I. Origin

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I.

ORIGIN

In nineteenth-century Europe the rise of nationalism and its concern with the
music of a national self-overshadowed the Enlightenment and colonialist fascination
with music of the Other. However, those preoccupations were relaunched in the late
nineteenth century when the Austrian scholar Guido Adler (1855–1941) published
his 1885 outline of a new field of study called Musikwissenschaft , musical science
or, in English, musicology. Arguing that its purpose was the “discovery of the true
and advancement of the beautiful,” he divided musicology into two main branches,
historical and systematic. The first was concerned primarily with the history of
European art music. The systematic branch, on the other hand, was divided into a
plethora of subfields, including music theory, pedagogy, aesthetics, and comparative
musicology. In this conception, comparative musicology and historical musicology
were subfields of a broadly conceived musicology. Since that time the term
“musicology” has come to refer, principally though not exclusively, to the historical
study of European art music. Ethnomusicology is no longer one of its subfields.

Today comparative musicologists are principally remembered for comparing


data provided in accounts of local musical practices by missionaries, diplomats, and
travelers. Their work was aided immensely by—and indeed the field of
ethnomusicology depends on—the invention of the phonograph in 1877. (The
earliest recordings of “world music” are usually attributed to Walter Fewkes [1850–
1930], an American anthropologist who, in 1890, made the first recordings of Native
American music.) Their comparisons focused on five principal issues: (1) the origins
of music;

(2) musical evolution;

(3) understanding the distribution of musical styles and artifacts

around the world;

(4) musical style analysis and comparison; and

(5) the classification and measurement of musical phenomena such as pitch, scales,
and musical instruments. They assumed, for example, that what they called
“primitive music” was a survival of humankind’s earliest music, and so it could be
used to answer the question of music’s origins. Studies of musical evolution, whose
authors were influenced by the social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer (1820–1903),
tried to demonstrate how musical elements such as scales and modes, rhythms,
harmonies, forms, and musical instruments evolved from simple to complex, from a
few tones in a scale to many, and from a single line of melody to multipart
polyphony. They imagined a universal music history culminating in European art
music. Ethnomusicologists routinely use these sorts of schemes to talk about music.
Comparative musicologists elaborated them to a great extent, and one that continues
to be used today is a system for the classification of musical instruments created by
Curt Sachs (1881–1959) and Erich von Hornbostel (1877–1935) in Berlin, and
published in 1914. Known as the Sachs-Hornbostel system, it divides musical
instruments into four groups according to the primary vibrating material: air
(aerophones), string (chordophones), skin (membranophones), and solids
(idiophones). Each major class was further subdivided in ways appropriate to it:
aerophones by the method of “excitation” (flutes, reeds, and horns); chordophones
by the geometry of the neck and body (lutes, harps, zithers, and lyres);
membranophones by the shape of the resonator (barrel, cylinder, kettle, vase,
hourglass); and idiophones by the material (wood, stone, metal) by the material
(wood, stone, metal). Originally designed so that instruments in museum collections
could be cataloged like books, the system remains in use among ethnomusicologists,
who prefer to call an instrument from another culture either by its actual name, say
bouzoukee, or by its Sachs-Hornbostel classificatory description, “long-necked,
fretted, pear-shaped, plucked lute,” rather than using an ethnocentric culture-to-
culture comparison like “Greek guitar.” The impulse to study music beyond one’s
own borders was not limited during this period to Europeans. In Japan Kishibe
Shigeo (1912–2005) and his colleagues established a Society (and journal) for
Research in Asiatic Music in 1936, and in 1945 scholars in Chile founded Revista
musical chilena, dedicated to the study of Chilean and Latin American music.

Early ethnomusicology

Research in comparative musicology faded for obvious reasons during World War
II. When Jaap Kunst suggested a new name for the enterprise after the war, it caught
on immediately, especially in the United States. The combination of anthropological
and musicological study in the new disciplinary name captured the imagination of a
group of four American anthropologists and musicologists: Charles Seeger (1886–
1979), Willard Rhodes (1901–92), David McAllester (1916–2006), and Alan
Merriam. In 1953 they started an Ethno-musicology Newsletter, established the
Society for Ethno-Musicology in 1954, held their first annual meeting in 1956, and
transformed the newsletter into the journal Ethnomusicology in 1958. By the early
1960s the first graduate programs in this newly named field had sprouted in
anthropology at Indiana University and in music at the University of California, Los
Angeles and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since then, this
discipline with the awkward name has continued to grow in institutional and
intellectual clout to the present day. The name changes from comparative
musicology to ethnomusicology initiated a gradual decline in the salience of the
musicological problems that characterized the older field.

