An Introduction to Applied Ethnomusicology

Our Introduction to this volume consists of three sections. Although applied ethnomusicology is practiced now in many regions of the world, it has developed differently in various times and places, just as ethnomusicology itself has. We begin in Section 1 (by Titon) with a focused statement on applied ethnomusicology as it has developed from a single representative area (the US), and then broaden out in Section 2 (by Pettan) to a global perspective, where a greater plurality of voices and viewpoints may be observed, so that we may end with the understanding that applied ethnomusicology is no single field but is instead an ever emergent movement, responding differently at various times and places, by means of music-centered interventions, to different cultures, histories, needs, and conditions. Indeed, this volume as a whole offers just such a plurality of voices and viewpoints. In addition to discussing histories and developments in national and global perspectives, particularly in the contexts of the US-based Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) as well as the UNESCO-affiliated International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM), the co-editors also each offer personal perspectives, based in many years of involvement. Section 3, jointly written by Titon and Pettan, offers an introduction to the chapters that follow.

We wish to thank many people who have made this work possible. Suzanne Ryan, music editor at Oxford University Press, supported this project from the outset and helped us to understand how to shape the volume in conformity with Handbook expectations. The anonymous external reviewers read perceptively and made many useful comments and suggestions. For guidance, vision, and support along the path to applied ethnomusicology, Titon would like to thank colleagues and teachers Alan Kagan, Mulford Sibley, Charlotte Heth, David McAllester, Dennis Tedlock, Burt Feintuch, Erma Franklin, Loyal Jones, Elwood Cornett, Kenneth Irby, Maryanne Wolf, Sandy Ives, Archie Green, Bess Lomax Hawes, and Daniel Sheehy.

Pettan would like to single out Samuel Araújo, Anthony Seeger, and Kjell Skyllstad, three important visionaries in applied ethnomusicology (among many more), who continue to inspire his own thinking and doing, and the contributors to this volume, with whom it was a true honor and pleasure to join forces in creating this essentially important Handbook.

I like to think of ethnomusicology as the study of people making music (Titon, 1989  1992b: xxi–xxii). People make sounds they call music, and they also make ideas about music. Those ideas form the cultural domain called music. They include what music is and is not; what it does and cannot do; how it is acquired and how it should be transmitted; what value it has; what it should (and should not) be used for; what it has been in the past and what it will be in the future; whether it should be encouraged and supported, or discouraged and repressed; and so forth. Just as music differs among individuals and social groups throughout the world, so do people’s ideas about it differ, and this has been so throughout history.

Applied ethnomusicology puts ethnomusicological scholarship, knowledge, and understanding to practical use. That is a very broad definition. More specifically, as it has developed in North America and elsewhere, applied ethnomusicology is best regarded a music-centered intervention in a particular community, whose purpose is to benefit that community—for example, a social improvement, a musical benefit, a cultural good, an economic advantage, or a combination of these and other benefits. It is music-centered, but above all the intervention is people-centered, for the understanding that drives it toward reciprocity is based in the collaborative partnerships that arise from ethnomusicological fieldwork. Applied ethnomusicology is guided by ethical principles of social responsibility, human rights, and cultural and musical equity. Although some ethnomusicologists regard applied ethnomusicology as a career alternative to academic work—and indeed, it can be—it’s not always helpful to make that distinction, because ethnomusicologists who do applied work are employed both inside academic institutions, such as universities and museums, and outside them in government agencies, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and client organizations directly. In other words, the place of employment does not determine whether the ethnomusicology has any application outside the world of scholarship. What matters is the work itself: how, where, and why the intervention occurs, and the communities to whom we feel responsible (Titon, 2003; Dirksen, 2012).

Putting ethnomusicological scholarship, knowledge, and understanding to practical use and terming it applied implies the usual distinction made in the sciences between pure research, or the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake (as it is often called), and applied research, or knowledge put to practical use. It is possible to minimize this distinction, claiming that the moment a researcher circulates knowledge within a scholarly community it is being put to beneficial use. Classroom teaching is of course another kind of use. Besides, the phrase knowledge for its own sake appears oxymoronic, for in what sense can knowledge possibly be for its own sake if knowledge cannot logically be an agent or a self? If all ethnomusicological knowledge is put to use in one way or another, then the term applied ethnomusicology is redundant. All of this may be so, but for strategic reasons the editors of this volume find the term useful, in order to highlight a certain kind of activity and distinguish an ethnomusicology based in social responsibility where knowledge is intended for beneficial use in communities outside the academic world from an ethnomusicology which is meant to increase and improve the storehouse of knowledge about music and circulate it among scholars. In the absence of this distinction, as I will argue later (see below, “Applied Ethnomusicology in the United States: A Brief History”), applied ethnomusicology has been marginalized or ignored in the definitions and histories of our field that circulate among ethnomusicologists. Indeed, examination of ethnomusicology curricula reveals very few, if any, courses devoted to applied work at the doctoral level. The Ph.D. is a research degree, after all, and the chief criterion for career advancement in the university remains research that enjoys a high intellectual reputation among scholars. Fortunately, however, a sense of social responsibility motivates an increasing number of ethnomusicologists, employed inside and outside the academic world, who find ways to integrate it into their scholarly research, and to apply it in the public sphere. Readers who wish to know more about my personal involvement with, and views on, applied ethnomusicology are invited to consult Titon 2003 and various entries on applied ethnomusicology on my blog at http://sustainablemusic.blogspot.com.

This volume is not meant as a “how-to” handbook, like the Girl Scout Handbook. Rather, in keeping with the other Oxford Handbooks in this series, it offers a sampling of current scholarship related to its subject, with contributions from some leading exponents. Applied ethnomusicology is a field of practice and theory, rather than a discipline with a bounded subject and an established, universally agreed-upon methodology. A branch of the academic discipline of ethnomusicology, its scope is still expanding. While its practitioners are in broad agreement over putting ethnomusicological knowledge to use rather than simply pursuing it as an end in itself, we differ in emphasis, whether in definition, method, or purpose (Harrison 2012). Readers may look here for a variety of subjects, approaches and models.

What kinds of activities are applied ethnomusicologists involved in? Where, typically, do we intervene in the public sphere? The co-editors of this volume, one active in North America, the other in Europe, have determined to write about these activities in the areas they know best. As I am most familiar with activities in the United States, and the professional organization based there (the Society for Ethnomusicology, or SEM), what follows in my part of this Introduction highlights US-based applied ethnomusicology. I will discuss the history (and prehistory) of applied ethnomusicology, and its reception, in the United States since the late 1800s. But before sketching that history, I describe applied ethnomusicology as it is practiced today. What are applied ethnomusicologists doing now? What are our goals, and how are we positioned within the larger world both within and outside the academy?

