It seems to me that a lot of good music research needs to be interdisciplinary. After all, music connects with a wide range of disciplines in a variety of ways. In fact, although we often picture research as being the work of specialists, trying to get a fuller picture of whatever one is researching frequently leads the researcher to acquiring knowledge beyond his or her own field.
Here are the two recent examples that got me thinking about this:
A student is working on a term paper about Beethoven's Ninth Symphony. The text in the symphony is by Schiller. For this student to do a good job with his research, he needs to go beyond what the books about Beethoven 9 say about Schiller to get an idea of the place of this text in his overall output, etc.
I am researching Erik Satie's Sports et Divertissements. I need to give a short presentation for Chowan's Symposium on Monday. My plan was to give a little general background and play a few of the pieces while pointing out what I have noticed about them, mostly from a theory and performance angle. Most of the reading I did was supporting that approach until I discovered an excellent book by Mary E. Brown that points out the fact that the person most responsible for the publication of the piano pieces and the drawings that went along with them had a background in women's fashion magazines, and the whole layout of Sports et Divertissements comes from that realm.
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