Sample Entry - Ethnomusicology
History
Modern ethnomusicology originated in the late nineteenth century
as part of a quest for universal psychological principles that
might be verified empirically and cross-culturally through careful
analysis of data gathered from ‘non-Western’ peoples,
many of them colonial subjects. Intersecting with other discourses
such as philosophy (which became linguistics) and folklore (growing
out of romantic nationalism in Europe), ethnomusicology developed
three branches: the ‘oriental’, concerned with comparative
analysis of ‘high-culture’ European and Asian styles
(hence the common term ‘comparative musicology/vergleichende
Musikwissenschaft); the ‘primitive’, dealing
with ‘nonliterate tribal’ peoples (in Africa, Oceania,
Asia, North and South America); and the ‘folk’,
concerned with the internal ‘primitives’ of Europe
and the United States.
Finally dubbed ‘ethnomusicology’ by Jaap Kunst around
1955 (Kunst 1959), the discipline came of age through institutional
grounding in the United States as part of the post-World War
II expansion of universities and the invention of an interdisciplinary
enterprise called ‘area studies’. The North American
ethnomusicology scene became the most populous and, eventually,
the most influential. In the 1950s and 1960s, discourse there
centered on the perceived split between two wings: the anthropological,
represented by scholars like Alan Merriam and David McAllester,
who were trained in cultural anthropology, and the musicological.
The dispute centered on whether ethnomusicology studied ‘the
music itself’, or whether it was necessary always to view
the music ‘in context’ after fieldwork immersion
in a foreign culture. Mantle Hood’s ‘bimusicality’
project, in the pioneering program at the University of California
at Los Angeles (UCLA), privileged experiential initiation into
unfamiliar music systems through performance.
By the1970s, this crack had been papered over as scholars moved
toward integrating the two approaches. Around this time, it
became possible for ‘popular music’ to be considered
a fit object of study, for the following reasons (amongst others):
(a) classic ethnography of isolated groups became politically
difficult, owing to postcolonialism and the global position
of the United States; (b) the rise of new, heavily urbanized
nation-states meant that there were ever fewer ‘untouched’
peoples to study; (c) globalization of technologies allowed
for the dramatic growth of internal and world markets for mass-mediated
musics; and (d) scholars began to legitimize studying ‘one’s
own’ culture, not just those of ‘others’.
As an example of (d), Mark Slobin undertook fieldwork on isolated
folk musics in Afghanistan in the late 1960s but, by the early
1970s, noticed that ignoring ‘radio music’ skewed
the understanding of local styles (Slobin 1976). By the mid-1970s,
Slobin was studying music of his own ‘heritage’
as part of an interest in issues of ethnicity and identity in
the United States (Slobin 1982, 1989).
New source materials filtered into research approaches. The
work of pioneering folklore-based scholars (for example, Archie
Green) demonstrated that early commercial sources – sheet
music and, particularly, sound recording – rather than
being the detritus of cultural destruction, often represented
the benchmark and reservoir of the very local traditions that
ethnomusicologists had been seeking all along (Green 1972).
Spottswood’s pioneering discography, Ethnic Music
on Records (1990), made more precise research possible.
Historical studies by ethnomusicologists on North American sub-cultural
musics began to appear (Slobin 1982; Glasser 1995), as the dictum
that ‘the past is a foreign country’ started to
make perfect methodological sense for ethnomusicology, a discipline
based on the study of alterity.
In Europe before 1989, East European ethnomusicologists and
folklorists engaged in the detailed study of ‘folk’
traditions as part of state-subsidized nationalism under socialist
rule, and they have continued in this line of inquiry, generally
eschewing the study of popular musics. West European ethnomusicologists
have been slow to recognize the ‘ethnic’ and ‘popular’
music in their midsts but, by the late 1990s, it has been generally
recognized that styles from former colonies, or those from groups
of new immigrants, might form a major area of research, particularly
with official recognition in many European Union states that
their societies are ‘multicultural’. Initially,
research began in Sweden, demonstrating the crossover of forms
among the various components of the population; Hemetek has
edited a volume with a broad view of musical ‘diversity’
from an Austrian base (1996).
Approaches
In addressing the long and complex interaction of ethnomusicology
and popular music studies, the word ‘popular’
needs careful consideration in approaches to the methodologies
and results of research. One perspective that might facilitate
an understanding of ethnomusicological inquiry would distinguish
the study of the ‘popular’ understood as the creation
and reception of the most broadly accepted musical forms from
the study of the ‘popular’ viewed as a technologically
produced and managed commodity, although the two overlap in
many respects.
Ethnomusicology
and the Broadly Popular
For most of modernity (the mid-eighteenth century on), there
has been a cultural practise of plundering the ‘popular’,
as understood by the intelligentsia and the upper classes
of Euro-American societies. This has meant that the educated
and the affluent could spend part of their time collecting
bits of culture deemed ancient, typical or customary from
the lower classes. The term ‘popular’ was one
of the labels applied to such materials, and in some European
languages the word retained this meaning, as, for example,
in the title of the Musée des arts et traditions populaires
in Paris.
The gradual widespread adoption in English of the German-derived
terms based on ‘folk’ supplanted this notion of
‘popular’, but ethnomusicologists have continued
to study ‘what’s popular’ – meaning
not only what’s currently fashionable, or produced by
the recording industry cartel, but also what people most commonly
or passionately choose as a basis for dancing, listening,
identifying with and remembering. This analytical attitude
can be subdivided into headings: What is broadly popular among
given genders, social formations, locations and so on.