First, we are involved in promoting traditional music, dance, and other cultural expressions in order to benefit artists, traditions, and communities. Whether undertaken by ethnomusicologists acting primarily on their own behalf, or whether supported by cultural organizations, these cultural policy interventions are among the oldest types of applied ethnomusicology and remain one of the most common, particularly as directed toward minority, immigrant, and otherwise underserved populations within developed nations, and among indigenous peoples throughout the world. Sometimes, but not always, these musics are considered threatened or even endangered. Lately, sustainability has become the generally accepted policy goal, whether the musics are endangered or not (see Schippers, Chapter 4, and Titon, Chapter 5, in this volume). Cultural trauma has often been an important motivating factor, particularly when cultural renewal appears important in the face of political and economic stress (see Haskell, Chapter 13 in this volume). Examples of these interventions include the settlement schools in the southern Appalachian mountains, begun more than a century ago to promote the arts and crafts of mountain folk culture; the immigrant folk music and dance programs for children and adults in large cities such as New York and Chicago, which involved settlement schools and included festivals as well as adult recreation groups and additions to the public school curriculum; national radio broadcasts undertaken by Alan Lomax shortly before World War II to bring the songs and stories of ordinary citizens into media circulation; regional and national festivals such as the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, begun in the 1960s; policymaking and granting agencies that promote community arts, such as historical societies, arts councils, and the National Endowments; and NGOs devoted to expanding the creative economy through musical heritage and cultural tourism, sometimes with a view to recovering from ecological disasters such as hurricanes, urban blight, and mountaintop removal. In the twenty-first century, UNESCO has become the major international force in cultural policy, with its treaties encouraging the preservation of what it calls intangible cultural heritage. The United States has not signed these treaties, but outside the United States many ethnomusicologists are involved with UNESCO activities and indeed, some North American ethnomusicologists participated in the planning and ongoing review stages. Ethnomusicologists have worked as consultants, arts administrators, ethnographic fieldworkers, festival presenters, radio and television producers, podcasters and Internet site developers, educators, facilitators, mediators, writers, expert witnesses, and in various other capacities formulating and administering cultural policies whose purpose is sociocultural, economic, and musical benefit. Ethnomusicologists also have been among those theorizing cultural policy interventions, and have contributed to a growing critical literature evaluating these practices. Many of the chapters in this volume comprise a part of this ongoing scholarship concerning applied ethnomusicology.

Another area of practice is advocacy, either on behalf of particular music-makers or a music community as a whole. Rather than adopting the role of the neutral, objective, scientific observer gathering information, the applied ethnomusicologist assumes the role of a partisan, working in partnership toward goals that are mutually understood and agreed upon. Indeed, the most successful advocacy usually arises after ethnomusicologists have visited and listened to the musicians articulate their concerns and what they would like to achieve. Seldom has partnership worked when the ethnomusicologist plays the role of expert and imposes solutions to problems perceived from a distance, or fails to understand the musical community’s perspective. Advocacy includes grant-writing on behalf of individuals and communities; writing promotional and press materials; acting as an agent to arrange performances; facilitating community self-documentation initiatives; repatriation of recordings and musical artifacts from museums and archives; political lobbying for arts spaces; facilitating community arts education projects; researching the history of musical traditions for the community; acting as an intermediary between cultural insiders and outsiders; long-term planning for the sustainability of community music cultures; and in general working in partnership and on behalf of musicians and their communities. Advocacy usually arises from relationships developed over time, when an ethnomusicologist is attracted to particular musicians or music cultures, visits them for research purposes and returns, and determines to make a commitment that goes beyond mere study. Academic ethnomusicologists undertaking long-term fieldwork in a community are well-positioned for this, but while an increasing number do become advocates, some prefer to remain neutral observers.

A third area of practice involves education. Often educators themselves, applied ethnomusicologists work with other educators designing curricula, and to bring musicians into the schools to demonstrate, teach, and perform; they also facilitate visits to performance spaces where youngsters may observe and participate in music-making activities. Music education once prepared youth to participate mainly in the culture of classical music, or as US academics call it these days, Western art music. As cultural pluralism and multicultural initiatives in North American schools gained traction in the last third of the twentieth century, musical pluralism increased, introducing popular music, jazz, and the music and dance of ethnic communities to the school curricula. Ethnomusicologists have been active in making musical activities more inclusive, fostering interest in local musical artists and traditions, particularly from newly arrived cultural and ethnic groups. In this way, music is viewed as a way to increase intercultural understanding.

Other areas of contemporary practice include peace and conflict resolution; medicine; law and the music industry; libraries, museums, and sound archives; journalism; and environmental sound activism and ecojustice. Peace-related applications are more frequent outside North America, but work of this sort has been done in Canada in disputes between First Nations communities and the Canadian government, while music has been an important part of labor and civil rights movements in the United States since the nineteenth century. Among the projects of medical ethnomusicology are HIV-AIDS work in Africa, therapeutic work with post-traumatic stress survivors, and music within the autism community. Legal applications have involved ethnomusicologists testifying as expert witnesses, particularly in music copyright infringement cases, and work on copyright and intellectual property issues as the question “who owns culture” becomes increasingly important when money is to be made and cases of exploitation have been documented. Ethnomusicologists have served as advisors to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a UNESCO-sponsored group attempting to arrive at laws for protecting intellectual property rights in the international arena. Ethnomusicologists are contributing to ecological studies of the soundscape, and of the effects of environmental noise on physiological and psychological health. We are involved in political action opposing sound pollution, such as noise from ocean vessels and military activities that affect whales, dolphins, and other sea mammals. Applied ethnomusicologists are contributing to the new discipline of ecomusicology, which involves music and sound in a time of environmental crisis. Journalists educated in ethnomusicology bring to world music a broadly informed historical and geographical perspective. Some are writing for newspapers, magazines, and online publications; many are active in promoting music, and some are performing musicians ourselves. Ethnomusicologists working in the music industry serve as consultants, ethnographers, technical assistants, and producers. Many libraries, museums, universities, and other institutions maintain sound archives where archivists with ethnomusicological training offer expertise in acquisition, cataloging, grant-writing, preservation, and outreach.

Since the 1990s, when applied ethnomusicology became a recognizable force within ethnomusicology, other names have been advanced to describe some of the work that applied ethnomusicologists do; but they ought not to be confused with applied ethnomusicology, which is the covering term.¹  Public sector ethnomusicology describes applied ethnomusicology that is practiced by people employed by public-sector, taxpayer-funded (i.e., government) institutions such as (in the United States) the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, the National Endowment for the Arts, and state arts councils; and whose efforts are directed to the public at large while often targeted at particular communities within it. By definition, “public sector ethnomusicology” is unable to include applied ethnomusicology as practiced by those who work in the private sector, in NGOs such as museums, historical societies, foundations, and various non-profit organizations, even when part of their funding comes from government grants; nor does it describe the work of applied ethnomusicologists in corporations and client organizations. Public ethnomusicology is a better name for this activity, insofar as it focuses on applications in the public arena. But both terms, public sector and public, neglect the private sphere and perpetuate an unhelpful distinction between academia and the world outside of colleges and universities. As I have pointed out, applied ethnomusicology is practiced by those employed inside the academic world as well as outside of it. Ethnomusicology appears to be in danger of replicating the same terminological virus that has infected American folklore studies since the 1980s, one which American Folklore Society President Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett labeled a “mistaken dichotomy” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1988).

