The Study of Ethnomusicology

Thirty-Three Discussions

Bruno Nettl

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780252097331
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Musik

Known affectionately as "The Red Book, " Bruno Nettl's The Study of Ethnomusicology became a classic upon its original publication in 1983. Scholars and students alike have hailed it not just for its insights but for a disarming, witty style able to engage and entertain even casual readers while providing essential grounding in the field. In this third edition, Nettl revises the text throughout, adding new chapters and discussions that take into account recent developments across the field and reflecting on how his thinking has changed or even reversed itself during his sixty-year career. An updated bibliography rounds out the volume.

A classroom perennial and a must-have for any scholar's bookshelf, the third edition of The Study of Ethnomusicology introduces Nettl's thought to a new generation.

PART I

Contemplating the Musics of the World

1

A Harmless Drudge

Reaching for the Dictionary

Definitions

I think it was in September 2013 that the field of ethnomusicology may have finally arrived in polite society; the term appeared in a New York Times crossword puzzle, with the clue “Prefix to musicology.” Sixty years earlier, when I was a brand-new college teacher and began using the word to describe what I did, it was met with expressions of wonder. But soon people were able to respond with terms such as “folk music” and “primitive music,” and “ancient music and instruments” soon entered the conversation. By 1960 the follow-up question might have often been “Oh, do you play in a gamelan?” or “Have you heard of the didgeridoo?” In the 1970s, the conversation might well include the term “ethnic” music or even the etymologically outrageous “ethnomusic”; and in the eighties and nineties, free association might lead to “diversity” and “world music” and “indigenous music” (no one said “primitive” anymore). In the twenty-first century, one hears about theoretical frameworks, about Orientalism, about ethics, diasporas, international hip-hop. The free associations that “ethnomusicology” calls up have changed, and by and large the word is no longer the puzzler it was in 1950. But if the term is broadly accepted in the academy, elsewhere we’re not yet out of the woods. Only recently, when I told my faithful physician that I taught a specialized field called ethnomusicology, he said, a bit condescendingly, “Oh, there must be as many as three or four of you.” Yet ethnomusicology has widely affected a number of academic disciplines, it has greatly influenced the world of performers and audiences, and it has had a significant impact on the world’s listening habits.

In the 130 years in which what is now called ethnomusicology may be said to have existed, beginning with pioneer works such as those of Alexander J. Ellis (1885), Theodore Baker (1882), and Carl Stumpf (1886), attitudes and orientations have changed greatly. And so also has the name, from something very briefly called Musikologie (in the 1880s; see Adler 1885), to “comparative musicology” (through about 1950, though also first used by Adler 1885), then to “ethno-musicology” (1950–ca. 1956), quickly to “ethnomusicology” (removing the hyphen, by the Society for Ethnomusicology, actually was an ideological move in the campaign for disciplinary independence), with later suggestions such as “cultural musicology” (Kerman 1985), “socio-musicology” (Feld 1984), and a perhaps doubt-inspired “(ethno)musicology” (Stobart 2008) occasionally thrown in. The changes in name accompanied changes in intellectual directions and emphases.

It is difficult to find a single simple definition to which most people in this field would subscribe, and maybe this is the reason ethnomusicologists were for many years excessively concerned with defining themselves. Alan P. Merriam, the scholar in the history of ethnomusicology most concerned with definition and the associated problems of basic orientation, cited repeatedly the need for ethnomusicologists to look carefully at what they had done, and wished to do, in order to move in concerted fashion toward their goals (Merriam 1960; 1964, 3–36; 1969b; 1975). In a major essay discussing the history of definitions, Merriam (1977a) brought together a large number of disparate statements defining the limits, the major thrust, the practicality, and the ideology of ethnomusicology; his list was later supplemented by Simon (1978), Myers (1992, 3, 7–9), and others. Interestingly, definitions are harder to come by in recent publications. Major theoretical statements such as those of Rice (2003, 2010), Stobart (2008), or Solis (2012) don’t come right out with any. In one of the most recent discussions of the field, Rice starts out with one that strikes me as both too general and too specific: “Ethnomusicology is the study of why, and how, human beings are musical” (2014a, 1), but then (9–10) lists more than a dozen others, all of which he seems to accept as useful. Perhaps this definitional uncertainty has been a good thing, contributing to the elasticity of ethnomusicology’s interests and the flexibility of its boundaries. Perhaps we need to remember the fable of the blind men and the elephant.

