Academic discipline concerned primarily with living music (and musical instruments and dance) of oral tradition, outside the limits of urban European art music.
IV. Contemporary theoretical issues
CAROLE PEGG (I), HELEN MYERS (II), PHILIP V. BOHLMAN (III), MARTIN STOKES (IV)
The origin of the term ‘ethnomusicology’ is attributed to the Dutch scholar Jaap Kunst (1950), who used it in the subtitle of his book Musicologica: a Study of the Nature of Ethno-musicology, its Problems, Methods, and Representative Personalities (Amsterdam, 1950). In European languages it is equated with French ethnomusicologie, Italian ethnomusicologia, German Ethnomusikologie or Musikethnologie and Polish etnografia muzyczna. The term ‘ethnomusicology’ has also been adopted by specialists in the Czech Republic and Slovakia and the Netherlands. In Germany and Austria some scholars continue to use the phrase Vergleichende Musikwissenschaft (‘comparative musicology’) to stress affiliation with the work of Stumpf, Hornbostel (Berlin) and Lach (Vienna) (see Wiora, 1975, Graf, 1974). Russian, Bulgarian and Ukrainian scholars distinguish etnomuzïkal'naya (the study of the music) from etnografiya muzïkal'naya (‘musical ethnography’) in turn equated with muzikal'naya fol'kloristika. Since the early 1980s, the term minze yinyuexue has been adopted in China to denote ‘ethnomusicology’ (see China §I). There are regional interpretations of the term. For instance, in Indonesia, both Western scholars and indigenous scholars trained in the West equate ethnomusicology with the study of Indonesian art music, while for scholars in the Academy of Central Java it is used to denote the study of the music of other Indonesian islands.
Historically ethnomusicology has been a scholarly discipline primarily within universities in the USA, Canada and Europe (see §II). Its specialists are trained in music or in anthropology, sometimes in both. Research is undertaken in university departments of music or anthropology, in ethnographic museums and in research institutes of national academies of science, found particularly in Eastern Europe.
As the following survey of musical activities illustrates (§II below), a multitude of musical research was being undertaken by a range of people from many Western countries prior to World War II including ethnologists, anthropologists, sociologists, comparative musicologists, folklorists, psychologists, physicists, missionaries, clerics, explorers, civil servants and enthusiasts, forming multiple influences both inside and outside the academy that affected contemporary thinking. This melting pot includes distinctive figures who have been simultaneously co-opted into the lineages of different disciplines. Ethnomusicologists and scholars in Folk Life Studies or Folkloristics, for instance, lay equal claim in their disciplinary ancestry to the English folksong collector cecil j. Sharp (see also Folk music, England, §II), the American Charles Seeger or the Hungarians Béla Bartók and zoltan Kodály, despite these individuals' own perceptions of their affiliations.
Similarly, a single geneological line is difficult to create for any single country, since these will vary individually according to a combination of personal interest and professional and cultural orientations. For instance, the myth of origin of the American discipline may be projected back to ‘founding fathers’ such as erich moritz von Hornbostel (1877–1935), who taught a heady interdisciplinary mix of music psychology, comparative musicology and music ethnology (Musikalische Völkerkunde, Musikethnologie) in Berlin supported by his mentor Carl Stumpf; Franz Boas (1858–1942) who, after moving to North America from Berlin in the 1880s, established fieldwork as a prerequisite of American anthropology and through his students influenced the anthropological strand of ethnomusicology; to George Herzog (1901–84), Hornbostel's student, who moved to Columbia University to study anthropology with Boas and established a consistent methodology for comparative musicological study and archival work; Charles Seeger (1886–1979) with his interest in vernacular musics and linguistics; and eventually to the musicological methods of mantle Hood and the anthropological methods of Alan P. Merriam which exacerbated the theoretical and methodological ‘great divide’. Alternative lineages might point to the work of ‘founding mothers’, such as Alice Cunningham Fletcher (1838–1923), who collaborated with the Omaha Indian Francis La Flesche (1857–1932) throughout her life, and Frances Densmore (1867–1957), author of over a dozen monographs on different Amerindian groups. Or they might draw upon figures from different disicplines relevant to the multiple approaches that have traditionally contributed to our understanding of music, such as Musicology, sociology, social and cultural anthropology, linguistics, psychology, folklore, political science and economics.
In Britain, the ‘father of Ethnomusicology’ is perceived generally as the British physicist and phonetician, alexander john Ellis (1814–90) who suggested that ‘acoustical phenomena’ should be studied by scientists rather than musicians, since those who had been trained in particular musical systems tended to consider ‘familiar’ sounds as ‘natural’ (1885). That the conceptualization of music – the way we listen to and evaluate musical sounds – is not value free was later to be developed in the British context by John Blacking in his theories on music as ‘humanly organized sound’. An anthropologist and ethnomusicologist from Cambridge is bound to point out the term ‘fieldwork’ was appropriated from natural science for anthropology by the ethnologist Alfred Cort Haddon, who led the ‘Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait’ in 1898. This multidisciplinary project, which included the physician and musician Charles Myers and photographer Anthony Wilkin, was equipped with the high technology of the day: two phonographs with recording and playback facility, a cine camera, still cameras and a magic lantern projector. Recordings of music on wax cylinders, some of which were transcribed using Ellis's system of ‘cents’ (division of the equal-tempered semitone into 100 equal parts), are now housed in the British Library National Sound Archives in the UK (Clayton, 1996) and Australia. The film – the first piece of ethnographic film made in the field – which depicts dance sequences performed at re-enactments of the Malu-Bomai ceremonies – now in the National Film Archives in the UK and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in Canberra. Several hundred field photographs including some of the masked dances of the Malu-Bomai cult are in the collections of the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The emphasis on direct field research on this expedition provided the basis for the development of intensive fieldwork as the essential methodology of British anthropology: ‘the ethnographic method’. Haddon's evocative description of the dance emphasizes ‘performance’ and ‘experience’ both of which are very much to the fore in contemporary ethnomusicological writings. From these origins, then, the anthropological lineage proceeds through the theoretical developments of Bronislaw Malinowski's strategizing Trobriand performer constantly reshaping tradition, through Radcliffe-Brown's elucidation of the power of the Andaman Islanders' music and dance to act as a moral force on the indivual (1922) and the parallel developments in; comparative musicology (e.g. Fox Strangways, 1914) and folk music research (Cecil Sharp and his descendants) before proceeding through Hamish Henderson at the School of Scottish Studies and John Blacking who moved from Cambridge to Paris then Belfast.
In addition to cropping up in different disciplinary lineages, certain personages appear in the national lineages of the same discipline. For instance, Constantin Brăiloiu who, following the Romanian Sociological School shaped by Dimitrie Gusti argued that music was indissolubly attached to social phenomena, is important for French, Romanian and Swiss ethnomusicology.
Not for the first time, ethnomusicology is faced with the need to reassess its perceptions of history (compare, for instance, the historical methodologies of §II and §III below), its subject matter, methods and ethics (see §IV). The subject matter of ethnomusicology has been constantly debated since its inception. Initially, it was perceived as all music outside the Western European art tradition and intended to exclude Western art and popular musics. It concerned itself with the musics of non-literate peoples; the orally transmitted music of cultures then perceived to be ‘high’ such as the traditional court and urban musics of China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, India, Iran and other Arabic-speaking countries; and ‘folk music’, which Nettl (1964) tentatively defined as the music in oral tradition found in those areas dominated by high cultures. At the beginning of the 21st century, ethnomusicology embraces the study of all musics in local and global contexts. Concerned primarily with living music (including music, song, dance and instruments), recent studies have also investigated music history (Blum, Bohlman and Neuman, 1991). A discipline that first examined music ‘in culture’ (Merriam, 1964) and then ‘as culture’, and has had ‘fieldwork’ as integral to its methodology now presents both ‘culture’ and ‘fieldwork’ as problematics rather than givens (see §IV).
Since its inception, ethnomusicology has always seen connections between itself and other disciplines, as outlined above. It never fitted happily into the modernist dichotomization between ‘us’ and ‘them’; the contemporary hot debate on whether musicology is part of ethnomusicology or vice versa therefore becomes irrelevant. Musicology is one of many theoretical and methodological interweaving strands in a discipline that recently moved in the West from concentrating on the traditional musics of the exotically removed ‘other’ to Popular music, both local and global, (e.g. Manuel, 1988; Waterman, 1990; Berliner, 1994; Mitchell, 1996; Schade-Poulsen, 1999), World music (e.g. Keil and Feld, 1994) and Western ‘art’ music (e.g. Born, 1995); from traditional interdisciplinary relationships to contemporary interactions with disciplines such as cultural studies (e.g. Lloyd, 1993; Straw, 1994) and performance studies (e.g. Schechner and Appel, 1990; Schieffelin, 1994; Pegg 2001); and from homogeneous, structural and interpretive perspectives to those of experience (e.g. Rice, 1994; Blacking, 1995). Ethnomusicology as a discipline is not homogeneous and, clearly, is no longer confined to the West or to Europe. It is now well placed to take on board the diverse national ethnomusicologies represented in this dictionary which include those who recently emerged from the former Soviet Union, non-European scholars and musicians untrained in the Western system.
See individual country articles for details of national archives and histoires as well as entries on cultural regions, concepts, genres, instruments and individual musicians. See also Ethnochoreology; Transcription; Notation, §II; Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM); International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM); and British Forum for Ethnomusicology (BFE).
2. Northern and western Europe.
3. Southern and eastern Europe.
Ethnomusicology, §II: History to 1945
Western interest in non-Western music dates back to the voyages of discovery, and the philosophical rationale for the study of foreign cultures derives from the Age of Enlightenment. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) argued that music is cultural not natural and that diverse peoples would react differently to ‘diverse musical accents’; his Dictionnaire de Musique (1768) includes samples of Swiss, Iranian, Chinese and Canadian Amerindian music.
As early as the 17th century Europeans, including missionaries, explorers and civil servants, made contributions to music research in the colonies, through references in diaries and monographs. Captain James Cook (1728–79) recorded careful descriptions of the music and dance of Pacific islanders (1784); the Swiss theologian Jean de Léry (1534–1611) wrote about Brazil in Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil (1578), which includes musical notation and describes antiphonal singing between men and women and dancers in elaborately feathered costumes. Jacques Cartier (1491–1557) observed Canadian Amerindian singing and dancing on his New World voyages (1534, 1535–6) and his crew entertained the Amerindians with ‘trompettes et aultres instruments de musique’ (Biggar, 1924).
The early literature is particularly rich in writings on Chinese music. The French Jesuit Jean-Baptiste du Halde (1674–1743) based his monograph, Description géographique, historique, chronologique, politique et physique de l’empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise (1735), on reports of Jesuit missionaries to China from the 16th century onwards. The French cleric Joseph Amiot (1718–93) served for some 60 years as a missionary in Beijing, where he wrote the pioneering study, Mémoire sur la musique des Chinois tant anciens que moderns (1779). The Irish-born Earl of MacCartney in 1793–4 led an embassy from the King of England to China, where he met with Father Amiot (1793–4; published, 1962). The party comprised 95 persons including a six-man German band that played for the Chinese on an assortment of string and wind instruments (supplied by the English musicologist Dr Charles Burney). The German theologian and music critic Gottfried Wilhelm Fink (1782–1846) published a monograph on Chinese and Hindustani music, Einiges über die Begründungsweise (1831). He also proposed an early diffusionist theory of European music (1831, Erste Wanderung der ältesten Tonkunst).
Francis Taylor Piggot, author of The Music and Musical Instruments of Japan (1893), spent years with Japanese musicians; his valuable treatise describes many aspects of Japanese musical life, some now obsolete. For the Arab world the Frenchman Guillaume-André Villoteau (1759–1839) worked at the request of General Bonaparte during the Egyptian campaign. In his three major works Villoteau discussed Arab folk and art music, the music of minority groups in Egypt from Asia, Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa and Ethiopian, Armenian and Greek music (1812, 1813, 1816). The French composer, Francesco Salvador-Daniel, lived in Algeria from 1853 to 1865; he combined eastern and western systems in his compositions and compared them in his essay, La musique arabe, se rapports avec la musique grecque et le chant grégorien (1863), in which he argued that Arab and Greek modes were similar, contradicting Villoteau’s theory.
In modern times some ethnomusicologists have put these sources to good use, for example in the analysis of musical change. In her research on Tongan dance, Adrienne Kaeppler used the diaries of Captain James Cook’s third voyage (1784) to confirm that the structures of the me’etu’upaki formal ceremonial dance survived relatively unchanged after the conversion of the T’ui Tonga chief to Christianity in the late 19th century and that the informal me’elaufola dance, for which Cook describes graceful hand and arm movements, was renamed lakalaka after conversion to Methodism (Kaeppler, 1970).
The writings of Mungo Park (1771–1806) provide evidence of stylistic continuity in African music. Imprisoned during his travels, he recorded observations in his diary about native song and dance, for example this passage about the women’s songs of Bambarra, Niger (20 July 1796).
They lightened their labour by songs, one of which was composed extempore; for I was myself the subject of it. It was sung by one of the young women, the rest joining in a sort of chorus. The air was sweet and plaintive, and the words, literally translated, were these. – ‘The winds roared, and the rain fell. – The poor white man, faint and weary, came and sat under our tree. – He has no mother to bring him milk; no wife to grind his corn. Chorus. Let us pity the white man; no mother has he, &c, &c’ (Park, 1799).
This passage describes some important features of African music; its integration with work and play, the predominance of leader–chorus form and the use of improvisation.
A useful anthology of early sources is given in Harrison (1972).
Scientific investigation of non-Western music was made possible by the invention of the phonograph in 1877 by Thomas Edison. The phonograph facilitated fieldwork, offering pioneering comparative musicologists the possibility of playback from which to transcribe and analyse.
Scholars were quick to use the phonograph, recording many two- to four-minute samples of music on wax cylinders, which they added to their collections of instruments, photographs and notations made ‘by ear’. The first field recordings were made by Jesse Walter Fewkes in 1890 among the Passamaquoddy Indians of Maine. In Hungary Béla Vikár (1859–1945) began recording in the field in 1896, and in Russia, Evgeniya Linoyova in 1897. The portable and convenient cylinder machine continued to be used in the field until the 1950s, even though more advanced technology, such as wire, and then tape recorders became available.
The English phonetician, Alexander J. Ellis (1814–90), an expert on the psychology of hearing and acoustics is often said, by English scholars, to be the father of modern ethnomusicology, and his publication ‘On the Musical Scales of Various Nations’ (1885), the first scientific and fair-minded appraisal of non-Western tuning systems, to mark the birth of the new study. Although he felt his hearing was faulty (or perhaps for this very reason), he devised the ‘cents’ system of pitch measurement, whereby the Western tempered semitone is divided into 100 cents, the octave into 1200 cents. The precision of his system allowed the objective measurement of non-Western scales. Musical scales, Ellis maintained, were the product of cultural invention and not based on natural acoustical laws. All musical scales were equally natural, hence equally good. The pronouncement he read before the Royal Society in 1885 is a credo for modern ethnomusicology, that ‘the Musical Scale is not one, not “natural”, nor even founded necessarily on the laws of the constitution of musical sound, so beautifully worked out by Helmholtz, but very diverse, very artificial, and very capricious’ (p. 526). This finding brought into question the superiority of Western tempered tuning and led the way to open-minded cross-cultural comparison of musical systems. It dealt a harsh blow to the pernicious theory of the ‘contemporary ancestor’ as applied to music, whereby so-called ‘primitive’ music was understood to represent an early phase in the evolution of European art music.
Ellis was assisted in his investigations by Alfred James Hipkins (1826–1903), specialist on temperament and pitch, of the Broadwood piano firm. This team measured the non-diatonic and non-harmonic tunings of Asian instruments, breaking precedent by testing in a performance setting rather than in the lab. They studied visiting Japanese musicians (1885), Central Javanese music during a gamelan appearance at the London Aquarium (1882) and Chinese court music at the International Health Exhibition (1884). In their findings they debunked the prevalent notion that pentatonic scales had developed in Asian cultures because of insensitivity to the subtleties of the semitone: ‘It is found that intervals of three-quarters and five-quarters of a Tone, and even more, occur. Hence the real division of the Octave in a pentatonic scale is very varied’.
Ethnomusicology, §II: History to 1945
Ethnomusicology, §II, 2: History to 1945: Northern and western Europe
Cylinder collections from colonial holdings steadily mounted in the archives of Berlin, Vienna and other European capitals. Most of these early recordings were made during ethnological fieldwork. Within the scientific climate of the late 19th century, with evolutionary theories spawned by Darwinians prevalent in the social sciences, this mounting body of data fueled the development of Vergleichende Musikwissenschaft (‘comparative musicology’).
Psychologists and acousticians of the Berlin Phonogrammarchiv, including Carl Stumpf (1848–1936) and Erich M. von Hornbostel (1877–1935), studied hundreds of cylinders recorded by German ethnologists in colonial territories from Africa to the Pacific. From analysis of this extremely limited and diverse material they posited ambitious theories about the distribution of musical styles, instruments and tunings. These included evolutionary schemes and later in the 1930s reconstructions of music history. This movement is often called the ‘cultural-historical school’.
Carl Stumpf’s landmark study ‘Lieder der Bellakula Indianer’ (1886), based on work with a touring group of Bella Coola Indians from British Columbia, is reckoned, by German scholars, to mark the birth of ethnomusicology as a scholarly discipline. Stumpf’s pioneering ethnography deals with the repertory of an individual group, with a description of musical elements, including transcriptions in Western notation and a discussion of the relationship of Bella Coola music to its cultural context. One of Stumpf’s assumptions was that the world’s musics can be divided into individual units, each with its own system and rational.
The Berlin school produced many monographs, particularly by Stumpf’s brilliant assistant Hornbostel, who, in his early writings, collaborated with Otto Abraham (1872–1926) whose special interest was psychology and absolute pitch. Many co-signed articles entitled ‘Phonographierte … melodien’, were appended to the great German ethnographies of the day, extended essays which dealt with the scales, tonal systems, and rhythms of the early cylinder collections. Marius Schneider (1903–82) and Mieczyslaw Kolinski (1901–81) assisted Hornbostel; and Curt Sachs (1881–1959), professionally trained in the history of art, joined with Hornbostel in their seminal classification for organology, Systematik der Musikinstrumente (1914). The Viennese scholars of this generation included Adler’s successor Robert Lach (1874–1958), Richard Wallaschek (1860–1917), Siegfried Nadel (1903–56), Walter Graf (1903–82) and Albert Wellek (1904–72).
The aim of comparative musicology was to outline the historical and genetic relationships between the music systems of the world, based on evolutionary models and genetic classification in biology. Many scholars of comparative musicology had trained in the natural sciences and this orientation was the hallmark of their research: Hornbostel was trained in chemistry, Boas in physics and geography and Abraham was a physician. The comparative approach of other scholars, for example Ellis, originated in linguistics. Their writings demonstrate historical relationships between musical systems described in terms that are unacceptable in modern parlance, for example, the progression from ‘simple’ music to ‘complex’ and ‘sophisticated’ systems. This work presupposed a Eurocentric perspective posing such dichotomies as ‘primitive’ versus ‘civilized’ peoples.
Comparative musicology was relatively short-lived, lasting from around 1885 until the death of Hornbostel in 1935, even though the need to compare melodies from around the world to determine their age was introduced as early as 1863 by Friedrich Chrysander. Interdisciplinary in nature and world-wide in scope, this experimental field sought to explain the origins of music and its subsequent historical development in the broadest cross-cultural comparative terms. Using diffusionist theories, Hornbostel (1911), Kunst (1935–6) and Sachs (1938), claimed historical links between the music of insular South-east Asia and of Africa. A connection between Madagascar and South-east Asia was also suggested, based on instruments, tunings and linguistic relationships. A.M. Jones (1964) correlated other cultural elements (fine arts, agriculture), an extension of the theory that has been refuted. Drawing on limited samples of music, the Berlin and Vienna scholars used tonal measurement and psychological testing to develop theories, many of which have not held up in the light of new data collected after World War II.
The most ambitious of these was Kulturkreislehre, the ‘theory of culture circles’, a theory of the history of culture advanced by Fritz Graebner (1877–1954), and the clerics Father Wilhelm Schmidt (1868–1954)) and Father Wilhelm Koppers (1886–1961). They proposed that culture developed in one geographical region, thought to be in Central Asia, and spread in waves of migration out from this centre. According to the theory, similarities between Kulturmerkmale or ‘culture traits’ (objects and forms of social organization) resulted from past migrations; traits discovered farthest from the centre were reckoned to be the oldest; and identical objects and ideas might exist thousands of miles apart. This notion assumed the fundamental uninventiveness of humankind (‘monogenesis’), and was espoused dogmatically by the Germans, rejected by the British and French anthropological schools and eventually dismissed by German-born anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942) and his students at Columbia University. Important studies which embraced this theory include: Ankermann, 1902; Hornbostel, 1933; Wieschoff, 1933; Danckert, 1937; and Hübner, 1935, 1938. Curt Sachs’ most ambitious study of musical instruments, Geist und Werden der Musikinstrumente (1929), was based on Kulturkreis. In this instruments were historically ordered and organized into 23 areas using distribution and technological level; those found in scattered regions were thought to be older than those found everywhere. The impact of such a theory in ethnomusicology is puzzling in light of its limited and brief role in the history of anthropology.
The Blasquintentheorie (‘theory of blown 5ths’) of Hornbostel (1927), was the most sensational proposal of the Berlin school. Berlin scholars found many examples of equipentatonic and equiheptatonic scales while measuring the tunings of instruments in collections. These scales with equally-spaced tones appeared to be widespread and thus of particular significance. By testing Brazilian panpipes (and blowing harshly on some of the tubes), Hornbostel derived the hypothesis that many non-Western tuning systems were based on intervals of 678 cents (rather than on Pythagorean 5ths of 702 cents). However, Hornbostel failed to heed Ellis’ argument that ‘there is no practical way of arriving at the real pitch of a musical scale, when it cannot be heard as played by a native musician; and even in the latter case, we only obtain that particular musician’s tuning of the scale, not the theory on which it was founded’ (1885). When the Blasquintentheorie theory was disproved by Manfred Bukofzer for lack of empirical evidence (1937), the Berlin school lost credibility for much of its other powerful ethnographic work.
Ethnomusicology, §II, 2: History to 1945: Northern and western Europe
Early Dutch scholarship focussed on the music of their colonial holdings including the East Indies (now Indonesia), the Moluccas, the Dutch Antilles, and Dutch Guiana (Surinam) on the South American coast. Several important ethnographies on Java, the most densely populated island of the Indonesian archipelago, included music, beginning with the writings of the philologist J.A. Wilkens whose linguistic survey includes an inventory of the instruments and description of the gamelan orchestra (1850), J.P. Veth’s survey on Javanese music (1875), and J. Groneman De gamelan te Jogjakarta (1890), based on his years in Yogyakarta where he served as physician to the sultan. Groneman sent descriptions and photos of the court gamelan to Jan P.N. Land whose study of non-European scales and intervals (including Arab and Indonesian material) was researched in consultation with Alexander J. Ellis. The descriptions were published as the ‘Foreward: On Our Knowledge of Javanese Music’ (1890), to the Groneman monograph.
The leading figure in Dutch ethnomusicology is Jaap Kunst (1891–1960), whose early music ethnography on the Dutch island of Terschelling (1915) is still used by the islanders. Kunst first visited Java in 1919 on an 18-month tour as the pianist of a trio. Kunst remained in Java to study the gamelan tradition of the palace of prince Paku Alam in Yoyjakarta. His prolific correspondence with Hornbostel during the 1920s and 30s (some 160 letters) illustrates the scholarly dialogue of the period between the World Wars and reveals Kunst’s methods for his classic De toonkunst van Java (1934). Hornbostel and Kunst were fascinated by the two gamelan tuning systems, the seven-tone pélog and the five-tone sléndro, which Kunst measured with a self-devised monochord. Hornbostel used Kunst’s measurements to support the Blasquintentheorie and Kunst was surprised by Manfred Bukofzer’s disproof of it: ‘If ever I had had any confidence in a theory, it was this one’, he wrote to Bukofzer in May 1936.
In collaboration with his wife, Kunst also wrote authoritative and lengthy monographs on the music of Bali (1925), Flores (1942), Nias (1939) and Hindu Javanese instruments (1928).
Ethnomusicology, §II, 2: History to 1945: Northern and western Europe
The leading French musicologist of the early 20th century was André Schaeffner (1895–1980), who did exhaustive fieldwork with the Dogon people of Mali (formerly French Sudan). Schaeffner, a specialist in organology, worked with Curt Sachs and Sachs’s instrument study of 1929 was the impetus for Schaeffner’s work, Origine des instruments et musique. Introduction ethnologique à l’histoire de la musique instrumentale (1936). Schaeffner includes Western art music in his study, and paints a picture of universal origins of instruments based on secondary souces and his own fieldwork.
In Paris, Dr L. Azoulay recorded 400 wax cylinders in 74 Asian, European and African languages at the World Exhibition of 1900, a collection that formed the basis of the first French archive, the Musée Phonographique de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, expanded in 1938 to become the Phonothèque Nationale. In 1929 Schaeffner established the Museé d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro, renamed Musée de l’Homme in 1937.
In Belgium, the music historian François-Joseph Fétis (1784–1871) was one of the first to recognize the value of non-Western music in his Histoire général de la musique, depuis les temps les plus ancien jusqu’á nos jours (5 vols., 1869–76). He includes material on the music of China, Japan, India and the Central Asian Kalmyks, Kyrghyz, Kamchadals and other Siberian peoples. He recommends the study of ethnology, anthropology and linguistics for music historians. Both Fétis and the Bengali musicologist Sir S.M. Tagore (1840–1914) gave their instrument collections to King Leopold II. These instruments formed the basis of the Musée Instrumental du Conservatoire Royal de Musique of Brussels, 1877, a collection studied by the Belgian organologist Victor-Charles Mahillon (1841–1924), who developed a classification system for instruments, with four main categories, autophones, membranophones, chordophones and aerophones (1880–92), a scheme that was the foundation for the Hornbostel–Sachs system (1914).
Extensive Belgian research was carried out on the music of Central Africa, beginning with the study of E. Coart and A. de Haulleville (1902) based on the collection of Musée du Congo Belge at Tervuren established in 1837 (now the Musée Royal d’Afrique Centrale). A. Hutereau recorded some 210 wax cylinders in north-eastern Zaire between 1910–12, particularly of the Zande people. Musical instruments of the Belgian Congo were studied by Joseph Maes from 1912, Gaston Knosp (1934–5, published by P. Cullaer in 1968) and Olga Boone (1936).
Ethnomusicology, §II, 2: History to 1945: Northern and western Europe
British colonial writings on Indian music begin with Sir William Jones’s (1746–94) On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos (1792). His music treatise was based on his reading (in Persian translation) of the Sangīta-darpana of Dāmodarapandita (c1625), the Sangīta-pārijāta of Ahobala Pandita (17th century, also in Persian translation) and the Rāga-vibodha (1609) of Somanātha. The value of Jones’s treatise lies not in its essential accuracy or strength of argument but the role it had in bringing the traditions of North India to the attention of Western scholars.
This was followed by Captain N. Augustus Willard’s A Treatise on the Music of Hindoostan (1834), that includes descriptions of forms and an informative glossary. The Jones and Willard essays were reprinted in an early anthology, Hindu Music from Various Authors (1875), by s.m. Tagore, who influenced Mahillon, Ellis (1885) and Hornbostel and Abraham (1904, Phonographierte indische Melodien).
The scholarly exchange between English and Indian scholars includes: The Hindu Musical Scale and the Twenty-Two Shrutees (1910) by the Indian scholar K.B. Deval, who examined the 13th-century Sangīta-Ratnākara in the light of Western research; Introduction to the Study of Indian Music (1913/R) by Ernest Clements, who correlates modern Hindustani scales with the early scales discussed by Deval; and The Music of India (1921) by Herbert A. Popley, who consulted with the Indian theorist, v.n. Bhatkhande (1860–1936).