Some ethnomusicologists are attracted to applied work, and others not so much. Most ethnomusicologists, I’ve observed, do share certain characteristics, however. Sound and music are immensely important to the way we orient ourselves. As humans, we are beings “in the world” through all of our senses, but we are particularly aware of vibrations that come to us as sound. Epistemologically, we feel that knowing sound—and knowing by means of sound—is essential to being human in the world and is one of the most important avenues through which to understand the human condition. Certainly it is our special avenue. Where we diverge, somewhat, is in what we do as a result of this ontological and epistemological orientation. Some of us are most interested in pursuing and increasing knowledge about sound and music in the world, the music of the world’s peoples. This is the usual end of scholarship. Scholars feel a special responsibility to present, discuss, debate, and circulate this knowledge among colleagues and students in the institutional world of universities and professional associations of ethnomusicologists. Others, those of us who practice applied ethnomusicology, also feel a responsibility to help put this knowledge to practical use in the public arena; and so either in addition to our research, scholarship, and teaching within the university world, or instead of it, we also involve ourselves in interventions into musical communities, for public benefit.

Some 45 years ago Mantle Hood wrote a textbook about the nature of ethnomusicology, but instead of titling it “Ethnomusicology” he named it The Ethnomusicologist (Hood, 1971). In the Introduction he described an ideal ethnomusicologist’s background, education, skills and aptitudes, and personality. It was an unusual emphasis for a graduate textbook in ethnomusicology, but then this was an unusual book, often written in the first person, and to some extent reflecting, I think, the California social and intellectual atmosphere of the 1960s that had also produced public figures like Stewart Brand and Jerry Brown. Although the influence of personality on an ethnomusicologist’s accomplishments is not often written about, it is sometimes discussed among ethnomusicologists, especially when we reflect on ethnographic fieldwork, that rite of passage in which ethnomusicologists (like their counterparts in cultural anthropology) traditionally travel to a different, and sometimes strange, culture and while there, try to learn something of the musical universe among that group of people. It is difficult, sometimes alienating, even psychologically traumatic, work (Wengle, 1988); and ethnomusicologists tend to think that certain personality types are better able to accomplish it than others. Applied ethnomusicologists like to interact with our field subjects, not just observe them. We feel a desire to give something back in exchange for what we are learning, and this impulse leads us not only to research but to work directly for the benefit of those we visit. And so although most ethnomusicologists are in the world ontologically and epistemologically in similar ways, we differ somewhat over what we should be doing with those ways of being and knowing. It should go without saying that applied ethnomusicologists engage in research and contribute to the growth of knowledge. Our Ph.Ds are research degrees, after all, and many of us have made substantial scholarly contributions to the flow of knowledge inside academia. But we also feel a social responsibility to put that knowledge to use in the public arena.

As the co-editors worked on this volume and saw it through an eight-year period of invitations, proposals, abstracts, essays, reviews, revisions, and yet more reviews and more revisions, it became increasingly and unsettlingly clear that many US contributors thought of their work within a local and national context but knew relatively little about the history, ideas, and accomplishments of applied ethnomusicologists living outside the United States. Non-US contributors were similarly knowledgeable about applied work in their spheres of activity outside North America, but generally unaware of the history, projects, scholarship, and cultural policies generated by applied ethnomusicology in North America. Ideas that had been theorized, practiced, and thoroughly critiqued in some localities were being introduced in others as if they were newly discovered. More than once, contributors seemed to be reinventing wheels. Many whose work would benefit from an exchange of ideas with others involved in similar projects elsewhere were not taking advantage of that possibility. Although we believe that the reasons for this insularity have more to do with institutional histories and geography than with any serious divergence over assumptions, approach, and goals, one of the happy consequences of this volume, we hope, will be to increase the dialogue among practitioners of applied ethnomusicology no matter where they work, so that each becomes aware of the ways in which similar problems have been faced, and solutions attempted, elsewhere, while problems and issues that had not even occurred to some will become apparent after reading about the work of others. Another consequence of this insularity, however, was that it became impossible to sketch a unified history and description of applied ethnomusicology apart from those considerations. For that reason, in this section I construct a history of applied ethnomusicology in the United States, related to the growth of ethnomusicology and its professional organization, SEM, founded in 1955. (Svanibor Pettan writes in Section 2 of this Introduction about the communities of applied ethnomusicologists associated with the International Council on Traditional Music [ICTM], and its earlier incarnation, the International Folk Music Council [IFMC, founded in 1947].) In doing so, I draw on a graduate seminar in the history of ethnomusicological thought which I led at Brown University from 1988 until 2013. Reflexivity, postcolonial ethnomusicology, efforts to sustain musical genres and cultures, collaborative ethnography and advocacy, tourism and the creative economy, archival stewardship and repatriation of field recordings, applications to medicine and to peace and conflict resolution, proper roles for government in the arts, the place of world music in education—these are not new themes in our field, but the timing of their entrances, their reception, and their use in applied work has not been uniform among the North American, European, Asian, African, Australian, and Latin American communities of applied ethnomusicologists.

Strictly speaking, the history of ethnomusicology began in 1950, when Jaap Kunst invented the term and it entered scholarly discourse (Kunst 1950). I prefer to think of the pre-1950 period as ethnomusicology’s prehistory, paying particular attention to the two disciplines, comparative musicology and cultural anthropology, that combined in the 1950s as ethnomusicology.² I find prototypes of US applied ethnomusicology among nineteenth-century ethnologists and folklorists whose field research in music exhibited both social responsibility and collaborative involvement with musical communities for their benefit. Music was an integral part of early folklore and anthropology, not an afterthought. From the very beginning, scholars writing for the American Anthropologist and the Journal of American Folklore showed much interest in people making music. The second issue of the former contained an essay by Washington Matthews (1843–1905) on a Navajo sung prayer (Matthews, 1888), for example, while the inaugural issue of the latter featured an article on Kwakiutl music and dance by Franz Boas (1858–1942), the most influential North American anthropologist of his generation (Boas 1888). Boas’s article described some of the group’s music, stories, and their ideas and behavior in relation to them; it contained musical transcriptions, and mentioned his 1886 music collecting trip with the German comparative musicologist and music psychologist Carl Stumpf among the Bella Coola. Nothing in Boas’s article might be considered applied ethnomusicology per se, but Boas undertook a public anthropology project of enormous import in the early twentieth century when he opposed so-called scientific racism and helped establish the idea that differences in human behavior result from learned cultural, rather than fixed biological, traits.

Matthews’s work was aided by a deeply collaborative relationship in which he underwent Native rituals and may have married a Hidatsa woman. Collaborative relationships in which the parties work toward mutually agreed-upon goals became a hallmark of applied ethnomusicology, but their roots may be found in people like Matthews, as well as Alice Cunningham Fletcher (1838–1923), whose collaborative work moved more clearly in the direction of social and economic benefits that would be recognized today as applied ethnomusicology. Fletcher, who became President of both the American Anthropological Association and the American Folklore Society, as well as Vice President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, lived with the Sioux in 1881, and collaborated with an Omaha, Frances La Flesche, whom she took into her household from 1890 on. Falling ill with a severe case of rheumatoid arthritis in 1883, she was nursed back to health by her Native American friends, who sang to her while she lay recovering. Then, she wrote, “the sweetness, the beauty and meaning of these songs were revealed to me” (Fletcher, 1994: 8). Like the others, Fletcher undertook ethnographic studies of Native music; but she also worked tirelessly on behalf of Native American education, integration, and advancement into mainstream culture.