There are various types of definitions: Some tell what each ethnomusicologist must do or be in order to merit the title, and some synthesize what the entire group does. Others focus on what kinds of research have been done, or what should have been done instead, or what must eventually be done. Some definitions contemplate a body of data to be gathered and studied, or activities to be undertaken by typical scholars, or again the questions to which raw data may lead. Some seek to broaden limits, and to include within the scope of ethnomusicology all sorts of issues also claimed by other fields or disciplines, while others envision narrow specialization. A scholar trying to find order among all of these definitions (Merriam cites more than forty, but he stopped in 1976) would surely become what Samuel Johnson called (referring to himself, the lexicographer) a “harmless drudge.” It’s not, lest you’ve been misinterpreting the title of this chapter, the ethnomusicologists who deserve that title; it’s me.

What now, specifically, are some of these definitions, and how can one group them? In their briefest form, without elaboration or commentary:

People who seek—or sought—to define ethnomusicology by the material that it contemplates have opted for one of these alternatives: it is the study of (1) folk music and music that used to be called “primitive,” that is, tribal, indigenous, or possibly ancient music; (2) non-Western and folk music; (3) all music outside the investigator’s own culture; (4) all music that lives in oral tradition; (5) all music of a given locality, as in “the ethnomusicology of Tokyo”; (6) the music that given population groups regard as their particular property—for example, “black” music of the United States; (7) all contemporary music (Chase 1958); (8) all human music; and (9) everything produced in culture or nature that could conceivably be called music.

Those who focus on the typical activities of ethnomusicologists might choose among the following: (1) comparative study of musical systems and cultures (a basically musicological activity); (2) comprehensive analysis of the musical culture of one society (essentially anthropological); (3) the study of musics as systems, perhaps systems of signs (an activity related to linguistics or semiotics); (4) the study of music in or as culture, or perhaps music in its cultural context, with techniques derived from anthropology (often called “anthropology of music”); and (5) historical study of musics outside the realm of Western classical music (using approaches of historians, area studies specialists, and folklorists).

Those definitions that focus on ultimate goals might include the following: (1) the search for musical universals, (2) the descriptions of the pattern of sound produced by a society (as discussed in Blacking 1969), and (3) a field whose practice will benefit humanity (see Titon 1992 and Averill 2003).

This sampling provides an idea of the number and variety of definitions and approaches. Beyond this, however, the disciplinary identity of ethnomusicology is often the subject of debate. Opinions: Ethnomusicology is (1) a full-fledged discipline; (2) a branch of musicology or (3) of anthropology; (4) an interdisciplinary field, or an “interdiscipline” (Solis 2012); (5) the kind of all-encompassing discipline that “musicology” ought to be, but is still trying to become (see various publications by C. Seeger as well as Stobart 2008).

One might also define a field of research by the kinds of things about which its people argue and debate. In a sense, this series of essays is itself an attempt to define ethnomusicology in terms of some of its abiding issues, concepts, questions, and problem areas of general concern. Conciseness continues to elude us: Wikipedia tells us ethnomusicology is “an academic field encompassing various approaches to the study of music (broadly defined) that emphasize its cultural, social, material, cognitive, biological, and other dimensions or contexts instead of or in addition to its isolated sound component or any particular repertoire.” The Society for Ethnomusicology, on its website, uses what strikes me as an excessively narrow definition: “Ethnomusicology is the study of music in its cultural context. Ethnomusicologists approach music as a social process in order to understand not only what music is but why it is: what music means to its practitioners and audiences, and how those meanings are conveyed.”

Some scholars have tried to find an elegant way of putting all of the aims of the field into one sentence. Thus, Merriam (in my composite formulation): the study of music in culture, as concept, behavior, and sound. Blacking: “the study of the different musical systems of the world” (1973, 3). Timothy Rice (1987) reduced a longer and less elegant sentence into the simple “How do humans make music?” My personal definition? Ethnomusicology is the study of all of the world’s musics from a comparative perspective, and it is also the anthropological study of music. But don’t construe this narrowly. As the reader will see in the ensuing essay, I have tried to get away from this two-pronged approach, but I haven’t quite managed it.

Whence This Strange Word?

