Vol. 10 • No. 1 • 2026

Musicology’s Monumental Turns

Edited by Erol Köymen and Dylan Principi

How do we know music’s histories? Until fairly recently, we might have asked instead, “how do we know music history?” The singularity of this latter question invites equally singular answers, even in the twenty-first century. In 2007, for instance, the singularity of Richard Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music so impressed its readers that Gary Tomlinson described it as “monumental musicology”—monumental in both virtuosity and size. Lately, however, scholars have begun to speak of music’s history and theory in the plural. Book series on Global Musicology and “New Material Histories” and conferences on “Auditory History” suggest that the story of music and sound is multiplying and taking on qualifiers. Change is afoot.

Are these changes demanding yet another New Musicology for yet a newer generation? Or are they hinting at the end of history (in the singular)? Already more than thirty years ago, Leo Treitler observed that musicology no longer resembled a department store, the kind of twentieth-century shopping establishment whose monolithic size and hierarchical organization epitomized capitalist modernity. Rather, the postmodern age had transformed musicology, Treitler argued, into a bazaar in which anything and everything is on offer. Newly connected and accelerated by technology, musicology today navigates an increasingly free market, but it is no flea market. The changes afoot in music and sound studies reflect a growing awareness that if the known (music) is plural, then so are the knowers (musicologists), the means of knowing (musicologies), and (musicological) knowledge itself. This awareness is fundamentally epistemological, in other words; there is simply too much for any one scholarly community, let alone one person, to know. We are facing a monumental turn away from monumental musicology.

This turn has been called by many names. Throughout the summer, contributions to this issue of Musicological Brainfood will explore the global, auditory, and literary turns in the study of music and sound. Together, they exhibit new attitudes toward musical knowledge, offering a smorgasbord of new musicologies, so to speak. Global musicology will be familiar to readers of Musicological Brainfood, but its parameters and aims continue to be up for debate. Daniel K. L. Chua’s post in this issue challenges us to rethink longstanding models of musicological turf in order to focus on relations among global musicologists. Olivia Bloechl will then inform us about a major new initiative drawing together scholars in the field, the Oxford Handbook of Global Music History.

The theme of auditory history is also fostering relations among scholars, as evidenced by the new IMS Study Group “Auditory History” and its inaugural conference, “The Historical Ear: What is Auditory History?,” held in Paris in March 2026. But it is doing so in particular by drawing together approaches from across disciplines—musicology but also anthropology, art history, cultural studies, literature, and a host of other disciplines—to consider the auditory experiences and sonic environments of the past. In their post, one of the founders of this exciting new approach, Tin Cugelj, reflects on the possibilities of this exciting new approach.

While Chua and Bloechl emphasize new connections between people and Cugelj new pathways between disciplines, our final contributor explores literature as a new lens on music history. Reflecting on music and sound in Tanzanian literature, Imani Sanga explores how we might gain richer insights into the cultural work of music through its literary inscription. Together, these contributors paint a picture of what musicology is turning into. These posts offer new approaches to engage what is perhaps now the pressing question: how do we know musics’ histories?