Around 1910 A.H. Fox Strangways (1859–1948) carried out research in India, recorded cylinders of North and South Indian classical music, Vedic chant, ghazal and tappa, and extremely valuable samples of Ādivāsī and traditional music (1914).
A major figure was the Dutch-born London-based linguist and musician Arnold A. Bake (1899–1963). He began his research in the 1920s, did doctoral research at Tagore’s academy, Shantiniketan, learned to sing the songs of Rabindranath Tagore, Bengali kīrtan, traditional and some classical genres. He made several trips to India up to the 1950s, totalling some 15 years in the subcontinent. He collected material from eastern India, South India, Sind (now Pakistan), Ladakh and Punjab, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and Nepal (Bake, 1949, 1957, 1970).
Interest in English traditions began in the first half of the 19th century. The first published folksong collection was John Broadwood’s Old English Songs as Now Sung by the Peasantry of the Weald of Surey and Sussex (1843). By the 1890s interest had increased and was marked by the publication of important collections by Lucy Broadwood (1893, 1908), Frank Kidson (1891) (1895, 1895–6) and Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould (1895, 1895–6). Also important was the work of the American scholar Francis James Child (see §4(iii)(a) below).
The most influential collector of English folksong and dance was Cecil Sharp (1859–1924). Sharp and his contemporaries believed that ‘authentic’ traditions were dying out and that scholarly interest had only been focussed on them after they had been greatly affected by the Industrial Revolution, general education and urbanization. In the interests of urgent preservation they sought most of their material from singers over the age of 60. Sharp advocated the use of folksongs in education and in the composition of an ‘authentic’ English repertory of art music. Maud Karpeles (1885–1976) and her sister were also leading figures in this movement, which came to be thought of as a folksong ‘revival’ (see Folk music; Folk Music Revival; England).
In English Folk Songs: Some Conclusions (1907) Sharp set out his principles of folksong evolution: continuity (the unfailing accuracy of the oral record); variation (spontaneous invention, the product of the individual); and selection (based on the taste of the local community). He collected 4977 tunes during his career some of which came from the trips he made with Karpeles to the USA. There they collected tunes and variants from people of English, Lowland Scots and Scots-Irish descent in the southern Appalachian mountains of North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky. They used this work to illustrate the theory of marginal survival, whereby traditions lost in their native environment have been preserved by immigrant groups.
After Sharp’s death Karpeles edited his two-volume English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (Sharp and Campbell, 1917). Returning to the southern Appalachians in 1950 and 1955 she discovered that many of the traditional songs they had earlier collected were no longer performed. In 1935 she organized the International Folk Dance conference at Cecil Sharp House, hosting 800 dancers from 18 countries, after which the International Folk Dance Council was established.
Another major figure in the English folksong revival was Percy Grainger. He began his study of folksong at the North Lincolnshire Musical Competition in Brigg, 1905. During the next four years he collected about 500 songs, surviving on 216 cylinders, mainly from Lincolnshire, Gloucestershire and Worcestershire, as well as sea shanties from Dartmouth and vendor’s cries from London. Amid protests, he advocated the use of the Edison phonograph in fieldwork, presenting his case in ‘Collecting with the Phonograph’ (1908–9). Grainger was able to demonstrate that irregularities in folksongs were systematic; variations between verses significant; accents, dynamics and ornamentation essential to style; and that folksongs rarely could be analyzed in terms of conventional modes, as advocated by Sharp. In 1908 he persuaded the Lincolnshire singer Joseph Taylor to issue nine songs with the Gramophone Company; the first commercial recordings of folksong.
Ethnomusicology, §II: History to 1945
The collecting projects of southern and eastern Europeans of the second half of the 19th century were largely contributions to folkloric studies. These collectors feared that entire repertories were on the point of extinction, repertories that were thought a proper base for nationalist styles of art music. Early collectors were motivated by musical nationalism, theories of self-determination and by hope for a musical rationale for a pan-Slavic identity. Thus composers of the late 19th century, from Janácek, to Grieg, Sibelius, Bartók and Rimsky-Korsakov were indebted to the painstaking research of song collectors. Whereas German scholars focussed on small samples of music from distant colonies, eastern European collectors explored their own linguistic setting, amassing large collections, thousands of song texts and, later, tunes, which they sought to classify and compare. The approaches of folk music research and comparative musicology were synthesized after World War I in the studies of Béla Bartók for Hungary and adjacent regions, the Romanian collector Constantine Brăiloiu, Klement Kvitka for Ukraine, Adolf Chybinski for Poland and Vasil Stoin for Bulgaria. These later writings dealt with theory, method, documentation and analysis, in light of the orientation of the Berlin school.
(iv) Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia.
Ethnomusicology, §II, 3: History to 1945: Southern and eastern europe
The leading Bulgarian scholar was Dobri Christov (1875–1941), who was the first to identify characteristic asymmetric rhythms (1913). Bartók started recording in Bulgaria in 1912 and referred to these rhythms as ‘Bulgarian’ (1938). A contemporary of Christov, Vasil Stoin (1880–1938) organized the collection of some 24,000 Bulgarian folksongs (without recording equipment), including instrumental tunes with indices classifying rhythms and scales (1928–39). His theoretical study (1927) was an important source for Hornbostel, Bartók and the Ukrainian scholar Klyment Kvitka. In 1910–11 the Russian scholar Nikolai S. Derzhavin recorded songs from the Bulgarian areas of Russia (1914) and worked until 1915 in the Taurian, Kherson and Bessarabian provinces.
Ethnomusicology, §II, 3: History to 1945: Southern and eastern europe
Karol Štrekelj (1862–1912) amassed the first collection of Slovenian folksongs to include melodies (8000 texts including 200 melodies; 1895–1923), Štrekelj, and later Matija Murko (1861–1952), headed the Slovenian language section of the Viennese project, Das Volkslied in Oesterreich; between 1906 and 1914, 12,000 songs and melodies were collected (Murko, 1929). Russian ethnomusicologist Evgeniya Linoyova recorded some 100 cylinders of Slovenian songs, housed in the Phonogram Archive in St Petersburg.
The Croatian musicologist Franjo Ksaver Kuhač (1834–1911) made the most important collection of southern Slav folksong, with 1600 songs, melodies, texts and piano accompaniments. His monumental study (fieldwork 1861–9) extended from Slavonia through central Croatia, Slovenia, Vojvodina, Istria, Serbia, Dalmatia, Bosnia and Hercegovina, Bulgaria and Macedonia (1877–82); some of his massive collection remains unpublished. Between the wars the composer and ethnomusicologist, Božidar Širola (1889–1956) organized the instrument collection of the Ethnographic Museum in Zagreb. Another leading Croatian scholar, Vinko Žganec (1890–1976), published song collections from his native Medjimurje (1924–5).
The first Serbian nationalist composer, Stevan St Mokranjac (1856–1914), based his choral suite Rukoveti on the folksongs of Serbia, Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro and Bosnia. He published a study of Serbian folk music and collected extensively in Kosovo, and notated the repertory of the Serbian Church chant (Bušetić and Mokranjac, 1902; Mokranjac, 1902, 1935). Vladimir R. Djordjević (1869–1938) published Macedonia and Serbian folksong collections (1928, 1931). The Belgrade composer and ethnomusicologist Kosta P. Manojlović (1890–1949) began the music section of the Ethnographic Museum; this collection was moved to the Musicological Institute of the Serbian Academy after World War II. He recorded in Serbia, Kosovo and Macedonia from 1932 to 1940.
In Bosnia, Hercegovina, Macedonia and Montenegro almost all folk music research before 1939 was carried out by outsiders: Kuhač from Croatia, the Czech Kuba and Mokranjac, and Djordjević and Manojlović from Serbia. Marko K. Cepenkov (1829–1920) from Macedonia, whose collection of folklore texts was gathered from 1856–1900, left material also on folk music instruments, with drawings. During 1934–5, the American scholars Milman Parry (1902–35) and Albert B. Lord recorded in Hercegovina, Bosnia, Montenegro and Macedonia, focussing on south Slavic heroic songs. They collected over 12,500 texts, 800 heroic song texts, and 2200 double-sided disc recordings of 350 heroic songs (Bartók and Lord, 1951). Parry and Lord also preserved on aluminium discs an archaic style of southern Slavic narrative song, mainly from Gacko, Hercegovina.
Ethnomusicology, §II, 3: History to 1945: Southern and eastern europe
Oskar Kolberg (1814–90) began notating Polish folksong in 1839, paying particular attention to the ritual and folkloric setting of the songs. He published 33 regional monographs under the title Lud: Jego zwyczaje, sposób życia, mowa, podania, przysłowia, obrzedy, gusła, zabawy, pieśni, muzykz i tańce (‘The folk: their customs, ways of life, language, legends, proverbs, rituals, spells, entertainments, songs, instrumental music and dances’) and 11 with the general title Obrazy etnograficzne (‘ethnographic pictures’).
The distinctive music of the mountainous Podhale region, south of Krakow, was studied by Stanisław Mierczyński (1894–1952), who notated by ear the free and complex rhythms and Lydian scales typical of this district (1930).
Helena Windakiewiczowa (1868–1956) published several analytic studies on Polish song including a work on rhythm (1897), poetical form (1913), musical form (1930), pentatonic scales (1933) and a catalogue of parallels between Polish and Moravian folksongs (1908). Jan Czekanowski (1882–1965) took part in the German Central Africa Expedition (1907–9) during which he recorded cylinders in Rwanda (Czekanowski 1911–27). Hornbostel published two articles on these cylinders of the Wakusuma and a transcription and analysis of 43 songs from Rwanda (1911, 1917).
Other early recordings were made by Bronisław Piłsudski (1866–1918) who, during political exile in eastern Siberia, recorded the Ainu, Gilyak and Orochi peoples of Sakhalin (1912), and the Gilyaks and Orochi (c1896–1905). 83 of his cylinders were deposited in the Phonographic Institute of the University of Poznań.
In 1930 Łucjan Kamieński (1885–1964) organized the Regionalne Archivwum Fonograficzne as part of the University of Poznań. In 1935 Julian Pulikowski (1908–44) organized the Centralne Archiwu, Fonograficzne in Warsaw. These two collections were destroyed during World War II.
Ethnomusicology, §II, 3: History to 1945: Southern and eastern europe
The pioneer of Bohemian folksong collection was the Czech poet Karel Jaromír Erben (1811–70), who published 2200 texts and 811 melodies as well as games and other genres (1842–3 and 1862–4). His anthology is carefully documented and classified, and particularly significant for its complement of village material. Jan Rittersberk was first to publish Czech folksongs (1825), a collection notable for ribald humour and urban content, drawn from Bohemian and Moravian materials collected in 1819 by the Vienna Gesellschaft für Musikfreunde under Austrian decree.
The Czech musician and scholar Ludvík Kuba (1863–1956) collected Lusatian Serbian songs and instrumental melodies (1887, 1922) and songs from towns in Bosnia and Hercegovina (Kuba, 2/1984). His notes are impressive for their unique approach to folklore, with lucid writing and evocative comments, including statements by performers and accounts of performing practice, and Kuba’s professional sketches and drawings of instruments and regional costumes. His work covers a wide geographical area including collections from Lusatia, Old Serbia, Macedonia, Dalmatia, Bosnia and Hercegovina.
The scholarly study of Czech folk music was established in two important studies by Otakar Hostinský (1847–1910) which include 16th-century material (1892) and statistical analyses of some 1000 secular melodies (1906).
Moravian collectors include the cleric František Sušil (1809–68), whose collection dates from the 1840s and 1850s (2361 texts and 1890 melodies); despite his ‘corrections’ of texts his anthology is comprehensive, including religious genres, ballads, love songs and some lyrics from broadsides (1860). The philologist Frantisek Bartoš (1827–1906) sought to gather the Moravian folk heritage before it was taken over by urban culture. His collection is marred by editorial faults, but remains important for its size and variety particularly the eastern materials from Slovácko and Valašsko (1882).
Leos Janáček (1854–1928) edited music from the 1898 and 1899–1901 Bartoš collections and published a discourse on Moravian music. In his own compositions he drew on the 300 songs he collected in the field. He served as the Czech-language director of the Moravian and Silesian section of the 1904 Viennese project, Das Volkslied in Oesterreich, for which he instructed collectors, contacted Moravian teachers, developed methods and systems of notation, and organized cylinder recordings. In 1917 he declined to send the collection of 10,000 songs to Vienna, and it remains in Brno. His collection of Moravian love songs was published posthumously (Janáček and Váša, 1930–6). Janáček’s Moravia team recorded Slovak musicians from 1909 to 1912, including 25 Terchov part-songs. The French Pathé company, in cooperation with the Paris Institut Phonétique, recorded Czech singers and bands in Prague studios; noteworthy is the Chodsko collection, reissued for the 1962 meetings of the International Folk Music Council in Czechoslovakia.
The classic collection of Slovak folksong is Slovenské spevy (1880–1926), although compiled primarily by amateurs and lacking systematic organization, it remains an important source of folksong.
Béla Bartók recorded in Slovakia from 1906 to 1918 (1959–). The Hungarian Béla Vikár recorded in north-western Slovakia (Trenčiansko) from 1903 to 1907; his cylinders were transcribed by Bartók, who included them in his Slovak collection along with those of Kodály from the 1900s. In 1929, working for the French Pathé company, musician and film-maker Karel Plicka (1894–1987) selected Slovakian singers and instrumentalists (including musicians from Subcarpathian Russia) to be recorded in Prague. From 1924 to 1939 Plicka notated by ear some 8500 melodies and texts and additionally 10,000 texts (Plicka, 1961).
Ethnomusicology, §II, 3: History to 1945: Southern and eastern europe
Since 1832, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences has been responsible for the collection and publication of folksongs both to preserve ‘authentic song’ and to present composite versions of folksongs to form a national public aesthetic and musical taste. Early Hungarian work includes that of collector Károly Szini, who published 200 melodies in notation (1865); Áron Kiss prepared an important collection of Hungarian children’s games (1891); and István Bartalus (1821–99) produced Magyan népdalok (1873–96), a seven-volume work including items acquired through correspondence and pieces by contemporary composers.
The philologist Béla Vikár (1859–1945) was first to record Hungarian folksong with the Edison phonograph in 1895. Zoltan Kodály (1882–1967) began transcribing Vikár’s recordings in 1904. Scholars such as Lászkó Lajtha (1892–1963) and Antal Molnár (1890–1983) worked from the Ethnographic Department of the National Museum (later the Museum of Ethnography).
Kodály set out on his first collecting trip in 1905, Bartók in 1906. Working in collaboration, they divided the districts they hoped to cover between them. Bartók’s travels took him to neighbouring countries and led to comparative studies. Between 1906 and 1918 Bartók collected 3223 Slovak melodies and between 1908 and 1917, 3500 Romanian melodies. In 1913 he collected Arab music in Biskra, North Africa and in 1936 travelled to Turkey. His Hungarian collections include 2721 songs (1924). In A magyar néodak (Hungarian folksong) (1924) Bartók summarized his work with Kodály and presents 8000 melodies, attempting to reconstruct the evolution of Hungarian folksong through classification and typology. His work Népzenénk és a zomszéd népenéje (Our folk music and that of neighbouring peoples) (1934) presents a comparison of Hungarian, Romanian and Slovak songs, notable for the 1930s. Kodály’s A magyar népzene (Hungarian folk music) (1937) covers the entire oral tradition of Hungary including instrumental genres, folk customs and the relationship of music to culture. In 1953, Kodály founded the Folk Music Research Group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (renamed the Folk Music Research Department of the Institute for Musicology in 1974); its major project has been publication of Corpus musicae popularis hungaricae (1951–). The collection of the Institute of Musicology is expanding (holdings of some 150,000 melodies) and research is ongoing, reflecting the changing scene.
Ethnomusicology, §II, 3: History to 1945: Southern and eastern europe
The leading figure of Romanian musicology was Constantin Brǎiloiu (1893–1958), who founded the Folklore Archives of the Society of Romanian Composers in 1928. Noted for his thoroughness and method, for using the phonograph, cameras and questionnaires, Brǎiloiu outlined his system in ‘Esquisse d’une méthode de folklore musical’ (1973). His interest in colinda, wedding songs and laments is reflected in his various collections (1931, 1936, 1938). He was first to identify the syllabic giusto of Romanian traditional song (1948), the asymmetrical aksak rhythms of eastern Europe (1951) and the antiquity and universality of the three-tone pitch system. Brǎiloiu rejected the German focus on extra-European musics (1959) and sought to reconstruct the history of traditional song of his own country, identifying more or less advanced states of dissolution.
Ethnomusicology, §II, 3: History to 1945: Southern and eastern europe
During the mid-19th century, Prince V. Odoevsky and A. Serov sponsored the scientific study of Russian folksong, including the connections of music with ethnography, cultural history, philology and physiology. Examining only folksongs before the time of Peter the Great (1672–1725), considered distinctively ‘Russian’, they sought to examine the material on its own merits rather than by the standards of European music. They compared the rhythms and modes of the Russian repertory to those of ancient Greek theory. Odoevsky also conducted research on Russian orthodox chants (1867, 1871). Serov dealt with the harmonization of folksongs and their use by nationalist composers (1870–71).
The Russian nationalist composers Mily Balakirev (1837–1910), Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (1849–1908) and Modest Musorgsky (1839–81) acknowledged the importance of folksong in creating a nationalist school of composition. Balakirev’s important collection of folksong appeared in 1886 and Rimsky-Korsakov transcribed seasonal songs and Ukrainian dumy (epics; 1876–7; 1882). The Ukrainian collector Mykola Lysenko (1842–1912) was a pioneer in the study of folksong; he published some 1000 Ukrainian songs (1868–1906; 1874; 1896) and studied instrumental music (1894). The first transcriptions of Russian folk choral polyphony were published by Yuly Melgunov and Nikolay Palchikov, fascinating a cappella pieces with simultaneous improvisation by individual choristers. Distortions were introduced as Melgunov homogenized the individual variants and rendered them as a piano score (Melgunov, 1879–85; Palchikov, 1888).
P. Sokalsky’s theoretical monograph (1888) identified three ages of song, that of the interval of the 4th, the 5th and the 3rd. He emphasized the union of song tune and text, the problems of notating irregular folk rhythms and intonation and the common source of Russian and Ukrainian music.
The first recordings of Russian music were of the byliny epic bard Ivan Ryabini in Moscow around 1894. Evgeniya Lineva took the Edison cylinder machine to the field in 1896, recording in the central Russian and Novgorod provinces (1897–1901), Ukraine (1903), the Caucasus (1910) and Austria-Hungary (1913) (e.g. Lineva 1904, 1909). She accompanied her collections with interviews of musicians and descriptions of performances. In 1901 the Music-Ethnographic Commission supported a team of ethnologists to record byliny from Arkhangel’sk district, the White Sea region, Don Cossacks part singing (1904), and choral songs from Voronezh district; the Commission published five volumes on methods of collecting, notation and analysis (1906, 1907, 1911, 1913, 1916).
After the Revolution of 1917, The Association of Proletarian Musicians (1923–32) declared traditional village music harmful to the Proletariat ideology. Nonetheless, collectors continued their work although the many collections of the 1930s sometimes include material composed to illustrate Soviet realism.
Ethnomusicology in the former USSR began with the research of Filaret Kolessov, Evgeny Gippius and Klyment Kvitka. Kvitka (1880–1953) began his collection of Ukrainian song in 1896 and also worked in southern Russia, Belorussia, Moldavia and Crimea. He published comparative studies including the mapping of song types, their structural characteristics and associated rituals. In 1922 Kvitka organized the Bureau of Musical Ethnography of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences and in 1937 the Bureau of Study of the Musical Creation of the Peoples of the USSR at the Moscow Conservatory.
Gippius accompanied Belorussian Zinaida Evald on the 1926–30 expedition to the north Russian rivers, where they recorded over 500 cylinders (Iskusstov Severa, 1927–8). Gippius’ 1933 essay on methodology criticizes Western ethnomusicology and discusses a ‘production-consumption’ music function model. In 1926–7 he founded the Music-Ethnographic Bureau at the Leningrad Conservatory and the Phonogram-Archive (later the Phonogram-Archiv of the Pushkin House, Institute of Russian Literature).
Kvitka’s student, Moshe Beregoviski (1892–1962), was the foremost scholar of his generation of the music of Eastern European Jewry. He set new standards of fieldwork, documentation, transcription and analysis. He was harshly critical of Bartók, whose research was based on notions of a ‘monolithic and inert peasantry’, an assumption that could not account for the rich musical repertory of urban Jewish workers, artisans, and businessmen.
Ethnomusicology, §II: History to 1945
(iii) European American music.
Ethnomusicology, §II, 4: History to 1945: North America
American ethnographies of late 19th century and early 20th avoided Germanic theories, concentrated on Amerindian music and were based on extended fieldwork with individual tribes. American scholars used the phonograph to preserve the vanishing traditions of aboriginal peoples.
The ethnologist Jesse Walter Fewkes (1850–1930) was the first to use the treadle-run Edison cylinder machine in the field during his research with the Passamaquoddy Indians of the north-eastern USA (1890) and in the south-west with the Zuñi Pueblos (1890) and the Hopi Pueblos (1891). Fewkes’ recordings were transcribed and analysed by the American psychologist Benjamin Ives Gilman (1852–1933) who concluded that these peoples had conscious norms for the intervals in their songs. Later in an article on Zuñi melodies he described the minute differences between the Amerindian tonal system and the Western tempered scale (1891).
Alice Cunningham Fletcher (1838–1923) was noteworthy for her lifelong collaboration with the Omaha Indian singer Francis La Flesche (1857–1932), son of the Omaha chief and the first Amerindian ethnomusicologist. For their first work, A Study of Omaha Music (1893), songs were collected by ear, the informant repeating the item as necessary. The melodies were notated and harmonized by piano teacher John Comfort Fillmore (1843–98), who prepared the transcriptions for Fletcher’s early work and wrote on the theory of Indian music. Fillmore believed that Omaha songs had pitch ‘discrepancies’ because the Indians had an inferior sense of pitch discrimination. The Omahas sang in unison, and octaves (men and women singing together, sometimes in falsetto), and to Fillmore a sort of harmony seemed to be achieved. He tested his chords against the Indians’ perception of the songs, and settled on those harmonies claimed by his subjects to be most pleasing to Indian ears. He asked ‘many times’ and the informants, confronted by the satisfied transcriber, had to choose between unsatisfactory alternatives.
Fillmore tried to reduce Omaha Indian songs to pentatonic or minor scales, but: ‘there remained some very puzzling cases of songs whose tones could not be reduced to either the major or the minor scale’. He also had a problem when Indians sang the note ‘about a quarter of a tone above the pitch’, which he tried to resolve by ‘syncopation’. He struggled with the phrasing, which, he said, had a ‘rich variety’ with anywhere from two to seven measures to a phrase.
Fillmore’s work was bitterly criticized by Gilman who rejected Fillmore’s theory of latent harmony. Gilman published his Hopi and Zuñi transcriptions without key or time signatures, ridiculed Fillmore’s use of Western notation and experimented with a 45-line quarter-tone staff. During his work sessions with cylinder recordings, Gilman recorded the rotation speed of the machine, the condition of the batteries as well as other details of method.
Frances Densmore (1867–1957) was the most prolific collector of the period, employed for 50 years by the Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian Institution. She collected over 2000 Indian melodies and wrote over a dozen monographs on the music of individual tribes from every part of North America including the Chippewa (1910–13), Teton Sioux (1918), Papago (1929), Choctaw (1943) and Seminole (1956).
The anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942) taught the holistic study of musical cultures through contemporary anthropological fieldwork methods to a new generation of students at Columbia University, including Helen Heffron Roberts (1888–1985) and George Herzog (1901–84). Boas opposed the speculation, reductionist thought, and armchair studies of the German school and stressed thorough ethnographic description. He encouraged anthropologists to study music, included musical transcriptions in his publications and made important analyses of rhythm in Northwest Coast Indian songs (1887). He also published the first comparative study of the same song as transcribed by different scholars (1896, 1897).
Ethnomusicology, §II, 4: History to 1945: North America
Descriptions of music before the Civil War attest to African features of slave songs, for example, Benjamin Latrobe’s descriptions of celebrations in Place Congo, New Orleans, including drums, a string instrument, singing and dancing. James Eights presents a more fair-minded account of the Pinkster celebrations of New York slaves, written at the time of the Revolutionary War (1867). Thomas Jefferson notes that slaves play the ‘banjar’ and ‘in music they are more generally gifted than the whites’ (1782). Richard Allen, first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, compiled the earliest book of black hymns and ‘wanderings strains’ (1801).
During the Second Great Awakening, as camp meetings were attended by blacks and whites alike, observers noted the enthusiasm and idiosyncratic performing practice of the blacks. Voicing a characteristic White Victorian sentiment, John F. Watson criticized blacks for dancing during worship and for singing ‘merry airs’ (1819).
Motivated by political and moral agendas, White observers heard black music accordingly: advocates of slavery reported that slave songs were happy; abolitionists found them sad. The abolitionists, William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware and Lucy McKim Garrison collected and published Slave Song of the United States (1867), which includes examples of sacred music from South Carolina, Georgia, the Sea Islands and some inland slave states. Allen’s introduction discusses performing practice including harmony, intonation, leader-chorus form, tempo variation and describes the ‘shout’, noting regional variations.
The early studies of black music by musicologists tried to pinpoint the origins of African-American style. Richard Wallaschek found scant evidence of Africanisms in transcriptions of Negro spirituals, and claimed they were imitations of European song (1893). Hornbostel concluded that African and European musics are ‘constructed on entirely different principles’ and could not be combined (1928).
The success of the Fisk Jubilee Singers of the 1870s, the first of many popular ‘Jubilee’ choirs from black colleges, stimulated publication of their song arrangements and reviews of their concerts (Marsh, 1875). Spiritual collections of this period include Johnson and Johnson (1925, 1926), Grissom (1930) and Work (1940). Spirituals were the first black musical genre to receive comprehensive scholarly attention. Early in the 20th century a controversy arose that lingered on until the 1990s. In Afro-American Folksongs (1914) Henry Edward Krehbiel (1854–1925) asserted that black American music was purely African material, that it sprang, without any outside influences, from its unique historical position. In White and Negro Spirituals (1943) George Pullen Jackson (1874–1953) put forward the ‘white origin theory’, arguing that black music had been influenced by Anglo-American song and constituted an integral part of the British tradition. Jackson discovered many of these white spirituals published in shape-note hymn books of the early 19th century. For example, the black spiritual ‘Down by the Riverside’ is derived from the white spiritual ‘We’ll Wait Till Jesus Comes’, published in 1868. The black spiritual ‘I want to Die A-Shouting’ uses a variant of the tune from the white spiritual ‘New Harmony’, but takes parts of its text from three other white spirituals: ‘Amazing Grace’, ‘Jesus My All’ and ‘Am I a Soldier’. This ‘white origin theory’ was rejected by James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamund Johnson (1925–6), John W. Work (1940), Mieczyslaw Kolinski (1969) and John Lovell (1972).
During the 1940s, anthropological theory weighed in heavily on the debate over the origins of spirituals. Melville J. Herskovits (1895–1963; The Myth of the Negro Past, 1941) and his student Richard A. Waterman (‘African Influence on the music of the Americas’, 1952) developed important anthropological theories based on hypotheses of culture change that included acculturation, syncretism and cultural focus, and demonstrated how European and African forms had blended to produce new genres bearing features of both parent musics. European and African music, they argued, have many features in common, among them diatonic scales and polyphony. When these two musics met, during the slave era, it was natural for them to blend; a lack of shared features explains why European and Amerindian musics failed to combine.
