ABSTRACT
Since its inception as a scholarly discipline in the second half of the 19th century, and for many decades to come, musicology aimed at the scientific study of music, seeking to adopt the same rational standards as the natural sciences. Musical instruments, and more recently mechanical, electronic, and digital music technologies, were indeed looked at as incredibly sophisticated and elaborate devices, meeting rational and finely measured standards. And this is the way those objects were, until recently, commonly approached in the field of organology: as precisely engineered ones where contingencies and the “human” barely seemed to act. The study of scientific controversies, however, is not such a long-established phenomenon. One had to wait until the 1970s to see a “sociology of scientific knowledge” moving away from approaches considering scientific content based on a positivist philosophy of science. Since the mid-2000s, this multifaceted field has known a large but scattered number of developments.