Such an approach sidesteps thorny issues raised by the more
materialist approach to the popular detailed below; for example,
Keil and Keil (1992) have studied ‘polka happiness’
as a popular musical phenomenon among Polish Americans in
a way that includes, but extends beyond, issues of commodification.
This perspective holds for numerous studies of popular micromusical
systems based on heritage and affinity. It also informs studies
of musical forms that move freely between cities and rural
areas in many recently urbanized parts of the world (for example,
Turino 1993 on Peru), where issues of popular taste spill
beyond questions of ‘mediaization’. Even in media-based
studies, if they are about local, rather than transnational
flow (see Manuel 1993 on India), intense popularity becomes
the focus of attention. It is in such ethnographically based
work that ethnomusicology remains truest to its roots as the
study of small-scale populations and an interest in the older
notion of ‘the popular’.
Ethnomusicology
and the Technologically Popular
Noted above was ethnomusicology’s historical shift from
studying local musics to researching transnationally produced
musics, moving from fieldwork on person-to-person transmission
to research on the mediated forms of performing and perceiving,
now understood as ‘production’ and ‘consumption’.
This meant that the ‘cutting-edge’ works of ethnomusicology
in the 1980s focused on musics that were popular both locally
and technologically, as studies based on both the ethnography
and the history of popular forms began to emerge, beginning
in Africa (Waterman 1990; Erlmann 1991) and the Caribbean
(Austerlitz 1997; Guilbault 1993) and broadening through the
1990s to include many other world areas, such as the United
States (Walser 1993), Eastern Europe, once the heartland of
‘folk’ studies (see Slobin’s 1996 anthology),
and more and more regions of Africa and Asia (Danielson 1997
on Egypt; Jones 1992 on China). Even a broad survey stressing
tradition, Yampolsky’s massive CD anthology of Indonesia
(1991), found it necessary to include a representation of
‘classic’ popular musics.
There are (at least) two main reasons for this shift: (a)
the simple fact that it is impossible to find a world music
in which mediated popular music forms do not play a significant
role in local commerce and consciousness; and (b) the advent
of the megafield called ‘cultural studies’. Ethnomusicology
has found itself surrounded by a huge interdisciplinary literature
and methodology that privilege the popular, principally in
terms of a Marxist-derived analysis. Cultural studies, beginning
in Britain in the 1960s, has channelled off into multiple
streams of inquiry that have a materialist bent and a textual
frame of analytical reference, approaches that come naturally
to ethnomusicology’s concerns. Enhanced by the more
traditional ethnographic methods, ethnomusicology has seriously
amplified its interdisciplinary voice even as it has tried
to avoid the pitfalls and excesses of trendsetting approaches.
Institutionally, overlap of membership in organizations like
IASPM and the broadening of teaching responsibilities among
academics ethnomusicologists to include popular music studies
have accelerated the pace of ‘popularization’
of the discipline.
Bibliography
Austerlitz, Paul. 1997. Merengue: Dominican Music and
Dominican Identity. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Danielson, Virginia. 1997. The Voice of Egypt: Umm Kulthum,
Arabic Song, and Egyptian Society in the Twentieth Century.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Erlmann, Veit. 1991. African Stars: Studies of Black South
African Performance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Glasser, Ruth. 1995. My Music Is My Flag: Puerto Rican
Musicians and Their New York Communities, 1917-1940.
Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Green, Archie. 1972. Only a Miner. Urbana, IL: University
of Illinois Press.
Guilbault, Joyce. 1993. Zouk: World Music in the West
Indies. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hemetek, Ursula, ed. 1996. Echo der Vielfalt/Echoes of
Diversity. Wien: Böhlau.
Jones, Andrew F. 1992. Like a Knife: Ideology and Genre
in Contemporary Chinese Popular Music. Ithaca, NY: East
Asia Program, Cornell University.
Keil, Charles and Keil, Angeliki. 1992. Polka Happiness.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Kunst, Jaap. 1959. Ethnomusicology: A Study of Its Nature,
Its Problems, Methods and Representative Personalities to
Which is Added a Bibliography. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff
Manuel, Peter. 1993. Cassette Culture: Popular Music and
Technology in North India. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Slobin, Mark. 1976. Music in the Culture of Northern Afghanistan.
Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.
Slobin, Mark. 1982. Tenement Songs: The Popular Music
of the Jewish Immigrants. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois
Press.
Slobin, Mark. 1989. Chosen Voices: The Story of the American
Cantorate. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Slobin, Mark, ed. 1996. Returning Culture: Musical Changes
in Central and Eastern Europe. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press.
Spottswood, Richard K. 1990. Ethnic Music on Records:
A Discography of Ethnic Recordings Produced in the United
States, 1893-1942. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois
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Turino, Thomas. 1993. Moving Away From Silence: Music
of the Peruvian Altiplano and the Experience of Urban Migration.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Walser, Robert. 1993. Running With the Devil: Power, Gender
and Madness in Heavy Metal Music. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan
University Press/University Press of New England.
Waterman, Christopher. 1990. Jújù: A Social
History and Ethnography of an African Popular Music.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Yampolsky, Philip. 1991. Music of Indonesia, Vol. 2: Indonesian
Popular Music. Washington, DC: Smithsonian/Folkways Records
(Smithsonian/Folkways SF- 40056).
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