Herskovits and Waterman maintained that musical survivals, ‘Africanisms’, were stronger in areas of the New World where blacks predominated numerically. In the West Indies, particularly in Haiti, Jamaica and Trinidad, for example, Shango and Vodou cult songs (which derive directly from Africa) are still sung (these songs may have changed or even died out in their original African setting). In the USA the cotton plantation system placed blacks in close association with white musics, and fewer pure Africanisms can be identified in black folksongs of the American South. Herskovits proposed a scale of intensity, rating music as ‘a little African’ in the urban North, ‘quite African’ in the rural South, and ‘very African’ on the Gullah islands (Herskovits, 1941; Waterman, 1948, 1951, 1952).
Ethnomusicology, §II, 4: History to 1945: North America
The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1883–98) by Francis James Child (1825–96) contains some of the oldest ballads of the English tradition, including multiple versions, and a variety of topics: apocryphal legends, Christian miracles, outlaw tales, history and lore, feuds and raids and domestic quarrels. The ‘Child ballads’ mentioned in practically every subsequent study refer to the 305 songs in his collection. Over 100 Child texts and around 80 tunes have been collected in the USA (Child himself made no special search for New World variants, discovering only 18).
American collecting methods differed from those of the British, due in part to the size of the continent and the fact that Americans were more inclined to accept newly composed popular folksongs. Some collections were based on fieldwork, but many were assembled through correspondence with friends, relatives, students and state folklore societies.
The earliest systematic collection was Games and Songs of American Children (1883) by poet and literary scholar William Wells Newell (1839–1907), a Harvard student of Frances James Child. This collection of tunes, texts, formulae, rules and movements was gathered during fieldwork with children (some on the streets of New York) and interviews with adults, and is a product of the late 19th-century romanticized vision of the freedom and adventure of childhood. Newell challenged the theory of Francis Barton Gummere (1855–1919; 1896), which claimed that ballads were derived from group-sponsored dance-songs, at its ethnological roots, and proposed a ballad history for the Old and New Worlds based on literary evidence.
In 1888 the American Folklore Society was founded by Newell, Child and Franz Boas, modelled on the Folklore Society of Britain. The centennial of American independence stimulated a review of national culture incorporating folklore of the frontier experience, the social experiment of democracy and American social pluralism. Newell, executive secretary of the Society up to the time of his death, served as editor of the Journal of American Folklore (1888–1900) and for the first nine issues of Memoirs. These publications served as a forum for early collectors, the issues reflecting changing approaches and attitudes in American folksong research.
Music found its place in folksong study, first in the UK with the work of the Folk-Song Society (founded in 1898), and in the USA with the work of Philips Barry, who investigated text, tune, performance and transmission. Unlike his English counterpart Cecil Sharp, Barry collected broadsides and music-hall ballads, refusing to make a distinction not recognized by the folk. Barry demonstrated the history of communal re-creation by comparing ancient ballads with their modern variants including those he had collected in New England, beginning in 1903. He argued for the vitality of the ballad tradition, self-renewing, flourishing in cities as well as countryside, embracing popular forms and at times perpetuated via the printed page (1905, 1913).
Henry Marvin Belden (1865–1954) began collecting in Missouri in 1904. He proposed a programme to recover American versions of Child ballads and to answer questions regarding the origins of the American repertory (1905). Belden emphasized documentation including the circumstances of recording, biographical information and local concepts of song origin. He argued for comprehensive collection (including printed versions), contrary to the selective methods of European contemporaries, who rejected popular and broadside material. While acknowledging Gummere’s important contribution to ballad study (1911), he mounted a vigorous attack on his communalist theories (1909).
In the early years of the 20th century state folklore societies were founded, dedicated to collecting and preserving Old World folksong. In 1914 the US Department of Education instigated a rescue mission for ballads and folksongs, stimulating an era of collecting by local enthusiasts and academics that lasted through the Depression until World War II. The extensive regional collecting between the two World Wars reflected the amount of unstudied material, a reaction against the theoretical preoccupations of the earlier generation and a search for a sense of national tradition in the face of striking regional diversity.
These regional eclectic collections are nondiscriminatory, include all material sung from memory and cite all known variants, including imported and indigenous narratives, lyric songs, popular music-hall songs, game songs, instrumental music and black songs (mostly collected from White informants). The first major collection of southern folksong, from members of both black and white populations, was Tennesee-based E.C. Perrow’s Songs and Rhymes from the South (1912).
Three typical essays of the early 20th century illustrate cross-cultural historical studies of ballad themes: G.H. Gerould, ‘The Balad of the Bitte Withy’ (1908); Walter R. Nelles, ‘The Ballad of Hind Horn’ (1909); and Paul Franklin Baum, ‘The English Ballad of Judas Iscariot’ (1916). Characterized by broad comparisons, they are summations of the sparse evidence then available.
John Avery Lomax (1867–1948) was a pioneer in the study of south-western lore. At Harvard in 1907 he encountered folklorists Kittredge and Barrett Wendel, who encouraged him on a venture to collect the songs of cowboys, miners, stage drivers, freighters and hunters, through correspondence as well as field trips. He was the first scholar to collect Anglo-American folksongs with the Edison phonograph (Lomax and others, 1947). Lomax’s Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, with 112 song texts and 18 tunes, was published in 1910. Lomax presented his collection as ‘indigenous popular songs that have sprung up as has the grass on the plains’, a romantic interpretation that supported the communalist views of Kittredge and of Wendell, who wrote an introduction to the Lomax collection. Lomax cleaned up the language and combined lines from different versions to produce a ‘complete’ song, violating the ‘ethics of ballad-gatherers, in a few instances, by selecting and putting together what seemed to be the best lines from different versions, all telling the same story. Frankly, the volume is meant to be popular’ (1910).
In 1931, Lomax resumed his collecting career, setting out with Alan, his son, on a four-month, 16,000-mile trip to record black American songs (1934). In southern prison camps they encountered prisoners who still sang old work songs. In one of the jails in 1933 the Lomaxes met Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter) (1885–1949), a black American songster, blues singer and guitarist. They engaged him to record much of his repertory of some 500 songs for the Library of Congress Archive (1935–40). Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly (1936) is one of the first extensive presentations of an individual repertory.
The composer Ruth Crawford (1901–53) transcribed, arranged and edited hundreds of recordings from the Archive, many of which were published by John and Alan Lomax in Our Singing Country (1941). In the collection, Folk Song USA: the 111 Best American Ballads, John and Alan Lomax and Charles and Ruth Seeger (née Crawford) presented a popular anthology with piano arrangements and annotations (1947).
A market for commercial folk music steadily developed from the 1920s to 1940s as recording technology improved. With the popularization of folk radio broadcasts prior to World War I, record sales plummeted (Alan Lomax was featured as a radio personality for many years on ‘Well-springs of America’, ‘Transatlantic Call’ and ‘Your Ballad Man’). During the 1920s, in a search for new material, record producers turned to folksong, black and European (especially race and hillbilly; pejorative terms later replaced by blues, soul, country and western). In 1939 Moses Asch (1905–86) founded Asch Records (later Folkways), releasing recordings of Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie. Other labels featured Josh White, Burl Ives and Carl Sandburg. On the Folkways label Asch amassed a huge collection of commercial folk music with help from colleagues Henry Cowell and Pete Seeger.
Ethnomusicology, §II, 4: History to 1945: North America
The foremost collector of French Canadian materials was anthropologist and ethnologist Charles Marius Barbeau (1883–1969). In 1946 in collaboration with his leading disciple, Luc Lacourière, he founded the Archives de Folklore at Laval University, the first of several folklore programmes at Canadian Universities and the repository (together with the National Museums of Canada, Quebec City) for field recordings of the French tradition. The publication of Les archives de folklore, organ of the Archives, began in the same year. Barbeau’s writings include Alouette: nouveau recueil de chansons populaires (1946), ‘La guignolée au Canada’ (1946) and Le rossignol y chante (1962).
The Anglo-Canadian tradition has been documented by Helen Creighton (1950, 1960, 1962, 1971), Edith Fowke (1963, 1965, 1970) and Edward D. Ives (1962, 1964, 1971). The folksongs of Newfoundland have been collected by Kenneth Peacock (1954, 1960, 1965) and Maud Karpeles (1930, 1971).
Seminal anthropological studies of Inuit culture were made by Franz Boas (1888). Zygmunt Estreicher (1917–93), a Swiss musicologist of Polish origin, wrote his doctoral dissertation on Canadian Caribou Eskimo dance-songs (1948) and in 1954 Laura Boulton (1899–1980) issued her Folkways recording and booklet summarizing the Hudson Bay and Alaskan traditions.
7. Unitary field or cluster of disciplines?.
Ethnomusicology, §III: Post-1945 developments
Ethnomusicology entered a distinctively, even radically, new phase of its history in the wake of World War II. Ethnomusicologists took pains to declare the disciplinary independence of their field, even when this meant placing distance between ethnomusicology and the several disciplines with which it had shared issues, methodologies and institutional structures, especially musicology, anthropology and folklore. Whereas ethnomusicological approaches remained more eclectic than unified during the second half of the 20th century, the discipline itself moved decisively in the direction of unity. It first challenged the role of comparison and the primacy of the musical object implicit in Vergleichende Musikwissenschaft (‘comparative musicology’, see §II, 2 (i) above) during the first half of the century, and then accorded greater significance to cultural materials gathered during ethnographic fieldwork and to the more quantitative and ‘scientific’ methods of the social and systematic sciences (Nettl, 1964; Schuursma, 1992).
Symbolizing the dramatic disciplinary realignment and the distinctive achievements of the discipline during the second half of the 20th century has been the name ‘ethnomusicology’ itself, adopted in the early 1950s because of its inclusiveness but increasingly called into question in the 1990s because of its exclusiveness (Kunst, 1950; Bohlman, 1992). The identity of ethnomusicology in the practices and products of its scholars and in its academic and pedagogical structures became increasingly canonized in the decades after World War II, while in the decades approaching the end of the 20th century disciplinary boundaries began to blur in new ways, especially in the 1990s, precisely at a historical moment in which ethnomusicology was enjoying its most influential presence among the humanities and social sciences (see Rice, 1987).
World War II and its aftermath unleashed entirely new processes of globalization that increased the availability of music on hitherto unimaginable levels. New forms of cultural and economic contact replaced previous European colonial forms. Collecting projects were no longer carried out primarily as an extension of colonial intervention, with the concomitant aim of locating non-Western music in the comparative framework of Western, largely European, history. Armed with new recording technologies, ethnomusicologists of the post-World War II era were able to embark upon fieldwork untrammeled by the necessity of assessing a music culture's historical stage of development. Synchronic observation quickly supplanted diachronic observation in importance, and at the same time linguistic and national musical boundaries were dismantled to make way for shifting and contested cultural landscapes.
Just as the places in which ethnomusicological field research took place shifted dramatically after World War II, so too did the global geography of its institutional practices. The historical centre of Vergleichende Musikwissenschaft prior to World War II, as its name suggests, was Central Europe, with many approaches to ethnomusicology outside Central Europe also influenced extensively by German and Austrian scholars (Bose, 1953). Post-World War II ethnomusicology shifted its centre to North America, receiving its initial impulse from immigrant students and scholars during and after the war, many of them with Central European intellectual roots, for example, Walter Kaufmann, George List, Bruno Nettl and Klaus Wachsmann.
No less crucial for the growing influence of North American ethnomusicology was the conscious embrace of the disciplinary affinity with social and cultural anthropology (Merriam, 1964; Reinhard, 1968). Already in the late 19th century, North American scholars had drawn heavily upon anthropological methods, especially in their field studies of Native American music. In the 1950s, however, North American ethnomusicologists took their engagement with anthropology several steps further, insisting on the primacy of ethnography and fieldwork (A. Seeger, 1991; McAllester, 1954), and establishing the institutional basis of the Society for Ethnomusicology in the American Anthropological Association. Even in the 1990s, debates about the extent of anthropology's influence on ethnomusicology continued to form on two sides of a global divide, with American ethnomusicology's engagement with anthropology on one side and European and Asian trepidation about ethnographic approaches to the study of music on the other (Bohlman, 1992).
The radical new phase of ethnomusicology's history that was well underway already within a decade after World War II resulted from the convergence of four paradigm shifts, each having its own revolutionary impact on the field (see Kuhn, 1970). Firstly, World War II itself brought about a sweeping reformulation of the nation-state on a global level, which in turn led to completely different instantiations of music and nationalism. The geographical, cultural, and musical boundaries of European and Asian empires were greatly reduced, in some cases necessitating the reformulation of ethnomusicological methods (for example, the concept of folksong as a representation of ‘speech islands’ in German musical folklore). The independence of former European colonies in the late 1940s, many of them crucial to pre-World War II canons of ethnomusicology (particularly India and Indonesia, which gained independence from the UK in 1947 and from the Netherlands by 1949 respectively) led to the reconfiguration of colonial structures as indigenous ontologies for research. The nation-state as a site for intensive and extensive musical research was a global phenomenon by the early 1950s, and the institutional and political practices of ethnomusicology were transformed to respond to this phenomenon.
Secondly, debates about the appropriate subjects and approaches of ethnomusicological research proliferated. By coining the name ‘ethno-musicology’ (later just ‘ethnomusicology’; see Kunst, 1950), Jaap Kunst made it possible to name and describe the paradigmatic shift away from musical comparison and toward social scientific methods (see Sturtevant, 1964). The prefix ‘ethno’ effectively replaced the adjective ‘comparative’, but more crucially it marked a shift from methods that relied on universals to forms of representation that emphasized local and individual distinctiveness (Merriam, 1977; C. Seeger, 1977).
As important as the term ‘ethnomusicology’ was to the post-World War II paradigm shift, it has not proved to be unassailable, and its appropriateness was increasingly called into question in the 1990s, when the Society for Ethnomusicology prompted a third shift, openly debating replacing the term with another, or even several others, that more appropriately described changing practices (see §7 below). The discursive debates of the 1990s did not produce an obvious replacement for ‘ethnomusicology’, but they did continue to underscore the persistence and seriousness of the same discursive debates that had brought about the disciplinary revolution of the 1950s.
The fourth paradigm shift has accompanied technological revolutions. In part because of their reliance on field research and in part because of the widespread experimentation with systematic methodologies, ethnomusicologists have quickly responded to the technological changes that have multiplied the representational potential for the field. In the immediate wake of World War II, the use of portable magnetic tape recorders and the emergence of the long-playing record produced a change of technologies that enabled ethnomusicologists to collect, transport, analyze and disseminate musical information with relative ease and at moderate cost. Film and video technologies in the 1960s and 70s were no less sweeping in their impact on field research. The spread of new and inexpensive technologies to musicians, especially cassette, digital (CD) and internet, unleashed a massive globalization of musical production in the 1980s and 90s, and ethnomusicologists quickly responded to that globalization, documenting the concomitant paradigm shift in musical meaning and the mass consumption of musical culture.
The second and third paradigm shifts, in particular, lead to the representational revolution that constitutes the fourth paradigm shift (Bohlman, 1991). What ethnomusicologists collected, analyzed and documented underwent an enormous transformation from the 1950s to the 1990s. Whereas the sound recording technologies of the 1950s shaped the ethnographic practices at the time, ethnographic practices rarely relied only, or even primarily, on sound recording in the 1990s. The representational revolution during the second half of the 20th century made it possible to provide a much thicker description of musical soundscapes, the multiple levels of musical performance and consumption in society, and the multiple directions of musical change at local and global levels (Feld, 1990). With seemingly unlimited representational potential at their disposal, ethnomusicologists at the end of the 20th century were faced with the challenge of providing as complete a picture of the diverse phenomena constituting music as possible, a challenge almost diametrically opposed to the more focussed tasks of the 1950s, when ethnomusicologists were charged with the isolation and collection of as much musical data as possible.
The historical tension between ethnomusicology as a field that draws more and more musics into a canon for study, and ethnomusicology as a discipline whose methods, if not unified, are distinctive, had become even greater by the end of the 20th century (C. Seeger, 1970). Ethnomusicology was again undergoing an extensive discursive and methodological revolution. Many of the paradigm shifts that spawned the sweeping disciplinary changes of the 1950s were evident again in the 1990s, engendering sweeping change in the discipline. Nationalism, for example, reasserted itself in the 1990s, not only in the new nation-states of a post-communist Eastern Europe, but in post-colonial nation-states wishing to strengthen regional and international power in a fluid transnational political culture. Debates, too, raged again in the 1990s, and accordingly ethnomusicologists actively engaged in a process of realigning disciplinary borders and establishing new discursive alignments with disciplines as diverse as cultural studies and film studies. If technological revolution brought about a fourth paradigm shift already in the late 1940s, internet technologies are the cause of virtually unchecked shifts in the 1990s, ranging from the worldwide trafficking of digitalized sound to the transformation of traditional ethnographies through publication in internet journals, such as Ethnomusicology On-Line and Music and Anthropology. The representational revolution evident in the fourth paradigm shift, finally, stimulated an entirely new set of debates about the structures, methods, pedagogies and subjects of the field, stimulating a dizzying array of new disciplinary alignments, some perhaps ephemeral but others crucial to the reshaping of the discipline's identity in the 21st century.
Ethnomusicology, §III: Post-1945 developments
Ethnomusicology became a new and different kind of science after World War II. During the second half of the 20th century new forms of scientific inquiry broadened the range of objects available for investigation, while at the same time refining the procedures for study. Ethnomusicologists, especially in the 1950s and 60s, sought new forms of exact measurement, particularly those machines that would draw upon methods from the physics of sound to represent the cognitive parameters of music with objective detail, for example, the melograph employed by Charles Seeger at UCLA (C. Seeger, 1953). European systematic musicologists were among the first to adopt developing digital technologies in the 1970s and 80s to propose new scientific procedures for the representation of musical sound (see Zannos, 1999). Although the history of ethnomusicology had always looked towards the physical and natural sciences for parallel procedures and models, the tendency toward scientism accelerated rapidly in the second half of the 20th century (see Bohlman, 1991). By the end of the 20th century, nonetheless, the larger questions ethnomusicologists faced were is ethnomusicology a science, and, what kind of science can and should ethnomusicology be?
Several distinctive shifts accompanied the endeavours of ethnomusicologists to strengthen the scientific foundations of their field. Firstly, the broadly historical framework of comparative musicology was replaced by an ethnographic framework. Secondly, procedures based on pre-existing collections of music, in which music was treated as an object, gave way to collecting through fieldwork, in which music's subjective qualities were also investigated. Thirdly, the transcription of music using Western notation was severely scrutinized and it was supplanted by forms of representation that depended on technological reproducibility. Fourthly, psychological theories that treated music as the product of nature were replaced by theories from the cognitive sciences, which examined music as the product of human mental processes. Fifthly, musics that had been examined as self-referential symbol systems were transposed to contexts outside themselves, allowing music to be investigated as a component in a larger cultural complex. These shifts toward ‘scientific’ methods rarely followed similar paths and though proponents of all purported to redefine the scientific framework for ethnomusicology, they did so in ways that were scarcely comparable (see the different approaches in Zannos, 1999). By the closing decades of the 20th century, moreover, postmodern and post-colonial trends in ethnomusicology challenged the scientific impulse characterizing the first decades of ethnomusicology's radical realignment after World War II.
The comparative focus of ethnomusicology prior to World War II depended on a broadly historical ontology of music, in which music, wherever it was found, fitted the models of an organic and linear history. Traditional and non-Western musics, therefore, were comparable throughout the world because they could be calibrated as fulfilling different stages of development. The teleology from which comparative musicology developed depended on the Hegelian model of a universal history that moved ineluctably toward Europe as civilization developed ever higher levels. Accordingly, the comparativists ultimately constructed their own models of non-Western music as fulfilling an earlier stage of Western music history, or reflecting Western music history at a different stage of its development (see Schneider, 1976).
The wholeness of universal history was mirrored by the psychological models of music that emanated from the work of comparativists such as Carl Stumpf and Erich von Hornbostel, who were influenced by gestalt psychology (Schneider, 1999; Klotz, 1998). The question ethnomusicologists attempted to answer was, just how could the methods of the field perceive, measure and represent the parts that constituted that whole? The comparativists argued that wholeness largely cohered from a complex of systems with bases in both the physics of sound – hence, nature – and in musical and cultural practice. Javanese and Balinese traditional musics provided one of the most consistent sources of experimental material for investigating the natural and cultural domains of systemeticity. The instruments of the gamelan, particularly the idiophones, made it possible to investigate both the more or less fixed boundaries of tuning systems and the infinite variety within them that individual gamelan orchestras nonetheless demonstrated, theoretically tuned to themselves, and therefore demonstrated a complex of culturally bounded decisions (Hood, 1966; Rahn, 1979).
The historical rupture effected by World War II brought about a dramatic rejection of the historical framework upon which comparative musicology had depended. Whereas ethnomusicologists whose careers had been established prior to the war (e.g. Curt Sachs; see Sachs, 1962) sought ways to rejuvenate the field as an historical science, a new generation turned away from history and embraced the new scientific possibilities developing in the social and natural sciences. By recasting ethnomusicology as an ‘anthropology of music’, Alan Merriam was one of the first scholars to formulate a science of music that recognized music as only one of the subjects of ethnomusicology's scientific investigation (Merriam, 1964). His tripartite model held that music was but one of three subjects of inquiry, the other two being ‘behaviour’ and the ‘conceptualization’ of music, thereby drawing upon both psychological and aesthetic trends in anthropology.
The British social anthropologist and ethnomusicologist, John Blacking, pushed the scientific turn in yet another direction, that is, into biology. Music-making, Blacking argued in a series of very influential works (for example 1979 and 1995), was based in the human body, in both its genetic and physical structures, rendering music, therefore, a species-specific practice within nature. Culture, therefore, was not primarily a context for music, rather a product of musical practices that combined with other fundamental human activities to yield society. Blacking's provocative appeal to the biological sciences stimulated an interest in related musical phenomena with physical bases, notably dance, but he never fully theorized a set of biological parameters for ethnomusicological investigation before his death in 1990.
The attempts to introduce scientific discourse from the natural sciences were not without their detractors, and by the 1990s growing discontent, even outright resistance, countered scientism as emerging disciplines within the humanities, especially post-colonial studies and cultural studies, increasingly influenced ethnomusicology. Claiming that ethnomusicologists working in the natural sciences had neglected deeper social and historical problems – examining the biological structures of musical practice, for example, but ignoring the explicit presence of music in racial constructions and racism (see Radano and Bohlman, 2000) – new discourses of ethnomusicology endeavoured to be more broadly responsive to the culture and politics of modernity and the post-colonial world. Research methods turned towards problems arising, for example, from the globalization of the nation-state in the 1980s and 90s, yielding post-colonial forms of fieldwork that investigated the nationalization of music archives or the nationalization of music education. New methods, drawn from political science and sociology, were adapted to interpret the politicization of musical institutions and the commercialization of world-music consumption (for example Mitchell, 1993). At the end of the 20th century, the sharp tensions between methods adapted from cognitive and natural sciences and those drawn from cultural studies and the reflexive shift in the social sciences defined new faultlines in ethnomusicology's engagement with science and scientific methods, revealing that it had become not a single scientific field in the second half of the 20th century, but a cluster of disciplines that continued to formulate scientific procedures in different ways.
Ethnomusicology, §III: Post-1945 developments
As ethnomusicology spread across and embraced the methodologies of a growing number of disciplines during the second half of the 20th century, its history was subject to the changes within those disciplines. Ethnomusicology's disciplinary revolutions were not primarily confined to developments within musical scholarship, but rather responded frequently to paradigm shifts in other disciplines. If, at mid-century, ethnomusicology turned away from the mainstream developments within musical scholarship, especially historical musicology, there was also a reintegration into the mainstream by century's end, particularly during the 1990s as other areas of musical scholarship varied and strengthened their interaction with ideas and developments outside music. The disciplinary revolutions during the half-century following World War II fall into two distinctive periods: those from around 1950 to 1975 followed paths that placed distance between ethnomusicology and mainstream scholarship; those from around 1975 to the end of the century sought, however tentatively, to influence the mainstream by seeking integrative paths.
No intellectual history was more profoundly influential on ethnomusicology's history in the second half of the 20th century than that of social and cultural anthropology. The collection and analysis of musical phenomena was already an important component of anthropology by the second half of the 19th century, particularly in North America, with the intense interest in Native American music, and in European traditions whose growth accompanied the spread of colonial empires (see Schneider, 1976). Anthropology provided ethnomusicologies not only with an impulse and framework for studying the cultures of ‘others’ deemed different, but a set of methods and technologies for appropriating their cultures. After World War II, however, it was not so much anthropology's methods or the cultures investigated by anthropologists – Native American music retained its central role – that brought about ethnomusicology's most sweeping paradigm shift in the 1950s but rather anthropology's challenge to the object of study itself, music. Claiming that musical scholarship had far too little evidence for and knowledge of the vast variety of musical repertories, Alan P. Merriam and David P. McAllester in the USA and John Blacking in the UK argued that the comparative study of music had been premature. More critical in the 1950s and 60s would be the expansion of fieldwork, the enrichment of basic collections and the refinement of ethnographic methods. Concomitantly, anthropologists called for a reconceptualization of music e.g. in Merriam's tripartite model. The paradigms of anthropology are most evident in the shift of ethnomusicological focus from music to music cultures, in other words, music as inseparable from the entire complex of society and culture.
Anthropology and other social science disciplines also shaped ethnomusicology's history, in some cases undergirding traditional areas of research, in others laying the groundwork for distinctively new directions. Folk-music research, for example, retained a large measure of its importance, but was redeployed from philological and textual to ethnographic and contextual approaches. In the USA Charles Seeger and Bruno Nettl theorized new approaches during the 1950s and 1960s. Folk music was no longer idealized as universal, but was investigated as a domain of cultural practice allowing local and regional groups to express uniqueness and difference. Ethnicity became the primary factor for North American folk-music scholars, while individuals as music-makers and small-group performance increasingly influenced scholarship in West and Central Europe, for example in the work of Ruth Finnegan (1989) and Ernst Klusen (1969). Previous emphases on text also underwent an anthropological turn, notably in the work of Steven Feld and Anthony Seeger, both of whom established new paradigms for musical anthropology by retheorizing the relation between music and language (Feld, 1990; A. Seeger, 1987).
Despite influences from the social sciences, ethnomusicology did not abandon its historical connections to humanistic and musicological study. Several emerging paradigms of the 1950s intensified the concern for the musical object. Ki Mantle Hood's notion of ‘bi-musicality’ privileged the musical component in ethnomusicological participant-observation, arguing that the only way to know another culture's music was to develop fluency as a skilled performer, a goal possible only after years of intensive study. Organological research in ethnomusicology, moreover, continued to emphasize the integrity of musical instruments, whose identities were circumscribed by the objects themselves and their positions within classificatory systems indebted to 19th-century philological methods. The organological methods adapted from Curt Sachs and Erich M. von Hornbostel by scholars such as Klaus Wachsmann and Laurence Picken (1975) in the decades after World War II also gave way to new approaches to organology, such as those theorized by Erich Stockmann (for example in the series Studia instrumentorum musicae popularis) and Margaret Kartomi (1990), which responded to the distinctive forms and interrelations between instruments within each music culture. A similar shift of focus from discrete data to the complex interrelations within cultural systems characterized the revolution in systematic musicology. Systematists such as Oskár Elschek and Albrecht Schneider expanded melograph techniques by developing new computer applications, that allowed ethnomusicologists to read beyond the sound itself and to interpret the ways in which acoustic phenomena represent cultural context.
Characterizing ethnomusicology's disciplinary revolutions was a renewed concern for musical texts, a reinterpretation of culture and its meanings, and a reintroduction of historical methods. Theories from literary criticism, particularly the processes of music as a symbolic and signifying form of expression, drawn from the work of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, generated new analytical languages for talking about music. Popular music, both as the product of small groups or as globalized world music, increasingly became a postmodern object of ethnomusicological enquiry, with many scholars negotiating with the emerging theories of British and American cultural studies, from Stuart Hall to Arjun Appadurai. Ethnomusicologists also turned to ‘new historicism’ and other post-structural theories to find the new ways in which music contributed to the construction of history itself (see Blum, Bohlman and Neuman, 1991).