“Giving back” is the usual term North American ethnomusicologists employ to identify this reciprocity, which has taken various forms over the decades. However, Fletcher’s efforts at aiding Native Americans are characterized today as attempts to Americanize them, a “grievous error in the administration of Native American lands and peoples” according to a Smithsonian Institution author (Smithsonian: Fletcher). Ethnomusicologists consider it unfortunate that the Omaha songs she collected were published with Western harmonization, added to them by the musician John Comfort Fillmore, who convinced Fletcher that these harmonies were implicit in the Omaha melodies (Fletcher, 1994). Nonetheless, Fletcher may be understood in her time as a progressive. The principal alternative to Americanization (or Christianization), after all, had for nearly three centuries been genocide. And prominent American composers such as Edward MacDowell were quoting, transforming, and harmonizing Native American melodies in their musical compositions.

Daniel Sheehy and Anthony Seeger trace the history of twentieth-century pioneers in applied ethnomusicology, such as Robert Winslow Gordon, Alan Lomax, and Charles Seeger (Sheehy, 1992; Seeger, 2006). In terming them applied ethnomusicologists, Seeger, Sheehy, and others combine ethnomusicology’s historical and pre-historical periods. Certainly, these ancestors would have been called applied ethnomusicologists if ethnomusicology proper had come into being prior to 1950. To some extent their work was related to that of early anthropologists such as A. L. Kroeber and others on endangered Native American languages. The Lomaxes’ folk music collections were meant for the general public, to supply a kind of people’s alternative to the art music that was being taught in the public schools. Alan Lomax insisted that the treasure trove of folk music should be made accessible through media production, which in the 1940s and 1950s meant radio programs—he produced dozens of them for national broadcast. He issued an appeal for “cultural equity” that articulated many of the principles under which he had been operating for decades (Lomax, 1972). Lomax’s “Appeal” may be the single most often-cited document in the literature of US applied ethnomusicology. Charles Seeger, Anthony Seeger’s grandfather, had issued a call in 1939 for an applied musicology that would follow from government involvement in the arts, a vision in some ways similar to the situation in China today (Seeger, 2006: 227–228; also see Zhang, Chapter 21 of this volume). Seeger and his wife Ruth Crawford Seeger, John and Alan Lomax, Herbert Halpert, Zora Neale Hurston, and others were involved in efforts to encourage folk music (as the authentic popular music of a democratic society) during the Roosevelt administration. These activities, of course, diminished greatly as the United States concentrated during the 1940s on mobilization for World War II. But Sheehy concludes that “there is a tradition of applied thought and purpose that should be included in the history of ethnomusicology,” as well as “an evolving sense of strategy and techniques for action that has flowed through this thought and that demands our attention as ethnomusicologists” (Sheehy, 1992: 329). Anthony Seeger entitled his 2006 essay “Lost Lineages” in the history of ethnomusicology and, like Sheehy, called for a more inclusive history of the field.

The usual historical accounts of ethnomusicology in the United States are not so inclusive: applied ethnomusicology is treated either as a peripheral activity or, more often, ignored entirely. These mainstream accounts trace ethnomusicology’s roots to comparative musicology, a scientific project of the European Enlightenment. They do not pay much attention to its roots in folklore and cultural anthropology. In 1885 Guido Adler defined comparative musicology as “the comparison of the musical works … of the various peoples of the earth for ethnographical purposes, and the classification of them according to their various forms” (Haydon, 1941: 117). Comparative musicology began in the latter part of the nineteenth century with the systematization of music knowledge, which proceeded with the measurable, classificatory, and comparative procedures borrowed from philology, embryology, and other sciences, generating various hypotheses concerning origins, growth, diffusion, and function. Aided by the recording phonograph and efforts of various music collectors, it included the comparative work on the musical scales of various nations accomplished by the Englishman Alexander Ellis, and the research of the German Carl Stumpf and others in music psychology (or psychophysical science, as it was then called). Comparative musicology was further developed as a research discipline in early twentieth-century Berlin by Stumpf’s younger colleague Erich von Hornbostel, Curt Sachs, and others, with related scholarship accomplished by Béla Bartok in Hungary, Constantin Brailliou in Rumania, and others in the fields of comparative musical folklore and the sociology of music.

Comparative musicology arrived in the United States in 1925 in the person of George Herzog, who had been von Hornbostel’s assistant in Berlin. He went on to study anthropology with Franz Boas at Columbia University, specializing in “primitive music,” as it was then called. Herzog received his doctorate in 1931 under Boas’s supervision and pursued an academic career at Yale, Columbia, and Indiana University that lasted until the mid-1950s. He was recognized during this period as the leading authority on “primitive music.” Among his students were two of the founders of SEM, David McAllester and Willard Rhodes. Bruno Nettl, who has written knowledgeably about Herzog’s contributions to comparative musicology, was another of his students (Nettl and Bohlman, 1991: 270–272; Nettl, 2002: 90–92; Nettl, 2010: 168). Herzog’s writings exhibited an empirical, scientific method that required large amounts of reliable data, a high standard to which he held himself and others. “All evidence,” he wrote, “points to the wisdom of dispensing with sweeping theoretical schemes and of inquiring in each case into the specific historical processes that have molded the culture and musical style of a nation or tribe … . So little is actually known … that the main attention of this field [of comparative musicology] is devoted to increasing that little, and collecting more material before it all disappears under the impact of Western civilization” (Herzog, 1936: 3). He had learned the importance of fieldwork and data-gathering from his teacher Boas, and he insisted on that, as well as musical transcription and analysis, from his students. His methods added Boas-styled ethnographic research to the comparative analysis that characterized the work of Horbostel and the Berlin school.

A useful summary of comparative musicology, with due attention to Herzog’s prominence in the United States, appeared in Glen Haydon’s graduate-level textbook, Introduction to Musicology (Haydon, 1941). As outlined there, its purpose was to increase knowledge of the music of the world’s peoples. Academic research was the means to that end. The work of numerous comparative musicologists, chiefly European, was described, and their most important publications referenced. But comparative musicology soon underwent a facelift. Historical accounts date this to Jaap Kunst’s book Ethno-Musicology (Kunst, 1950, and two subsequent editions), which defined ethno-musicology as the study of “all tribal and folk music and every kind of non-Western art music. Besides, it studies as well the sociological aspects of music…” (ibid., 1950: 1). Although he is usually credited with inventing the term ethnomusicology, Kunst’s argument for the name change rested chiefly on redundancy of the word “comparative.” All good science, he argued, is comparative in nature; disciplines like linguistics and embryology had, after all, dropped the adjective for the time being. His argument was persuasive, and some comparative musicologists began to adopt the new name, while others who wished to place more emphasis on the cultural study of music and less on musical analysis welcomed the name change and saw opportunity in it. However, comparative musicology remained the ancestral predecessor for Kunst and in later US historical accounts of the discipline, chiefly by Bruno Nettl (1956, 1964, 1983, 2002, 2005, 2010) as well as others. For nearly 60 years these historical accounts have informed generations of ethnomusicology professors and graduate students, in the United States and elsewhere. Despite increased theoretical sophistication and a growing recognition of historical relativism (e.g., Nettl and Bohlman, eds., 1991; Nettl, 2010; Rice, 2014), different subject emphases by other authors (e.g., Hood, 1971; Merriam, 1964), and an enlarged cast of characters (McLean, 2006), these mainstream histories continue to construct ethnomusicology as a research discipline almost exclusively centered in the academic world. Applied ethnomusicology seldom appears; when it does, it usually is treated with some reservations. As long as comparative musicology remained ethnomusicology’s central occupation, applied work would be marginal at best.