Instead, the new discipline moved in the direction of studies of “music as


culture.” Such studies view music as a human activity linked to other aspects of
culture such as religion, art, language, politics, dance, crafts, and social institutions.
The new discipline, with its roots in musicology and anthropology, suggested new
questions that the older discipline had not asked. When the word “ethnomusicology”
burst on the scene in the 1950s, it completely erased the name “comparative
musicology,” and along with it that discipline’s grand theories of musical origins,
universal music history, musical evolution, and culture-circle distribution of musical
traits. Although some early ethnomusicologists argued against comparison in favor
of more detailed ethnographic work in particular cultures, comparative musical
analysis and the scientific impulse that drove it did not immediately subside. Bruno
Nettl, in his 1954 North American Indian Musical Styles, analyzed structural
similarities and differences between the music of neighboring tribes in order to
create a classification of regional musical styles.

In 1971 Mantle Hood (1918–2005), founder of the ethnomusicology program


at UCLA, published a comparative tool he called “hardness scales” so that
ethnomusicologists could compare maximum and minimum ranges of such musical
features as loudness, pitch, timbre, and density (pulse per minute). The continued
interest in musicological analysis was also reflected in an efflorescence of articles in
the new journal Ethnomusicology on how to transcribe musical sound into musical
notation, and transcribing the same piece get the same results) and validity (can
European notation accurately reflect the melodic and rhythmic complexities of the
music created in aural traditions). A “symposium,” published in 1964 and edited by
Nicholas England (1922–2003), featured four prominent ethnomusicologists’
transcriptions of a song performed by a Bushman from southern Africa to the
accompaniment of a musical bow. The striking differences among them were signs
of the unreliability of the exercise. These concerns about the reliability and validity
of musical notation are no longer as important as they were when comparison of
musical structures recorded in musical notation was a core problem of early
ethnomusicology. The problems of transcription were pushed into the background as
ethnomusicologists renounced comparative musicological studies in favor of more
in-depth, fieldwork-based idiographic studies of “musical cultures.”

Although musicological analysis was never completely abandoned, the


anthropological study of musical cultures was sparked to a large degree when, in
1964, Alan Merriam published The Anthropology of Music. Merriam argued that the
study of the “music sound itself” was but one “analytical level” in the
ethnomusicological study of “music in culture.” In other words, the “ethno” part of
ethnomusicology required two other analytical levels, “conceptualization about
music [and] behavior in relation to music,” levels that had not been worked out at
that time in the same detail as musicological analysis and comparison had been.
Apart from this three-part model of ethnomusicological analysis, Merriam’s most
important contribution was a list of twelve “areas of inquiry” and “problems” that
would characterize an ethnomusicology true to its double nature as both a form of
anthropology and a form of musicology, both in pursuit of knowledge about humans
as makers of music.

The twelve areas of inquiry were:

1. shared cultural concepts about music;

2. the relationship between aural and other modes of perception

(synesthesia);

3. physical and verbal behavior in relation to music;

4. musicians as a social group;

5. the teaching and learning of music;

6. the process of composition;

7. the study of song texts;

8. the uses and functions of music;


9. music as symbolic behavior (the meaning of music);

10. aesthetics and the interrelationship of the arts;

11. music and culture history;

12. music and cultural dynamics.

Merriam carefully reviewed the literature to provide overviews of each of these


topics. He hoped to stimulate ethnomusicologists to adopt new approaches to
research on music, and indeed he did.

“Mature” ethnomusicology

In the wake of Merriam’s, The Anthropology of Music and influential


writings by John Blacking, the African ethnomusicologist J. H. Kwabena Nketia (b.
1921), and others, scholars in the new field of ethnomusicology slowly but surely
began to create a rapprochement between the poles inherent in the discipline’s name
by writing more sophisticated and detailed studies of particular music cultures’
musical sounds, conceptions, and behaviors. This newly mature ethnomusicology
understood musical performance as fundamentally social. It had succeeded in
erasing the distinction in early ethnomusicology between musicological and
anthropological approaches to the study of music. Since then, the social-scientific
and philosophical underpinnings of ethnomusicology have been strengthened, and
the move away from the study of the “music sound itself” as an autonomous
aesthetic domain has been decisive.

Today rap and reggae, norteño and Serbian turbo folk, Puerto Rican salsa and
Jamaican dub, jazz improvisation and country music, the Eurovision song contest
and piped-in music at the Mall of America, and new popular-music fusions in the
world-music marketing category are as central to ethnomusicological inquiry as
Japanese gagaku, Bulgarian folk music, Javanese gamelan, Hindustani classical
music, and Native American drumming, dancing, and singing. By embracing
modern musical practices, ethnomusicologists are better able to provide convincing
answers to the question of why and how humans are musical.

