts academies” by Adam Whittaker, Aleksandra Pister, Lyra Kastrati, Guillaume Avocat

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Setting out the scope of an academic field – in our case ‘historical musicology’ – is a significant challenge, but is something we must confront to be able to advocate for the continued importance of a field and its associated disciplines. Through a Short-Term Scientific Mission in at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire (UK) back in February 2024, Adam Whittaker, Aleksandra Pister, Guillaume Avocat, and Lyra Kastrati worked together to assess the existing data around historical musicology in music colleges, conservatories, and arts academies. Although many of these institutions do not have a department of musicology in the same way as a university model, they play an important role in the ecosystem of musicology and so are a vital part of our field to represent and better understand. In this short blog post, we summarise some of our key findings based on specific national contexts to help illustrate the complexity of the pan-European landscape, and set out some of the key areas for future exploration. One of the spin-off areas of work from this STSM was around ORCID data and is addressed in greater detail in another post next week.

During the STSM the team of researchers noticed terminological issues related to the definition of historical musicology, music history, and early music, as well as the diversity of educational systems and their administrative frameworks across Europe. A critical mass of the COST countries’ higher education systems was involved in the Bologna processes, which aimed to create a common European Higher Education Area including a common degree system among the participating countries. However, these processes did not include the unification of how conservatoires award third-level degree – a doctorate (PhD). Pister investigated the cases of the Lithuanian Academy of Musik and Theatre and Basel Academy of Music-Schola Cantorum Basiliensis have shown, how the regulatory constraints for conservatories can be solved through inter-institutional cooperation. Both institutions award a doctorate in musicology in cooperation with a university and/or other academies and research institutions. The inter-institutional model of the PhD program in Musicology in Lithuania is received positively due to the interdisciplinarity, exchange of ideas, and dynamics of the science debate. Meanwhile the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis sees this as a disadvantage and unnecessary limitation. Clearly these are interesting models worthy of further exploration.

In the French music education and musicology system, which is based on a strict hierarchy of public teaching and research institutions, there is a strongly corporatist organisation. These subdivisions place Conservatoires into four categories according to three criteria:

  1. their funding scale aligned with the hierarchy of the national space (city, departmental, regional, national);
  2. their regulations around awarding of diplomas, becoming increasingly higher and professionalizing;
  3. and their policies concerning training offerings, becoming increasingly varied, plural, and interdisciplinary following the same template.

Additionally, this system awards specific diplomas, and establishes parallel qualifications for careers in university research and teaching, secondary education, artistic training, and curating. As a result, there are no available pathways between these different levels of education, except by obtaining the relevant diploma or qualification, and thus, multi-certified profiles of musicologists are quite common. In such a context, higher music education institutions are exceptions. The 40 Pôles supérieurs de musique and the two Conservatoires Nationaux Supérieurs (CNSs) in Paris and Lyon award degrees equivalent to university levels: bachelor’s level for the former, and up to master’s and doctoral levels for the latter. This raises four questions related to the focus of this STSM:

  1. Although the CNSs clearly centralize research in conservatoires, how much Conservatoires à Rayonnement Départmental (CRDs) or Régional (CRRs), which are training at a pre-professional level, involved in research?
  2. How is research structured and incorporated into the pedagogical offerings of these institutions?
  3. What proportion of PhDs in musicology, whether active in research or not, teach within the CNSs as well as in CRDs and CRRs?
  4. What is the involvement of musicology PhDs in the artistic training provided by conservatoires?

To address the questions, Avocat gathered data from institutional conservatoires websites, French musicological research units, and individual profiles on platforms such as Academia, ORCID, LinkedIn, ResearchGate, and Theses.fr. There are a significant disparities in the availability and currency of information on institution websites, but this research found some permeability between the world of pre-professional conservatoires and the research field, primarily due to individualised collaborations rather than national structures.

Kastrati focused on the music department within the Faculty of Arts of the University of Pristina, the oldest and best regarded institution in Kosovo. Public-facing information on this department is quite limited, so Kastrati sought to shed light on the way this institution is organized and operates. Based on website data, it became clear that a small number of academic staff are responsible for teaching across a wide-ranging set of subjects; one member of staff appeared to be teaching across 32 topic areas. Musicology or musicology-adjacent areas were located within many of these, but it was not clear who within the department was tasked with taking overall leadership of musicological content. The qualifications amongst the staff were not all clear from institutional profiles, but there appeared to be a mixture of staff with and without doctorates. There also did not appear to any provision for doctoral studies in musicology, meaning that aspiring musicologists must look to institutions abroad to continue their development.

That it proved so challenging to find clear evidence as to how our field was represented and organised within this institution, is symptomatic of wider issues that the STSM team encountered when looking at smaller countries within the COST network. Without detailed and inside knowledge of the workings of individual departments, it is nearly impossible to understand with precision the functioning of an academic field in this particular national context. Further compounding this issue is the fact that the institutions where these academics are engaged in musicological research are not always registered with international databases, significantly reducing the visibility of their work in the kind of survey we were undertaking here.

To summarise this necessarily brief overview of our work, many of the challenges around accessing robust and reliable data on the state of our field within conservatories and arts academies are similar to those discussed in Christophe Levaux’s post from 12 months ago. Even though the Bologna framework has exerted a degree of standardisation in European higher education, the structures of conservatories is still subject to significant variability, as is the location of ‘musicology’ within the programmes of study, research activity, and staff profiles. However, even though there is still more work to be done, there is clear evidence that musicology in conservatories and arts academies represents an important contribution to the development of the discipline. By understanding the ways that this section of historical musicology operates, we can represent a richer picture of our discipline beyond the walls of the university.