What is 'Professional Musicology' – and does it have a future?

Abstract

What is professional musicology – and does it have a future? This was the title that almost immediately came to my mind when professor Lars Bergman, Chair of Musicology
at Uppsala University, and Chairman of the Swedish Society for Musicology (Svenska
samfundet för musikforskning), invited me to deliver the Norlind Lecture, which is the
traditional keynote lecture to the annual meeting of the Swedish Society for Musicology.
What is professional musicology – and does it have a future? The double question of this
title is based on my personal experience in the discipline of musicology in various countries and on various continents, covering a period of more than 25 years – a period in
which our discipline has undergone incisive changes that, in turn, go hand in hand with
the more general development not only of the university system, but also of society and
its organization as such.
For me, it was a special honour to be invited to give that lecture – not least, since the
2016 meeting of the Swedish Society for Musicology was not just any annual meeting,
but the meeting celebrating 100 years of musicology in Sweden. This seemed indeed the
right occasion to draw some conclusions – the conclusions of a scholar’s journey from
being a full-blood musicologist via working as a cultural historian to becoming an expert in veterinarian anatomy and alternative methods of medical treatment for animals.
Strange as it may sound: my schooling in musicology is still of great use of me when I
teach anatomy to students of veterinarian medicine and physiotherapy – due to the firm
basis of professionalism when I studied musicology and wrote my Ph.D. dissertation in
the 1990s. It was this question of professionalism that I wished to take up in the Norlind
Lecture in Växjö.