Academic discussions on music from various aspects have existed since ancient times. Aristides Quintilian (about 2nd to 3rd century) of ancient Greece once wrote in his book "On Music" Try to divide music into three parts: theory, technology and performance. The real consideration of classifying music into specialized categories and systematizing it to form the discipline of musicology began in the second half of the 19th century. The "Annals of Music" compiled by F. Clusander in 1863 was generally regarded as the modern Western The beginning of musicology. In the preface to Volume 1 of the journal, Clusander emphasized that music research should have the same level of accuracy and rigor as the natural sciences and humanities.

In 1885, the Austrian musicologist G. Adler published a paper "The Field, Methods and Objectives of Musicology", which divided the various categories of musicology into two major departments. The first department The first part is historical musicology, including the general history of music and various professional histories; the second part is systematic musicology, including rules that can be applied to different fields of music, such as rules for studying harmony, rhythm, melody, music aesthetics and music psychology. , music pedagogy and teaching methods, comparative research on music ethnology and folklore, etc. In addition, the auxiliary disciplines of these two departments are listed, such as philology, biography, historiography, literary history, pantomime and dance history in the history department; acoustics, physiology, logic, etc. in the system department. His classification became the basic basis for the subsequent classification of German and Austrian systematic musicology.

So far, many systems have emerged in musicology, the more important of which is H. Liman's "Introduction to Musicology", which divides music into five departments, namely acoustic physics and acoustic psychology. , music aesthetics, music theory and music history research (comparative musicology). The characteristic of Riemann's system is that it emphasizes music history and music theory. It believes that music aesthetics is a speculative subject in theory, and music theory is actually close to applied music aesthetics. H.J. Moser (1889~1967) classified musicology according to the relationship between four aspects, namely: ① Philosophical musicology, that is, music aesthetics. ②Musicology of natural science, including acoustics, acoustic physiology, acoustic psychology, and music technology. ③Musicology of folklore, including comparative musicology and instrumental science. ④ Musicology of spiritual science, that is, the history of Western music. As for music theory in the narrow sense, it is listed as practical theory, alongside the above items. The characteristic of Moser's system is that it links musicology with general art, with music history as its focus.