If ethnomusicology's forays through the interdisciplinary terrains of the late 20th century produced quite different types of revolutions, some affording only short-term exchanges across disciplinary borders, others yielding long-term paradigm shifts, the sheer multitude of those forays reveals a dynamic history, one in which experimentation was valued as a means of questioning and challenging the mainstream of musical scholarship on an increasingly global level.
Ethnomusicology, §III: Post-1945 developments
The history of ethnomusicology has frequently formed along international ideological faultlines, articulating and, at times, politicizing them. Because scholarship prior to World War II had participated quite fully in colonialism and its appropriation of culture for use and consumption in the West, the field was often unable to extricate itself from the post-colonial fissures forming as new nations achieved independence and distanced themselves from the control of Western nation-states. Colonialist alliances between Western ‘Selves’ and non-Western ‘Others’ underwent processes of radical realignment and ethnomusicology itself entered a phase in which it struggled toward institutional centralization when many of those previously studied were calling for resistance to disciplinary centralization according to Western intellectual and academic models. Attracted to the ideological and political issues of the post-colonial world, many ethnomusicologists also confronted the need to reexamine and recast the political motivations that they had inherited from the era of colonial expansion into and representation of the world's cultures.
As post-colonial delineations shifted, so too did ethnomusicology's paradigms. Within European ethnomusicology the fissure between East and West, already a product of the Enlightenment, deepened as the cultural implications of the Cold War became increasingly evident. Eastern European ethnomusicologists remapped musical folklore to reflect regional musical landscapes so that they would constitute new nationalist realities. Supported with resources from national academies of science, ethnomusicologists intensively collected at the local and regional level, assembling an image of the nation based on related, balanced parts (see Elschek, 1991; Nixon, 1998). Eastern European nations came to embody national musics – for example Romanian, Bulgarian or Yugoslav – and the new national musics contributed to the writing of new national histories, such as the ‘six centuries of democratic struggle’ undergirding the canon of ‘folk music’ in the German Democratic Republic (Steinitz, 1978). Western European ethnomusicologists, in contrast, frequently eschewed nationalism, albeit for no less ideologically motivated notions about the democracy of music-making. There was relatively little support of ethnomusicological research at the national level, with institutional frameworks both proliferating and fragmenting. The importance of the split between East and West in Cold War ethnomusicology is not to be underestimated, for it also shaped the institutionalization of ethnomusicology at a global professional level, particularly in the history of the International Council for Traditional Music, whose activities, such as conferences in both East and West, sought to bridge the ideological divide separating the regions.
By the 1970s new schisms began to supplant the division between East and West. A palpable geographical shift between North and South, with major divisions between Europe and Africa, and between North and South America, increasingly replacing the divide between East and West. Those who had previously been studied asserted their intellectual right to represent themselves and to do so with methods of their own making and implementation. The power implicit in Western music history and anthropology was subjected to growing scrutiny and criticism. Scholars from Africa and South America, as well as from other areas of emerging economic and political power in the so-called Third World, continued to turn to European and North American ethnomusicology because of opportunities for advanced study, but they insisted on the necessity for new forms of dialogue and exchange that both highlighted the differences between North and South, and charted new, more international historical paths for ethnomusicology.
In the closing decades of the 20th century the explosion of Asian economic power and the implosion of European nationalism again shifted ethnomusicology's paradigms along ideological faultlines. National schools and institutions of ethnomusicology developed in some Asian countries, such as China, Indonesia and Japan. Some Asian ethnomusicologists, such as those in Australia and Japan, drew upon and extended Western models, whereas others, such as those in China and India, turned toward distinctive models of their own, which often represented music history according to indigenous paradigms, often quite devoid of European teleological patterns (see Qureshi, 1991; Wong, 1991). South American and African ethnomusicological histories also took shape and followed distinctive directions in the 1980s and 90s, influenced more by post-colonial responses and even ideological rejection of the West than by the power accrued from global economic expansion.
During the 1990s, particularly in response to the end of the Cold War and periodic economic crises in Asia, the paths along which ethnomusicology's history had formed entered new phases of destabilization and engendered new debates about and challenges to the ways in which the field could study, represent and appropriate world musics. At their core, most debates about who possessed the intellectual capital and political power to study whom remained rooted in historical problems and persistent questions about music and identity. Native American musical scholarship, for example, deepened its stance toward the rights of any scholar to study Native American musical practices. Few questioned the claims that Native American should themselves largely control access to and the representation of their musical practices, but just how non-Native American might work together on ethnomusicological research remained open to question (see Herndon and McLeod, 1981; Diamond and others, 1994) and spawned new versions of older, historical questions, such as the gendered presence of ethnomusicologists in ethnographic research (Frisbie, 1991).
New ideological schisms, some ontologically more reactionary and others more intellectually radical, formed in the new ethnomusicologies emerging in the 1990s. Some scholars working in the Middle East and in Islamic traditions of the Mediterranean and Central and South Asia, for example, began to argue for approaches that would place musical repertories and practices in more appropriately Islamic categories, reflecting a larger tendency to view Islam as a determining factor in world history and culture. Islamic musics and Islamic ethnomusicology would therefore cut across and even negate the history and geography at the core of Western ethnomusicology, yielding histories of scholarship shaped entirely within their own religious traditions (see al-Faruqi, 1985; Qureshi, 1991).
The critique of African ethnomusicologists levels its attacks at the Western underpinnings of ethnomusicology. Rather than seeking to articulate an overarching category, such as ‘Islamic ethnomusicology’, African scholars deny the very possibility of an ‘African ethnomusicology’, decrying the damage such disciplinary categories have unleashed throughout the colonialist presence in Africa and the post-colonialist attempts to redress that presence (see Agawu, 1995; Appiah, 1992; Masolo, 2000). The challenge of the new ethnomusicologies at the end of the 20th century has been to expose old and new ideological faultlines, and to insist that ethnomusicologists recognize and address the politicized paradigms that shape the past, present and future of their field.
Ethnomusicology, §III: Post-1945 developments
As ethnomusicology's distinctiveness and independence as a discipline grew during the second half of the 20th century, educational and scholarly institutions increasingly defined, directed and, to some extent, limited the directions in which ethnomusicology developed. Two general historical directions asserted themselves, one inclusive, the other exclusive: institutions generating the inclusive impetus sought to open methodological boundaries, embrace scholarship from other disciplines and broaden the field of inquiry; more exclusive institutions stressed more rigorous methodological approaches, stressed ethnomusicology's uniqueness and focussed on the growth of ethnomusicology from within. Exclusive institutions generally were more locally or nationally bounded than inclusive institutions.
The most common institutional sites for the development of ethnomusicology were governmental agencies and centres of learning and education. Broadly speaking, the governmental agency furthered research which begins with fieldwork in a field that hypothetically includes an entire population group, provides opportunities for archiving and processing of music from the group, and concludes with some kind of dissemination and return of research material to the group. Governmental agencies range from local arts and humanities councils to academies of science on the national level. These institutions dominate ethnomusicological research in many countries, notably in Central and Eastern Europe, in South America, and in many emerging nations of Africa and Asia, in which governmental agencies are charged with the institutional inculcation of national culture and cultural nationalism.
One of the primary institutional reasons for the international spread of ethnomusicology after World War II was its growing presence as an academic discipline in the university and other institutions of higher education. Teaching posts and research possibilities proliferated rapidly, particularly as the humanities and social sciences in universities throughout the world sought to attract students from other nations. University programmes in ethnomusicology drew a large – and crucial – percentage of their students from areas of the world whose musics were being taught. Especially in the USA, but to some degree also in the UK, Japan, Italy, Austria and West Germany, ethnomusicology became a primarily academic discipline in the 1950s and remained so until the end of the 20th century. During the 1980s and 1990s, university programmes offering advanced training and degrees in ethnomusicology spread to countries throughout the world, often founded by returning scholars, who had received graduate degrees in ethnomusicology from Western universities. Such institutions drew upon Western approaches and methods, but adapted these to local resources and concepts of music and music education.
In the 1980s and 90s institutions within private and business sectors expanded their support of ethnomusicology, particularly as such institutions perceived the possibilities for the mass collection and dissemination of world musics. In the first decades after World War II recording companies, usually small and rarely subsidiaries of transnational conglomerates, sponsored collecting endeavours, among the most notable of which were the Moses Asch's Folkways recordings (Cantwell, 1996; Goldsmith, 1998; McCulloh, 1982) and the UNESCO-sponsored anthologies from countries and regions throughout the world. With the entry into the market of Electra (Nonesuch), Ocora and other international recording companies in the 1960s and 70s, the possibility of marketing musics from the world as ‘world music’ became increasingly attractive to the private sector. In the 1980s and 90s other areas of the private sector, particularly publishing houses and concert organizers, provided a substantially new and powerful institutional infrastructure for ethnomusicology.
Academies of science, national sound archives and their related agencies transformed their production of sound recordings from formats dedicated to more limited archival and scientific uses to those making more public and commercial dissemination possible. The EU, for example, sponsored nationally-based recording projects among its members that were designed to make regional musics available on CD, thereby emphasizing the EU's concern for regionalism. By the end of the 20th century, new recording technologies, not only CD, but also internet and CD-ROM, stimulated a turn toward historicism as historical recordings, among them the field recordings from the beginning of the 20th century, were rereleased and recontextualized for scholarly and public consumption. Virtually every type of institution, therefore, could sponsor and finance its own recording projects, expanding the availability of sound documents for historical and ethnographic research on local, national and international levels.
The proliferation of new forms of music publishing yielded new contexts for institutionalizing ethnomusicology after World War II. Rather than contributing mosaic pieces to larger histories of music as they had at the beginning of the century, ethnomusicological monographs became genres that reflected the new forms of research and institutionalization. Scholars used the monograph to represent a music culture as extensively and intensively as possible, with sections devoted to ethnographic detail, transcription, and biographical studies of musicians. The ethnomusicological monograph, therefore, responded to the enjoinder from the critics of comparative musicology to collect more empirical evidence from throughout the world and examine that evidence in greater detail. During the 1960s and 70s, publishing in ethnomusicology shifted focus from series emphasizing area studies to those attempting to embrace the integrity of ethnomusicology as a discipline unto itself. Journals provided venues for ethnomusicologists to present empirical studies, but even more important, the journals introduced a discursive venue for extensive debate about the nature of the discipline and for critical self-reflection about methodology, interdisciplinarity and ethics (for example Merriam, 1977; Gourlay, 1978; Shelemay, 1999). One measure of ethnomusicology's expansion and diversification in the final decades of the 20th century was a parallel increase in the journals devoted primarily to ethnomusicology research (Etzkorn, 1988). In the 1980s and 90s, new publishing venues for reference works in ethnomusicology emerged, usually conceived as encompassing the musics of a nation or region (Stockmann, 1992) or providing encyclopedic coverage of many world musics, as with the Garland Library of World Music.
Soon after World War II ethnomusicology entered a phase of extensive professionalization, leading in turn to new possibilities for international contact and the exchange of information and resources. Two scholarly societies, the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) and the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM), have dominated the field's professionalization. The histories of the two societies reveal that they have been more different than alike, for they have responded to the changing nature of ethnomusicology in distinctive ways. The ICTM's conceptualization of music was nationally, rather than internationally, bounded. Many articles in the early volumes of the ICTM's journal were devoted to comprehensive definitions of the folk music in individual countries, replicating in many ways the template of comparative musicology. The term ‘folk music’ was retained as a designation of the ICTM's official object of study until 1981, despite attempts to redefine that object (Elbourne, 1975). The ICTM has located music as an object at the centre of its discourse, reflecting a European disciplinary preference for musical folklore and the predilection of many scholars to write on their own musics rather than looking beyond their national borders for areas of study. National committees wishing to admit more methodological variety and breadth have occasionally struck out in independent directions, as in the UK and Ireland, with the British forum for ethnomusicology. ICTM conferences have moved from host country to host country, and attendance from all sides of international political conflicts has been facilitated, maintaining the ICTM's emphasis on an international membership and disciplinary inclusivity.
The Society for Ethnomusicology, in contrast, has followed a path shaped by North American ethnomusicologists and institutions. The SEM has concerned itself less with the object of study than with the development of new methodologies and the encouragement of interdisciplinarity between the humanities and the social sciences. In part to redress the American domination of the SEM, European scholars formed the ESEM in the 1980s, which attracted growing numbers of participants to its conferences in the 1990s. The SEM and ICTM together occupied the professional activities of most ethnomusicologists until the end of the 20th century. Together, they heightened the potential of ethnomusicology to include a multitude of approaches to local and world musics, and to musicological and anthropological approaches, making it possible for ethnomusicologists to choose from a broad spectrum of disciplinary methods and institutional alignments.
Ethnomusicology, §III: Post-1945 developments
Ethnomusicology as a discipline did not escape the post-colonial theories of the final decades of the 20th century, which increasingly criticized the Western intellectual engagement with and appropriation of music cultures elsewhere in the world. Whereas ethnomusicological research reached into more and more places, and a growing number of scholars from non-Western countries received formal ethnomusicological training, directly or indirectly, in Western, especially American, universities, ethnomusicology's virtually ubiquitous presence became the focus of a concern that indigenous traditions of scholarship were repressed or even failed to take shape because of the hegemony of Western ethnomusicology, its institutional structures and the power it wielded in the collection, dissemination and interpretation of the world's music. At issue were questions of ownership: whose music was subjected to ethnomusicological study; by whom and for whom; whose musical resources could be appropriated; to what ends; and whose ethnomusicology should have the right to examine other musics?
By the end of the 20th century such questions had led to an extensive scrutiny of ethnomusicology as a global discipline and had spawned growing forms of intellectual challenge to Western ethnomusicology, chief among them the establishment of new programmes of study and research, which in turn responded to national and regional differences and spurred the emergence of other discourses (see Béhague, 1991; Perlman, 1994; I.K.F. Wong, 1991; Zhang, 1985).
Though many of the ‘other ethnomusicologies’ were genealogically and institutionally bound to Western ethnomusicology, they largely sought forms of scientific independence that allowed them to forge models for research and teaching appropriate to their own national and local needs. Were, for example, basic ethnomusicological assumptions about the ontology of music sufficient, and were the genres and typologies borrowed from the West productive? Emerging national discourses naturally emphasized the local and the ways in which diverse local traditions collectively represented the nation, usually referred to with categories that juxtaposed traditional music with the nation. Thai music, for example, was privileged in programmes in Thailand (D. Wong, forthcoming).
Whether or not ‘folk music’ in an Asian national history had meanings parallel to those in Europe was, nonetheless, a different question (Jones, 1995). European musical terminology was itself one of the greatest problems as scholars sought to broaden their scopes (Blum, 1991). Different traditions of pedagogy and concepts of music history and historiography were equally problematic (Qureshi, 1991). The models borrowed from the field of cultural studies, such as globalization and transnationalism, exacerbated rather than solved the need for intellectual independence, for these models, too, placed non-Western musical traditions in a position subservient to the hegemony of Western economic and cultural power (Slobin, 1993). Articulate performers, such as Sumarsam and Ali Jihad Racy, channeled another type of response, translating indigenous music-making to ethnomusicological discourse.
The most sustained critiques of a global ethnomusicological hegemony have been those from East Asia, South Asia and Africa. Distinctive critiques from South American and Middle Eastern scholars began to crystallize in the 1990s as ethnomusicology established itself more securely in institutions of higher education. It would not be entirely correct to subsume all these critiques and the other scholarly traditions from which they are issuing under the single umbrella of post-colonial response, for they respond to the colonial presence of ethnomusicologists, be it as missionaries, government officials or scholars financed by transnational foundations, in different and distinctive ways. Indian critiques of Western views and methods, for example, take as their point of departure the longue durée of an intellectual history of Indian music.
If Indian scholars have been dismissive of Western ethnomusicology, particularly its terminology, scholars in African and China, in contrast, have been sharply oppositional, calling in their extreme forms for a break with Western scholarly approaches. African critiques have coalesced around various forms of post-colonial response, with African scholars consistently drawing attention to the ways in which the terminologies and discourses of African music have been imposed in such ways as to discipline African cultures and thereby to reduce them to a position of subservience (Masolo, 2000). African scholars have debunked commonly-held theories stated by comparative musicologists in the first half of the 20th century, as well as by Africans attempting to construct the pan-African aesthetic and ideology of négritude, that there was a larger field of practices that could be subsumed under the single rubric of ‘African music’. Whereas many Western concepts, foremost among them the insistence that the basis of African musics was rhythm, imposed primitiveness, thereby racializing African musics, new ethnomusicological voices emphasize the ways in which indigenous concepts challenge the very metaphysics of music on a global scale (Erlmann, 1999).
Chinese ethnomusicologies and ethnomusicologists have tended to be less post-colonial asserting that the ideologies and histories motivating the study of Chinese musics are distinct from those of the West in certain fundamental ways. The historical issues derive not only from the distinctive character of Chinese political and cultural history, but also the nexus of 20th-century ideological conflicts within East Asia itself, such as the interrelations between mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. Ideological and historical issues influence the ways in which, for example, minorities in China are recognized as part of a national culture, or the ways in which religious musical practices have survived in isolation or in highly politicized contexts, be they in mainland China or Taiwan, or even in the extensive Chinese diaspora (Chen, 1999). In a series of articles and internet exchanges, J. Lawrence Witzleben was particularly effective in focusing debates about the direction a Chinese ethnomusicology would need to proceed, so that by the end of the 20th century many new ethnomusicologies were turning to the critiques coming from Chinese scholars as touchstones for their own moves towards independence.
The critique of Western ethnomusicological hegemony did not only have a regional basis in Asia and Africa, but rather it came to unleash new forms of ethnomusicological discourse in Europe and North America. In particular, popular-music studies were empowered to formulate approaches to the study of musics and cultural practices that many believed had been too long neglected by mainstream ethnomusicology. The rise of popular-music studies in the 1980s marked a turn from the privileging of élite non-Western musics, hence, also the colonialist stance of late 20th-century ethnomusicology towards the musical practices of working-class and powerless members of industrialized societies. ‘Popular music’ did not only assume a new set of ontological meanings, but rather it required substantially new theoretical and ideological approaches, which together informed the journal, Popular Music. Much scholarship devoted to popular music, therefore, took shape outside mainstream ethnomusicological discourse, and it came to challenge ethnomusicology through its more broadly based and inclusive methodologies that allowed scholars to investigate popular musics within the global context of late 20th-century transnationalism.
One of the most striking characteristics of ethnomusicology's development in the closing decades of the 20th century is that ethnomusicologists took the challenges to their disciplinary hegemony seriously, seeking to address many of the issues raised by other ethnomusicologists. By responding to the critiques of the emerging other ethnomusicologies, the discipline maintained one of its fundamental tenets, that of inclusivity. Indeed, if that inclusivity had historically also provided one of the components of the discipline's hegemony and expansion together with colonial histories, it also opened ethnomusicology's discursive borders at the end of the 20th century, stimulating many scholars to look outward and to attempt to grapple with the challenges to the discipline rather than looking inward to buttress the approaches and methodologies that the critiques were actively trying to dismantle.
Ethnomusicology, §III: Post-1945 developments
In the mid-1990s, at the moment of its most extensive presence in the global study of music and of its greatest influence on the shaping of an interdisciplinary musical scholarship, ethnomusicology became the focus of a chorus of criticism calling for a renaming of the discipline. There was no single motivation for the call to rename the discipline, but rather the call itself signalled that a crucial historiographic juncture had been reached, a shift in paradigms, if not a moment of disciplinary rupture and revolution, paradoxically following on the heels of the discipline's most widely acknowledged successes. There was also no single term that won overwhelming support, or that really solved the problems that the call for renaming the discipline identified.
A younger generation of North American ethnomusicologists claimed that ‘ethnomusicology’ misrepresented their own disciplinary training, suggesting that the discipline was merely a subdiscipline of a larger musicology. The methods employed in new studies of popular music or drawn from cultural studies were not, so they claimed, primarily musicological. There was a further argument that ethnomusicology, as the discipline devoted to ‘ethnic groups’ and all musical cultures and subcultures, should be charged with the brief of studying all musics – folk, popular, classical, Western, non-Western, ect. In contrast, other critics claimed that ethnomusicology had increasingly turned inward because of its successes, making it more exclusive and deflecting the reflexive turn that had inspired the generations after World War II. Feminist and post-colonial theories, so this critique held, have slipped to only secondary significance as ethnomusicology strove to strengthen its institutional and political structures.
The most arresting call for renaming the field came from traditions that had taken shape outside Europe and North America, in economically developing countries and in the emerging discourses and academic traditions of the so-called Third World. The name ‘ethnomusicology’, so these critics decried, had too long represented a skewed distribution of power between Western musical scholarship and the cultures whose music it studied and appropriated. By retaining the name of their discipline, ethnomusicologists had also failed to question the historical split between Europe and its others, between industrialized nations and economically disadvantaged nations, and between music cultures formed by history and the people who had been denied history.
Various names were proposed as replacements for ‘ethnomusicology’, for example, ‘cultural musicology’ or ‘musical anthropology’ or, in the spirit of Charles Seeger, simply ‘musicology’, but there was virtually no agreement that any of these solved the range of problems cited in the critique levelled against ‘ethnomusicology’. In the late 1990s the debate intensified, and it unleashed a new and productive discourse about the nature of ethnomusicology's methods and its goals as a discipline and field. The debates clustered around the question: was ethnomusicology a unitary field, or was it a cluster of disciplines? On the one hand, ethnomusicology at century's end increasingly claimed the disciplinary structures of a unitary field, a canon of theory and methods, and publications and programmes of advanced study that undergirded these. National and international scholarly societies and a palpable presence in public debates about globalization and transnational cultural capital also lent ethnomusicology strength as a unified and central field. On the other hand, the more centralized the field became, the more difficult it had become to embrace diverse ontologies of music and methodologies of musical scholarship. As a centralized field, ethnomusicology was only tentatively dealing with the political and cultural realignments following the end of the Cold War in 1989. It was left to local and national efforts to deal with many of the challenges of a post-Cold War, postmodern world, such as continuing civil strife in Eastern Europe and South and South-east Asia. To the more politically progressive scholars of the 1990s, ethnomusicology seemed too encumbered by its growth and successes to engage critically and actively with the presence of music in the rising tide of racism and nationalism.
By the end of the 20th century the question remained open as to whether the new – or renewed – debates about the discipline's name were symptomatic of a change in the central core of the discipline. Whereas the debates might have been contradicted by the growth of ethnomusicology in institutions internationally, there were more fundamental historiographical questions than the challenge to the name itself. Did ‘music’ really remain the central object of ethnomusicological study, especially given the challenges of ethnomusicology to the limits of representation in a postmodern age? Would the institutional structures that supported the sea changes in the second half of the 20th century be those that provided the basis of ethnomusicology in the 21st? Would the cluster of scientific discourses embraced by ethnomusicologists change in fundamental ways? Would ethnomusicology really expand into new public spheres with the potential to bring about a major change in its language and political responsibilites, for instance, with the growth of the ‘world music industry’?
The period in ethnomusicology's intellectual history from 1945 to the end of the 20th century began with the challenge posed by renaming the discipline so that it would best represent a group of disciplines and scientific practices in the humanities and social sciences, and it concluded with the same challenge. Among the debates that generated responses to that challenge, few were characterized by a hardened stance that ethnomusicology was a single discipline whose defenses needed to be strengthened to fend off those malcontents who would strike at its very heart, symbolized by the name ethnomusicology. The persistence and vitality of the challenge to the discipline's names, be they ‘comparative musicology’, ‘the anthropology of music’ or ‘ethnomusicology’, revealed that ethnomusicology did not locate a single object at its centre, nor did it rely on a core of tools that all ethnomusicologists needed to acquire in order to command a common body of knowledge.
At the end of the 20th century, ethnomusicology remained a discipline openly willing to pose new questions, to embrace different and diverse methodologies, and to break with tradition when required by the empirical evidence. The paradigm shifts and radical reformulation of ethnomusicology in the decade after World War II had become normative by the end of the century, empowering ethnomusicology as a cluster of disciplines, discourses and scholars, challenged rather than fettered by the symbolic baggage of a name, to respond to the ever-changing meaning and presence of music on the world's contested cultural landscapes at the turn of the century.
2. Communities and their musics.
5. Diasporas and globalization.
10. Music theory and analysis.
Ethnomusicology, §IV: Contemporary theoretical issues
Summarizing ethnomusicological theory, following Nettl (1983), as ‘the study of music in and as culture’ is no longer a straightforward matter. The classical Enlightenment notion of theory, as modular, testable and preferably verbal abstraction, articulated from an all-seeing distance is itself subject to serious epistemological and methodological doubt. In an important sense, ethnomusicologists might be described as living in a post-theoretical environment, one shared by many in the social sciences and humanities. ‘Post-theoreticism’ is of course itself a theoretical condition. The recursive nature of this enterprise has often been noted, in music studies and elsewhere. Doubt and scepticism as to the very possibility of theory have initiated inquiry into the historical and political conditions of ethnomusicological theory, reflexive attention to fieldwork practice, and vigorous consideration of alternative modes of ethnographic expression, written, recorded, filmed, staged or displayed (for examples of experimental ethnographic writing, see Coplan, 1994, Kisliuk, 1997; on biography, see Danielson, 1997; on film, see Baily, 1986; on recording, see Zemp, 1996; on museum ethnography, see Simpson, 1996).
One might also ask whether the culture concept still serves as a unifying rubric for ethnomusicological research. Many other scholarly traditions are now also involved in investigating music ‘in and as culture’. The culture rubric also fails to define the work of many ethnomusicologists. This is particularly so in Britain and France, where culture has not been the overriding theoretical precept, and in Germany, where the culture concept has been substantially discredited by its appropriation by Nazism. The buoyant state of the US university system and university presses has done much to spread North American culturalogical models of ethnomusicological research, but this is far from being the whole story. In recent decades, the culture concept has come under sustained hitorical critique. The term culture emerged, as Elias pointed out, in a process of sociogenesis following the assembly of the German nation-state in the period following the Thirty Years War, separating the courtly, French-speaking nobility from an emerging German-speaking middle-class intelligentsia (Elias, 1982). In this context Kultur referred to a process of self-making and ‘inner’ achievement, as opposed to the ‘outer’ formalities of courtly etiquette and behavioural form. For Herder and those who followed him in 18th-century Germany and elsewhere in Europe, Civilization connected the individual to universal norms, while Culture was the incommensurable property of groups and, more specifically, nations. In this sense the history of the ‘culture’ concept was inextricably bound up with the history of the characteristic institutional forms of modernity itself. Critiques of modernity in recent decades have almost necessarily implied a critique of the notion of culture itself.
Ethnomusicological understandings of music culture have often been criticized in precisely these terms. Ethnomusicologists have indeed been inclined to ignore or downplay the problematic relationship of culturalism with the self-interested pronouncements of colonial and post-colonial elites. They have also often failed to understand and sufficiently distance themselves from the baggage of an Enlightenment rationalism in which European and non-European ‘others’ are simply there as examples or ‘cases’ for classification according to metropolitan criteria. Ethnography in this mode purports to provide connections and an inclusive framework for analysis, but often reifies, abstracting texts from contexts, enabling commodification and other forms of exploitation. Culturalism relies on the myth of insider knowledge as providing the only relevant terms for grasping the particularities of meaning and expression in a given community, but, ironically, fieldwork interlocutors are rarely granted the status of co-authors of ethnographic knowledge, and too often consigned to muted oblivion as exemplars, illustrations and, occasionally, statistics. Criticism of ethnomusicological theory and practice has often been expressed in these terms from outside the discipline, but similar concerns have been articulated by practicing ethnomusicologists for some time (Keil, 1991; Guilbault, 1993; Waterman, 1990).