The founding of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) in 1955 not only provided an opportunity for a new emphasis on the cultural study of music, but might also have moved applied ethnomusicology to a more central position. Why it did not do so, at a time when applied anthropology was becoming important within US cultural anthropology, is an interesting question. In large part, as this brief history will show, the answer has to do with the founding generation’s desire to establish and expand ethnomusicology as an academic discipline, on a firm institutional footing, throughout the university world. In so doing, they missed an opportunity to integrate applied work into the agenda of the new Society. It was left for the next generation to do so.

The early period of SEM was, predictably, taken up with debate over the direction of the discipline. In its first 15 years or so, the SEM journal, Ethnomusicology, was filled with essays by many leading practitioners who attempted to define the discipline and influence its course. Research in ethnomusicology’s first two decades (ca. 1950–1975) has been characterized as falling broadly into two approaches, one musicological and the other anthropological (Kerman, 1986: 155–181). This is an oversimplification, but it is useful in highlighting the legacies of Hornbostel and Herzog, which in SEM could be seen in the work of Herzog’s former colleague Kolinski, William Malm, George List, Mantle Hood, and Nettl, among others. Their focus was on collecting, recording, transcribing, describing, classifying, analyzing, and comparing music in order to increase the music knowledge-base and to test theories concerning musical distribution, diffusion, and acculturation. Like Herzog, most were interested also in the ethnographic study of cultural contexts for music (“music in culture”) and in comparing and contrasting music’s functions within cultures. Unless one thinks of the polymath Seeger as a comparativist, these comparative musicologists were not represented among the four SEM founders; but their work was prominent in monographs and in Ethnomusicology, where they advanced their scholarship and their view of what ethnomusicology ought to be. They also played a major role in establishing ethnomusicology as an academic discipline at the graduate level in US universities during the first 20 years of SEM.

On the other side of the debate over the future of ethnomusicology were the anthropologists, dance ethnologists, folklorists, and various other scholars who shared an interest in music and had been attracted to the new field. Most prominent among these were the anthropologists Alan Merriam and David McAllester, both among the four founders of SEM. Herzog was noticeably absent from SEM’s origins, and it is worth asking why. Nettl, who writes movingly and generously about Herzog, observed that Herzog already was behaving erratically in 1952 (he would be hospitalized from the mid-1950s onward, with occasional time off, until his death in 1983, for what we would now call a bipolar disorder) and attributes his absence to this (Nettl, 2002: 90–92; Nettl, 2010: 168; Nettl and Bohlman, 1991: 271–272). No doubt this is correct; but it appears that the founders also wished to escape Herzog’s dominance over the field. McAllester reported that as far as he knew, he was the only student ever to complete the doctorate under Herzog’s supervision. “The campus was littered with the bodies of failed Herzog students,” McAllester said. Herzog’s habit was to demonstrate to them time after time that they could not meet his standards. “He never failed them in so many words,” McAllester continued, “but they had a very hard time ever getting an appointment with him, and when they finally did, it was all at such a high level that they felt sort of defeated. If they brought in a transcription, it was so bad that he went over it note by note to show them and said, now see if you can’t, now that you’ve had this practice, do better next time. Then a month or so later, when they caught up with him again, then the same thing would happen again.” Rhodes was one of the dropouts, but he was already a full professor at Columbia and did not need the degree; yet it remained a sore point with him and his friend McAllester both. Even before Herzog moved from Columbia to Indiana University in 1948, he had been showing signs of the mental instability that would institutionalize him (Memorial Resolution, 1983). Herzog was Nettl’s dissertation supervisor at Indiana, but before Nettl could complete his doctorate, Herzog’s erratic behavior forced him to move to a different supervisor. “Bruno studied with him [Herzog] when he went out to Indiana, and he [Nettl] had a professor for a father, and so he had a strong position,” McAllester said. (Paul Nettl, Bruno’s father, was a professor of musicology at Indiana University.) “And he [Nettl] demanded another teacher, and he finished his Ph.D. with Carl Voegelin, the linguist. He left Herzog, but most of us couldn’t do that. We were with Herzog and it was do or die, and many died” (McAllester, 1989).

No wonder then, given McAllester’s and Rhodes’s opinion of him, that Herzog was not invited into the inner circle of SEM founders. At that time they may have been less aware of Herzog’s illness and decline than Nettl and the others who worked with Herzog at Indiana. But that must be only part of the answer. The other part is that McAllester, Merriam, Rhodes, and Seeger wanted to take a new direction, to move away from comparative musicology and Boasian ethnography, and toward an ethnomusicology that would make room not only for a greater variety of authoritative voices but also for more emphasis on the cultural study of music. Reaching out to scholars throughout the world, in 1953 the four founders initiated an ethnomusicology Newsletter, and two years later they founded the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), designed to foster communication and research in the field. SEM immediately began publishing a journal, Ethnomusicology, which since its inception has served as the flagship research periodical for the discipline. It is worth pausing for a moment to examine what the founders themselves thought they were up to. Nettl, reminiscing about this early period, the name change from “comparative musicology” to “ethnomusicology,” and the founding of SEM, recalls that he (and others, he thinks) regarded these events more as a “revival” of a great scholarly tradition (comparative musicology, which had been all but eliminated in Europe during the Nazi era) than as a revolution (Nettl, 2010: 160–162.). Inclined toward his teacher Herzog’s understanding of that tradition, Nettl’s subject position is understandable. Still a graduate student at the time and not directly involved as a founder, he had nevertheless set his course and was already a major stakeholder in the new field. His memoirs (Nettl, 2002, 2010, 2013) of this transitional period are both charming and invaluable, filled with information unavailable elsewhere and required reading for anyone interested in the history of ethnomusicology. In these memoirs, he tries to deconstruct the “myth” of SEM’s “grand entrance,” as he puts it, arguing that its historical significance and the importance of the four founders has been overrated (Nettl, 2010: 160–165). In retrospect, it is apparent that comparative musicology continued to exert a strong influence upon ethnomusicology during its first few decades (ca. 1950–1980). But the new Society, the new name, and its founders’ orientation toward anthropology is a historical fact that signaled a significant and enduring new direction for the field.

