Music history

They may examine the intersection of music and music-making with issues such as race, class, gender, sexuality (e.g. LGBTQ), and disability, among other approaches.

However, crucial to the practice of musical semiotics – the interpretation of meaning in a work or style – is its situation in a historical context.

The interpretative work of scholars such as Kofi Agawu and Lawrence Kramer fall between the analytic and the music historical.

Concurrently the number of musicological and music journals increased to create further outlets for the publication of research.

The domination of German language scholarship ebbed as significant journals sprang up throughout the West, especially America.

Within historical musicology, scholars have been reluctant to adopt postmodern and critical approaches that are common elsewhere in the humanities.

According to Susan McClary (2000, p. 1285) the discipline of "music lags behind the other arts; it picks up ideas from other media just when they have become outmoded."

In McClary's words (1991, p. 5), "It almost seems that musicology managed miraculously to pass directly from pre- to postfeminism without ever having to change – or even examine – its ways."

Furthermore, in their discussion on musicology and rock music, Susan McClary and Robert Walser also address a key struggle within the discipline: how musicology has often "dismisse[d] questions of socio-musical interaction out of hand, that part of classical music's greatness is ascribed to its autonomy from society."

(1988, p. 283) According to Richard Middleton, the strongest criticism of (historical) musicology has been that it generally ignores popular music.

Middleton argues that a number of "terms are ideologically loaded" in that "they always involve selective, and often unconsciously formulated, conceptions of what music is."

On the other hand, historical musicology tends to "neglect or have difficulty with parameters which are not easily notated", such as tone colour or non-Western rhythms.

As such, music that does not use a written score, such as jazz, blues, or folk, can become demoted to a lower level of status.

As well, historical musicology has "an ideology slanted by the origins and development of a particular body of music and its aesthetic...It arose at a specific moment, in a specific context – nineteenth-century Europe, especially Germany – and in close association with that movement in the musical practice of the period which was codifying the very repertory then taken by musicology as the centre of its attention."