What Is Music History? Meaning, Eras, and Significance

Unpack what is music history: its meaning, major eras (Western & global), and profound significance. Explore diverse musical pasts & sharpen your critical listening.

Music history is the study of how music has developed across time and cultures, and what those sounds tell us about the people who made them. Behind that straightforward definition sit three questions every curious listener eventually asks: What exactly does the term mean, which eras mark the biggest turning points, and why does any of it matter today? For generations the answers came almost exclusively from Western concert halls, but modern scholarship now weaves in global, popular, and folk traditions that refract the story through many more voices.

This guide offers a quick grounding before you hit play. We’ll begin with a nuts-and-bolts definition, trace the dawn of human music making, sprint through the Medieval-to-streaming-age timeline, zoom out to parallel histories from Africa, Asia, and the Americas, and close with practical tips and lightning-round FAQs. To start, let’s pin down exactly what scholars mean when they say “music history.”

Defining the Field of Music History

Ask five scholars to define music history and you’ll hear several accents. Some will speak in the language of dusty manuscripts, others will reference TikTok data sets, and a few will point to a village drum circle they recorded last summer. All of them, however, are concerned with the same puzzle: how human beings organize sound over time and why those choices matter. This section breaks the discipline into its main branches, explains the two basic ways historians structure their research, and closes with a pocket-size timeline you can pin on your practice-room wall.

Historical Musicology vs. Popular and Ethnomusicology

Historical musicology grew out of nineteenth-century German scholarship and still centers on written scores, composers’ biographies, and stylistic analysis of what textbooks call “art music.” Think Monteverdi motets, Beethoven sketches, or Schoenberg serial rows. The American Musicological Society (AMS) and journals like The Journal of the American Musicological Society remain its flagship venues.

Ethnomusicology, by contrast, sprang from anthropology. Its researchers head into communities—be that an Indonesian gamelan troupe or a Brooklyn drill studio—armed with portable recorders and participant-observation notebooks. The Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) and Ethnomusicology journal foreground this method. Fieldwork, oral history, and cultural context drive the narrative as much as chord progressions do.

Popular-music studies bridges the two. Scholars analyze mass-mediated genres—jazz, rock, hip-hop, K-pop—using tools from both camps: archival contracts, Pro Tools stems, sociological surveys. The International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) anchors this niche.

Lines blur constantly. A dissertation on Beyoncé’s use of Baroque ground bass, or on how medieval Sephardic melodies thrive in today’s Ladino revival, belongs to all three sub-fields. In other words, if you’re asking “what is music history?” the safest answer is “any rigorous look at how music changes and circulates.”