Information Organizations

So far, we have discussed research modalities; explored the information life cycle; and defined three kinds of sources to help you plan and organize your research strategically. You are equipped to locate your research in a research-creation modality and articulate potential research questions. This can help you decide what kinds of primary, secondary, or tertiary sources you need and how to map that to the information life cycle.

Next, we cover the ways institutions have collected and organized these resources as well as the different methodologies that music researchers have used to create traditional scholarship. When you understand how information has been collected and organized, you can more efficiently access the resources you need for your work. Being familiar with historical and emerging methodologies benefits musician-scholars in two ways: you will be more efficient when searching for published research and make better informed decisions about which methodologies you may want to use in your research-creation.

Archives and Institutions

“Archive” is a noun and a verb. An archive is an entity within an institution that collects documents and objects of informational value. As a noun, an archive usually contains information that provides evidence about an institution’s history or people. Archive is a verb in the sense that it also describes the work that is done to preserve evidence for posterity and to organize or arrange it in an unbiased way for future access.

It is essential to acknowledge that institutions like universities, museums, archives, and libraries are largely enterprises of Western culture. Advocates for these institutions cite the preservation of—and visibility or access to—information as net positive justifications for their continuation. However, some institutions that deal in cultural heritage also have a complicated history of seizing, excluding, and even erasing valuable information that exists outside of text and artifacts.

Because of this complicated history, we sometimes need to think about primary source evidence that might exist in the information life cycle but may be difficult to find through institutional resources. You might encounter a barrier because of the way that information is described: Institutions have developed practices to catalog information to help make these resources more discoverable. However, those practices may ignore cultural or communal approaches to knowledge production and preservation. A disconnect can emerge when an institution archives a community in one way, and yet that community collects, describes, and preserves its culture in other ways. Resources can become challenging to find; you may need to connect directly with a community to continue your research process.

Another phenomenon that can interrupt your ability to access primary sources as evidence is archival silence, which occurs when there is “a gap in the historical record resulting from the unintentional or purposeful absence or distortion of documentation.”^[1] As a researcher, you may need to consider whether this silence may be addressed through community archives that are built and maintained outside of institutions.

For musician-scholars, this aspect of the research process can be complicated. These resources may only exist as evidence in audio recordings or oral traditions shared among community members. This can be especially true in musical traditions that live on through oral and communal creation of music that may not be notated or recorded.

Organizing Knowledge and Institutions

Learning how information has been organized throughout history reveals the underlying systems that regulate the presentation and location of research in library catalogs, indexes, research databases, and search engines. There are vast quantities of information to be preserved, organized, and used. This results in the adoption of systems that are deemed most effective, shaped by the needs and insights of those closely involved in the process. Today, more people have access to education and research resources than ever before. Despite this increased access, a significant amount of influence and power remains with academics, librarians, and publishers. These three groups play a key role in how information is made available and disseminated.

The ways that information is organized within institutions is subject to the respective limitations of various Western intellectual traditions. The most fundamental component of any collection is the catalog, or “list” of its contents. The word “catalog” itself has Greek roots in kata (by) and logos (reason), which indicate the word’s application: organization by reason.^[2]

First developed in the 7th century B.C., catalogs increased in complexity as major cities and their collections of records grew throughout Mesopotamia. As various cultures found their way to the fertile land between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, each civilization was compelled to preserve their writing and diverse cultural histories. Multiple versions of the same texts began to emerge along with transactional records. As resources were copied and distributed with increasing frequency, it became necessary to discern the different versions of these documents.^[3] While the organization of the ancient Near East’s information resources grew more sophisticated, Western Europe’s practices languished as the continent suffered significant intellectual losses during the spread of the bubonic plague (known as the “Black Death”) in the mid-14th century.

Later, the United States established its first research collection, the Library of Congress, in 1800. Following the War of 1812 and the resulting burning of the first Library of Congress in 1814, Thomas Jefferson sold most of his private book collection to Congress in 1815, claiming “There is in fact no subject to which a member of Congress may not have occasion to refer.”^[4] Having inadvertently established the mission for the Library of Congress, Jefferson enclosed several notes on the organization of his collection, which he hoped would be preserved by Congress. Using Lord Francis Bacon’s “table of science,” he employed a hierarchical arrangement by subject: Memory (History), Reason (Philosophy), and Imagination (Fine Arts).^[5] From there, Jefferson outlined an organizational scheme within each subject chronologically.

