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Theorizing Aesthetics in a Practical Musicology

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  • By Simon Zagorski-Thomas
  • Source: The Intellect Handbook of Popular Music Methodologies , pp 52-66
  • Publication Date: June 2025
  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/9781835951033_5
  • Language: English
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Having spent a large proportion of my academic career focused on theories of practice and vocational pedagogy, I have noticed a continuing tension between musicology about how things are (or were) done and how they could be done ‘better’. While ethnographic and auto-ethnographic approaches fall into the first category, artistic research, practice research and a good deal of pedagogy research fall into the second. This chapter explores how aesthetics can be incorporated into research questions and, by extension, how subjectivity can be included in research methods.

My recent work, in particular a forthcoming monograph on Practical Musicology, has identified categories of practice research (artistic, pragmatic and activist) in which the judgments of quality – whereby the outcomes of the research are assessed – are also developed throughout the research process as opposed to being established at the outset. Thus, for example, the artistic researcher is also documenting the development of an aesthetic for the work as well as any technical or conceptual innovations. And, of course, that aesthetic is the result of implicit and explicit negotiations between individual and socially constructed factors.

How, then, do such individual case-study approaches constitute research in the sense of producing shareable new knowledge? What could be widely applicable about such notionally individual knowledge? I will explore two strands of this question in detail through this chapter which suggest avenues of new knowledge which are broadly applicable:

  • 1.  How do these negotiations between individually and socially constructed aesthetics occur and how do they produce implications for other practitioners?
  • 2.  What is the meta-narrative of how aesthetics develop through creative practice? How can we get better at ‘doing music better’?

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References

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References

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  2. Albini, S. (1993), ‘The problem with music’, The Baffler, December 1993, https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-problem-with-music. Accessed 20 October 2018 .
     [Google Scholar]
  3. Borgdorff, H. (2012), The Conflict of the Faculties: Perspectives on Artistic Research and Academia, Amsterdam: Leiden University Press.
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  4. Bourdieu, P. (1986), The Forms of Capital, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley Online Library.
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  5. Bourdieu, P. (1993), The Field of Cultural Production, New York: Columbia University Press.
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  6. Bourdieu, P. (1996), The State Nobility: Elite Schools in the Field of Power (trans. L. Clough), Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
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  7. Bowman, R. Danielsen, A. and Théberge, P. (2013), ‘Rhythm sections … in the studio panel discussion’, in Performance in the Studio Online Conference, Association for the Study of the Art of Record Production, https://www.artofrecordproduction.com/aorpjoom/component/easyblog/categories/rhythm-sections. Accessed 8 February 2020 .
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  8. Brooks, W. (2021), Experience Music Experiment: Pragmatism and Artistic Research, Ghent: Leuven University Press (Orpheus Institute Series).
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  9. Bruford, B. (2018), Uncharted: Creativity and the Expert Drummer, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press (Tracking Pop).
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  10. Bulley, J. and Şahin, Ö. (2021), Practice Research – Report 1: What Is Practice Research? and Report 2: How Can Practice Research Be Shared?, London: PRAG-UK, https://doi.org/10.23636/1347.
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  12. Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1988), ‘Society, culture and person: A systems view of creativity’, in R. Sternberg (ed.), The Nature of Creativity: Contemporary Psychological Perspectives, New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 325–39.
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  14. Emirbayer, M. and Williams, E. (2005), ‘Bourdieu and social work’, Social Service Review, 79: 4, pp. 689–725.
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  18. Goodman, N. (1968), Language of Art, Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Company.
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  20. Impett, J. , De Assis, P. , Beghin, T. , Laws, C. and Vaes, L. (September 2019), Artistic Research for Music: An Introduction [Massive Open Online Course], Ghent: Leuven University Press (Orpheus Institute Series), http://www.orpheusinstituut.be/mooc. Accessed 17 September 2021 .
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  22. Ingold, T. (2013), Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, London and New York: Routledge.
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  23. Kelly, G. (1955), The Psychology of Personal Constructs, New York: Norton.
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  24. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1999), Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought, New York: Basic Books.
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  25. Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (2003), Metaphors We Live By, 2nd ed., Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
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  27. Long Lingo, E. and O'Mahony, S. (2010), ‘Nexus work: Brokerage on creative projects’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 55, pp. 47–81.
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  28. Lounsbury, M. , Ventresca, M. and Hirsch, P. M. (2003), ‘Social movements, field frames and industry emergence: A cultural–political perspective on US recycling’, Socio-Economic Review, 1:1, pp. 71–104.
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  30. Nettl, B. (1995), Heartland Excursions: Ethnomusicological Reflections of Schools of Music (Music in American Life), Urbano, IL and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press.
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  31. Noë, A. (2004), Action in Perception, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.66
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  32. O'Mahony, S. and Bechky, B. A. (2008), ‘Boundary organizations: Enabling collaboration among unexpected allies’, Administrative Science Quarterly, 53:3, pp. 422–59.
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  33. Sæther, E. (2021), ‘The art(s) of getting lost: Halting places for culturally responsive research methods’, in A. A. Kallio , H. Westerlund , S. Karlsen , K. Marsh and E. Sæther (eds), The Politics of Diversity in Music Education, Landscapes: The Arts, Aesthetics, and Education, 29, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 15–27.
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  34. Slager, H. (ed.) (2021), The Postresearch Condition, Utrecht: Metropolis M Books.
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  35. Smith, G. D. (2022), Magical Nexus: A Philosophy of Playing Drum Kit, Elements: Twenty-First Century Music Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press .
     [Google Scholar]
  36. Turnbull, H. W. (ed.) (1959), The Correspondence of Isaac Newton: 1661–1675, London: The Royal Society.
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  37. Vygotsky, L. S. (1980), Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
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  39. Zagorski-Thomas, S. (2014), The Musicology of Record Production, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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  40. Zagorski-Thomas, S. (2018), ‘Directions in music by Miles Davis: Using the ecological approach to perception and embodied cognition to analyze the creative use of recording technology in Bitches Brew’, Technology and Culture, 59:4, pp. 850–74.
     [Google Scholar]
  41. Zagorski-Thomas, S. (2022), Practical Musicology, New York: Bloomsbury Academic (21st Century Music Practices).
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