Although ethnomusicology got its start when scholars from past and present
imperial powers began to study music in all its variety the world over, another group
of researchers entered the field intent on studying their own music as one step on the
path to better self-understanding. Some of the earliest moves in this direction flowed
from the civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s and the resulting identity
politics that sought a place at the scholarly table for minorities and women. In the
United States, African Americans, Chicana/os, women, and Asian Americans began
to ask new questions about their own music and its history and meaning from the
perspectives of critical theory and cultural studies. Why, for example, is our music,
the music of women, say, left out of the standard histories of music or the
ethnographies of particular music cultures? Can we find the African roots of African
American music in genres as diverse as the blues, gospel, soul, jazz, and rap? These
scholars launched critiques of the ethnomusicological study of the Other, especially
the way they contribute to structures of power and hegemony in the academy. They
demanded that new methods and perspectives from inside their own cultures become
part of the conversation.

Today, in addition to these once dominant musicological paradigms for the


study of local traditional music, scholars in many parts of the world, some of them
trained in American, British, and Australian universities, are turning to questions
about the meaning and function of music in their own societies, to the notion of
“music cultures.” They are embracing multiculturalism, respect for other cultures,
and the study of the music of ethnic minorities. Since about 2000, however, an
interest in comparison may be reasserting itself. The evidence for this can be seen in
books with titles such as Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing, Music as
Social Life, and Music and Technoculture. Overview works like these, usually on
particular themes, invite comparisons rooted in social or scientific theory rather than
in comparative methods. In fact, comparative or generalizing studies are necessary if
ethnomusicologists are to keep in balance their fascination with the way music
works in particular cultures and their goal of contributing to a general understanding
of human musicality.

Today, interest in world music and in the discipline of ethnomusicology is as


high as it has ever been. The field has achieved a solid and respected, if still
somewhat marginal, place in English-speaking universities, and growing recognition
in universities around the world. At the same time, it continues to question critically
its purpose and potential to contribute to knowledge about, and the betterment of,
humankind, and to open itself to new ways of studying and thinking about music.
II. THEORIES AND SCIENTIFIC METHODS

There exists some number of theories and method in the field of


ethnomusicology that can help in any research work carried under ethnomusicology.
Some of them are:

- Cultural Evolutionism
This theory held that all cultures are on an evolving track, some having reached a
more developed state than others at any one time.
The assumptions in cultural evolution are as follows:
1- cultures evolve from simple to complex and as they do so, they move from
primitive to civilized
2- music evolves from simple to complex within societies as they progress.
3- Societies are built of fairly coherent and functional systems that interrelate to
one another
4- Certain musical practices may occur in multiple societies because of shared
human psychological structures as those groups of people evolve through a
particular level.
5- The theory that all cultures are evolving to ever-higher states and some
cultures have reached a more developed state than others support the idea of
polygenesis
Critique or disadvantages
1- Their theories were not grounded in facts but rather in conjecture
2- All other cultures according to this orientation were judged to be less
culturally evolved than western cultures.
Advantages
1- It took into account changes over times in broad regions of the world.
2- It attempted to compare vast expanses of culture one to another.

Diffusionism
It assumes that:
1- Cultural traits diffuse or move from one place to another over times. Using
diffusionism it is possible to proceed to reconstruct the route by which the
stick moved from one location to another
2- There is a single point of invention or monogenesis. Common elements are
assumed to have moved from one point to another and research constitutes
creating the path of movement from the place of origin to another location.
3- Societies are built of many traits that exhibit various origins and histories.
Therefore, diffusionism can be seen as the theory that cultural traits move over time
and space out from the point of origin, supporting the idea of monogenesis.

Advantages:
1- It attempts to explain culture change over time and space by comparing traits
it sought to account for variations as well as stability of traits whether they
occurred in music or folktales or religion.
2- It attempted to identify similarities across cultures, even those that were
widely separated. Orientation looked for connections from one group of
people to another.
Disadvantages:
1- Although it presents an order of events and relative times sense, it does not
indicate a precise or chronological sense of time? It is more of placing of one
respect before or after another.
2- It is difficult to predict how a trait will be accepted by a group of people.

Structuralism and functionalism/Les approches structurelles / fonctionnelle

C’est la combinaison du structuralisme et du fonctionnalisme, deux théories bien


connues en science sociale. Cette approche étudie les phénomènes sociaux en termes
de conséquences pour la société, de façon large. Elle se focalise sur les systèmes
variés (politique, parenté) qui sont en interrelation les uns avec les autres. Fondée sur
l’idée de la solidarité sociale d’Emile Durkheim, la fonction est une partie
importante de cette orientation.
Les approches linguistiques

La relation étroite entre le langage et la musique est de notoriété publique. Ici,


il y a plusieurs approches parmi lesquelles la sémiotique qui est la science des
signes. Le postulat dans cette approche veut que l’homme soit un symbole ; son
langage est la somme de lui-même et il se développe à partir d’autres signes.
Autrement dit, l’homme cache en lui des informations qui s’expriment par des
gestes, des mouvements et/ou des signes que l’on peut découvrir par l’observation
ou l’analyse.

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