Today, this organizational scheme has been expanded and refined into the Library of Congress Classification system, or LCC, which has expanded with the help of thousands of information practitioners. When you visit academic libraries with large and varied collections, you see these LCC numbers, called call numbers, on the spine of books and musical scores on the shelves. This system organizes all of the physical materials in a library by subject. This ensures that when you use the call number for a biography of Robert Schumann to find that specific book on the shelves, you’ll see that biographies of Clara Schumann are shelved nearby.

In addition to this numbering system, which tells us which order things appear on the shelf, many libraries around the world also use the Library of Congress Subject Headings. This distinct system provides specific sets of keywords that are used to describe information and a series of rules to apply them. We explore how to use this keyword system in Chapter 5: Practical Search Strategies.

In this section, we present a range of methodologies used in music research, illustrating their interdisciplinary nature and how they evolved over time. Methodologies such as historical musicology, ethnomusicology, popular music studies, music psychology, performance practice, and action heritage research are covered. Each methodology can provide unique insights into your research questions. They also can provide a window into how music integrates methods and methodologies from multiple disciplines in its research practices.

We also introduce ideas about how methodologies can create or maintain power structures in the study of music, emphasizing the historical organization of information and its influence on modern research systems. Methodologies in music have developed over a 150-year history; some of these methodologies can still reflect the power structures in existence when music researchers first introduced them.

However, new methodologies, such as action heritage research challenge these traditional power structures. In musicology, researchers are adopting action heritage research practices that seek to disrupt traditional research paradigms. This approach is pivotal in challenging existing power dynamics and advocating for a more inclusive and diverse scholarly dialogue. By understanding and applying these methodologies, you can enhance your research-creation projects; acknowledging and addressing the biases present in scholarly resources; and recognizing the influence of power structures in the study of music.

Music Research Methodologies

A methodology is broadly understood to be the “practices, procedures, and rules used by those who work in a discipline or engage in an inquiry.”^[6] There are some methodologies regularly used in music research that are helpful to know. You’ll see these methodologies in scholarly books and articles published specifically in music research. Being able to recognize these methodologies in research will help you start to think about which methodologies might be useful in your own work.

For generations, music research has been dominated by studying scores as texts and doing strict historical investigation–all methods that mirror the traditional methodology of academic historians. Music research also borrows from literary practice. Reading a score can include multiple literary methods: technical dissections of the mechanics of music (such as Schenkerian analysis), critical scholarly editions of performance pieces, or the application of specific literary techniques that invite scholars to read alternate meanings between the musical lines in a score. Traditional musical study has also centered on the historical facts and circumstances of music making. It involves interpreting culture, connecting events to contexts, and tracing performance critiques over time.

We will examine some broad areas of music research that utilize specific methods to analyze resources we identified in the information life cycle. Many of these borrow techniques from other disciplines, like history, literature, and art history. In many ways, music research is an inherently interdisciplinary field. The methodologies presented here do not constitute an exhaustive list, but they represent some of the most common approaches to music research that you’ll encounter.

Historical Musicology

Historical musicology uses methods that are closely related to history. It examines the history of music composition, performance, and reception history. Traditionally, historical musicology focused exclusively on the study of Western art music. The study of non-Western music is understood to have begun with Fétis’ Histoire de la musique (1869–76).^[7] Historical musicology is deeply concerned with archival records and primary sources, including manuscripts, diaries, news reports, and personal letters. Scholars use historical musicology to understand the information contained in these primary sources or place them in historical context.

An example of historical musicology is Gayle Murchison’s book American Stravinsky: The Style and Aesthetics of Copland’s New American Music, the Early Works, 1921-1938.^[8]  Dr. Murchison’s approach uses historical musicology to examine archival sources that give insight into the influence of Igor Stravinsky and other European music traditions on Aaron Copland’s music. She uses this research to analyze how Copland American-ized these Western classical traditions to shape his own unique compositional voice.