So, it is legitimate to ask whether ‘culture’ continues to serve as a useful anchor for ethnomusicological theory. On the one hand, ethnomusicologists brought up in the culturalist traditions are increasingly sensitive to the limitations of the term. They are more attentive to critical voices from within cultural studies and the sociology of culture, and more aware of traditions of studying other musics in which ‘culture’ is not central. Hyphenated formulations such as ‘socio-cultural’ draw attention to the need to transcend the local in analysis, and to understand social and historical forces which may lie outside the field of vision of local actors, and the organizing, meaning-making, structuring capacities of these local actors in constant dialectical interplay. On the other hand, the notion of culture has often nurtured radical activism by and for the sake of minority, peripheral or disadvantaged groups, in ways which have become increasingly attentive to problems of interest, agency, voice and the unwitting perpetuation of metropolitan stereotypes. The very notion of African American ‘culture’, as articulated by Boas and Herskovits in the early and middle years of the 20th century, played a role in the civil rights movement in the USA. Today, notions of ‘strategic essentialism’, articulate a variety of global subaltern alliances, temporary affective bonds of shared political destiny, in culturalist terms. As Weiner puts it: ‘culture is no longer a place or a group to be studied. Culture, as it is being used by many others, is about political rights and nation-building. It is also about attempts by third-world groups to fight off the domination of transnational economic policies that destroy these emergent rights as they establish their own nation-states’ (Weiner, 1995). The idea of cultural critique as a form of political engagement is still very much alive in contemporary ethnomusicological writing. In this partial and strategic sense the notion of ‘music in and as culture’ might continue to generate productive questions.
Ethnomusicology, §IV: Contemporary theoretical issues
From rituals involving intense face-to-face interaction to situations of electronically mediated dispersal, ethnomusicologists continue to be driven by a fascination with the socially integrative effects of music and dance. Social anthropologists have stressed the functional and structural properties of music and dance in terms which have generally owed much to Durkheim's discussion of effervescence (Durkheim, 1915). Ethnomusicological theorists of the role of music and dance in constructing imagined communities (Anderson, 1983) in situations of wide spatial dispersal have stressed the dynamics of specific media systems, from cassette to the web, with some stress on the radical possibilities for self-imagining and mobilization that these media open up. In different ways, all of these writers perceive music and dance as a kind of ‘deep sociality’ (Finnegan, 1992), engendering a vital sense of community, of participation and affective bond.
A distinctive ethnomusicological contribution from within this line of inquiry has been directed at the question of how music, as opposed to or in relationship with other activities, achieves this task. Music clearly plays an important role in symbolizing community, expressing and structuring the relationship of parts to wholes, male to female, tradition to modernity, self to collectivity (e.g. Mitchell, 1956 on the Kalela dance; Mach, 1994 on national anthems; Sugarman, 1997 on gender). Communities undoubtedly recognize themselves as such in their music making, and constitute themselves through and around this recognition. But music-making and dance do more than express or symbolize processes taking place elsewhere in the social structure, as indicated by the considerable surplus of affect they generate in performance. As Blacking’s ethnomusicology constantly stressed, music-making is often itself the primary context in which a community reproduces and transforms itself: the Venda Tschikona dance was, for example, the only event at which Venda came together as an entire community. Musical principles in more isolated and socially fragmented musical genres all revealed, on analysis, significant examples of primary modelling systems which organized and informed significant aspects of Venda collective life. This insight has been extensively elaborated in tribal, ‘enclave’ societies on the far peripheries of nation-states (Seeger, 1987, Parkes, 1994), in situations of migrancy and diaspora, whether within or outside the nation-state (Sugarman, 1997; Bohlman, 1991), and in urban subcultures (Reily, 1992; Baumann, 1990). It continues to challenge and inspire a great deal of contemporary ethnomusicological thinking. Its Durkheimian roots continue to be evident.
For Charles Keil, music brings people together through ‘participatory discrepancies’. The theory of participatory discrepancy also draws on a reading of Durkheimian effervescence: participation takes place in ‘collective mental states of extreme emotional intensity, in which representation is as yet undifferentiated from the movements and actions which make the communion towards which it tends a reality to the group. Their participation is so effectively lived that it is not yet properly imagined’ (Durkheim, quoted in Keil, 1994). Slight deviations in timbre and pulse, such as give rise to the particular styles and sounds of jazz or polka drummers, or the overlapping and slightly discrepant textures of the trumpets and shawms used in Tibetan monastic music generate the performative ebb and flow, the groove which is central to communal musics. The task of socio-musical analysis is then one of comprehending, and finding some means of representing, just how such discrepancies operate in relation to meaning and feeling in a given musical context. Whether or not western musical transcription and analysis can adequately engage with these discrepancies, often located in minute details of rhythmic and timbral inflection, and whether or not the process simply reinscribes traditional assumptions rooted in grammar-based music theory, is open to discussion.
Bernard Lortat-Jacob discusses the centrality of music in the production of community in highland Berber festivities in the High Atlas in Morocco (see Lortat-Jacob, 1994, for a comparative analysis in relation to community festivity in Sardinia and Romania). In this situation, good music is good festivity, and vice-versa. No distinction is really possible, despite a minimal level of functional differentiation of musicians and other festival-goers. Analysis of the event, and the collective ahwash in particular, demonstrates not only a complex process of interaction among the participating drummers and singers, but a musical process of the progressive acceleration, expansion and displacement of internal elements within a rhythmic figure over the course of the performance. This sensuous texturing of the event achieves an effervescence which is central to the festivity, and its role in reproducing highland Berber life, not only as an image, but also as the very practice of Berber sociality. Processes of effervescence, solidarity and collective representation are thus mutually constituting and defining. Lortat-Jacob (1994) suggests a continuum between festivities (such as those of the Berber highlands) which rely on internally generated community mechanisms, and those which rely on others, both for musical services, and as a symbolic site of otherness through which community identity and a sense of self is configured. This shift, from homeostatic mechanisms for reproducing communities to the unstable and unruly dynamics of constructing selves through the medium of others, is revealing. Ethnomusicology in the last ten years of the 20th century was, indeed, absorbed by the question of difference, particularly in relation to matters of ethnicity, nation, race, gender and sexuality. It has also reflexively generated concern with the ways in which the discipline of ethnomusicology itself constructs difference, and the consequences of this process.
Ethnomusicology, §IV: Contemporary theoretical issues
Since the 1960s, anthropologists have been inclined to think of ethnicity as a process of categorization producing social and cultural difference. For many ethnomusicologists, this has shifted the emphasis from the production of homologies linking a specific social structure with a specific musical style, to thinking about musical style as a way of producing difference in a more complex and plural ensemble of social relationships. It also initiates an inquiry into the power relations that structure such relationships. The presence of powerful ‘difference producers’ in a given social space has fundamental implications for those whose means of representation are less powerful. The relatively powerless see themselves partially through the eyes of the relatively powerful. The extent of this ‘partiality’ is variable and crucial to cultural analysis; it also frames the political and cultural consequences of powerlessness in significant ways. Attention to the production of difference in cultural analysis has been accompanied by parallel attention to the question of representation. Theories of articulation and mediation (see Guilbault, 1997), drawing particularly on the work of Stuart Hall (e.g. see Hall, 1986), have problematized homology theories positing a one-on-one connection between social structure and cultural morphology. Musical performance is increasingly seen as a space in which meanings are generated, and not simply ‘reflected’; ‘ethnic’ markers, like any other, are the negotiated products of multiple, labile, and historically constituted processes of difference making. They operate upon social space, and do not simply reflect differences already ‘there’ (on the performative turn in ethnicity studies, see Stokes, 1994).
A general interest in matters of ethnicity has raised questions about the relationships between academic ethnomusicology and forms of musical research, cultural activism and writing being pursued outside the academy. On the one hand, it has sharpened the focus on the disjunction between the deconstructive project, in which identities are shown to be relative, historically mobile and culturally constructed, and the demands of political struggle outside of universities, in which research and writing are geared to the strategic tasks of rendering old myths suitable and usable for contemporary political struggle. The issue is sharply focussed in the British Isles, for example, around questions of revisionism and Celtic nationalisms (see Chapman, 1994, for an ethnomusicological angle), and more generally in post-colonial critique. It has also sharpened, and rendered substantially more complex, distinctions between ethnomusicological writing in first world capitalist democracies, and that in parts of the world, notably sout-east Europe, where academic ethnomusicological production is closely identified with nation-building processes or with related resistance struggles (Pettan, 1998). Global habits of attention to metropolitan theoretical trends have disseminated various forms of deconstructive historicism theory widely. These have been brought ‘back’ to the Euro-American metropolis by scholars (among whom Edward Said, Homi Bhabha and Gayatri Spivak are pre-eminent) who received their intellectual formation elsewhere, nuanced by a keen sense of colonial continuities in the post-colonial world, and the imperatives of establishing a coherent politics in the face of this. The extent to which post-colonial theory has succeeded in doing so, or has, on the contrary, weakened the basis of collective political action, and allowed Euro-America to appropriate and export yet another valuable commodity (‘radical theory’) to the ‘third world’ is sharply debated. Ethnomusicologists are of necessity increasingly sensitive to these kinds of dilemmas. They assume a sharp focus in relation to questions surrounding nationalism.
Ethnomusicology, §IV: Contemporary theoretical issues
The history of the culture concept and that of the nation-state are entangled. The difficulty of distinguishing an object of study, ‘the nation’, from the very tools of analysis we might use to define and critique such an object (historicism, the culture concept, ethnography and so forth) renders critical intellectual engagement a complex and reflexive project. At the same time, ‘globalization’, which means in practice the hegemony of norms and values associated with some of the largest and most powerful nations across much of the world, has recast nationalism as a language of resistance on the part of those excluded from its apparent benefits. This is the case whether nationalism is harnessed by the nation-state apparatus itself or by subaltern elements within it. Critical thinking in western Europe, responding to the break-up of Yugoslavia and the re-unification of Germany in the 1990s, has addressed both the apparent ‘exceptionally’ of ethno-nationalist violence and the counter-intuitive possibilities of ‘good nationalism’. One of the compelling difficulties in thinking about nationalism, for ethnomusicologists and others, remains one of taking a persistent and disturbing issue seriously.
Ethnomusicologists have responded in four different ways to nationalism's increased prominence as a political issue in the later 1980s and 1990s, all of which continue to bear strongly on research. Firstly, inspired by Hobsbawm and Ranger's notion of nation-states as ‘invented traditions’ (Hobsbawm and Ranger, 1983) and Anderson's analysis of the relationship between print-capitalism and the emergence of national ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson, 1983), ethnomusicologists have attended to the ways in which national musics have participated in the construction of a national imaginary, with some stress on the artificiality and alien nature of the musical elements that were assembled to constitute new national styles. Others have consistently stressed the class dynamics of the encounter between bourgeois nationalists and their working-class or regional others.
Secondly, the post-colonial dynamics of nation-state building have been the object of sustained analyses by a number of ethnomusicologists. The inheritance of colonial constructions of colonized others has been hard and in some cases impossible to shake off. As Fanon suggested, post-colonial élites have been haunted by ambivalent desires and interests which have in some senses bound them more closely to their former colonial masters than did the colonial system itself. The pervasive contours of colonial thinking have been traced in the analysis of national musics from the Eurocentric aspirations of the Cairo congress of 1932 and the paternalism of French orientalists in North Africa, to versions of French metropolitan Noirisme in the Francophone Caribbean. Colonial contours may also be perceived in reverse in post-colonial nation-states. In West Africa, British colonial élites developed cultural policies which were explicitly designed to counter creolism; on the one hand the British colonial administration worked through ‘native’ administrations of their own making, and on the other existing creole élites in West African cities constituted a powerful threat to colonial trading interests. ‘Creolism’ in this sense became as much a colonial construction, albeit a negative one, as nativism. Post-colonial West Africa's turn to creole cultural forms as the new language of national identity involved some strategic selections which demand understanding in terms of the jockeying for power on the part of certain élites at the expense of others, but which also speak powerfully of the continuity of colonial ethnic categories in the construction of new nationalisms.
Thirdly, ethnomusicologists have attended to the processes of othering involved in national culture construction. This approach has characteristically assessed the process of national music culture building in terms of the construction of difference, in which the desired ethnic constitution of the nation-state is conflated with notions of modernity. Others are ‘othered’ according not only to their perceived spatial distance from national centres, but to their remoteness from modern national temporality. The musical signification of communities that are held to be pleasure-loving or ‘easy-going’, from a metropolitan perspective, registers the characteristic ambivalences of these formulations. Indeed, ambivalence is a vital component of the pleasures and desires associated with them: they generate a certain frisson of difference, but under controlled and regulated conditions. The extent and nature of this supervision in states with strong traditions of socio-cultural engineering varies from the quiet encouragement to the partial acknowledgment of transnational and Diaspora musics produced elsewhere, outside of nation-state control. Studies of the quasi-exclusion of orientalized others in a variety of Eastern European and Middle Eastern situations (e.g. Rasmussen, 1996, Stokes, 1992, Buchanan, 1996, Rice, 1994), and of Black others in the Caribbean (e.g. Wade, 1998, Averill, 1997, Guilbault, 1993, Pacini-Hernandez, 1995, Austerlitz, 1997) characterize this approach. Such approaches have a dual focus, on both the dynamics of national-musical construction, and on the related dynamics of subaltern popular musical styles.
These forms of ‘othering’ implicit or explicitly connected to the development of a national-culture are closely related to population movements both within and outside of nation-state boundaries. Nationalism, understood as a temporary holding-form for capital accumulation, has articulated forms of industrial expansion which have generated import-substituting industrial expansion, in particular the mechanization and capitalization of agriculture, which, in turn, have provoked huge movements from rural areas to cities. The ideological and ‘economic’ dynamics of the situation are impossible to disentangle. Migrant music making is simultaneously the product of an ideological process of self-fashioning (as modern citizen-subjects, increasingly with a global frame of reference) and the effort to organize and in some cases exploit self-sustaining bases for communal life on the part of rural-urban migrants. A substantial literature has concerned itself with rural-urban migrant musics, from questions of before-after social change and processes of cultural transformation, to investigations of the ways in which ‘the rural’ is fantasized and the object of ideological manipulation on the part of music industries, national élites and migrants themselves. If there has been a shift in this kind of literature in recent years, it has been from a national to an increasingly transnational frame.
Ethnomusicology, §IV: Contemporary theoretical issues
The most conspicuous population movements at the end of the 20th century are transnational, and identity strategies on the part of migrants increasingly revolve around transnational parameters. While intra-national labour-migrant movements have not necessarily declined, and in fact are in some circumstances being increased by global and transnational trends, transnational movements, for ethnomusicologists, have been conspicuous, close to home, and also associated with newer and more pressing theoretical paradigms. These have been concerned particularly with race, diaspora and globalization.
The accelerated global flow of labour, capital and culture has informed related lines of inquiry into Diasporas and other varieties of ‘travelling culture’ (Clifford, 1992). While an earlier migration literature tended to stress before-after patterns of assimilation and acculturation in accordance with modernization theory paradigms, contemporary theories of music in diaspora elaborate the cultural ambivalences of return, subalternity in host societies, and the forging of transnational strategic alliances, as illustrated by the appropriation of black expressive culture among many North Africans in France and Turks in Germany (Gross, McMurray and Swedenburg, 1997). Travelling culture theorists conceptualize migrancy as a paradigmatic postmodern condition (see in particular Clifford, 1992) initiating a significant critique of cultural theory predicated on bounded culture areas, nationalism chief among them. In the light of such theories, ethnomusicological attention to music in conspicuous sites of movement (tourism or pilgrimage, for example), or in the lives of ‘travellers’ (Jews, Roma) invites consideration of the more or less violent historical processes through which travellers are marginalized and ‘othered’ and through which notions of bounded and authentic culture are summoned into existence, policed and maintained (Bohlman, 1993; Silverman, 1996).
Successive micro-electronics revolutions (from the transistor to the silicon chip and the web) have had an incalculable impact on mass media dissemination in the latter part of the 20th century. The movement of mass mediated musical genres across the world constitutes an inescapable fact for ethnomusicologists. It also marks a productive moment of engagement of ethnomusicological theory with mass media and, more recently, globalization theory. One product of this has been a stress on the incapacity of nation-state systems to generate coherent national musical systems in the face of musics which rely on micro-electronic systems of reproduction that lie largely outside of their control (Manuel, 1992), and on trans- or multi-national sites of production (Rice, 1994, Virolle, 1995). The idea that the nation-state is no longer capable of intervening meaningfully in the production of meaning is, however, increasingly being challenged. Indeed, in the face of global laissez-faire capitalism, nation-states and national media policies are increasingly seen by the European social-democratic left as offering some hope for cultural democracy and diversity.
Globalization theory has sought new terms for understanding global cultural production. Appadurai's terminology of ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes and mediascapes (Appadurai, 1996) has been particularly significant for a number of ethnomusicologists and popular music scholars. Slobin draws on Appadurai's terminology to grasp new relationships between global supercultures, subcultures and intercultures (Slobin, 1993). In a fractal landscape of potentially infinite regress, global forces produce ‘micromusics’, that is, endlessly varied local and localizing particularities. The term ‘culture’, unhitched from its national moorings, assumes different forms. Culture is, in this context, provisional, reflexive and mediated. It is no longer the semi-invisible ground of being and belonging, but a site of manipulable and malleable self-fashioning, in which the boundaries of this self are constantly open to question and negotiation. Hybridity and creolism are crucial aspects of global cultural consciousness, not in the sense that their origins are ‘no longer’ pure (since no culture's origins are or can be), but in the sense that they engender new forms of relativizing self-consciousness, of being neither here nor there, ‘us’ or ‘them’, but being in-between, in a ‘third space’ (Bhabha, 1994). The possibilities that these conceptualizations offer for a radical politics have been keenly debated in post-colonial theory; ethnomusicologists have approached hybridity and creolism in terms of the opportunities they afford for re-thinking bounded entities by stressing their relational character and their capacity to undermine essentializing cultural strategies. They join others in suggesting that music offers peculiar opportunities for re-configuring identities.
For others, globalization is understood as an advanced phase of capital accumulation in accounts which stress either continuities with the colonial past, or the radical new demands of information-based economies. Crucial to this kind of understanding is an argument rooted in Marxian dialectics and directed against modernization theory. In varieties of modernization theory, capitalism is commonly perceived to advance by encountering others as it expands across time and space, and then by subordinating them to its own disciplines and imperatives. The dialectical argument emphasizes capitalism's production of otherness from within. This propensity to produce and model otherness is a crucial aspect of capitalism's restless energy and the West's global expansion, as a large historical and anthropological literature on the mid-19th-century world fairs has emphasized. What was represented was not so important as the fact of representation; a representational system, which referred ultimately only to itself and its own representational powers, derived its formidable energy from this fact. Reality becomes an ‘effect’ sustained by all manner of trickery, and all representation represents is yet other domains of representation, in an endless chain of ‘hyperreal’ signification. This forms the background to some influential critiques of the world music industry by ethnomusicologists (e.g. see Erlmann, 1996), in which Otherness is fetishized, modelled and packaged according to the demands of the first world culture industry system. Far from marking a new hegemony of the periphery, world music, some argue, marks a more decisive phase in the hegemony of the centre. The ethnomusicological task is simply one of determining the relationships between different sites and centres of production. In both scenarios, ‘culture’ assumes strategic and instrumental forms; the culturalist assumption that cultural morphologies provide a relatively transparent window onto ‘forms of life’ is substantially problematized.
Ethnomusicology, §IV: Contemporary theoretical issues
Race is often distinguished from ethnicity in terms of the supposedly voluntaristic qualities of the latter and the coerced and imposed qualities of the former. This perspective predominates in US based scholarship, where it marks a clear distinction between hegemonic and subaltern identities, and responds to the ongoing legacy of slavery and the civil rights movement within the USA. Theories of ethnicity in Europe are less inclined to make such distinctions. The radical political movements of the 1960s were, in Europe, more directly concerned with de-colonization in Africa; the rights of minorities ‘at home’ were a lesser issue. All ethnicities, in most European writings on the subject, are marked by greater or lesser degrees of power on the part of the various parties involved in the production of difference. The terms ‘race’ and ‘ethnicity’ are often used interchangably.
On both sides of the Atlantic, however, critics have argued that the brutal dislocations of slavery and colonial encounter have played central, if buried, roles in the emergence of western Enlightenment reason and the paradigmatic forms of modernity associated with it. ‘Reason’, then, becomes a highly problematic tool in the analysis of ‘race’, which has generated a double discourse in response. One side of this is an appeal to Enlightenment reason: racial discourse is irrational, and has no place in a just and democratic society. Critics stress that the Enlightenment was built on the back of slavery; reason itself, conceived in Enlightenment terms, is tainted by western self-interest. On the other side lies an appeal to primordial African identities and a rejection tout court of western Enlightenment rationality. These however suppress the varieties of post-slavery experience, and the possibilities of framing reasonable, democratic and plural cultural futures in the diaspora. They also appeal to a language of retentions, which is either explicitly used as a means of evaluating the authenticity of a wide range of African-derived New World musics, from blues to jazz, or used more generally as a means of identifying the particularity of black American experience.
Black cultural and literary criticism has devoted considerable energy to developing forms of critique that can engage more productively with this either/or choice; writing in these theoretical traditions has had an increasing impact on ethnomusicologists and others involved in the study of black musics. Ethnomusicologists have responsed to the question of African retentions with considerable caution, however. For some, Afrocentrism remains an obstacle to critical understanding, tending to reproduce the very system it sets out to subvert. A number of more empirically driven studies have focussed on the large variety of musical genres that an Afrocentric canon has excluded, for example the music of the Harlem Renaissance. For others, the notion of African ‘retentions’ has some strategic value, principally as a kind of deconstructive irritant to the pretensions of Enlightenment rationality.
Poststructuralist critique has addressed the problem of race primarily as ‘a pernicious act of language’ (Gates, 1985). Seen as language, of a particularly unstable and unexpectedly creative kind, the question of race becomes one of comprehending black cultural experience in terms of ‘literary’ techniques, in the widest possible sense, particularly those associated with troping and ‘signifying’, understood as a form of destabilizing, critical repetition and intertextuality. The theory has been applied extensively to jazz, rock and pop. A more sociological angle on this genre of theory has been provided by George Lipsitz, who sees in black expressive cultural style, and music in particular, an increasingly globalized language of resistance and subversion, connecting subaltern groups in the first world metropoles to form new majoritarian forms of radical consciousness (Lipsitz, 1994). The point amplifies and globalizes one made somewhat earlier in British subcultural theory.
Paul Gilroy's Black Atlantic thesis has been particularly influential. Gilroy situates his argument dialectically between enlightenment appeals to non-racial reason, and Afrocentrism. The former is disabled through its suppression of its racial undertow; the latter occludes the varieties of black experience, as though African styles ‘survive’ in the present without bearing any of the marks of their complex mediation through non-black expressive styles. Reasoned critique, which draws on and embraces its suppressed and racialized past, provides the possibility of movement away from this sterile binarism. For this purpose, Gilroy draws on Du Bois's influential formulation of ‘double consciousness’, ‘(that) sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others’, as Du Bois wrote in 1903 to initiate this dialectical movement, concentrating principally on writers (such as Du Bois) who have dealt creatively with this ‘doubleness’ and, more generally, the movement of African and African expressive styles as they cross and re-cross the Atlantic. Gilroy concludes by stressing the significance of music as a space affording particular expressive possibilities.
Gilroy's Black Atlantic thesis is not ultimately incompatible with a certain form of Boasian culturalism as developed by Melville Herskovits, and later by ethnomusicologists such as Charles Keil (1991). This specifically addressed ‘culture of poverty’ and ‘poverty of culture’ arguments about African American ghetto life. For conservative theorists, African Americans were caught between cultures, but could not be described as possessing their own. Anthropologists in the USA devoted considerable energies to debunking such claims, and did so in ways which stressed forms of cultural creativity in the New World diaspora which developed African ‘retentions’, rather than endlessly looking back and referring to them. More specifically, Gilroy's attention to the Atlantic as a site of crossings, mediations and exchanges, draws on and stimulates a detailed and thorough consideration of the movements of African derived popular musics ‘back to Africa’, both in the form of autobiographies of musicians who have risen to fame on the back of the world music industry, and in ethnomusicological writing attentive to the complex global movements of black popular musical styles in various parts of Africa (see Collins, 1992, Waterman, 1990, Erlmann, 1991). The prospects for ethnomusicological theory might usefully be considered in the light not only of productive dialogue with academic cultural theory elsewhere, but also with a significant body of non-academic writing on global popular genres for a non-academic audience.
Ethnomusicology, §IV: Contemporary theoretical issues
Gender has been a pressing and extremely long-standing issue in ethnomusicological research. A substantial body of writing now exists, detailing women's musical worlds (Doubleday, 1988), the musical production of gendered ideologies (Sugarman, 1997), and problems of male bias in matters of documentation and interpretation (e.g. Keeling, 1989). The radical energies which informed feminism and gender studies in the 1970s and 80s have been largely transformed into questions about sexuality in the 1990s. Though often conflated, movement from the one to the other contains both significant continuities and breaks. Both are concerned with the assumption of the universal Enlightenment subject on which significant areas of musicological history writing and analysis continue to operate. Both critique the gendered and heteronormative nature of Enlightenment modernity, and do so through simultaneously documenting areas of cultural experience hidden or ‘muted’ (Ardener, 1989) by these normative processes, and, reflexively, by considering the disciplinary mechanisms which constitute this muting. Both are thus concerned with the construction of alterities, a concern which connects gender and sexuality issues to the broader questions of identity discussed above, and implicates questions of gender and sexuality with questions of ethnicity and race. In both cases, gender and sexuality have characteristically been seen as cultural constructions with profound ideological ramifications; attempts to ground these differences in nature (understood biologically) are usually understood by both feminists and Queer theorists as part of a more general problem of ideological obfuscation, itself demanding critical attention.
Gender theorists have understood sexuality as constitutive of gendered norms. Anthropologists of the Mediterranean in the 1960s and 1970s were among the first to look consistently at the construction of masculinity in this light. This partially accounts for the fact that some of the first studies of musical genres to explicitly thematize the cultural construction of masculinity have been concerned with the Mediterranean area; Robert Walser's study of Heavy Metal constitutes an analogous move in relation to a popular music genre in North America (Walser, 1993). This focus on the unstable dynamics of the sexual and gendered ‘centre’, and the anxiety-laden work involved in making it less so, link traditional concerns of gender theory with Queer theory's more radical point of departure.
Queer theory has drawn more directly on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytical theory, and separates the question of gender from the question of sexuality. In this respect it has marked a break with the kind of cultural constructivism which typified an earlier moment of feminist writing in ethnomusicology (and the social sciences and humanities in general). Lacanian theory sees mechanisms of identification as a disruptive process. The linguistic signs through which identities are constructed are seen by Lacanian theorists as inherently unstable, never fully able to exclude ‘always-already’ present others from the self, and always prone to being undone by their own work of identity construction. It has stressed investments of pleasure and desire in the processes of identification, a move which addresses the spectre of violence which haunts the work of gendered, sexual and ethnic identification, particularly when these forms of identification bolster one another. But it also stresses the playful ambivalence of signs of identity, and reads texts against the grain to release hidden or repressed readings. Queer theory has initiated significant conversations between musicologists and ethnomusicologists who have a similar critical interest in exposing the limiting heteronormative assumptions that govern canonical activity in both areas. It has, arguably, done more than anything else in recent years to rekindle the radical and questioning spirit of reflexivity that is central to culturalist thinking in general, and ethnomusicology in particular.
