EarlyMuse COST action
Published September 5, 2026 | Version v1
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COST Action EarlyMuse 2022-2026. Six Reports on Musicology in Europe

Authors/Creators

  • 1. ROR icon Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
  • 2. Utrecht University

Description

This volume gathers the six reports produced between 2025 and 2026 within COST Action CA21161, A New Ecosystem of Early Music Studies (EarlyMuse), the first COST Action ever devoted to historical musicology. Running from September 2022 to October 2026, the Action brought together close to three hundred researchers from some forty countries in five working groups: Education, Sources, Publications, Performances and Policies.

Each report was drafted, discussed and published separately, with its own editorial team, corpus, method and primary audience. Assembled here, they describe a single object from six angles: not "early music" as a repertory, but the ecosystem in which musical scholarship is now produced: the departments and conservatoires that train and employ musicologists, the doctoral frameworks that certify their work, the libraries and archives that hold the sources, the digital infrastructures and computational tools that mediate access to them, the European funding architectures that decide which questions become fundable, and the professional and public worlds in which musical knowledge circulates.

The six reports cover: musicology as data science and heritage science; the mapping of musicology in European higher education and research institutions; musicology and artificial intelligence; historical musicology and European research infrastructures and initiatives (EOSC, ECCCH/ECHOES, the Data Space for Cultural Heritage, DARIAH, E-RIHS); doctoral-level artistic research in music; and musicology within Horizon Europe co-funded partnerships, notably Resilient Cultural Heritage and the emerging Virtual Worlds partnership.

Taken together, they document a growing mismatch between the intellectual vitality of the field and the fragility of the structures through which it is taught, documented, funded and made visible. Recurrent findings include the statistical invisibility of musicology in OECD, Eurostat and UNESCO classifications; the institutional cost of methodological pluralism; and the claim that the field is under-positioned rather than under-qualified for the European agendas now being written. The volume is neither a state of the art nor a synthesis nor a manifesto, but a handover document, a description of the terrain, closing with recommendations addressed to institutions, national funders, European bodies, learned societies and individual researchers.

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Additional details

Identifiers

ISBN
978-2-489-34201-7

Related works

Compiles
Publication: 10.5281/zenodo.21166717 (DOI)
Publication: 10.5281/zenodo.21166833 (DOI)
Publication: 10.5281/zenodo.20639951 (DOI)
Publication: 10.5281/zenodo.20639784 (DOI)
Publication: 10.5281/zenodo.18334685 (DOI)

Funding

European Cooperation in Science and Technology
EarlyMuse CA21161

Dates

Copyrighted
2026-10