Abstract

Anthropological criteria can be integrated into historicist lexicology. Anthropological analysis could help a wider differentiation of musicological language. Indeed, not all the meanings of a musical term change homogeneously during the same time-span; on the contrary, some appear to evolve more slowly than others. For this reason by turning its attention mainly to those meanings that are under constant change, historicism often omits those significant aspects that remain almost unchanged or that evolve very slowly, thus running the risk of not exhaustively covering the understanding of a musical term.