Let me try to reconstruct something of that significance as I believe it to have appeared to the founders at the time. (In so doing, I rely in part on my conversations with Rhodes, Merriam, Seeger, and especially McAllester about that period.) McAllester recalled that after Herzog was finally confined to a mental hospital, he could no longer exercise his former control over degrees, grants, and publications in the field. “He became so ill that he had to be in an institution, and then the lid was off and the Society [SEM] could be established” (McAllester, 1989). For the four founders, SEM represented a move away from comparative musicology, not simply as an escape from Herzog’s iron grip, but in establishing a new interdisciplinary field: ethnomusicology. The founders resisted efforts from other Societies who tried to dissuade them from starting a new Society. The American Musicological Society sent representatives to their early meetings and “announced that we should not be a splinter group, but that we should be part of the American Musicological Society …. And we said, if we joined them, the AMS, there were a whole bunch of people that would not be any longer members. We had folklorists, anthropologists, ethnologists, acousticians, physicists… and they would have dropped out if we had become a part of the American Musicological Society.” These same scholars likewise would have left SEM had they allied themselves with the IFMC, McAllester reported. “Maud Karpeles came and pleaded with us to become a wing of the International Folk Music Council…. Alan Merriam particularly, well, Charlie Seeger too, they were both very insistent that it not get into the hands of… the International Folk Music [Council]. So when we started the society, they [the IFMC] soon got wind of it, and they were very upset because they had their American branch and they were afraid we would simply split their society and draw membership away from them…. There were scholars among them, great scholars among them, but they were not anthropologically oriented. And it just happened by the way we operated, that the Society for Ethnomusicology began with an anthropological orientation” (McAllester, 1989). Nettl agreed: “The beginning of the SEM was deeply rooted in the anthropological background of its most influential leaders” (Nettl, 2010: 143).

McAllester recalled the excitement that accompanied the founding of SEM, along with the possibilities of new directions for the Society. For Merriam even more than for McAllester, that direction was to be cultural anthropology. Eventually he termed this direction “the anthropology of music” rather than “comparative musicology,” and he lobbied hard for the study of music, not in culture, but as culture, a phrase (“music as culture”) that Merriam referenced to his earlier “unpublished thoughts” (Merriam, 1977: 204). According to Merriam, music was not something that existed within a cultural context; it was culture in the anthropological sense itself, with its own domain of ideas, behavior, and sonic dimension. Obtaining a full professorship in anthropology at Indiana University in 1962, Merriam was not only a founder but a forceful presence in SEM from the very beginning until his untimely death in an airplane crash in 1980. His area interests were in indigenous musics primarily, Native American and African. A former jazz musician, he had little use for the study of folk music, and even less for bi-musicality, about which more shortly. When I taught a summer session in Indiana’s Folklore Institute in 1977, he invited me to his home a number of times. He had just remarried, and was in an expansive mood. Relevant for this historical sketch is the attitude he expressed toward the IFMC. He affirmed that the founders had refused Maud Karpeles’s invitation to join the International Folk Music Council rather than form their own Society. Nettl attributed Merriam’s reasons for objecting to the IFMC to “his perception of the IFMC as specifically interested in music alone, the notion that folk-music scholars were interested in only a small segment of the music of any society; and the idea that the IFMC included a substantial practical component, that is, was in large measure a society of folksingers and dancers” (Nettl, 2010: 143). Merriam’s views had evolved since then, for in 1977 he told me the IFMC as a group was insufficiently objective and scientific about music as a human phenomenon. If they had been, they would have been concerned with all music, not mainly the oldest layers of music in what were then regarded as folk societies (Redfield, 1947). And if they had been, they would not have been so concerned with authenticity and so worried about salvaging this music for archival preservation; or worse yet, reviving it for a sophisticated urban audience. Merriam took some pleasure in noting that Indiana University’s Folklore Institute did not share this attitude toward musical revivalism; indeed, Richard Dorson, the head of the Institute, had coined the term “fakelore” to describe it, and on the advice of George List, the senior ethnomusicologist in the Folklore Institute, Dorson would not permit amateur folk musicians in their doctoral program to undertake music research unless they had had sufficient formal training in Western music theory and history to be admitted to ethnomusicology courses. As Indiana was one of only a very few universities in the US granting doctoral degrees in folklore, the amount of academic research in US folk music during the Dorson-List-Merriam era was severely diminished as a consequence. For Merriam, ethnomusicology was revolutionary insofar as it elevated anthropology to a position of equality with musicology in birthing the new offspring, ethnomusicology. The ethno- prefix (derived from the Greek ethnos [=people with a common culture]) firmly established it as a new discipline that was properly part of “the scientific study of man,” as anthropology had long been defined. Merriam assiduously pursued this goal, which he called “sciencing about music” (Merriam, 1964: 25 and passim).

With SEM established on the promise of interdisciplinarity and new directions, particularly from anthropology, one might have expected that the new organization would have been hospitable to applied ethnomusicology. Anthropologists had by then started putting their knowledge to use in solving social problems. John Van Willigen dates the rise of a socially committed applied or “action” anthropology to 1945, although he notes that anthropologists had for decades previously taken on community consultantship roles (van Willigen, 2002). But this exciting, albeit controversial, development in anthropology did not cross over into SEM with any success until decades later. The reasons, in retrospect, are not entirely surprising. To establish ethnomusicology within the most secure of institutional bases, that is, within universities, it was necessary to position it as a research science, aiming to increase knowledge of the music of the world’s peoples. Musicological and anthropological ethnomusicologists might disagree over the discipline’s emphasis, but they agreed that scholarship and the production of knowledge were its goals. Applications of that research in the public arena might be well and good, but the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake had always been valued most highly in university settings, where it could be protected from outside forces. In 1950 ethnomusicology itself was a fringe discipline in the United States, with only a few courses being offered (sometimes in anthropology departments, sometimes music) and only a few professors available to advise doctoral dissertations. For ethnomusicology to expand inside the university world, professors must succeed in establishing courses, programs (especially graduate programs), tenure tracks, and recognition of the discipline as a legitimate academic pursuit. The proven strategy to advance the discipline in the university world would be through research, emphasizing that study of the music of the world’s peoples would add to the store of knowledge about human behavior and achievement. Research “for its own sake” was then, and remains, regarded in the academy as more elegant, of higher and “purer” disinterested purpose than research driven by applications. In the arts and humanities, where contemplation of the pure aesthetic object was required for philosophy, literary criticism, and art history, disinterested acts of scholarship were experienced as pleasurable in themselves. Eventually, one could hope, every music department, every music school or conservatory, and every anthropology department would have at least one ethnomusicologist doing research and offering music courses with a worldwide scope; and some would have more than one and would establish graduate programs training future generations of ethnomusicologists as the discipline would expand. Professionalization of ethnomusicology as a research discipline, and with that a need to distance it from well-meaning amateurs who also engaged in music research, was a second reason. Applied work might be done by those who lacked the proper scientific attitude and scholarly training to conduct credible research: missionaries, for example, who had historically put music to use in attempting to convert indigenous peoples, or amateur collectors who became partisans on behalf of those whose music they recorded. I believe that a third reason was the distrust, among this generation of scholars who came of age during or soon after World War II, of social engineering, whether for political, cultural, or musical ends. Applied research put to practical use in musical or cultural interventions, despite intended benefits, was something Americans might well oppose, particularly given the uses to which music was put during the Nazi regime, and was being put in the Soviet sphere during the Cold War. Many in the previous generation of US music scholars had been born in Europe and had fled to North America to escape Nazi persecution and establish a musical scholarship inside the university world where they would be free from political interference. I do not mean to suggest that a cell of ethnomusicology professors drew up such a plan, but rather that they were inclined by personality and training to move in that direction. Partly as a result, in its first two decades, ethnomusicology became more firmly established as a scholarly discipline; but applied ethnomusicology languished inside the US academic world.

