Musicology conjures up images of someone rummaging through dusty volumes in musty basements looking for a long-dead composer's works.

Yet to Brian Stewart it is much more.

As a musicologist primarily interested in 18th century music, Stewart conducts research in music history which enables him to define the trends which affected the direction music took, he said.

Stewart, an assistant professor of music history, spent the past two summers and part of December in East Germany researching German composer Georg Telemann. Telemann (1681-1767) was particularly important in determining the direction German music took because his style changed with the times, Stewart said. Other composers of the period, such as conservative Johann Sebastian Bach, maintained the same basic composition style, he said.

Telemann was interested in the latest musical style, and his compositions started with a style similar to Bach and ended with a style similar to Mozart, Stewart said. Because of his stylistic development, his contemporaries looked to him for guidelines, Stewart said.

"Telemann is a very interesting composer in many respects," Stewart said. "He was a very prolific composer. He wrote more than three times as much music as Bach, and was more famous with his contemporaries."

Stewart said his fascination with Georg Telemann began when he was in ninth grade. He taught himself to play the recorder, he said, for which Telemann wrote a lot of music. His interest in Telemann increased when he became a major in music history and musicology.

Stewart's interest in music history and musicology evolved for two reasons, he said. First, he said he didn't have the will to practice as much as it would take to be a really good musician, and second, he said he was always more interested in the historical aspects of musical performance.

The Telemann research project started in December of 1986, and is a cooperative effort between Penn State, the Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities, which is based in Menlo Park, Calif., and the Zentrum fuer Telemann-Forschung, an East German institution.

Stewart said he spends most of his time in libraries with large music collections. His primary job is dating manuscripts of Telemann's works, he said. Most of the manuscripts are copies of the original works, which makes them difficult to date, because he can not see changes in Telemann's hand-writing and because there are not dates on the works, he said.

"It's a bit like detective work," he said.

Stewart said he tries to find water marks in the copies to identify the paper's manufacturer, and keeps a journal of different copiers' handwriting styles to help date the copies. Stewart said that all copiers had their own style when they wrote flats and sharps, treble and bass clef signs, and key signatures.

"You sit in a library and see a manuscript and see the handwriting and think, where have I seen this before?" he said.

Once when he was working in the library in Darmstadt, West Germany he found an autograph manuscript; a work written by Telemann himself. He took his finding to the librarian, who did not know the library had an authentic Telemann manuscript.

Stewart said an autograph manuscript is more important than a copy because the composer's actual writing can be studied without any mistakes or changes that a copier might have made.

Today, composers write full scores for every instrument in the work; in the past they may have only written bit parts for the musicians, Stewart said.

Stewart said once there was confusion as to the authenticity of the oboe parts in a Telemann violin concerto. He said there were two oboe parts in the concerto, which some researchers thought might have been added by someone else. When the autograph manuscript was found, Stewart said, they saw that Telemann intended for both oboe parts to be there.

Stewart has received some support for his work form the graduate school of music at Penn State, but most of his support comes from the Center for Computer Assisted Research in the Humanities, said James Moeser, dean of the college of arts and architecture. The school's main assistance is in the form of release time which gives Stewart the chance to take the time to do his research, Moeser said.

"It's cutting edge research," Moeser said. "It does a lot for our reputation in the field of musicology."

Moeser said Stewart's work is beneficial because Telemann has been neglected by music scholars until now.

Stewart uses a portable computer to keep track of his data and make comparisons and draw conclusions that would be difficult otherwise. Even with the use of computers, Stewart's Telemann research is a long-term project.

"It may take thirty years," he said. "That's the estimate I usually give people."