It began to be widely used shortly after 1953. Before that, the field was “comparative musicology,” and Merriam (1977a, 192–93) believed that the terminological change came from the recognition that this field is no more comparative than others, that comparison can be made only after the things to be compared are well understood in themselves, and that, in the end, comparison across cultural boundaries might be impossible because the musics and cultures of the world are unique. In The Anthropology of Music (1964, 52–53), he also pointed out that most of the general publications of ethnomusicology did not deal with methods and techniques of comparative study. This was perhaps true at the time (Wiora 1975, A. Schneider 2006, and many essays in the Garland Encyclopedia from ca. 2000 are counterexamples, but they came later), but I would argue that it is difficult to find specialized studies that do not in some way, at least by implication, make use of intercultural comparison as a way of gaining and presenting insights.

But if we debate what caused the term to be adopted so quickly, we’re also not sure just where it came from. Jaap Kunst is generally regarded as the first to have used the new term prominently in print (1950, 7). He did so, he says, because comparative musicology is not especially comparative. Most general works (for example, Myers 1992, 3) accept him as the inventor of the term.

But there are alternate possibilities. If I may insert a personal recollection, I first heard the term used by Merriam in 1952, and I have the feeling that he, and his associates in the Department of Anthropology at Northwestern University, might not have known Kunst’s book. The participation of a number of anthropologists in the American leadership of comparative musicology seems likely to have favored the use of a term paralleling the names of several anthropological subfields: ethnolinguistics, ethnobotany, and ethnohistory, with others, such as ethnoscience, coming later. Then, scholars coming from music, seeing the term used by Kunst and by anthropologists, would have quickly joined in. Among the academic disciplines around 1950, anthropology had greater prestige than did musicology, itself often misunderstood even in midcentury. Musicologists, after all, were seen as academic Simon Legrees for students by students of musical performance, and musicological study was frequently regarded as the refuge of the unsuccessful player or composer. Nationalism too may have played a part. Americans were proud of their significant contributions to non-Western and folk music research between 1930 and about 1955, in comparison to their more modest work as historians of Western music. They might have wished for a term that expressed their special role, a term that was not simply a translation of the established German term vergleichende Musikwissenschaft. The fact that one was dealing with a special kind of music, low in the hierarchy of musics with which the conventional musicologist dealt, may also have stimulated the need for a special term, a whole word, “ethnomusicology,” instead of a term merely designating a subfield of musicology that dealt, by implication, with “submusics” worthy only of being compared invidiously with the great art music of Europe.

But a further strand of the history of our word comes from the writing of the Ukrainian scholar Bohdan Lukaniuk (2010), who traces the word to the writings of his compatriot, the folklorist and collector Klement Kvitka, who coined it in 1928 (as etnomusikologia). Lukaniuk believes that the term was adopted by Mieczyslaw Kolinski (a Polish scholar who, due to the calamities of World War II, moved to Germany, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, the United States, and eventually Canada, and whom we will meet later in other contexts) and that Kolinski introduced it to Kunst. This makes good sense, but I don’t remember Kolinski or Kunst ever mentioning Kvitka. My belief is that the term was actually coined—“invented,” if you will—three times, but that it was so obviously available that almost anyone could have come up with it, at least by 1950. But there is little doubt that Kvitka was the first to use the word (or its Ukrainian equivalent).

Becoming an Ethnomusicologist

There may be many definitions of ethnomusicology, but those who call themselves ethnomusicologists or who otherwise associate themselves with this field are actually a relatively compact group. So, who are they? In 2008 the Society for Ethnomusicology conducted a survey that suggests that, professionally, their primary loyalty seems to be to the field of music, rather than to the social sciences. Some 80 percent of the teachers among them are in music departments. Admittedly, this survey applies largely to North America. Descriptions of the ethnomusicological population between around 1950 and 1980 may be found in Hood (1971) and Myers (1992). Let me try an impressionistic overview of the present, based on my experience largely, though not exclusively, in North America. Of those working in this field since about 1980, many have an initial background in academic music, as students of performance, theory, or composition. But increasingly, they have also come from backgrounds in popular music, and some are motivated by prolonged residence—perhaps as teenagers—abroad. A good many also come to this field from exposure to the wider world, perhaps as members of the Peace Corps, or as teachers of English abroad, or in missionary work, or through contact with—or membership in—minorities of many kinds. Typically, they seem to have been turned on to the field by the love of or fascination with a particular music and then become exposed to it intensively, perhaps learning to perform it, going on to the formal study of anthropology, or of a field of area studies such as South Asia, Africa, or the Middle East. Some turn to ethnomusicology after a period of living in a non-Western culture as teachers of Western music. Many students of ethnomusicology very quickly form a specialized allegiance to the music of a particular culture or area, and even a particular genre of music—Plains Indian powwow dances, Javanese gamelan, North Indian classical music, Algerian rai, popular music at home such as rap. In the United States, popular music has become a field of enormous interest. It is my impression that in western Europe and Australia, somewhat similar conditions obtain, but that in Asian and African nations students are most typically attracted by indigenous musics. Some ethnomusicologists started out as competent performers of the music they eventually wish to study academically—Patricia Sandler, originally a competent mbira player, undertook Ph.D. research in Afro-Brazilian music. Mei Han, a virtuoso performer on the zheng, received a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology after a successful performing career.

