Sheer Folk

What is Ethnomusicology?[1]

Taking into account the precept that music takes meaning from its cultural context, ethnomusicology can be defined as the study of music that stresses the importance of music in and as culture. The term, which contracts ethnology with musicology, was first used to denote the discipline in 1950 by Jaap Kunst[2], replacing comparative musicology (from the German vergleichende Musikwissenshaft), the accepted name from the late nineteenth century. Kunst argued, along with others, that comparison neither distinguished nor sufficiently delineated the research in this discipline.

At the onset, studies focused on music outside the Western art music tradition. Early researchers came from a range of disciplines and geographic areas—ethnology and anthropology in the United States, musicology and music folklore in the United Kingdom, eastern Europe and Latin America, and psychology in Germany and Austria. The disparate academic backgrounds of the researchers imparted an interdisciplinary cast that persists in ethnomusicology, albeit with changing disciplinary shades.

Music outside the Western tradition continue to hold an important position within ethnomusicology. However, the study of Western art music often has been implicit, through comparison, in the research. A few scholars explicitly have made Western music, even art music, a focus of their work.

Moreover, research concerned with music in urban and complex societies has emerged as an important concern of ethnomusicologists. More generally, ethnomusicology seeks to explain and champion neglected and undervalued kinds of music and to denounce ethnocentric attitudes toward the music of other communities and cultures.

Ethnomusicology distinguishes itself from other academic disciplines through specific topics and issues of interest: origins and universals of music, musical change and conflict, the function of music within society, and relationships between language and music, to list a few historically prominent examples. Partly because of this issue-based orientation, scholars today most often define the discipline by means of a shared, if eclectic, corpus of research theory and methodology, rather than by geographic area. Ethnomusicology can be characterized further by the persistent examination of the bounds and objectives of the discipline and by critical inquiry into its own definition.

Charles Seeger argued that the most general term, musicology, would best describe this discipline that views all kinds of music from all times with equal scholarly import, rather than restricting the general term to historical musicology, a discipline largely concerned with Western art music. And George List, writing in 1979, questioned if a single definition was even possible. Other writers have argued similarly. The inquiry into definitions stems, in part, from the divergent theoretical and methodological bases of the researchers seeking common modes of discourse. Another aspect of this questioning involves efforts to gain institutional support and position for ethnomusicology vis-à-vis other more established disciplines, especially anthropology and historical musicology.

Guido Adler, in his 1885 definition of musicology and its divisions, saw the focus of comparative musicology as the classification of the different kinds of music of the world. Thus, at Adler’s christening of the discipline within academe, comparison was the discipline’s central feature. Two technical developments made the comparison of oral-tradition music feasible: the invention of the phonograph by Thomas Edison in 1877 and the development of a pitch measurement system[3] by the English physicist and phonetician Alexander J. Ellis. The phonograph facilitated the collection of music data, previously a Herculean task limited by one’s musical ear and access to cooperative performers. Ellis’ cents system of measurement, outlined in his 1885 article “On the Musical Scales of Various Nations,” made possible a more objective comparison of pitch elements based on the division of the octave into 1,200 equal units.

Comparison infused much early ethnomusicological research in the United States. From the nineteenth century, scholars working on Native American music, most conspicuously Alice Cunningham Fletcher and Frances Densmore, created monographs on the music of individual Native American cultures. Stemming, in part, from the Austrian Kulturhistorische Schule (culture history school), students of Franz Boas, however, sought to organize Native American cultures into geographic areas established by shared cultural traits. George Herzog, who had worked with both Hornbostel and Boas, applied the notion of culture areas in his “The Yuman Musical Style” (1928). Helen Roberts used this approach to classify Native American musical styles and instruments in her 1936 book, Musical Areas in Aboriginal North America.

Comparison was explicit in researching the relationships between African-American musical practices and those found in Africa, seen most notably in the work of Melville Herskovits and Richard Waterman. Alan Lomax’s research methodology of cantometrics, exemplified in the 1968 publication Folk Song Style and Culture, linked musical style with social organization and took comparison as its central feature.

The use of the term comparative musicology declined in the 1940s, to be replaced eventually by ethnomusicology. Coupled with this change in labels, there was a sharp decline in work concerned with crosscultural comparison. In this new milieu, comparison was criticized and seen as premature until more detailed, accurate descriptions of individual cultures existed. Many discussions arose then corresponding to a realization that each culture’s music deserved study in its own right, in terms appropriate to that culture and built around methods and theories that emerged from the study of that culture and its music. Early comparative studies invariably focused on music expressions as artifacts, with little concern for the context of their existence. The shift toward the view of music as part of culture stressed methods of fieldwork, thereby making fieldwork a defining feature of ethnomusicology.

Since the late 1950s, ethnomusicological activity often has been characterized as oriented toward the methods and theories of either anthropology or historical musicology. Alan Merriam, the foremost champion of the anthropological orientation in ethnomusicology, suggested in The Anthropology of Music that the label ethnomusicology, combining ethnology with musicology, implies this division. Merriam drew upon methods and theories of anthropology, notably participant observation with extended periods of fieldwork and the theories of structuralism and functionalism. He argued as early as 1960 that ethnomusicology should be concerned with music in culture, later refined to music as culture, and he explicitly joined music to its cultural context in The Anthropology of Music through a definition of music that connected musical sound and musical behavior to a culture’s beliefs and concepts of music.

In Europe during the nineteenth century, research into local, oral traditions was driven by an interest in creating nationalist musics fortified and sustained through materials from peasant cultures. Composers such as Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály working in Hungary, Romania, and Transylvania and Percy Grainger in England drew upon indigenous folk music to create new art music compositions. Similarly, folk music enthusiasts, collectors, and analysts such as Cecil Sharp and Maud Karpeles researched the music of England and its immigrant offspring in the United States.

Ethnomusicology in Latin America displays the clearest correspondence to European folk music research. Latin American music scholars began to comprehend the relevance of local traditions as nationalizing forces. This recognition coincided with nationalist movements throughout Latin American—for instance, the Andean indigenismo and the Brazilian modernismo movements. In this context, such traditions were viewed as part of the opposition to dominant elite social classes who disregarded local traditions in favor of European-derived expressive forms.

The influence of folk music research in ethnomusicology has been circumscribed, too. The attention given to oral-tradition musics in ethnomusicology stems, in part, from early folk music research. However, with a theoretical framework that stresses comparison, folk music scholarship’s import was more significant during the early periods of ethnomusicology, especially in the domains of melodic analysis and tune classification. This research did not fall neatly within or completely outside definitions of ethnomusicology.

The term ethnomusicology today has currency remote to the academic discipline. Activities such as the performance and dissemination of non-Western and oral-tradition musics and the teaching of such musics in primary and secondary schools are often linked with ethnomusicology. Moreover, the term often is invoked to describe the work of Western composers who make use of the musical possibilities of non-Western sources, as well as those people involved with non-Western musics as part of a global economic marketplace.

Somewhat alarmed by these uses of the term, Alan Merriam in 1975 made the distinction between ethnomusicologists and others whose activities draw upon ethnomusicology. In 1956, Willard Rhodes, arguing the importance of ethnomusicological scholarship for both the social sciences and humanities, warned against narrowing the discipline’s scope and goals. His caveat evidently has been taken to heart, given the wide range of research and activities that now fall under the rubric ethnomusicology.

What is Ethnomusicology?[1]