Russian musicology in the dissertation space
The article presents an overview of Russian dissertation researches on music over the past half a century for the purpose of analysis, evaluation, and identification of perspectives. The question is raised about attributing them not to field of academic research, which implies the obligatory presence of discoveries in the observed phenomena, but to the area of the qualification procedure of a university teacher. The analysis focuses on the musical material and issues - theoretically defined research angles. The topics of dissertations are covered in connection with the research objects: a composer, a musical piece or its structural elements, a performance, a historical context of music culture. For persuasiveness and specificity, the study is confined to the time periods of five years - the first half of the 80s and the last five years of our contemporary epoch. A detailed description of the researches allows us to draw conclusions about certain inertia of the research objects and issues chosen by the scholars. Its assessment allows the author to formulate a conclusion that their dissertations often turn out to be "secondary" in relation to the actual musicology. The naturalness of the process lies in fundamental orientation of the authors - university teachers - not to discoveries, but to absorption of the content and methodology of musicology. The inertia of the modern music researches is explained by the lack of reactions to the main factor - the change in the system of musical culture. Therefore, the prospects for dissertation researches are directly dependent on the musicology objective to explain the mechanisms of the emergence of new phenomena and processes, such as a replacement of the audience's interest in a philharmonic hall with musical events in the digital space, a new layer of specific "amateur art" - Internet visualizations, media in pedagogy, etc.