Ethnomusicology

The Society for Ethnomusicology describes ethnomusicology as the study of music in its social and cultural contexts. Ethnomusicologists examine music as a social process to understand the nature of music and its meaning to practitioners and audiences.^[9]  One point of differentiation between ethnomusicology and historical musicology is the use of fieldwork—the method of observing and participating in music making and related activities. Ethnomusicologists favor community engagement over or in combination with primary source analysis.

For example, in her book Women, the Recited Qur’an, and Islamic Music in Indonesia, Dr. Anne K. Rasmussen explores the role of women reciting the Qur’an in the urban Indonesian soundscape. ^[10] Rasmussen studies with Indonesian women who play an important role in these recitations to understand the ways that religious practice and musical performance intertwine in their culture. Her observations and collaborations with the community help the reader understand the role of relgious-musical practice and tradition in modern Indonesia.

Popular Music Studies

Popular music studies emerged in the 1980s as music, social sciences, and humanities scholars identified a need for a scholarly community that focused specifically on the study of popular music. Popular Music Studies, the first journal in the field, seeks to cover “all aspects of the subject—from the formation of social group identities through popular music, to the workings of the global music industry, to how particular pieces of music are put together. The journal includes all kinds of popular music, whether rap or rai, jazz or rock, from any historical era and any geographical location.”^[11]  The source material for popular music studies is often the same as historical musicology, but it increasingly involves fieldwork and methods from ethnomusicology as well.

Dr. Lauron Kehrer, one of our expert panelists, recently released their book Queer Voices in Hip Hop: Cultures, Communities, and Contemporary Performance.^[12] Dr. Kehrer utilizes many methods in the book: They combine musical, textual, and visual analysis with traditional methods of reception history. These methods allow them to retell the story of queer involvement throughout the history of hip hop.

Music Psychology

A relatively new field, music psychology is concerned with “the processes by which people perceive, respond to, and create music, and how they integrate it into their lives.”^[13] Scholars in this field engage with the variety of ways that music is interpreted by the brain, ranging from cognitive perception of pitch to psychological and physiological responses to rhythm, tempo, instrumental timbres, and other aspects of music. The use of empirical research sets music psychology apart from the more humanities-based music methodologies. Rooted in empirical research, these studies often derive their design from psychology and employ statistical analysis in determining results. Researchers in this discipline can replicate previous designs or present new designs that are contextualized in previous research.

Researching the perception of 12-tone music, Dr. Jenine L. Brown designed an experiment to expose people with no formal music training to 12-tone melodies.^[14] Her initial findings indicate that listeners do not need the context of a tonal scale to learn patterns of intervals. Dr. Brown’s research uses methods from statistics to analyze the findings in her experiment.

Performance Practice

Performance practice often feels the most familiar to novice musician-scholars. This area of music research is concerned with understanding how music written in the past was performed at the time it was written. This can involve many ways of exploring performance from a research-creation lens: reading a treatise on bel canto singing from the 18th century can embody research-as-performance, but performing using specialized instruments in places that acoustically match where a work was premiered can be research-as-creation. Performance practice research often employs the study of primary resources in archives and application of music theory analysis techniques.

In The Songs of Fanny Hensel, Stephen Rogers^[15] presents the first complete critical analysis of the 249 songs written by Fanny Hensel (1805-1847) in her lifetime. Hensel, regularly still referred to by her maiden name of Mendelssohn, has often been cast in the shadow of her famous brother and his music. Examining Hensel’s music as a distinct body of work with a unique approach to composition, Dr. Rogers’ research provides a guide for historically informed performance, helping performers understand the context in which the music was composed and performed.

The methodologies of historical musicology, ethnomusicology, popular music studies, music psychology, and performance practice have evolved over time and largely position scholars as experts studying documents, culture, and performance. In many of these fields results are generally shared through peer-reviewed conference presentations, scholarly articles, and scholarly books.