Most ethnomusicologists, in any event, undertake graduate study in this field; there aren’t many (though there once were) scholars already established in other disciplines—music history, anthropology—who, in midcareer, switched lanes and moved to ethnomusicology. Graduate curricula in ethnomusicology vary considerably. Some of the leading ones are free-standing programs in their universities, many are attached to music departments and may be considered one of a number of specializations within musicology, and a few are in anthropology, popular culture, media studies, and folklore departments or programs. But while the orientations of these programs in North America varied greatly when they first came into existence in the 1950s and 1960s, and they still differ considerably, there has gradually developed a kind of mainstream, a central core of preparation, that includes some study of performance of the music in which one plans to undertake research—and perhaps incidentally also performance of other noncanonical musics that may be available—and considerable reading and study of anthropology and of anthropologically related theory.

What happens next is not as predictable as it once as. However, near the end of one’s graduate study, one ordinarily undertakes field research in a society or culture or subculture. This dissertation fieldwork. preceded by cultural and linguistic preparation, usually involves a year or more of residence in the field venue. Analysis of collected data used to include automatically the transcription of recordings into musical notation, and this is still important, though the arsenal of techniques has been widened. Arriving at musical insights, and—more difficult—developing a procedure for the analysis of human activities and attitudes revolving around the musical sounds, should follow, and the final stage in this research process is the interpretation of data.

Most ethnomusicologists, Ph.D. in hand, seek teaching positions in higher education, though other kinds of work—librarianship, archival activities, museums, the recording industry, journalism, public service of various sorts, publishing, and professional performance—are increasingly making use of ethnomusicological expertise. Ethnomusicologists appointed to teaching positions are typically assigned a course in “musics of the world,” or at least something going far beyond the scope of their specialized research, along with something more in their particular line of expertise. Advanced courses may be devoted to geographical areas, or they may be topical (for example, world perspectives on children’s music, improvised music around the world, or the study of musical change on a global basis).

Interestingly, it seems that in middle age, many ethnomusicologists add a second world area to their fields of expertise. For myself, I started with Native American music and, at the age of thirty-nine, added the classical music of Iran. Among my colleagues, Thomas Turino, first an Andeanist, added the music of East Africa and, further, American vernacular musics, and Charles Capwell added Indonesia to South Asia. Paul Berliner, an authority on East African mbira music, became, as well, an authority on jazz. I wish I could assert that elderly ethnomusicologists become wiser and more inclined to take broad and long views of the world of music, but I’m not so sure.

What They Actually Do

A typical ethnomusicologist’s profile? Despite all diversity, a good many of my colleagues will recognize themselves here. As for the definitions cited above, there may be a lot of them, but ethnomusicologists really aren’t all that different from each other. There is often a gap between what ethnomusicologists do and what, by their own definition, they claim or hope to do.

There will be a lot more on this subject in the ensuing chapters. By way of introduction, however: What most ethnomusicologists actually do is to carry out research about non-Western, folk, popular, and vernacular music and to teach about these subjects. Popular music, once a kind of outlier, has come to occupy the largest portion of our research program. In all this, we take into account both the music itself, as sound, and how it interacts with other things that people do—that’s really what we mean by “music in culture.” However we define these terms, they are what the majority of authors in such journals as Ethnomusicology, World of Music, Ethnomusicology Forum, the Yearbook for Traditional Music, and Asian Music actually write about. The layman’s definition o...