Merriam was perhaps the first US ethnomusicologist to recognize an applied ethnomusicology by that name, although he did not favor it. The phase “applied ethnomusicology” did not appear in the SEM Newsletter or journal until Merriam’s 1963 review of Henry Weman’s African Music and the Church in Africa. Merriam wrote that this book is “perhaps most accurately described as a study in applied ethnomusicology, for his principal concern is how African music can be used…” in missionary work (Merriam, 1963b: 135). Merriam expanded on his comments a year later in The Anthropology of Music, and it is worth looking at them in detail:

… the ultimate aim of the study of man… involves the question of whether one is searching for knowledge for its own sake, or is attempting to provide solutions for practical applied problems. Ethnomusicology has seldom been used in the same manner as applied or action anthropology, and ethnomusicologists have only rarely felt called upon to help solve problems in manipulating the destinies of people, but some such studies have been made [here he references Weman’s book] and it is quite conceivable that this may in the future be of increased concern. The difficulty of an applied study is that it focuses the attention of the investigator upon a single problem which may cause or force him to ignore others of equal interest, and it is also difficult to avoid outside control over the research project. Although this problem is not yet of primary concern, it will surely shape the kinds of studies carried out if it does draw the increased attention of ethnomusicologists.

(Merriam, 1964: 42–43)

Here, as elsewhere, Merriam privileges “knowledge for its own sake.” In criticizing applied work for its narrow focus, Merriam is appealing to the idea that ethnomusicology should study music as a whole; but “outside control” may be viewed as a threat to academic freedom, while the phrase “manipulating the destinies of people” expresses that distrust of and distaste for the political and cultural interventions of applied anthropology and, by extension, of applied ethnomusicology.

Several books and articles critique recent interventions, especially those resulting from UNESCO initiatives to preserve intangible cultural heritage (e.g., Weintraub and Yung, 2005). But this tradition of critique may be traced to Merriam’s “white knight” label for those ethnomusicologists who feel called to “function as knights in shining armor riding to the defense of non-Western music” (Merriam, 1963a: 207). Skepticism toward applied ethnomusicology is also evident in Bruno Nettl’s histories and descriptions of the field. Nettl, more than anyone else among the founding generation of SEM, shouldered the responsibility to construct a history of ethnomusicology, something which he has come to call his “elephant” (Nettl, 2010). The sole active survivor of his generation of ethnomusicologists, Nettl early on assumed the mantle of spokesperson for the discipline, and today he is recognized in the United States and elsewhere as its elder statesman. As intellectual history is his central concern, he devotes relatively little attention to applied ethnomusicology. His most influential book, The Study of Ethnomusicology, treats applied ethnomusicology within the context of applied anthropology: “In the course of the 1950s there developed a concept and a subdiscipline, ‘applied anthropology,’ whose task it was to use anthropological insight to help solve social problems, particularly those occasioned by rapid culture change in the wake of modernization and Westernization.” Applied anthropologists also were consulted in attempts to solve economic problems such as third-world poverty. They advised government organizations such as the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), on interventions involving democratization, agricultural modernization, and economic development. Rapid social change and cultural upheaval was the result of the intervention, not the original problem to be solved. No wonder then, as Nettl continues, that although “Anthropologists wanted to help [they] frequently ended up offending the local population and doing what was perceived as harmful. As a result, in the late 1960s and early 1970s they were widely attacked for doing work of no relevance to social problems, of mixing in local politics, of spying. Ethnomusicologists shared in this criticism….” Here, applied ethnomusicologists’ efforts to conserve traditional music and culture are conflated with applied anthropologists’ efforts meant to aid in the modernization of traditional culture. The implication is that, like applied anthropologists, applied ethnomusicologists were criticized as offensive, harmful, and irrelevant; and that they barged into local politics and were accused of being spies. But if this critique of anthro-colonialism is accurate about interventions meant to bring about modernization and development, it does not follow that it applies to interventions by applied ethnomusicologists meant to conserve traditional music. Nettl then balances the critique with a somewhat more positive view:

the picture [of applied anthropology and ethnomusicology] is not entirely negative. Some societies are happy to have outsiders come, appreciate their efforts, their respect for the traditions, and their help in restoring vigor to rapidly disappearing musics. Persian and Indian music masters are proud to have Western scholars as students, for it raises their prestige locally and legitimizes their traditional art in the face of modernizing doubters. Even so, there is often the feeling that members of the society itself, given the right training, equipment, and time, could do it better.

(Nettl, 1983: 297; repeated in the 2nd edition, 2005: 206).

Nettl points out that some ethnomusicologists “espouse fieldwork in which informants become collaborators, the members of a community being studied in effect becoming co-collaborators” (ibid.). Yet Nettl’s deep usease with applied work as social engineering is embedded in the tone and weight of his discussion and in the examples he offers; and it is apparent where he thinks the majority of ethnomusicologists stand. For the first edition of this book (1983) this was a correct assessment, but by the second edition (2005) it was not. Indeed, in a recent interview he acknowledged applied ethnomusicology’s considerable appeal to a new generation (Fouce, 2014: 1).³

A few ethnomusicologists in SEM’s founding generation were involved in applied projects during the 1960s and 1970s, yet they did not call it applied ethnomusicology. No doubt they thought of these as proper activities for an ethnomusicologist, but to my knowledge they did not think of them as part of a subfield where research was directed toward the public interest. Some, most prominently SEM founder David McAllester, took an advocacy role in educating music teachers and broadening the kindergarten-through-high school curricula to include examples of the musics of the world’s peoples. McAllester worked through the Music Educators’ National Conference to accomplish this goal, and he advised several graduate students in the Wesleyan University world music program who went in this direction, among them Patricia Shehan Campbell (see her Chapter 18, coauthored with Lee Higgings, in this volume). Another prominent ethnomusicologist in the founding generation, Mantle Hood, undertook applied ethnomusicology projects in Indonesia. He related the story of his successful intervention to revive Javanese gamelan gong-making (for the large gong ageng), which had nearly gone extinct. However, he also reported that his intervention resulted in some unintended, negative consequences. He offered another example, when he was called on for suggestions to improve gamelan educational practice—what innovations would he recommend? But here he stepped back from applied ethnomusicology and refused to interfere, thinking that Western influence would not be good for the tradition (Hood, 1971: 358–371). His major work on ethnomusicology ends with a section on cultural exchange through music and the arts as part of a program to further international understanding—putting ethnomusicological knowledge to practical use for a clear and intended social benefit.

Thus it could be fairly said that SEM’s founding generation concentrated their US efforts in two areas: first, on research in order to increase knowledge about music and to circulate it among scholars; and second, to secure an institutional base for ethnomusicology within the academic world. In the latter, they were more successful in the music divisions of the universities and colleges (variously called music departments, schools of music, conservatories, and the like) than in anthropology departments. Growth within music divisions allied the discipline more closely with musicology than anthropology, and although the SEM founders envisioned a broadly interdisciplinary field with a new emphasis on the cultural study of music—and achieved this at SEM conferences and to some extent in the SEM journal, Ethnomusicology—the institutional growth of the discipline favored the musicologically oriented scholars.