Ethnomusicology, §IV: Contemporary theoretical issues
Ethnomusicology's turn to difference might usefully be compared and contrasted with that of the new musicology. Musicologists inspired by the new historicism have been inclined to represent the western art music canon as other to itself, establishing a mode of critical estrangement and distanciation from, for example, the musical cultures of early modern Europe. The process of ‘othering’ in the new musicology has a double task, one being to counteract the false sense of historical security and familiarity that canonical moments in western European music history engender, and the second being to open the way for critical readings and revisions. Hermeneutic philosophy, particularly that of Gadamer and Ricouer, has provided the dominant conceptual framework, explicitly connecting the new musicology with some influential theorizations of interpretation in ethnomusicology (see Rice, 1994). Hans-Georg Gadamer outlined a theory of historical inquiry in terms of a dialectical process in which a jolt of unfamiliarity (Verfremdung) in the encounter with a historical text is absorbed in a fusion of horizons (Horizontverschmelzung). This is achieved in a ‘consummatory moment of conversation’ (Vollzugsform des Gesprächs).
Where Hegelian epistemology stresses a teleology of assimilation (Aneignung), Gadamer suggests that interpretative historical inquiry is structured by a permanent and sustainable encounter with an Other. The fusion of horizons of self and other creates an enlarged self, but one whose enlargement inexorably brings that self face to face with new others, and so the process continues. Ricouer revised Gadamer's dialectic, suggesting that the alternation between ‘distanciation’ and ‘appropriation’ (to use Ricouer’s terminology) be regarded not as the succession of a negative state by a positive state, but as one in which, to use later critical language, distanciation and alterity is ‘always-already’ present in the activity of historical interpretation. Historical knowledge positively demands the existence of Others; it does not simply overcome it in a critical moment in which the horizons of self and other are fused as Tomlinson has stressed in an influential discussion (1993). The task of a hermeneutic historical musicology of Others is thus to locate the strange in the familiar past, and to engage in dialogue with this past, reading texts against the grain, probing for their silences and aporias, particularly with regard to matters of gender and sexuality, to locate points of unfamiliarity whose interpretation might be put to productive use in the present. Ethnomusicologists construct the same dialogue in the present. No provisional bracketing of the other as ‘Other’ is required, since this has been pre-configured into the encounter between ethnomusicologist and interlocutor. The issue is not confused by false familiarity. But in a similar way, dialogue generates an unravelling of self, and an expansion of the means of understanding details of musical style.
The dominant movement within ethnomusicology in the 1990s was however predominantly in the opposite direction, although motivated by a similar critical impulse. While the new historicism in western art musicology has sought to understand areas of the western canon as remote cultures, many ethnomusicologists have been concerned with showing that the very idea of ‘remote cultures’, amenable to mapping and comparison, is the product of characteristically modern institutions, notably the nation-state, colonial expansion and the commodity form. The two fields of enquiry new historicism and ethnomusicology, share common horizons in respect to a deeply rooted reflexive and deconstructive impulse. New historicists emphasize the cultural construction of the canon by demonstrating its repressions and aporias (in relation, for example, to magic, or to non-heteronormative sexualities). The work that has gone into constructing a transcendental and ultimately ahistorical body of exemplary composers and music works resistant to any kind of critical attention becomes itself the object of critical attention.
Notions of ethnography inform the project and provide a point of dialogue with ethnomusicologists involved in historical study. Questions of ethnography in both new historicist writing and ethnomusicology converge, for example, in discussions of historiography (Bohlman, 1997) and in emerging historical interest in space and the public sphere. Ethnography and fieldwork, however, also bear on some more conventional ethnographic projects carried out by anthropologists and ethnomusicologists, ‘studying up’ by focussing on western art music institutions. Ethnography in this context rhetorically creates ‘others’, and thus places in historical, social, cultural and political contexts musical practice which is often considered to transcend any such contextualization. Transcendental claims concerning western ‘high’ art culture, and indeed others, mark crucial sites in the reproduction of dominant ideologies, particularly those concerned with the pre-eminence and universality of western modernity. Critique of this sort, from both new historicists and ethnomusicologists, is directed at what Janet Wolff has called the ‘ideology of autonomous art’ (Wolff, 1987).
Ethnomusicologists have engaged in a similar critique of their own canonical practices. Chief among these practices is the location of ‘other cultures’ in ways which transcendentalize and de-historicize cultural difference. In particular, new critical ventures in ethnomusicology have focussed on genres (notably popular musics; e.g. see, Waterman, 1989; Pena, 1985; Reily, 1992; Baily, 1981; Averill and Stokes, 1992; Pacini Hernandez, 1995; Austerlitz, 1997), communities (diasporas, transients and travellers; see Silverman, 1996; Slobin, 1996; Bohlman, 1996), and issues (gender, sexuality and race; see Sugarman, 1997; Currid, 1997; Bohlman and Radano, forthcoming) whose critical investigation simultaneously reveals some of the quasi-colonial dynamics of the culture concept, and gives form and direction to contemporary critical energies in combating pernicious racial, sexual and gendered ideologies ‘at home’. Discussions about identity and positionality in a variety of intellectual fields (notably post-colonial studies, black and feminist literary criticism, and globalization theory) have sharpened ethnomusicological critiques of certain aspects of culturalist thinking. These have focussed attention on the ways in which cultural understandings of others have failed to account for the ways in which western military and economic power have framed certain objects of analysis and occluded others, decisively shaping the ways in which these others have been represented and, in turn, have come to represent themselves. At the same time, the discipline of ethnomusicology has from the outset been characterized by an innate and compulsive disposition to a certain critical reflexivity. Foundational texts were concerned as much with matters of method and epistemology as they were with furnishing transparent knowledge about other musics. The reflexive turn in many other areas of the humanities and social sciences operates upon and in relation to a larger body of less methodologically self-absorbed writing. Within ethnomusicology, and to a somewhat lesser extent popular music studies, it builds on more mainstream and historically established disciplinary habits.
Ethnomusicology, §IV: Contemporary theoretical issues
Accounts of culture have often endorsed crude Marxian tendency to see music as an epiphenomenon of other social and cultural facts, and construct an explanatory pyramid with a wide base of productive social relations at the bottom and an isolated artwork at the top. Poststructuralism upends this pyramid. What is significant is not so much how culture is produced as how (and what) it produces: ‘cultural production’ replaces the ‘production of culture’. Practice theory in ethnomusicology brings the ‘cultural production’ and ‘production of culture’ approaches together. It draws on a renewed attention to matters of history in those disciplines which have invested heavily in non-historical, synchronic forms of analysis (notably social anthropology). It also engages with Marx's well-known aphorism in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852/1978): ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past’ (1978).
Practice theory is most directly associated with the work of Bourdieu, Giddens and Sahlins. The work of each is informed by a certain ‘work’ model of consciousness informing Hegelian philosophy in general, and underpinning Marx's aphorism cited above. In this, consciousness of individual self as subject comes into being through the ‘labour’ of expressive externalization, reflection on and reappropriation of that work. That achieved ‘work’ confronts new circumstances, ones not ‘chosen by themselves’, generated by forgotten histories, the unintended consequences of past action, the emergence of new actors on the historical scene and so forth. This generates new forms of consciousness, and the development of new structures in an ongoing dialectic relationship with new circumstances. This dialectical model has displaced the term ‘culture’, either by juxtaposing it with the social, or by replacing it with other terms, such as ‘practice’ and ‘habitus’.
Practice theory has informed a relatively recent ‘turn to history’ on the part of a number of ethnomusicologists and others, a turn which itself demands historicization. This is partly motivated by a desire to credit other histories and historiographic traditions with some explanatory force, in relation for example to notions of tradition in a variety of south-east Asian genres (Stock, 1996; Slawek, 1993; Capwell, 1993). Other histories, in this sense, not only explain something about how other musics come to be and to mean, but also how they shape notions of action and agency and in this sense generate change. It is also partly motivated by a desire to understand how music, conceived as practice, ‘produces’ a sense of the past, and of temporality, more generally. Musical practice unfolds through time, and literally embodies temporal processes. It is, in this sense, a resonant medium. The temporal processes modelled through music thus engage in powerful and significant ways with experiences of change elsewhere in a given social and cultural space, which may be sharply marked in situations of de-colonization, nation-state formation and related population movements.
The ways in which music models a community's sense of its past, present and future have been the subject of studies of ‘Western’ art musics in the Middle East, the emergence of national popular ‘traditions’ in Africa, and among immigrant communities in the United States. In each case, practice theory enables a dual focus, firstly on conditions of musical production, and secondly on the ways in which musical practice itself constitutes conditions for future action and events. This has been a productive and influential move. Most significantly, it has enabled a closer attention to ‘texts’, which might, in the light of practice theory, be seen in ways which do not simply reify or reduce them to ‘contexts’. Practice theory not only brings ethnomusicology to bear on questions of music history which have hitherto been the sole domain of musicologists, but also into a more productive engagement with music theory and analysis.
Ethnomusicology, §IV: Contemporary theoretical issues
Academic music theory and ethnomusicology parted company in the 1960s. Ethnomusicologists turned increasingly to Geertzian hermeneutics and ethnoaesthetics, viewing the application of western theoretical methodologies to non-western musics with concern and suspicion. Many influential forms of academic music theory and analysis became more and more invested in explaining and legitimating the post-war European and, later, American avant garde. Theory, for many ethnomusicologists, was simply a way of marking European distinction, consigning the rest, the people without music theory, to historical and political insignificance.
One particular problem of theory, for ethnomusicologists, has revolved around the problem of representing music with words, or with logocentric formal grammars. Authoritative theoretical models deriving from linguistics have always invited criticism for their logocentrism when applied to musical grammars, although the assumption of a fundamental divide has also been criticized. Poststructuralism and Piercian semiotics have, more recently, sought to provide theorizations of how music signifies in ways which avoid the pitfalls of Saussure's influential separation of the signifier and the signified, and address the peculiarities of musical signification (Turino, 1999).
Later studies looked more empirically at the relationship between verbal or written theory, and the musical practice that theory purported to describe. Echoing Bourdieu's concept of theoreticism as cultural capital, habitus and bodily hexis, John Baily (1988) drew attention to the lack of fit in urban Western Afghanistan between Hindi musical theoretical terminology and its usage by Afghan musicians in Herat. Music theory emanating from metropolitan centres often embodies cultural aspirations rather than social realities, and words used to describe musical procedures came to be seen as unreliable guides to musical experience, at best. Blacking's anthropology of the body pushed this scepticism to an extreme. A complex melodic line on the mbira, for example, could be understood in terms of a ‘dance of the thumbs’ over the keys, and not of an abstracted Cartesian reasoning that could unproblematically assume verbal form. Language could only be redeemed for theoretical purposes if it was understood as bearing the mark of musical and other forms of non-verbal communication. And these, for Blacking, were to be understood ultimately in terms of the body. Work in this period increasingly drew on the cognitive theory of the time to substantiate the links between musical style and economies of gesture and movement.
The ethnomusicological tradition of theoretical scepticism is a long one, rooted in the liberal culture of academic research in the Anglo-Saxon world. It has, at the same time, exposed ethnomusicologists to the charge that they are reluctant to engage with the fine details of musical production and interpretation. Many, and probably the majority, remain ambivalent about the application of western music-theoretical systems to non-western musics. Other writers see the division of musical systems into those in which music theory is applicable, and those in which it is not as a quasi-colonial form of ethnocentrism. Provided culturally appropriate criteria are employed in the process of segmentation (and this is a crucial condition), there is no reason why the basic principles of music semiotics should not, for example, be applied to non-western musics (Agawu, 1999; see also Arom, 1991; Rouget, 1996). Post-colonial musicologies, however, complicate the question of ‘cultural appropriateness’. The instinctive turn to the balungan (‘skeletal melody’) in Javanese gamelan as the source of the most relevant information in modal analysis has been strongly contested by recent Indonesian scholars (see, for example, Sumarsan, 1992). The same is true of analytical expectations concerning octave duplicability in Middle Eastern maqam performance. Nonetheless, ethnomusicologists would concur that the application of western music theory to other musics can provide a common language with which music theorists and ethnomusicologists might discuss common problems in a mutually transformative way. It might also shed light on socio-historical processes which are currently obscured by interdisciplinary vagueness and a reluctance to consider musical processes in detail, such as the ‘retention’ and transformation of African socio-musical processes in the western hemisphere (Blum, 1999).
The task is now considerably more complex than the division, and reconciliation at some future date, of those concerned with ‘texts’ and those concerned with ‘contexts’ would suggest. The role of ‘texts’ in generating ‘contexts’ has been a persistent theme in the ethnomusicological study of community (see §2 above); it has also been substantially retheorized by practice theory. The dangers of reifying texts and contexts (with separate methodologies for identifying and explaining ‘details’) have been clearly identified. Many would argue, therefore, that this is a false opposition. However, the music theoretical terrain significantly changed over the course of the 1990s. Even if there was a distinction to be made between contextual and textual inquiry, the question would now be ‘with what kind of textual inquiry should ethnomusicologists engage?’. There have been three seismic shifts during the 1990s in the ways music analysts and theorists consider musical texts. One of these might be characterized as the gradual loosening of the hegemony of Schenkerian depth theory. The main shift within this tradition is associated with Cohn and Dempster's work in the early 1990s, arguing that musical surfaces might in fact be understood in terms of the working out of a variety of processes of transformation, and not just one from a single Urlinie. This relocates the theoretical task to the ‘surface’ and disrupts the hierarchical and reductionist assumptions of traditional Schenkerian practice. It also inverts an entire representational paradigm, in which theory reflects processes of composition, and performance, in turn, reflects the insights of theory. The implications for an ethnomusicology based on fieldwork and ethnography are direct: music theory no longer demands an abstracted art work as a starting point for comprehending music, and places performers and the performance situation at the centre of an analysis.
Lacanian psychoanalysis provided an influential method of close textual reading over the last decade. Its impact on music analysis is more inchoate, but of significance. Lacanian theory stresses the production of subjectivity through discourse, which is to say, through our everyday involvement in acts of seeing, hearing and speaking. Discourse, bearing the marks of traumas associated with early infant development, is both marked and disrupted by the always-already present Other it overtly seeks to exclude. Subjectivity is consequently an unstable and fragmented process, organized around complex anxieties, fears and pleasures. Seeing, hearing and speaking are thus not, as in Enlightenment rationalist thinking, the means by which stable, pre-formed selves gain stable and reliable knowledge about an external world, and texts are not transparent windows onto this knowledge. Analysis of texts identifies these marks of disruption and distortion, and uses them to account for some of the ways in which texts are both historically produced and historically productive. Psychoanalytic music theory has grappled with the peculiarities of musical signification; it has had a major impact on recent feminist music analysis influenced in more diffuse ways by post-structuralism, and also on some recent accounts of the history of Western music analysis. Its applicability to ethnomusicological practice, and, indeed, to non-western musics has yet to be explored in full. It offers distinct possibilities for organizing a social and cultural analysis of texts, though ethnomusicologists have perhaps been cautious of its tendency to an assumed and somewhat ahistorical universalism.
Finally, cognitive psychology, energized by major advances in neuroscience particularly in regard to modularity and neural mapping, has also transformed the close reading of musical texts. These developments have perhaps had the most obvious impact on ethnomusicological writing in the late 1980s and 1990s. Since the mid-19th century, psychologists of perception have turned to the study of music to provide demonstrable and measurable data concerning what was, and remains, the purest evidence of the human mind's structuring capacities. The quest for cognitive universals using evidence derived from a wide range of music cultures marked this research then as now. A number of music psychologists have turned unselfconsciously to non-Western data, while a number of ethnomusicologists have turned, with perhaps a greater degree of methodological introspection, to cognitivist issues. Studies of music cognition have aimed to provide an account of the competencies and knowledges that ‘a player needs to know in order to generate acceptable music in his society’ (Kippen, 1987).
Ethnomusicologists have stressed the importance of non-Western music in raising questions of competence that Western art musics do not foreground, particularly in regard to improvisation (jazz has provided a particularly significant area of research; note Berliner, 1997), and pitch and rhythmic perception in cultures with, for example, variable interval sizes and non-metrical concepts of pulse. Cognitive approaches based on Western art music practices have also characteristically assessed musical cognition in relation to the decisions made by individuals, either as sound producers or listeners. More recent cognitivist approaches in ethnomusicology have stressed the necessity of grasping musical competence in music cultures in which interactive group processes predominate. Javanese gamelan has provided a valuable point of comparative reference (Brinner, 1995). They have also stressed the need for framing experimental questions in culturally appropriate, contextually sensitive ways, and, more radically perhaps, they have argued for the crucial importance of dialogue between musician and researcher. Kippen's ‘dialectical ethnomusicology’ (1987) pursues the question of tabla rhythmic pattern generation in Lucknow with the aid of a computer program to generate rhythmic patterns, and to assess the compatibility of given rhythmic patterns to given generative grammars. The simultaneous process of analysis and pattern generation is conducted in situ with a tabla ustad who evaluates the patterns generated, identifies faults and revises the grammar with the ethnomusicologist. Small, portable and unobtrusive technology now permits this to take place in a culturally appropriate context. The construction of metagrammars for understanding, for example, the choice of one grammar over another, or the innovative application of rules from one grammatical system to the material more commonly associated with another at a given moment in improvisation or composition remains an ongoing project.
A Introduction. B History. C Post-1945 developments. D Contemporary theoretical issues.
d: contemporary theoretical issues
A.J. Ellis: ‘On the Musical Scales of Various Nations’, Journal of the Society of Arts, xxxiii (1885), 485–527
A. Haddon: Journal (Cambridge, 1888–89)
C. Brăiliou: Note sur la plainte funèbre du village de Dragus; La vie musicale d'un village: recherches sur le répertoire de Drăguş (Roumanie) (1929–32)
B. Malinowski: Argonauts of the Western Pacific (London, 1922)
A.P. Merriam: The Anthropology of Music (Evanston, IL, 1964)
B. Nettl: Theory and Method in Ethnomusicology (London, 1964)
A.R. Radcliffe-Brown: The Andaman Islanders (Glencoe, 1964)
J. Kunst: Musicologica (Amsterdam, 1950, enlarged 3/1959/R1975, as Ethnomusicology)
W. Wiora: Ergebnisse und Aufgaben vergleichender Musikforschung (Darmstadt, 1975)
G.W. Stocking, Jnr., ed.: ‘The Ethnographer's Magic: Fieldwork in British Anthropology from Tylor to Malinowski’, Observers Observed: Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, ed. G.W. Stocking Jnr. (Madison, 1983), 70–120
P. Manuel: Popular Musics of the Non-Western World (Oxford and New York, 1988)
R. Schechner and W. Appel: By Means of Performance (Cambridge, 1990/R1991)
C. Waterman: Juju, A Social History and Ethnography of an African Popular Music (Chicago, 1990)
D. Christensen: ‘Erich M. von Hornbostel, Carl Stumpf, and the Institutionalization of Comparative Musicology’, Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music, eds. B. Nettl and P.V. Bohlman (Chicago, 1991), 201–10
B. Nettl: ‘The Dual Nature of Ethnomusicology in North America: the Contributions of Charles Seeger and George Herzog’, Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music, eds. B. Nettl and P.V. Bohlman (Chicago, 1991), 266–76
S. Blum, P.V. Bohlman and D.M. Neuman, eds.: Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History (Urbana, 1991)
F. Lloyd: ‘The Changing Images of Madonna’, Deconstructing Madonna (London, 1993)
E.L. Schieffelin: ‘Performance and the Cultural Construction of Reality: A New Guinea Example’, Creativity/Anthropology, eds. S. Lavie, K. Narayan and R. Rosaldo (New York, 1993)
W. Straw: ‘Characterizing Rock Music Culture: the Case of Heavy Metal’, The Cultural Studies Reader, ed. S. During (London 1993/R1994)
P. Berliner: Thinking in Jazz: the Infinite Art of Improvization (Chicago, 1994)
C. Keil and S. Feld: Music Grooves (Chicago, 1994)
T. Rice: May It Fill Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian Music (Chicago and London, 1994)
J. Blacking: Music, Culture and Experience (Chicago, 1995)
G. Born: ‘Afterword: Music Policy, Aesthetic and Social Difference’, Rock and Popular Music: Politics, Policies and Institutions, eds. T. Bennet and others (London, 1995)
G. Born: Rationalizing Culture: Boulez, IRCAM and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-Garde (Berkeley, 1995)
M. Clayton: ‘Ethnographic wax cylinders at the British Library National Sound Archive: a brief history and description of the collection’, British Journal of Ethnomusicology, v (1996), 67–92
T. Mitchell: Popular Music and Local Identity: Rock, Pop and Rap in Europe and Oceania (London and New York, 1996)
A. Herle and S. Rouse, eds.: Cambridge and the Torres Strait: Centenary Essays on the Anthropological Expedition (Cambridge, 1998)
M. Schade-Poulsen: Men and Popular Music in Algeria (Austin, 1999)
C.A. Pegg: Mongolian Music, Dance and Oral Narrative: Performing Diverse Identities (Seattle, WA, 2001)
J.A. Fuller Maitland: ‘Hipkins, Alfred James’, Grove 3
A.J. Hipkins: ‘Ellis, Alexander John’, Grove 3
J. de Léry: Histoire d’un voyage faict en la terre du Brésil (1578; 3rd edn, with musical notations, La Rochelle, 1585/R
J.B. de Halde: Description géographique, historique, chronologique, politique et physique de l’Empire de la Chine et de la Tartarie chinoise (Paris, 1735)
J.J. Rousseau: Dictionnaire de musique (Paris, 1768/R; many edns to 1825; Eng. trans. by W. Waring, London, 771, 2/1779/R)
J.M. Amiot: Mémoire sur la musique des Chinois tant anciens que modernes (Paris, 1779/R)
J. Cook : Voyage to the Pacific Ocean … in the Years 1776, 1777, 1778, 1779, and 1780 (London, 1784)
M. Park: Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa Performed in the Years 1795, 1796, and 1797 (London, 1799)
G.A. Villoteau: De l’état actuel de l’art musical en Egypte (Paris, 1812)
G.A. Villoteau: Description historique, technique et littéraire des instruments de musique des Orientaux (Paris, 1813)
G.A. Villoteau: Mémoire sur la musique de l’antique Egypte (Paris, 1816)
G.W. Fink: ‘Einiges über die Begrundungsweise des ältesten Zustandes der Tonkunst, insonderheit über den Werth geschichtlier Überreste der frühesten gebildeten Völker namentlich der Hindostaner und Chinesen’, AMZ, xxxiii (1831), 785–
G.W. Fink: Erst Wanderung der ältesten Tonkunst, als Vorgeschichte der Musik oder als erste Periode derselben (Essen, 1831)
N.A. Willard: A Treatise on the Music of Hindoostan, Comprising a Detail of the Ancient Theory and Modern Practice (Calcutta, 1834; repr. in S.M. Tagore, ed., 1875)
F. Salvador-Daniel: La musique arabe, ses rapports avec la musique grecque et le chant grégorien (Algiers, 1863, repr. in Musique et instruments de musique du Maghreb, 1986; Eng. trans, by H.G. Farmer in The Music and Musical Instruments of the Arab, 1915/R)
A.J. Ellis, trans.: On the Sensations of Tone as a Physiological Basis for the Theory of Music (London, 1875, 2/1885, 6/1948) [trans. of H.L.F. von Helmholtz, Die Lehre von den Tonenpfindungen als physiologische Grundage für die Theorie der Music (Brunswick, 1863), with addns]
A.J. Hipkins: ‘Pitch’, Encyclopaedia Britannica (London, 9/1875–89)
A.J. Ellis: ‘Tonometrical Observaions on Some Existing Non-Harmonic Scales’, Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, xxxvii (1884), 368–85
A.J. Ellis: ‘On the Musical Scales of Various Nations’, Journal of the Society of Arts, xxxiii (1885), 485–527
A.J. Hipkins: Musical Instruments, Historic, Rare and Unique (Edinburgh, 1888, 3/1945) [ex. from India, China, Japan and South Africa]
J.W. Fewkes: ‘A Contribution to Passamaquoddy Folklore’, Journal of American Folklore, iii (1890), 257–80
The Earl of Macartney: An Embassy to China, Being the Journal Kept by Lord Macartney During his Embassy to the Emperor Ch’ien-lung 1793–1794, ed. J.L. Crabmer-Byng (London, 1962)
W. Jones: ‘On the Musical Modes of the Hindoos’, Asiatick Researches, iii (1792), 55–87; repr. in S.M. Tagore, ed.: Hindu Music from Various Authors (Calcutta, 1875, 2/1882 in 2 pts, 3/1965)
J.A. Wilkens: ‘Sewaka een Javanach gedicht’, Tijdschrift voor Nederlandsch-Indië, xii/2 (1850), 383–461; viii/1 (1851), 464
Fr.-J. Fétis: Histoire général de la musique, depuis les temps les plus anciens jusqu’à nos jours, (Paris, 1869–76)
J.P. Veth: Java, geographisch, ethnologisch, historisch (Haarlem, 1875, 2/1896–1907)
V.-Ch. Mahillon: Catalogue descriptif et analytique du Musée instrumental du Conservatoire royal de musique de Bruxelles (Ghent, 1880–1922; i/2 1893; ii/2 1909)
G. Adler: ‘Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft’, VMw, I (1885), 5–20
C. Stumpf: ‘Lieder der Bellakula-Indianer’, VMw, ii (1886), 405–26
J. Broadwood, comp.: Old English Songs (London, 1843) [pubd with addl songs by L.E. Broadwood as Sussex Songs (Popular Songs of Sussex), arr. H.F.B. Reynardson (London, 1889)]
J.W. Fewkes: ‘A Contribution to Passmaquoddy Folklore’, Journal of American Folklore, iii (1890), 257–80
J. Groneman: De gamelan to Jogjakarata: itgegeven met eene voorrede: over onze kennis der Javaansche Muzief, door J.P.N. Land (Amsterdam, 1890)
F. Kidson: Traditional Tunes: a Collection of Ballad Airs, chiefly obtained in Yorkshire and the South of Scotland (Oxford, 1891/R)
L.E. Broadwood and J.A. Fuller Maitland, eds.: English County Songs, Words and Music (London, 1893)
F.T. Piggott: The Music and Musical Instruments of Japan (London, 1893)
R. Wallaschek: Primitive Music: Inquiry into the Origin and Development of Music of Savage Tribes (London, 1893/R; Ger. trans., enl. 2/1903 as Anfänge der Tonkunst)
S. Baring-Gould and H.F. Sheppard, comps.: A Garland of Country Song: English Folk Songs with Their Traditional Melodies (London, 1895)
S. Baring-Gould and H.F. Sheppard, eds.: English Ministrelsie: a National Monument of English Song (1895–6)
B. Ankerman: Die Afrikanischen Musikinstrumente (diss., U. of Leipzig, 1902)
L. Azoulay: ‘Liste des phonogrammes composant le Museé phonographique de la Société d'Anthropologie’, Revue de la Société d’Anthropologie de Paris, iii (1902), 652
E. Coart and A. de Haulleville: ‘La musique’, Annales du Musée du Congo Belge, III, i/1 (1902), 145–31
C.J. Sharp: English Folk Song: Some Conclusions (London, 1907, 3/1954/R, ed. M. Karpeles)
L.E. Broadwood, comp.: English Traditional Songs and Carols (London, 1908)
P. Grainger: ‘Collecting with the Phonograph’, JFSS, iii (1908–9), 147–242
K.B. Deval: The Hindu Musical Scale and the Twenty-Two Shrutees (Poona, 1910)
L. Azoulay: ‘Les musées et archives phonographiques avante et depuis la foundation du musée phonographique de la Société d'Anthropologie de Paris en 1900’ (paper delivered at the meeting of 2 November 1911), Revue de la Société d'Anthropologie de Paris, ii (1911), 450
E.M. von Hornbostel: ‘Über ein Akustisches Kriterium für Kulturzusammenhsnge’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, xliii (1911), 601–15
E. Clements: Introduction to the Study of Indian Music (London, 1913/R)
R. Lach: Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der ornamentalen Melopöie: Beiträge sur Geschichte der Melodie (Leipzig, 1913)
A.H. Fox Strangways: The Music of Hindostan (Oxford, 1914/R)
J. Kunst: Terschellinger Volksleven (Uithuizen, 1915, 3/1951)
C.J. Sharp and O.D. Campbell, comps.: English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians (London, 1917, 2/1932, ed. M. Karpeles, 3/1960) [without acc.]
