Dr. Daniel Müllensiefen

The first SysMus interview was conducted with Dr. Daniel Müllensiefen in June 2010. Daniel is currently a lecturer at the Department of Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, and co-director of the MSc in Music, Mind & Brain programme. He holds a PhD in systematic musicology from the University of Hamburg, Germany.

M. M. (Manuela Marin): Hi Daniel, thanks for agreeing to talk with me about systematic musicology. What was your motivation for studying musicology, and specifically, systematic musicology?

D. M. (Daniel Müllensiefen): I chose music as a major option in my last years in secondary school, and I soon noticed that I was very much intrigued by the scientific questions with regard to music that you can ask, for example, how do musical instruments produce sound, is there something about music or certain musical pieces that all people experience, such as universal emotions triggered by certain musical features, or why can people use the same piece of music in very different ways? Luckily enough, my music teacher knew about the degree in systematic musicology offered by the University of Hamburg, and that’s how I got to study it as my major subject.

M. M.: Did you have any particular career plans before beginning your musicology degree?

D. M.: I think you can’t avoid having career plans when you start studying musicology because everyone is asking you what you are going to do with your degree, and you are under constant pressure to justify your choice.

M. M.: Yes, I experienced this in a similar way. So what did you answer?

D. M.: My initial career idea was music journalism, and I actually did journalism as one of my minor subjects at uni.

M. M.: You also worked in the private industry. How many of your German colleagues who you know from your studies work as researchers?

D. M.: I would say 5% of the people I met in my first years stayed in academia. As you know, musicology is a small discipline. It is very academic and does not have very clear career options, unlike for example studies in law, medicine, economics or psychology. There simply aren’t many jobs available inviting you to pursue a career in musicology, let alone systematic musicology. So most of my fellow students are not working at universities anymore.

M. M.: In what sectors of the private industry do these systematic musicologists work?

D. M.: This is an interesting question, but unfortunately there are no official statistics that would provide a precise answer. I compiled a list for the students of our Master’s degree in Music Mind and Brain at Goldsmiths to give them an idea of where people end up working if they don’t stay in academia. The list is purely based on my memory of where my former classmates are now employed and, of course, by no means exhaustive. Most of them stayed in jobs that have some connection to music such as the music industry (recording industry, music publishers etc.), music media (radio, TV, music press, online), event organisation (music events, festivals, societies, running music venues etc.), music teaching, or music therapy. Some make a living by composing (often film music, music for commercials, arranging music or writing music to go along with live performances) and some have managed to establish themselves as professional music performers.

M. M.: And do some of your ex-colleagues work in fields unrelated to music?

D. M.: Yes indeed, a substantial proportion of people who I know from my studies in systematic musicology are now in jobs that aren’t related to music in any sense. In some cases the decision not to work in a music-related area has been deliberate while in other cases it was merely by chance and coincidental circumstances. Quite a few people in this group work in advertising, do PR jobs or manage communication of private companies or large public institutions.

M. M.: How would you explain this?

D. M.: Ultimately, this might have something to do with the generic skills that you acquire as a systematic musicologist, with one foot in the humanities camp and the other one in science. By generic skills I mean something like reading difficult texts, understanding complex situations and writing about them in an analytic and accessible way. Many people I knew now work in the media industry, especially online media or have jobs that have to do with computers in one way or another. This might actually be a cohort effect of my generation (study years in the 1990s) where the computer penetrated every household and the internet was born as a mass medium. These sectors were growing staggeringly fast in the 1990s and early 2000s, so there was a huge demand on the labour market for people who knew how to operate a computer.

M. M.: In your opinion, what are the advantages and disadvantages of the current European systematic musicology programs?

