ABSTRACT

Prehistory If one assumes that it is the responsibility of music studies or musicology to take on all musical forms of the past and present, then the scientific examination of mainstream music, in short, popular music studies of the twentieth/twenty-first centuries, should be a significant subject area of this discipline. In Guido Adler’s extensive concept of an ‘entirety of musicology’ from 1885, he already names many helpful sciences for the systematic subarea that have a fundamental meaning for substantiated popular music studies. However, they are only mentioned with regard to the development of ‘the highest laws in the separate branches of sound art’. In other words: in the centre of musicology is the writing of music history, which is crucial for the conception, distribution and reception of art but not of popular music (cf. Adler, 1885; Schneider, 1993).