E.M. von Hornbostel and C. Sachs: ‘Systematik de Mussikinstrumente’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, xlvi (1914), 553–90 [Eng. trans., in GSJ, xiv (1961), 3; rev. ed. in Myers, 1992]
J. Maes: ‘La sanza du Congo Belge’, Congo, ii (1921), 542–72
H.A. Popley: The Music of India (London, 1921, 3/1966)
R. Lach: Die vergleichende Musikwissenschaft: ihre Methode und Probleme (Vienna and Leipzig, 1924)
H.P. Biggar: The Voyages of Jacques Cartier Published from the Originals with Translations, Notes and Appendices (Ottawa, 1924)
J. Kunst and C.J.A. Kunst-van Wely: De toonkunst van Bali (Weltevreden 1925); pt. 2 in Tijdschrift voor Indiche taal-, land- en volkenkunde, lxv (1925), 369–508
E.M. von Hornbostel: ‘Musikalische Tonsysteme’, Handbuch der Physik, viii, ed. H. Geiger and K. Scheel (Berlin, 1927)
C. Sachs: Geist und Werden der Musikinstrumente (Berlin, 1929/R)
R. Lachman: Musik des Orients (Breslau, 1929/R)
S.F. Nadel: Marimba-Musik (Vienna, 1931)
S.F. Nadel: Georgische Gesänge (Berlin and Leipzig, 1933)
E.M. von Hornbostel: ‘The Ethnology of African Sound Instruments’, Africa, vi (1933), 129–57, 277–311 [comments on C. Sachs: Geist und Werden der Musikinstrumente]
H. Wieschoff: Die Afrikanischen Trommeln und ihre ausserafrikanischen Beziehungen (Stuttgart, 1933/R 1968)
J. Kunst: De toonkunst van Java (The Hague, 1934; Eng. trans., 1949 as Music in Java, enlarged 3/1973)
H. Hübner: ‘Studien zur Musik im Bismarck-Archipel’, Anthropos, xxx (1935), 669
O. Boone: ‘Les xylophones du Congo Belge’, Annals du Musée du Congo Belge, iii/2 (1936), 69–144
J. Kunst: ‘A Musicological Argument for Cultural Relationships between Indonesia, probably the Isle of Java, and Central Africa’, PMA, session lxii (1936), 57–96
A. Schaeffner: Origine des instruments de musique: Introduction ethnologique à l'histoire de la musique instrumentale (Paris, 1936; rev. 2/1968)
M. Bukofzer: ‘Kann die ‘Blasquintentheorie’ zur Erklärung exotischer Ton-systeme beitragen?’, Anthropos, xxxii (1937), 402–18
W. Danckert: ‘Musikwissenschaft und Kulturkreislehre’, Anthropos, xxxii (1937), 1–14
J. Maes: ‘Sculpture decorative our symbolique des instruments de musique du Congo Belge’, Artes Africaanae, x/7 (Brussels, 1937), 1
H. Hübner: ‘Die Musik im Bismarch-Archipel’, Musikethnologische Studien zur Kulturgeschichte und Rassenforschung (Jena, 1938)
J. Maes: ‘Les Lukombe ou instruments de musique à cordes des populations du Kasai - Lac Léopold II - Lukenie’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 70 (1938), 240
C. Sachs: Les instruments de musique de Madagascar (Paris, 1938)
J. Kunst: Music in Nias (Leiden, 1939)
J. Kunst: Music in Flores (Leiden, 1942)
A.A. Bake: ‘Indische Musik’, MGG (1957), 1150–85
C. Sachs: The Rise of Music in the Ancient World East and West (New York, 1943)
A.A. Bake: ‘Indian Folk Dances’, JIFMC, i (1949), 47–54
A.A. Bake: ‘The Music of India’, NOHM, I (1957), 195–227, 488
A.M. Jones: Africa and Indonesia: the Evidence of the Xylophone and Other Musical and Cultural Factors (Leiden, 1964/R)
J. Kunst: Music in New Guinea (The Hague, 1967)
P. Collaer: Enquête sur la vie musicale au Congo Belge 1934–1935 (Questionnaire Knosp) (Tervuren, 1968)
A. Kaeppler: ‘Tongan Dance: a Study in Cultural Change’, EthM, xiv/2 (1970), 266–77
F. Ll. Harrison: ‘Music and Cult: the Functions of Music in Social and Religious Systems’, Perspectives in Musicology, ed. B.S. Brook, E.O.D. Downes, and S. Van Solkema (New York, 1972), 307–34
A. Schneider: Musikwissenschaft und Kulturkreislehre: zur Methodik und Geschichte der vergleichende Musikwissenschaft (Bonn, 1976)
W. Graf: Vergleichende Musikwissenschaft: ausgewählte Aufsätze (Vienna, 1980)
H. Myers, ed.: Ethnomusicology: an Introduction (New York and London, 1992)
J.R. z Rittersberk and B.D. Weber, comps, and eds.: České narodnj pjsne/Böhmische Volkslieder (Prague, 1825); repr. in Markl (1987), 221–445
O. Kolberg: Piésni ludu polskiego [Songs of the Polish folk] (Poznan, 1842)
K.J. Erben: Prostonárodní české písně a říkadla [Czech folksongs and nursery rhymes] (Prague, 1842–3, 3/1862–4/R)
O. Kolberg: Piésni ludu polskiego [Songs of the Polish folk] (Warsaw, 1857); repr. as vol. i of Dzieda wszystkie [Complete works] (Wrocław and Poznań, 1961)
F. Sušil: Moravské národní písně s nápevy do textu vřadenými [Moravian folksongs with melodies placed with the text] (Brno, 1860/R, ed. B. Václavek and R. Smetana, with commentary]
O. Kolberg: Lud: jego zwyczaje, sposób zycia, mowa, podania, przyslowia, obrzedy, gutsa, zabawy, piesni, muzika i tance [The folk: their customs, ways of life, language, Legends, proverbs, rituals, spells, entertainments, songs, music and dance] (Warsaw, 1865); repr. as vol. ii of Dziela wszyskie (Kraków, 1962)
K. Szini: A magyar nép dalai és dallami [Songs of the Hungarian folk] (Pest, 1865)
V. Odoevsky: ‘Russkaya I tak nazyvaemaya obshchaya muzyka’ [Russian and so-called general music], Russkiy (1867); repr. in Musykal’no-literaturnoe nasledie (Moscow, 1956), 318
M. Lysendo: Ukrains’ki narodni pisni [Ukrainian folksongs] (Leipzig and Kiev, 1868–1906); rev. in Zibranny tvoriv [Collected works] (Kiev, 1950–59)
A. Serov: ‘Russkaya narodnaya pesnya kak prealmet nauki’ [The Russian folksong as a subject of science], Muzykal’nyi sezon (1870–71), vi, xiii
V. Odoevsky: ‘Voprosy predlozhennye k obsuzhdeniyu na s'ezde’ [Problems suggested for a discussion on the (first archaeological) convention], Trudy Pervogo arkheologischeskogo s’ezda v Moskve, 1869 g., ii (Moscow, 1871)
I. Bartalus: Magyar népdalok: egyetemes gyujtemény [Hungarian folksongs: a universal collection] (Budapest, 1873–96)
M. Lysenko: ‘Kharacteristika muzichnikh osoblivostey ukraïns'kikh dum I pisen, u vikonannï kobzaria Veresa’ [Musical characteristics of Ukrainian Dumy and songs performed by kobzar’ Veresay], Zapiski Yugo-Zapadnogo otdela Russkogo Geograficheskogo Obshchestva, i (Kiev, 1874, 2/1978)
N. Rimsky-Korsakov: Sbornik russkikh narodnykh pesen, Op. 24 [A collection of Russian folksongs] (St Petersburg, 1876–7) [for voice and piano]
F.K. Kuhac: ‘Prilog za povjest glazbe juznoslovjenske’ [A contribution to the history of south Slavic music], Rad Jugoslavenske Akademije znanosti i umjetnosti, xxxviii, xlli, xlv, l, lxii, lxiii (1877–82)
Y. Melgunov: Russkie narodnye pesni neprosredstvenno s golosov naroda zapisannye I s ob'yasneniyami izdannye Yu. N. Melgunovym [Russian folksongs written down directly from people’s voices and with explanations published by Y. melgunov] (Moscow, 1879–85) [arranged for piano by N. Klenovsky and P. Blaramberg]
Slovenské spevy [Slovak songs] (Turciansky Sv. Martin, 1880–1926); new critical edn, ed. L. Galko (Bratislava, 1972–89)
F. Bartoš: Národní písně moravské v nové nasbírané [Moravian folksongs newly collected] (Brno, 1882, enlarged 2/1889 by Bartoš and L. Janáček, 3/1899–1901 with study by Janácek, pp.i–cxxxvi
N. Rimsky-Korsakov: 40 russkikh narodnykh pesen sobrannykh T.I. Filippovym I garmonizovannykh N.A. Rimskim-Korsakovym [40 Russian folk songs collected by Filippov and harmonized by Rimsky-Korsakov] (Moscow, 1882) [songs transcribed from Filippov’s singing and arranged for voice and piano by Rimsky-Korsakov]
L. Kuba: Slovanstvo ve svých zpěvech [The Slavonic world in its songs], I: Písně české [Czech songs] (1884–8); ii: Písně moravské [Moravian songs] (1888); iii. Písně slovenské [Slovak songs] (1888); iv: Písně polské [Polish songs]; v: Písně luzické [Lusation Serb, Wend, or Sorb songs] (1885–7); vi: Písně ruské [Russian – including Great Russian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian – songs] (1885–8); vii: Písně jihoslovanské [South Slavic – Slovenian, Montenegrin, Croatian, Dalmatian, Serbian Kingdom, Bosnian and Hercegovinian, Macedonian, Old Serbian and Bulgarian – songs] (1890–1929)
L. Kuba: Nowa zberka melodiji k hornjoluziskim pesnjam (233 cisla) zhromadzil Ludwík Kuba [A new collection of melodies to Upper Lusatian songs (233 numbers) Gathered by Ludvik Kuba] (Budysin, 1887)
N. Palchikov: Krest’yanskie pesni zapisannye v sele Nilolaevka menzelinskogo yez’da Ufimskoy gubernii N. Palchikovym [Peasants songs written down by N. Pal’chikov in the village Nikolaevka, Menzelinsk district of the Ufa Guberniya] (St Petersburg, 1888) [songs collected in one village over the period of 30 years]
P. Sokalsky: Russkaya narodnaya muzyka velilorusskaya I malorusskaya v ee stroenii melodischeskom I ritmicheskom I otlichiya eye ot osnov sovremennoy garmonicheskoy musyki [Russian music of Great- and Malo-Russia, its melodic and rhythmic structures and its dissimilarity with the bases of contemporary harmonic music] (Kharkov, 1888)
A. Kiss: Magyar gyermekjáték gyutemény [Collection of Hungarian children’s games] (Budapest, 1891)
O. Hostinský: 36 nápevů světských písní českého lidu z XVI století [36 secular song melodies of the Czech folk from the 16th century] (Prague, 1892/repr. 1956, with postword by J. Markl)
M. Lysendo: ‘Narodni myzichni instrumenty na Ukrain’ [Folk musical instruments in Ukraine], Zorya, i–x (1894), 2/1907, 3/1955)
K. Strekelj: Slovenske narodne pesmi [Slovenian folksongs] (Ljubljana, 1895–1923)
T.M. Busetic and S.S. Mokranjac: ‘Srpske narodne pesme i igre s melodijama iz Levca’ [Serbian folksongs and dances with melodies from Levac], Srpski etnografski zbornik, iii (1902)
M. Lysendo: Ukrains’ki obryadovi pisni [Ukrainian ritual songs] (Kiev, 1896); rev. in Zibrannya tvoriv, xx (1956)
H. Windakiewiczowa: ‘Rytmika ludowej muzyki polskiej’ [Rhythmics of Polish folk music] Wisla, xi (1897), 716
S.S. Mokranjac: Srpsko narodno crkveno pojanje [Serbian traditional church chant], i: Osmoglasnik u note stavio St. St. Mokranjac [The Octoechos, notated by S.S. Mokranjac] (Belgrade, 1902, 2/1922/R)
E. Lineva: Velikorusskie pesni v narodnoy garmonizatsii. Zapisany E. Linevoi (St Petersburg, 1904, 1909); Eng. trans, as The Peasant Songs of Great Russia as they are in the Folk’s Harmonization: Collected and Transcribed from Phonograms by Eugenie Lineff (Moscow, 1905–12)
O. Hostinský: Česká svetská píseň lidová [The Czech secular folksong] (Prague, 1906); repr. in Hostinsky (1961)
Trudy muzykalno-etnographicheskoy komissii [Transactions of the Music-Ethnographic Commission], (Moscow, 1906, 1907, 1911, 1913, 1916) [Simultaneously Izvestiya Obshchestva Lyubiteley Estestvoznaniya, Antropologii I Etnografii, cxiii, cxiv, cxv, cxviii, cxx]
H. Windakiewiczowa: ‘Katalog piesni polsko-morawskich’ [Catalogue of Polish-Moravian songs] i: Materialy antropologiczno-archeologiczne i etnograficzne, wydawne staraniem Komisyi Antropologicznej Akademii Umiejetnosci w Krakowie [Anthropological, archaeological and ethnographic materials, published under the auspices of the anthropological commission of the Academy of Learning in Kraków], x (1908), ii: Dzial etnograficzny [Ethnographic section] (1908), 3–43
E.M. von Hornbostel: ‘Melodya Wasukumska, podlug zapisek Dra. J. Czekanowskiego: Wasukuma-Melodie, nach der Aufnahme von Dr J. Czekanowski’, Bulletin international de l’Académie des Sciences de Cracovie, Series B, Sciences naturelles, Année 1910 (1911), 711
J. Czekanowski: Forschungen in Nil-Kongo Zwischengebiet (Leipzig, 1911–27)
B. Pilsudski: ‘Ainu Folk-Lore’, Journal of American Folklore (Kraków, 1912)
B. Pilsudski: Materials for the Study of the Ainu Language and Folklore (Kraków, 1912)
D. Christov: ‘Ritmichnite osnovi na narodnata ni muzika’ [The rhythmic bases of our folk music], Sbornik za narodni umotvoreniia I narodopis, xxvii (1913), 1–51; rev. 2 (1967), 33–98
H. Windakiewiczowa: ‘Studia nad wierszem i zwrotka poezji polskiej ludowej’ [Study of Polish folk poetry and poetic verse], Rozprawy Akademii Umiejetnosci, lii (1913), 175–269
N.S. Derzhavin: ‘Bolgarskie kolonii v Rossii’ [Bulgarian colonies in Russia]: Sbornik za narodni umetvareniia I narodopis, xxiv (Sofia, 1914)
E.M. von Hornbostel: ‘Gesänge aus Ruanda’, Forschungen in Nil-Kongo Zwischengebeit, i, J. Czekanowski (Leipzig, 1917), 379–412
L. Kuba: Písěn srbů lužických [The song of the Lusatian Serbs] (Prague, 1922)
B. Bartók: A magyar népdal [Hungarian folksong] (Budapest, 1924/R; Eng trans., 1931); repr. in Hung. and Ger. in Dille (1965–8)
V. Zganec: Hrvagske pucke popijevke iz Medjumurja [Croatian folksongs from Medjimurje], i: Svjetovne [Secular] (Zagreb, 1924); ii: Crkvene [Religious] (Zagreb, 1925)
Iskusstvo Severa [Arts of the North] (Leningrad, 1927–8) [includes articles by Evald and Gippius on north Russian songs]
V. Stoin: Bulgarska narodna muzika: metrika i ritmika [Bulgarian folk music: metrics and rhythm] (Sofia, 1927); repr. in Stoin (1956), 11–60
D. Christov: Tekhnicheskiiat stroezn na bulgarskata narodna muzika [The technical structure of Bulgarian folk music] (Sofia, 1928); repr. in Christov (1967–70), 63–124
V.R. Djordjevic: Srpske narodne melodije (Juzna Srbija) [Serbian folk melodies of ‘south Serbia’ (Macedonia)] (Skopje, 1928)
V. Stoin: Narodni pesni ot Timok do Vita: chantes populaires bulgares du Timok à la Vita (Sofia, 1928)
M. Murko: ‘Velika zbirka slovenskih narodnih pesmi s melodijami’ [The great collection of Slovenian folksongs with tunes], Etnolog, ii (1929), 5–54
L. Janáček and P. Váša: Moravské písně milostné [Moravian love songs] (Prague, 1930–36)
S. Moszynski: Muzyka Podhala (Lwów and Warsaw, 1930, 2/1973)
H. Windakiewiczowa: ‘Ze studjów nad forma muzyczna piesni ludowych: okres kolist’ [From studies on the musical form of folksongs: the era of the round], Ksiega pamiqtkowa ku czci Profesora Dr. Adolfa Chybinskiego [Festschrift for Adolf Chybinski] (Krakow, 1930), 115
C. Brailoiu: Colinde si cîntece de stea [Colinde and Star Songs] (Bucharest, 1931)
C. Brailoiu: ‘Esquisse d'une méthode de folklore musicale’ (Paris, 1931), repr. 1960; in Rouget, ed., 1973, 3–39; Engl trans. of Rouget, ed. A.L. Lloyd (Cambridge, 1984), 59–85
V.R. Djordjevic: Srpske narodne melodije (predratna Srbija) [Serbian folk melodies of prewar Serbia] (Belgrad, 1931)
V. Stoin: Narodni pesni ot Sredna Severna Bulgaria: chants populaires bulgares de la partie central de la Bulgarie du Norde (Sofia, 1931)
E. Gippius: ‘Problema muzykalnogo fol'klora’ [A problem of musical folklore], SovM, vi (1933)
H. Windakiewiczowa: ‘Pentatonika w muzyce polskiej ludowej’ [Pentatonic scales in Polish folk music], Kwartalnik muzyczny, v/17–18 (1933), 1
B. Bartók: Népzenénk és a zomszéd népenéje [The folk music of the Magyars and neighbouring peoples] (Budapest, 1934); Ger. trans., Ungarische Jahrbücher, xv (1935), 194–258; Fr. trans., Archivum europae centro-orientalis, ii (1936), 197–232 and i–xxxii
V. Stoin: ‘Rodopski narodni pesni’ [Rhodope folksongs], Sbornik za narodni umotvoreniia, xxxix (1934), 1–324
S.S. Mokranjac: Srpsko narodno crkveno pojanje [Serbian traditional church music], ii: Opste pojanje [General chant], ed. K.P. Manojlovic (Belgrade, 1935)
C. Brailoiu, ed.: G. Gucu: 200 colinde populare (Bucharest, 1936)
C. Brailoiu: ‘Ale morului’ din Gorj [‘The Songs of the Dead’ from Gorj district] (Bucharest, 1936); also in Mesures, v/4 (1939), 85; repr. in Constantin Brailoiu: Opere, v, ed. E. Comisel (Bucharest, 1981), 107
Z. Kodály: A magyar népzene [Hungarian folk music] (Budapest, 1937, enlarged 3/1952 by L. Vargyas, 6/1973; Eng. trans. 1960, rev., enlarged 2/1971, 3/1982)
B. Bartók: ‘Az úgynevezett bolgár ritmus’, Énekszó, v (1938), 537; Eng. trans., as ‘The so-called Bulgarian rhythm’, in B. Bartók (1976), 40; Ger. trans., as ‘Die sogenannte bulgarische Rhythmus’, in Bartók (1972), 94
C. Brailoiu: Bocete din Oas [Laments from Oas] (Bucharest, 1938); repr. in Constantin Brailoiu: Opere, v, ed. E. Comisel (Bucharest, 1981), 195
C. Brailoiu: ‘Le giusto syllabique: un système rythmique propre à la musique populaire roumaine’, Polyphonie, ii (1948), 26–57 (PE; O, i]; also in AnM, vii (1952), 117–58, 153–94
B. Bartók and A.B. Lord: Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs (New York, 1951)
C. Brailoiu: ‘Le rythme aksak’, RdM, xxx (1951), 71–108 [PE; O, i]
A.B. Lord, ed.: Serbocroatian Heroic Songs, Collected by Milman Parry, i (Cambridge, MA, and Belgrade, 1954)
B. Bartók: Slovenské l'udové piesne [Slovak folksongs], eds. A. Elscheková, O. Elschek, and J. Kresánek, I (Bratislava, 1959)
C. Brailoiu: ‘Réflexions sur la création musical collective’, Diogène [Paris], xxv (1959), 83–93 [PE; O, ii]
K. Plicka: Slovensky spevnik (Bratislava, 1961)
G. Rouget, ed.: Constantin Brailoiu: problèmes d’ethnomusicologie (Geneva, 1973)
L. Kuba: Pjesme I napjevi iz Bosne I Hercegovine [Songs and melodies from Bosnia and Hercegovina], ed. C. Rihtman with L. Simic, M. Fulanovic-Sosic, and D. Rihtman-Sotric (Sarajevo, 2/1984) [ see review in YTM, xviii (1986), 177, for background information]
T. Jefferson: Notes on the State of Virginia, Written in the Year 1781 (Paris, 1782)
R. Allen: A Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs from Various Authors: by Richard Allen, Minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (Philadelphia, PA, 1801) [excerpts repr. in E. Southern, ed: Readings (1971, 2/1983), 52]
J.F. Watson: Methodist Error, or, Friendly Christian Advice to those Methodists who indulge in Extravagant Religious Emotions (Trenton, NJ, 1819; excerpts repr. in E. Southern, ed: Readings (1971, 2/1983), 62
W.F. Allen, C.P. Ware and L. McKim Garrison: Slave Songs of the United States (New York, 1867/R1929, 1971)
J. Eights: ‘Pinkster Festivities in Albany’, Collections on the History of Albany, ed. J. Munsell (Albany, NY, 1867), 323; repr. in E. Southern, ed.: Readings (1971, 2/1983), 41
J.B.T. M[arsh]: The Story of the Jubiliee Singers, with their Songs (Boston, MA, 1875)
F.J. Child, ed.: The English and Scottih Popular Ballads (Boston, MA, 1883–98/R)
W.W. Newell: Games and Songs of American Children (New York, 1883, rev. and enl. 2/1903/R1963)
F. Boas: ‘Poetry and Music of some North American Tribes’, Science, ix (1887), 383–5
F. Boas: ‘The Central Eskimo’, Bureau of American Ethnology: Annual Report 1884–1885, vi (1888), 399–669
J.W. Fewkes: ‘A Contribution to Passamaquoddy Folklore’, Journal of American Folklore, iii (1890), 257–80
J.W. Fewkes: ‘On the Use of the Phonograph among the Zuni Indians’, American Naturalist, xxiv (1890), 687–91
B.I. Gilman: ‘Zuni Melodies’, Journal of American Ethnology and Archaeology, i (1891), 63–91
A.C. Fletcher and F. La Flesche: A Study of Omaha Indian Music (Cambridge, MA, 1893/R)
Boas: ‘The Central Eskimo’, Bureau of American Ethnology: Annual Report 1884–1885, vi (1888), 399–669
R. Wallaschek: Primitive Music: an Inquiry into the Origin and Development of Music: Songs, Instruments, Dances and Pantomimes of Savage Races (London, 1893/R1970, enlarged 2/1903 as Anfänge der Tonkunst)
F. Boas: ‘Songs of the Kwakiutl Indians’, Internationalies Archiv für Ethnographie, ix (1896), 1
F.B. Gunmere: ‘The Ballad and Communal Poetry’, Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature, v (1896), 41
F. Boas: The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, Report of the United States National Museum 1895 (Washington DC, 1897), 311–738
P. Barry: Some Traditional Songs’ Journal of American Folklore, xviii/68 (1905), 49
H.M. Belden: ‘The Study of Folk-Song in America’, Modern Philology, ii (1905), 573
G.H. Gerould: ‘The Ballad of the Bitter With’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, xxiii (1908), 141
H.M. Belden: ‘Review, The Popular Ballad, F.B. Gunmere’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, viii (1909), 114
F. Densmore: Chippewa Music (Washington, DC, 1910–13/R)
W.R. Nelles: ‘The Ballad of Hind Horn’, Journal of American Folklore, xxii/83 (1909), 42
J.A. Lomax: Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads (New York, 1910, enl.2/1916, rev. and enlarged 3/1938)
H.M. Belden: ‘The Relation of Balladry to Folk-lore’, Journal of American Folklore, xxiv/91 (1911), 1
E.C. Perrow: ‘Songs and Rhymes from the South’, Journal of American Folklore, xxv/97 (1912), 137
P. Barry: ‘An American Homilectic Ballad’, Modern Language Notes, xxviii (1913), 1
H.E. Krehbiel: Afro-American Folksongs: a Study in Racial and National Music (New York, 1914/R)
P.F. Baum: ‘The English Ballad of Judas Iscariot’, Publications of the Modern Language Association, xxxi (1916), 181
F. Densmore: Teton Sioux Music (Washington, DC, 1918/R)
J.W. Johnson and J.R. Johnson, eds.: The Book of American Negro Spirituals (New York, 1925/R)
J.W. Johnson and J.R. Johnson, eds.: The Second Book of Negro Spirituals (New York, 1926/R)
F. Densmore: Papago Music (Washington, DC, 1927)
E.M. von Hornbostel: ‘African Negro Music’, Africa, i (1928), 30–62; repr. in International Institute of African Languages and Cultures: Memorandum, iv (London, 1928), 1–35
M.A. Grissom: The Negro Sings a New Heaven (Chapel Hill, nc, 1930/R1969)
M. Karpeles: ‘British Folk Songs from Canada’, JFSS, xxxiv (1930), 218
J.A. Lomax and A. Lomax, comps.: American Ballads and Folksongs (New York, 1934)
J.A. Lomax and A. Lomax, comps.: Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly (New York, 1936)
J.W. Work: American Negro Songs and Spirituals: a Comprehensive Collection of 230 Folk Songs, Religious and Secular; with a Foreword (New York, 1940/Rn.d.)
M.J. Herskovits: The Myth of the Negro Past (New York, 1941)
M.J. Herskovits: ‘Patterns of Negro Music’, Transactions of the Illinois State Academy of Science, xxxiv/1 (1941), 19–23
J.A. Lomax and A. Lomax, comps.: Our Singing Country: a Second Volume of American Ballads and Folk Songs (New York, 1941, 2/1948) [R.C. Seeger, music ed.]