D. M.: The big advantage of the European study programmes in systematic musicology is their interdisciplinarity and openness to encompass a wide range of sub-disciplines and approaches. This stretches from philosophical aesthetics and cultural studies at the humanist end via music sociology and the systematic study of music education to hard-nosed science such as the neuroscience of music, music cognition, music informatics or musical acoustics and the analysis of music recordings with signal processing techniques. At the same time, this openness to embrace almost every discipline that can be applied to music is also one of the big disadvantages of the current programmes. For an outsider, and actually not only for them, it is sometimes difficult to see what the common and unifying core or focus of systematic musicology as a discipline actually is.

M. M.: What would you change in the current curricula?

D. M.: I think it would be quite helpful to establish a common canon of core skills and common knowledge that are taught to systematic musicologists which would help towards establishing a clear identity of the discipline but also to provide students with a good knowledge base. This would be similar to the core canon of propaedeutica that is established in historical musicology (harmony and counterpoint, music analysis, paleography). I often had conversations with systematic musicology students who discovered to their very surprise that you could gain completely different notions of what systematic musicology is depending on what lectures you go to and who you are taught by. The knowledge that two students have when they graduate from the same institution in the same year often largely depends on whether they have taken all the pop music history courses or mainly hung around in music informatics classes.

M. M.: Yes, I agree, but some programmes have introductory courses, offering students an idea about what systematic musicology may comprise. Later, the students can choose to specialize in one subfield, depending on the research focus of the professors working in the departments. This was at least the case for the programme I took at the University of Graz in Austria. Was this different for you in Hamburg?

D. M.: No, no, the degree in Hamburg has a number of compulsory introductory modules including research methods, acoustics and music psychology. But this not the case for all universities, especially when systematic musicology is not offered as a major option. Also, it would be interesting to think about what is taught in these modules. This is usually less of an issue with statistics or acoustics where you progress from simple to complex materials, but in introductory modules for music psychology you find a huge variety of topics that are taught at different universities. Just to give one example, one skill that I find extremely valuable and which is taught in most psychology curricula but hardly ever as part of a systematic musicology syllabus is the writing of empirical papers and reports, although systematic musicology is commonly defined as a largely empirical discipline.

M. M.: You are working in a country [United Kingdom] in which systematic musicology is not an established concept and where degrees in systematic musicology are not offered. How do you feel about it?

D. M.: Of course I feel very sorry for the British not to have discovered yet what an exciting discipline systematic musicology actually is [smiles]. On the other hand, I find myself in a constant personality crisis [quickly grabs a tissue]. When applying for jobs or grants in this country I have learned not to mention, or at least to downplay, my background in systematic musicology. No one would understand what I did for my degrees and what the qualifications are that I have. As a result, I have worked as a computer scientist in a computing department and as a psychologist in a psychology department since I came to the UK, but I have always done research that would qualify as systematic musicology in continental Europe.

M. M.: Why do you think is systematic musicology a useful concept?

D. M.: Because music is such a complex phenomenon. For a comprehensive understanding of music and even for the well-designed study of most aspects of music good knowledge from several different disciplines is required to avoid the pitfalls of naivety. Sometimes you come across studies where the authors might have a thorough understanding of their own discipline, for example engineering, psychology, informatics, but are naïve in their assumptions about how music or musical behaviour works in the real world. In principle, systematic musicology was designed against this naivety and towards a comprehensive study of music taking into account the perspectives of all relevant disciplines.

M. M.: What do you think about our new conference series SysMus?

D. M.: It was about time! I was very active as part of the German Association of Musicology Students (DVSM) in the 1990s and among other things I organised a students’ conference in Hamburg in 1995. It struck me back then that many of the DVSM conference themes were very close to questions that would be discussed within systematic musicology, and this was despite the fact that the DVSM was open to all musicology students and indeed most students actually had a background in historical musicology. It seems like there has always been a demand for a conference series like SysMus, and I’m glad that you were able to organise these conferences at an international level and at such a high standard of professionalism!

M. M.: Many thanks for your time and the positive feedback. Good luck with your future career!

D. M.: Thanks! It was a pleasure talking to you.