Practical Musicology

Practical Musicology outlines a theoretical framework for studying a broad range of current musical practices and aims to provoke discussion about key issues in the rapidly expanding area of practical musicology: the study of how music is made. The book explores various forms of practice ranging from performance and composition to listening and dancing, from historically informed performances of Bach in the USA to Indonesian Dubstep or Australian musical theatre, and from Irish traditional music played by French musicians from Toulouse to Brazilian thrash metal or K-Pop. Drawing on neuroscience, cognitive psychology, ecological approaches in anthropology, and the social construction of technology and creativity, Zagorski-Thomas uses a series of case studies and examples to investigate how practice is already being studied and to suggest a principle for how it might continue to develop, based around the assertion that musicking cannot be treated as a culturally or ideologically neutral phenomenon.