The Detmold University of Music was founded in 1946 as the Northwest German Academy of Music. Since then, musicology/music history has been taught at the university as part of the artistic and music education programmes.

As music academies did not have the right to award doctorates at that time, possibilities were explored in the early 1970s to establish an academic musicology programme in Detmold. A cooperation with one of the neighbouring young universities offered itself as a way to achieve this. Initially, the University of Bielefeld was considered, and from 1974 talks were held with Paderborn University, which had been founded two years earlier. In April 1976, a first cooperation agreement was signed between the then rectors Martin Stephani (Detmold University of Music) and Friedrich Buttler (Paderborn University of Applied Sciences), and at the end of the same year, the Paderborn committees decided to introduce a musicology degree programme. On 13 October 1977, the decision was made to establish an independent institution for musicology in Detmold, in which the local professors of musicology, Arno Forchert, Gerhard Allroggen and Klaus Rönnau (who was the first of the Detmold lecturers already employed in Paderborn), were united to form a three-member faculty. The new musicology degree programme was opened in spring 1978 with a lecture by Arno Forchert.

At the beginning of 1991, a ministry decree institutionalised the Musicology Department as a joint institution of the Paderborn University and the Detmold University of Music. To this day, the agreement reached at the time remains in force, with academic staff based in Paderborn and non-academic staff in Detmold. The seminar is based in Detmold, and the University of Music provides the building and the institutions. The costs of the library are borne equally by the Paderborn University and the Detmold University of Music.

Initially housed in Allee 20, in 1995 the department moved into one of Detmold's most beautiful villas at Gartenstraße 20, which not only houses the teaching staff's offices, but also workrooms for students and an extensive reference library.

In the thirty years of its existence, i.e. until 2007, the seminar has produced numerous graduates, including 29 doctorates and two habilitations. No fewer than five former Detmold doctoral candidates now hold the title of professor, while many others have worked as employees at universities and research institutions. In the anniversary year 2007, the seminar itself is the centre of several research projects and is considered to be a top address in the field of music editing in particular (DFG research project on the digital music edition Edirom, Carl Maria von Weber Complete Edition). Another focus of its work is the aesthetics and philosophy of music in the Romantic period. With the first appointment of Beatrix Borchard to the professorship for musicological gender research in 2001, women's and gender studies had already been added as an important field.

As part of the implementation of the Bologna Process, three new degree programmes were introduced in the 2007/2008 winter semester: the Bachelor of Musicology, the two-subject Bachelor of Cultural Studies with Musicology as one of the two subjects and the Master of Musicology. The conversion of the degree programmes from the Magister degree to the Bachelor's/Master's degrees was used as an opportunity to try something completely new - students on the Bachelor's degree programme in Musicology receive lessons in an instrument or singing - and thus further strengthen the connection between art and science - college and university.

More information on the history of the seminar can be found in the article "Thirty years of musicology in Detmold", which can be viewed here:
Prof. Dr. Rebecca Grotjahn: "Dreißig Jahre Musikwissenschaft in Detmold", in: ad notam, Jahrbuch der Hochschule für Musik Detmold 06/07, published by the Detmold University of Music in conjunction with the "Gesellschaft der Freunde und Förderer der Hochschule für Musik Detmold e.V.", Detmold 2007, pp. 78-81.

We would also like to refer you to the Wikipedia article with some further, more recent information: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musikwissenschaftliches_Seminar_Detmold/Paderborn