Just as archives prioritize collecting some voices and can sometimes misunderstand or lose the context of a collection, these methodologies can unintentionally create power structures that limit or prevent some voices from being heard in scholarship. Archives are not always inclusive, and methodologies that rely on archives are going to favor stories about materials that are well-represented in collections.

Ethnomusicologists have long wrestled with ethical approaches to fieldwork. For example in Bruce Jackson’s chapter “Being Fair” in his 1987 book Field Work^[16] and more recently in Audra Simpson’s 2007 essay “On Ethnographic Refusal.”^[17] In response to the question “Who owns the folklore?” Jackson answers “Not you or me, that’s for sure.”^[18] These scholars acknowledge that early research in the field situated the researcher as expert and music communities as subjects in scholarly publications. These historical power structures that have influenced our published and archival research collections can present challenges for musician-scholars, especially those who want to learn how to work with communities different than their own.

Action Heritage Research

The action heritage research movement presents a new methodology that challenges conventional academic practices and attempts to foster a more inclusive and democratized approach to knowledge creation. Proposed by Robert Johnston and Kimberley Marwood, the action heritage framework is characterized by an approach focused on collaboration between researcher and community. Johnston and Marwood define action heritage research as “undisciplinary research that privileges process over outcomes, and which achieves parity of participation between academic and community-based researchers through sustained recognition and redistribution.”^[19]  This definition underscores the prioritization of the research process in this methodology. Recognizing that all participants bring expertise to the research process, action heritage researchers also reframe the relationships among a “researcher” and a “community.”^[20]

By examining the way that archives, organizational approaches, and traditional methodologies have developed over time, we also expose ways that these institutions and systems can exclude some voices. By highlighting the importance of community narratives and the opportunity for new discoveries through localized research, action heritage research confronts these fixed assumptions and entrenched perceptions about how we preserve, organize, and analyze history. This approach fundamentally alters the traditional research paradigm: Rather than isolating a single researcher with artifacts in an archive, it fosters collaboration between researchers and communities. This collaborative effort is essential for generating a comprehensive understanding of heritage that reflects diverse perspectives and experiences.

Examining how information is organized helps us understand how information is presented to us as researchers. Familiarity with multiple methodologies can help you understand which scholarly resources can inform your research-creation projects. In addition, knowing that some researchers are challenging scholarly traditions that limit participation of some communities prepares you to interrogate scholarly resources. You can assess whose voices might be missing and open a path for including those voices in your work.

Conclusion

The institutional archive remains the main venue for research using primary sources in music. Institutions, such as universities, city halls, library branches, publishing houses, concert halls, and production companies, house archives that contains historical records of their organizational history and local communities. University archives continue to grow particularly quickly, as professors and musicians donate archival collections of their professional lives with the hope that their contributions to the intellectual and local community will be preserved. However, the nature of archives being separate from the communities who create the cultural history they preserve creates inherent power structures that impact what archives deem appropriate to collect, the ways they interact with communities, and how that information is organized and preserved.

The research community increasingly recognizes institutional structures that have historically limited the scope of inquiry, particularly in the field of music research. Music research, traditionally focused on the study of Western classical music, is expanding to engage with interdisciplinary methodologies and ideas from many disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. Contemporary scholars in musicology are adopting methods that examine structures of power in research and expanding the diversity of voices represented in research-creation.

About the authors

name: Kathleen DeLaurenti

institution: The Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University

website: https://peabody.jhu.edu/faculty/kathleen-delaurenti

Kathleen DeLaurenti is the Director of the Arthur Friedheim Library at the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University. She holds an MLIS from the University of Washington and a BFA in vocal performance from Carnegie Mellon University.

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name: Andrea I. Copland

institution: Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals/Répertoire international de la presse musicale (RIPM)

website: https://outwardsound.org/

Andrea I. Copland is an oboist, music historian, and librarian based in Baltimore, Maryland. Andrea has dual master’s of music degrees in oboe performance and music history from the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University and is currently Research Coordinator at the Répertoire International de la Presse Musicale (RIPM) database. She is also a teaching artist with the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s OrchKids program and writes a public musicology blog, Outward Sound, on substack.

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