F. Densmore: ‘The Use of Meaningless Syllables in Indian Songs’, American Anthropologist, xlv (1943), 160
G.P. Jackson: White and Negro Spirituals: their Life Span and Kinship (New York, 1943/R)
C.M. Barbeau: Alouette: nouveau recueil de chansons populaires (Montreal, Canada, 1946)
C.M. Barbeau: ‘La guignolée au Canada’, French Folklore Bulletin (1946), 115
J.A. Lomax, A. Lomax, C. Seeger, and R.C. Seeger: Folk Song U.S.A.: the 111 Best American Ballads (New York, 1947, rev. 2/1975)
R.A. Waterman: ‘“Hot” Rhythm in Negro Music’, JAMS, i (1948), 24–37
Z. Estreicher: ‘La Musique des Esquimaux-Caribous’, Bulletin de la Société Neuchâteloise de Géographie, v/1 (1948), 1–54
H. Creighton: Folklore of Luneburg County, Nova Scotia (Ottawa, 1950)
R.A. Waterman: ‘Gospel Hymns of a Negro Church in Chicago’, JIFMC, iii (1951), 87
R.A. Waterman: ‘African Influence on the Music of the Americas’, Acculturation in the Americas, ed. S. Tax (Chicago, 1952), 207–18
K. Peacock: ‘Nine Songs from Newfoundland’, Journal of American Folklore, lxvii (1954), 123–36
F. Densmore: Seminole Music (Washington, dc, 1956/R)
H. Creighton: ‘Songs from Nova Scotia’, JIFMC, xii (1960), 84
K. Peacock: The Native Songs of Newfoundland (Ottawa, 1960)
C.M. Barbeau: Le rossignol y chante (Ottawa, 1962)
H. Creighton: Maritime Folk Songs (Toronto, 1962)
E.D. Ives: ‘Satirical Songs in Maine and the Maritime Provinces of Canada’, JIFMC, XIV (1962), 65
E. Fowke: ‘British Ballads in Ontario’, Midwest Folklore, xiii (1963), 133
E.D. Ives: Larry Gorman: the Man Who Made the songs (Bloomington, IN, 1964)
E. Fowke: Traditional Singers and Songs from Ontario (Hatboro, PA, 1965)
K. Peacock: Songs of the Newfoundland Outports (Ottawa, 1965)
M. Kolinski: ‘Return of the Native’, Bulletin d’information No. 3, Premier Festival Cultural Panafrican (May, 1969)
E. Fowke: Lumbering Songs from the Northern Woods (Austin, TX, 1970)
H. Creighton: Folksongs from Southern New Brunswick (Ottawa, 1971)
E.D. Ives: Lawrence Doyle: the Farmer Poet of Prince Edward Island (Orono, ME, 1971)
M. Karpeles: Folk Songs from Newfoundland (London, 1971)
J. Lovell Jr: Black Song: the Forge and the Flame (New York, 1972)
F. Bose: Musikalische Völkerkunde (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1953)
D.P. McAllester: Enemy Way Music: a Study of the Social and Esthetic Values as Seen in Navaho Music (Cambridge, MA, 1954)
J. Kunst: Ethnomusicology: a Study of Its Nature, Its Problems, Methods and Representative Personalities to Which Is Added a Bibliography (The Hague, 1950, 2/1955, 3/1959)
A.P. Merriam: The Anthropology of Music (Evanston, IL, 1964)
B. Nettl: Theory and Method in Ethnomusicology (New York, 1964)
W. Sturtevant: ‘Studies in Ethnoscience’, American Anthropologist, lxvi (1964), 99–131
K. Reinhard: Einführung in die Musikethnologie (Wolfenbüttel, 1968)
T.S. Kuhn: The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, 1962, 2/1970)
C. Seeger: ‘Toward a Unitary Field for Musicology’, Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology, i/3 (1970), 171–210
A. Schneider: Musikwissenschaft und Kulturkreislehre: Zur Methodik und Geschichte der Vergleichenden Musikwissenschaft (Bonn-Bad Godesberg, 1976)
A.P. Merriam: ‘Definitions of “Comparative Musicology” and “Ethnomusicology”: An Historical-Theoretical Perspective’, EthM, xxi (1977), 189–204
C. Seeger: ‘Speech, Music and Speech about Music’, Studies in Musicology, 1935–1975 (Berkeley, 1977), 16–30
T. Rice: ‘Toward the Remodeling of Ethnomusicology’, EthM, xxxi (1987), 469–88
S. Feld: Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics and Song in Kaluli Expression (Philadelphia, 1982, 2/1990)
P.V. Bohlman: ‘Representation and Cultural Critique in the History of Ethnomusicology’, Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music, eds. B. Nettl and P.V. Bohlman (Chicago, 1991), 131–51
A. Seeger: ‘Styles of Musical Ethnography’, Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music, eds. B. Nettl and P.V. Bohlman (Chicago, 1991), 342–55
P.V. Bohlman: ‘Ethnomusicology's Challenge to the Canon: the Canon's Challenge to Ethnomusicology’, Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons, eds. K. Bergeron and P.V. Bohlman (Chicago, 1992), 116–136
A.B. Schuursma: Ethnomusicology Research: a Select Annotated Bibliography (New York, 1992)
Ethnomusicology On-Line 〈www.research.umbc.edu/eol/eol.html〉 [online journal]
Music and Anthropology 〈muspe1.cirfid.unibo.it/MeA/index.htm〉 [online journal]
C. Seeger : ‘Toward a Universal Music Sound-Writing for Musicology’, JIFMC, v (1953), 63–6
C. Sachs: The Wellsprings of Music (The Hague, 1962)
M. Hood: ‘Sléndro and Pelog Redefined’, Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology, i (1966), 28–37
J. Blacking: How Musical Is Man? (Seattle, WA, 1973)
J. Rahn: ‘Javanese Pelog Tunings Reconsidered’, YIFMC, x (1979), 69–82
A. Schneider: ‘Musikwissenschaftliche Theorienbildung, außereuropäische Musik und (psycho-)akustische Forschung’, Festschrift Martin Vogel, ed. H. Schröder (Bonn–Bad Nonnef, 1988), 145–74
A. Schneider: ‘Psychological Theory and Comparative Musicology’, Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music, eds. B. Nettl and P.V. Bohlman (Chicago, 1991), 293–317
T. Mitchell: ‘World Music and the Popular Music Industry: an Australian View’, EthM, xxxvii (1993), 309–38
J. Blacking: Music, Culture and Experience: Selected Papers of John Blacking (Chicago, 1995)
S. Klotz, ed.: Vom tönenden Wirbel menschlichen Tuns: Erich M. von Hornbostel als Gestaltpsychologe, Archivar und Musikwissenschaftler (Berlin, 1998)
I. Zannos, ed.: Music and Signs: Semiotic and Cognitive Studies in Music (Bratislava, 1999)
R.M. Radano and P.V. Bohlman, eds.: Music and the Racial Imagination (Chicago, 2000)
E. Klusen: Volkslied: Fund und Erfindung (Cologne, 1969)
L.E.R. Picken: Folk Musical Instruments of Turkey (London, 1975)
C. Seeger: Studies in Musicology, 1935–1975 (Berkeley, 1977)
A. Seeger: Why Suyá Sing: a Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People (Cambridge, 1987)
R.H. Finnegan: The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town (Cambridge, 1989)
M.J. Kartomi: On Concepts and Classifications of Musical Instruments (Chicago, 1990)
S. Blum, P.V. Bohlman and D.M. Neuman, eds.: Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History (Urbana, IL, 1991)
K. Bergeron and P.V. Bohlman, eds.: Disciplining Music: Musicology and Its Canons (Chicago, 1992)
O. Elschek: Die Musikforschung der Gegenwart, ihre Systematik, Theorie und Entwicklung (Vienna, 1993)
W. Steinitz: Deutsche Volkslieder demokratischen Charakters aus sechs Jahrhunderten (Berlin, 1978)
M. Herndon and N. McLeod: Music as Culture (Norwood, PA, 1979, 2/1981)
L.I. al-Faruqi: ‘Music, Musicians and Muslim Law’, AsM, xvii/1 (1985), 3–36
O. Elschek: ‘Ideas, Principles, Motivations and Results in Eastern European Folk-Music Research’, Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music, eds. B. Nettl and P.V. Bohlman (Chicago, 1991), 91–109
C.J. Frisbie: ‘Women and the Society for Ethnomusicology: Roles and Contributions from Formation through Incorporation (1952/53–1961)’, Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music, eds. B. Nettl and P.V. Bohlman (Chicago, 1991), 244–65
R.B. Qureshi: ‘Whose Music? Sources and Contexts in Indic Musicology’, Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music, eds. B. Nettl and P.V. Bohlman (Chicago, 1991), 152–68
I.K.F. Wong: ‘From Reaction to Synthesis: Chinese Musicology in the Twentieth Century’, Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music, eds. B. Nettl and P.V. Bohlman (Chicago, 1991), 37–55
K.A. Appiah: In My Father's House: Africa in the Philosophies of Culture (Oxford, 1992)
B. Diamond, M.S. Cronk and F. von Rosen: Visions of Sound: Musical Instruments of First Nation Communities in Northeastern America (Chicago, 1994)
V.K. Agawu: African Rhythm: a Northern Ewe Perspective (Cambridge, 1995)
P. Nixon: Sociality, Music, Dance: Human Figurations in a Transylvanian Valley (Göteborg, 1998)
D.A. Masolo: ‘Presencing the Past and Remembering the Present: Social Features of Popular Music in Kenya’, Music and the Racial Imagination, eds. R.M. Radano and P.V. Bohlman (Chicago, 2000)
Studia instrumentorum musicae popularis (1969–)
R.P. Elbourne: ‘The Question of Definition’, YIFMC, vii (1975), 9–29
A.P. Merriam: ‘Definitions of “Comparative Musicology” and “Ethnomusicology”: an Historical-Theoretical Perspective’, EthM, xxi (1977), 189–204
K.A. Gourlay: ‘Towards a Reassessment of the Ethnomusicologist's Role in Research’, EthM, xxii (1978), 1–35
J. McCulloh, ed.: Ethnic Recordings in America: a Neglected Heritage (Washington, DC, 1982)
K.P. Etzkorn: ‘Publications and Their Influence on the Development of Ethnomusicology’, YTM, xx (1988), 43–50
D. Stockmann, ed.: Volks- und Popularmusik in Europa (Laaber, 1992)
R. Cantwell: When We Were Good: the Folk Revival (Cambridge, MA, 1996)
P.D. Goldsmith: Making People's Music: Moe Asch and Folkways Records (Washington DC, 1998)
B. Nettl: ‘The Institutionalization of Musicology: Perspectives of a North American Ethnomusicologist’, Rethinking Music, eds. N. Cook and M. Everist (Oxford, 1999), 287–310
K.K. Shelemay: ‘The Impact and Ethics of Musical Scholarship’, Rethinking Music, eds. N. Cook and M. Everist (Oxford, 1999), 531–44
W. Zhang: ‘Recent Development of Ethnomusicology in China’, EthM, xxix (1985), 264–71
G. Béhague: ‘Reflections on the Ideological History of Latin American Ethnomusicology’, Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music, eds. B. Nettl and P.V. Bohlman (Chicago, 1991), 56–68
S. Blum: ‘European Musical Terminology and the Music of Africa’, Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music, eds. B. Nettl and P.V. Bohlman (Chicago, 1991), 3–37
C.A. Waterman: ‘The Uneven Development of Africanist Ethnomusicology: Three Issues and a Critique’, Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music, eds. B. Nettl and P.V. Bohlman (Chicago, 1991), 169–86
V.K. Agawu: ‘Representing African Music’, Critical Inquiry, xviii/2 (1992), 245–66
M. Slobin: Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West (Middletown, CT, 1993)
M.A. Perlman: Unplayed Melodies: Music Theory in Postcolonial Java (diss., Wesleyan U., 1994)
S. Jones: Folk Music of China: Living Instrumental Traditions (Oxford, 1995, 2/1998 with CD)
J.L. Witzleben: ‘Whose Ethnomusicology? Western Ethnomusicology and the Study of Asian Music’, EthM, xli (1997), 220–42
P. Chen: Morning and Evening Service: the Practice of Ritual, Music and Doctrine in the Chinese Buddhist Monastic Service (diss., U. of Chicago, 1999)
V. Erlmann: Music, Modernity and the Global Imagination: South Africa and the West (New York, 1999)
R.B. Qureshi: ‘Other Musicologies: Exploring Issues and Confronting Practice in India’, Rethinking Music, ed. N. Cook and M. Everist (Oxford, 1999), 311–35
D. Wong: ‘Ethnomusicology in Thailand: the Cultural Politics of Redefinition and Reclamation’, EthM (forthcoming)
W.E.B. Du Bois: The Souls of Black Folks (New York, 1903/R)
E. Durkheim: The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (London, 1915/R)
A.R. Radcliffe- Brown: The Andaman Islanders (Cambridge, 1922)
C. Mitchell: The Kalela Dance (Manchester, 1956)
L. Jones and A. Baraka: Blues People: Black Music in White America (Westport, 1963)
O. Barfield: Saving the Appearances: a Study in Idolatry (New York, 1965)
C. Keil: Urban Blues (Chicago 1966/R)
V. Turner: Dramas, Fields and Metaphors (Ithica, 1974)
J. Blacking: The Anthropology of the Body (London, 1977)
J. Blacking: How Musical is Man (London, 1977)
K. Marx: ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels: The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. R. Tucker (New York, 1978), 594–617
D. Hebdige: Subculture: the Meaning of Style (London, 1979)
N. Elias: The Civilizing Process (New York, 1982)
B. Anderson: Imagined Communities (London, 1983)
J. Baudrillard: Simulations (Paris, 1983)
B. Anderson: Imagined Communities (London, 1983)
E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger: The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983)
B. Nettl: The Study of Ethnomusicology: Twenty-nine Issues and Concepts (Urbana, 1983)
B. Bradby and B. Torode: ‘Pity Peggy Sue’, Popular Music, iv (1984), 183–205
M. de Certeau: The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, 1984)
H.L. Gates, Jr.: ‘The Blackness of Blackness: a Critique of the Sign and the Signifying Monkey’, Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. H.L. Gates, Jr. (New York, 1984), 285–317
R. Wallis and K. Malm: Big Sounds from Small Peoples (London, 1984)
H.L. Gates, Jr.: ‘Writing Race and the Difference it Makes’, Race, Writing and Difference, ed. H. L. Gates Jr. (Chicago, 1985), 1–21
D. Harker: Fakesong: the Manufacture of British Folksong, 1750 to the Present Day (Milton Keynes, 1985)
M. Pena: The Texas-Mexican Conjunto: History of a Working Class Music (Austin, TX. 1985)
J. Baily: Amir (London, 1986) [film and booklet]
S. Hall: ‘On Postmodernism and Articulation’, Journal of Communication Inquiry, x (1986), 45–60
J. Barucha: ‘Music Cognition and Pereptial Facilitation: A Connectionist Framework’, Music Perception, v/1 (1987), 1–30
M. Herzfeld: Anthropology through the Looking Glass: Critical Ethnography on the Margins of Europe (Cambridge, 1987)
J. Kippen: ‘An Ethnomusicological Approach to the Analysis of Music Cognition’, Music Perception, v/2, 173–96
A. Seeger: Why Suyá Sing: A Musical Anthropology of an Amazonian People (Cambridge, 1987)
J. Wolff: ‘Foreword: the Ideology of Autonomous Art’, Music and Society: the Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception, eds. R. Leppert and S. McClarey (Cambridge 1987), 1–12
J. Baily: Music of Afghanistan: Professional Musicians in the City of Herat (Cambridge, 1988)
V. Doubleday: Three Women of Herat (London, 1988)
H. Kingsbury: Music, Talent and Performance: a Conservatory Cultural System (Philadelphia, 1988)
E. Ardener: ‘Belief and the Problem of Women’, The Voice of Prophecy, ed. Malcolm Chapman (Oxford, 1989), 72–85
J. Collins and P. Richards: ‘Popular Music in West Africa’, World Music, Politics and Social Change, ed. S. Frith (Manchester, 1989)
R. Keeling, ed.: Women in North American Indian Music: Six Essays (Urbana, IL, 1989)
P. Tagg: ‘Open Letter: “Black Music”, “Afro-American Music” and “European Music”’, Popular Music, viii (1989), 285–98
J. Baily: ‘Music Performance, Motor Structure, and Cognitive Models’, European Seminar in Ethnomusicology Publications (1990), 33–43 [Blacking Lecture]
G. Baumann: ‘The Reinvention of Bhangra: Social Change and Aesthetic Shifts in Punjabi Music in Britain’, World of Music, xxxii/2 (1990), 81–95
S.A. Floyd, Jr., ed.: Black Music in the Harlem Renaissance: A Collection of Essays (New York, 1990)
F. Jameson: ‘Modernism and imperialism’, Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, eds. T. Eagleton, F. Jameson and E. Said (Minneapolis, 1990), 43–66
R. Middleton: Studying Popular Music (Milton Keynes, 1990)
C.W. Waterman: Juju: a Social History and Ethnography of an African Popular Music (Chicago, 1990)
S. Arom: African Polyphony and Polyrhythm: Musical Structure and Methodology (Cambridge, 1991)
P.V. Bohlman: ‘Of Yekkes and Chamber Music in Israel: Ethnomusicological Meaning in Western Music History’, Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History, eds. S. Blum, P. Bohlman and D. Neuman (Urbana, 1991), 254–67
V. Erlmann: African Stars: Studies in Black South African Performance (Chicago, 1991)
F. Fanon: Black Skin, White Masks, trans. C. Lam Marlcmann (New York, 1991)
T. Mitchell: Colonizing Egypt (Berkeley 1991)
B. Nettl and P.V. Bohlman, eds.: Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology (Chicago, 1991)
J. Racy: ‘Historical Worldviews of Early Ethnomusicologists: An East-West Encounter’, Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History, eds. S. Blum, P. Bohlman and D. Neuman (Urbana, 1991), 68–94
C.A. Waterman: ‘The Uneven Development of Africanist Ethnomusicology: Three Issues and a Critique’, Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology, eds. B. Nettl and P.V. Bohlman (Chicago, 1991), 169–186
S. Blum: ‘Analysis’, Ethnomusicology: an Introduction, ed. H. Myers (London, 1992)
J. Clifford: ‘Traveling Culture’, Cultural Studies, eds. L. Grossberg, C. Nelson and P. Treichler (London, 1992), 96–116
R. Cohn and D. Dempster: ‘Hierarchical Unity, Plural Unities’, Disciplining Music, eds. K. Bergeron and P. K. Bohlman (Chicago 1992), 156–81
J. Collins: West African Pop Roots (Philadelphia, 1992)
R. Finnegan: The Hidden Musicians: Music-making in an English Town (Cambridge, 1992)
S. Reily: ‘Musica Sertaneja and Migrant Identity: the Stylistic Development of a Brazilian Genre’, Popular Music, xi/3 (1992), 337–58
M. Stokes: The Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey (Oxford, 1992)
Sumarsan: Gamelan: Cultural Interaction and Musical Development in Central Java (Chicago, 1992)
C. Abbate: ‘Opera, or the Envoicing of Women’, Music and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. R. Solie (Berkeley, 1993), 225–258
P.V. Bohlman: ‘Music, Modernity and the Foreign in the New Germany’, Modernism/Modernity, i (1993), 121–40
S. Blum, P.V. Bohlman and D. Neuman, eds.: Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History (Urbana, 1993)
C. Capwell: ‘The Interpretation of History and the Foundation of Authority in the Visnupur Gharana of Bengal’, Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History, eds. S. Blum, P.V. Bohlman and D. Neuman (Indiana, 1993), 95–102
P. Gilroy: The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London, 1993)
J. Guilbault: Zouk: World Music in the West Indies (Chicago, 1993)
P. Manuel: Cassette Culture: Popular Music and Technology in North India (Chicago, 1993)
M. Morris: ‘Reading Opera as an Opera Queen’, Music and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship, ed. R. Solie (Berkeley, 1993), 184–200
S. Slawek: ‘Ravi Shankar as Mediator between Tradition and Modenity’, Ethnomusicology and Modern Music History, eds. S. Blum, P.V. Bohlman and D. Neuman (Indiana, 1993), 161–70
M. Slobin: Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West (Hanover, NH, 1993)
G. Tomlinson: Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago, 1993)
T. Turino: Moving Away from Silence: Music of the Peruvian Altiplano and the Experience of Urban Migration (Chicago, 1993)
R. Walser: Running with the Devil: Power, Gender and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Hanover, NH, 1993)
H. Bhabha: The Location of Culture (London, 1994)
P. Berliner: Thinking in Jazz: the Infinite Art of Improvization (Chicago, 1994)
D. Coplan: In the Tme of Cannibals: the Word Music of South Africa’s Basotho Migrants (Chicago, 1994)
M. Chapman: ‘Thoughts on Celtic Music’, Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place, ed. M. Stokes (Oxford, 1994/R), 29–44
M. Dibango with Danielle Rouard: Three Kilos of Coffee: An Autobiography (Chicago, 1994)
C. Keil and S. Feld: Music Grooves, (Chicago, 1994) [incl. S. Feld: ‘Communication, Music, and Speech about Music’, 77–95; C. Keil: ‘Participatory Discrepancies and the Power of Music’, 96–108; C. Keil and S. Feld: ‘Grooving on Participation’, 151–80;S. Feld: ‘Notes on “World Beat”’, 238–46; S. Feld: ‘From Schizmophonia to Schismogenesis: On the Discourses and Practices of World Music and World Beat’, 357–8
G. Lipsitz: Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Postmodernism and the Poetics of Place (London, 1994)
B. Lortat-Jacob: Musiques en Fête: Maroc, Sardaigne, Roumanie (Nanterre, 1994)
Z. Mach: ‘National Anthems: The Case of Chopin as a National Composer’, Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place, ed. M.Stokes (Oxford, 1994/R), 61–70
P. Parkes: ‘Personal and Collective Identity in Kalasha Song Performance: The Significance of Music-making in a Minority Enclave’, ibid., 157–88
T. Rice: May It Fill Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian Music (Chicago, 1994)
T. Rose: Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contermporary America (Hanover NH, 1994)
M. Stokes: ‘Introduction: Ethnicity, Identity and Music’, Ethnicity, Identity and Music: the Musical Construction of Place, ed. M. Stokes (Oxford, 1994/R), 1–27
K. Agawu: African Rhythm: A Northern Ewe Perspective (Cambridge, 1995)
G. Born: ‘Afterword: Music Policy, Aesthetic and Social Difference’, Rock and Popular Music: Politics, Policies and Institutions, eds. T. Bennet and others (London, 1995), 266–91
G. Born: Rationalizing Culture: Boulez, IRCAM and the Institutionalization of the Musical Avant-garde (Berkeley, 1995)
B. Brinner: Knowing Music, Making Music: Javanese Gamelan and the Theory of Musical Competence and Interaction (Chicago, 1995)
B. Brinner: ‘Cultural Matrices and the Shaping of Innovation in Central Javanese Performing Arts’, EthM, xxxix/3 (1995), 433–56
H. Pacini: Deborah Bachata: a Social History of a Dominican Popular Music (Philadelphia, 1995)
G. Spivak and G. Chakravorty: ‘Acting Bits/Identity Talk’, Identity, eds. K. A. Appiah and H. L. Gates Jr. (Chicago, 1995), 147–80
M. Virolle: La chanson Rai: de l’Algerie profonde à la scene internationale (Paris, 1995)
A. Weiner: ‘Culture and our Discontents’, American Anthropologist, xcvii/1 (1995), 14–40
A. Appadurai: Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis, 1996)
P.V. Bohlman: ‘Pilgrimage, Politics and the Musical Remapping of the New Europe’, EthM, lx (1996), 375–412
D. Buchanan: ‘Wedding Musicians, Political Transition and National Consciousness in Bulgaria’, Retuning Culture: Musical Changes in Central and Eastern Europe, ed. M. Slobin (Durham, NC, 1996) 200–38
M. Castells: ‘The Net and the Self: Working Notes for a Critical Theory of the Informational Society’, Critique of Anthropology, xvi/1 (1996), 9–38
V. Erlmann: ‘Aesthetics of the Global Imagination: Reflections on World Music in the 1990s’, Public Culture, viii (1996), 467–88
J. Stock: Musical Creativity in Twentieth-century China: Abing, his Music, and its Changing Meanings (Rochester, 1996)
T. Langlois: ‘The Local and Global in North African Popular Music’, Popular Music, xv/3 (1996), 259–73
T. Mitchell: Popular Music and Local Identity (London, 1996)
I. Monson: Sayin’ Something: Jazz Music and Interaction (Chicago, 1996)
M. Perlman and C.L. Krumhans: ‘An Experimental Study of Internal Interval Standards in Javanese and Western Musicians’, Music Perception, xiv/2 (1996), 95–116
L.V. Rasmussen: ‘The Southern Winds of Change: Style and the Politics of Identity in Prewar Yugoslavia’, Retuning Culture: Musical Changes in Central and Eastern Europe, ed. in Mark Slobin (Durham, 1996), 99–116
G. Rouget: Un roi Africain et sa musicque de couer: chants et danses du palais a Porto-Novo dans la regence de Gbeifa (Paris, 1996)
C. Silverman: ‘Music and Marginality: Roma (Gypsies) of Bulgaria and Macedonia’, Retuning Culture: Musical Changes in Central and Eastern Europe, ed. M. Slobin (Durham, 1996), 231–53
M. Slobin: Retuning Culture: Musical Changes in Central and Eastern Europe (Durham, 1996)
C. West: ‘Black Strivings’, The Future of the Race, H. L. Gates Jr. and C. West (New York, 1996), 65–106
H. Zemp: ‘The/an Ethnomusicologist and the Record Business’, Yearbook for Traditional Music, xxviii (1996), 36–56
P. Austerlitz: Merengue: Dominican Music and Dominican Identity (Philadelphia, 1997)
G. Averill: A Day for the Hunter, a Day for the Prey: Popular Music and Power in Haiti (Chicago, 1997)
G.F. Barz and T.J. Cooley, eds.: Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology (New York, 1997)
P.V. Bohlman: ‘Fieldwork in the Ethnomusicological Past’, ibid., 139–62
V. Danielson: The Voice of Egypt: Umm Kulthum, Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 1997)
R. Davis: ‘Traditional Arab Music Ensembles in Tunis: Modernizing al-Turath in the Shadow of Egypt’, AsM, xxviii (1997), 73–108
J. Gross, D. McMurray and T. Swedenburg: ‘Arab noise and Ramadan Nights: Rai, Rap, and Franco -Maghrebi Identity’, Diaspora, iii/1 (1997), 3–39
J. Guilbault: ‘Interpreting World Music: a Challenge in Theory and Practice’, Popular Music, xvi/1 (1997), 31–44
G. Hartman: The Fateful Question of Culture (New York, 1997)
M. Regev: ‘Rock Aesthetics and Musics of the World’, Theory, Culture and Society, xiv/3 (1997), 125–42
J. Sugarman: Engendering Song: Singing and Subjectivity at Prespa Albanian Weddings (Chicago, 1997)
M. Kisliuk: ‘(Un)doing Fieldwork: Sharing Songs, Sharing Lives’, Shadows in the Field, eds. G.F. Barz and T.J. Cooley (New York, 1997), 36–56
J. Shepherd and P. Wicke: Music and Cultural Theory (Oxford, 1997)
S. Blum: ‘Review of Koji Agawu: African Rhythm, A Northern Ewe Perspective’, Music Theory Spectrum, xx/2 (1988), 305–10
B. Currid: The Acoustics of National Publicity: Music in German Mass Culture 1924–45 (diss., Univ. of Chicago, 1998)
K. Dawe: ‘Band Leaders in Crete: Musicians and Entrepreneurs in a Greek island Economy’, British Journal for Ethnomusicology, vii (1998), 23–44
J. Fodor: In Critical Condition: Polemical Essays on Cognitive Science and the Philosophy of Mind (MA, Cambridge, 1998)
M. Morris: Too Soon Too Late: History in Popular Culture (Indiana, 1998)
S. Pettan, ed.: Music, Politics and War: Views from Croatia (Zagreb, 1998)
P. Wade: ‘Music, Blackness, and National Identity: Three Moments in Colombian History’, Popular Music, xvii (1998), 1–19
K. Agawu: ‘The Challenge of Semiotics’, Rethinking Music, eds. N. Cook and M. Everist (Oxford, 1999), 138–60
M. Schade-Poulsen: Men and Popular Music in Algeria, (Austin, 1999)
T. Turino: ‘Signs of Imagination, Identity, and Experience: A Peircian Semiotic Theory for Music’, Ethm, xc/2, (1999)
R. Radano and P.V. Bohlman: ‘Introduction: Race and Music, their Past, their Presence’, Music and the Racial Imagination, eds. R. Radano and P.V. Bohlman (Chicago, forthcoming)