Ironically, however, it was not by positioning ethnomusicology as a research science that institutional growth was achieved; rather, in the last half of the twentieth century ethnomusicology benefited from a combination of external circumstances that the founding generation did not foresee. The most important of these were, first, the meteoric rise in the popularity of world music among the general public, and especially the young, which began in the 1960s. Second was the reversal, in US cultural mythology, from the idea that the nation was a melting pot that produced a single American type, to the acceptance of cultural diversity and pluralism, which in the field of education broke the Eurocentric hold on curricula and opened it to a variety of minority voices in the humanities: literature, fine arts, music, and history. Youth cultures became deeply involved in alternative musics, including folk music, blues, and bluegrass. World music began to enjoy widespread popularity, as George Harrison of the Beatles studied sitar in India, and Hindustani musicians Ali Akbar Khan and Ravi Shankar went on extended annual tours throughout the United States. Recording companies such as Nonesuch released world music recordings and targeted both indigenous as well as Asian art musics to an appreciative public. Young men and women turned to world music as one of many paths toward personal growth. Fueled by the rising popularity of world music, master musicians from Ghana, North and South India, the Arab world, China, Japan, and Indonesia soon were in residence as world music performance ensemble directors at American colleges and universities where ethnomusicologists were already teaching. Performance was attracting students into the field. Mantle Hood, director of the Ethnomusicology Institute at UCLA, spearheaded this movement, advocating on behalf of what he called bi-musicality. Just as serious study of a foreign language could turn a person bilingual, so serious study of a foreign music could make one bi-musical and impart a knowledge of that music that was otherwise unavailable. Some senior ethnomusicologists tempered their enthusiasm for world music performance ensembles, however, and for decades they were conspicuously absent at the University of Illinois and Indiana University. Nonetheless, the possibility that world music might be learned intrigued many, and some went on to enroll in graduate programs in ethnomusicology, resulting in more degrees, professors, and programs. By 1970 it was possible to study ethnomusicology and obtain the doctorate by studying with Hood at UCLA, Fredric Lieberman at Brown, George List and Merriam at Indiana, Nettl at Illinois, Robert Garfias at Washington, William Malm at Michigan, and McAllester at Wesleyan, among other universities. Moreover, those with doctoral training in ethnomusicology had begun teaching at other colleges and universities, and SEM’s US membership had increased.

Diversification and expansion of the US college and university music curriculum created a demand for professors who could teach the new courses. Within music divisions, this meant the end of the near-complete domination of Western art music (or classical music, as the American public calls it). Now popular music, jazz, and the music of the world’s peoples took their place among the course offerings. Gradually, ethnomusicologists began to realize that they could take a proactive role and convince university administrators that one way to accomplish their goal of affirmative action toward so-called American minority groups (something which ethnomusicologists by and large supported) was through greater diversity of music offerings, which would also mean more ethnomusicology hires. As programs and departments were established in African American studies, Native American studies, Asian American studies, Hispanic American studies, and the like, it became apparent that the music of American minorities, along with world music, had an important role to play in the expanded curricula. Of course, ethnomusicologists were far from the only ones to benefit from diversity, cultural pluralism, and affirmative action in the academic world; but while the popularity of world music has ebbed and flowed since the 1960s, the movement toward greater cultural diversity within US higher education has been persistent.

The folk music revival, rising popularity of world music, and the positive value now attached to ethnic roots and cultural pluralism brought about a renewed emphasis in applied ethnomusicology outside the academic world before it had much impact inside it. Because Alan Lomax embodied this public work in applied ethnomusicology—not only as a collector, writer, and promoter, but also as an advocate for cultural democracy and musical pluralism—it is instructive to ponder his encounter with none other than George Herzog, who also believed in the value of musical diversity and had devoted his life to the study of folk and “primitive” music. Herzog, as noted, embodied comparative musicology in the United States during the 1930s and 1940s. After Lomax had been “Assistant in Charge” of the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress for several years—field-collecting, acquiring from others, and curating recordings—he decided to move his base of operations, from February through June of 1939, to Manhattan to obtain “more systematic academic training in anthropology and in the anthropological approach to primitive and folk music.” He hoped to study with Herzog and other anthropologists at Columbia, and also “to study music with private instructors” (Cohen 2010: 115). A recently published collection of Lomax’s correspondence reveals the encounter with Herzog—from Lomax’s viewpoint, of course—to have been less than successful. Herzog would not let Lomax into his course, insisting that he must take his two courses in sequence—primitive music (offered in the fall) followed by folk music (in the spring). Herzog would not budge from the requirement. To Harold Spivacke, his supervisor at the Library of Congress, Lomax then wrote, “I met a very much surprised Dr. Herzog at Columbia this morning, a Dr. Herzog who told me that I had made a great mistake in coming to school to take his course this term, that I should have come next term, should have come next year and for a whole year. Such a neurotic little academic man you never saw before” (Cohen 2010: 121). Although Lomax had a marvelous ear, outstanding musical taste, and broad knowledge of folk music, he had little formal musical education and could be regarded as a well-meaning amateur in search of professional training. In some scientific disciplines, such as ornithology and astronomy, serious work by amateur researchers is highly valued; and in the early history of science, the majority of natural historians and natural philosophers were amateurs and proud of it. But Herzog was wary of amateur music research. Their confrontation, exacerbated by their prickly personalities and strong convictions, can be understood as a sign of incompatibility between public and academic ethnomusicologies in an earlier era; today, as mentioned earlier, more practitioners of applied ethnomusicology are employed within academia than outside it.

Indeed, the growth of US applied ethnomusicology from the 1960s through the 1980s owed much to Alan Lomax’s continuing influence, his call for cultural equity, the work of public folklorists, and the establishment of government institutions that supported cultural pluralism within the arts. At the federal level were the Office of Folklife Studies at the Smithsonian Institution, the Folk Arts program of the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Archive of Folk Culture at the Library of Congress, enlarged from the former Archive of American Folk Song, which Lomax had directed, and under the aegis of a new Library division, the American Folklife Center. Regional, state, and, in some cases, city arts councils also were established, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts, and by the end of the 1980s most of the state arts councils employed at least one folklorist and a few employed ethnomusicologists (see Murphy, Chapter 20 of this volume). Folklore in the United States, while conservative in the academic world, enjoyed a tradition of populist activism outside it. Each of these government agencies employed scholars as consultants, and some employed them as arts and humanities administrators; thus, a large public outreach and concern for the health of expressive culture within various US communities was put in place, with a growing number of ethnomusicologists involved in public folklore, most often as consultants, but sometimes as advocates and collaborators, doing applied work. Several ethnomusicologists worked as presenters at folk festivals, their prior fieldwork having identified and documented some of the musicians who performed there. Music was the most prominent among the arts singled out by public folklorists for identification, documentation, and presentation. As arts administrators, ethnomusicologists were employed by the Smithsonian Institution (Thomas Vennum, Charlotte Heth) and by the Folk Arts Division of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA; Daniel Sheehy), which also hired numerous ethnomusicologists as consultants to sit on panels recommending funding for various community music projects as well as for apprenticeships and heritage awards (see Titon, Chapter 5 of this volume). Bess Lomax Hawes held an informal session at the SEM conference most years during the 1980s to inform ethnomusicologists of the opportunities for submitting applied ethnomusicology project proposals to the NEA. This activity, known in the 1970s and 1980s as public sector folklore, in the 1990s became known simply as “public folklore,” and influenced the course of applied ethnomusicology in the United States profoundly.

Academic ethnomusicologists involved in public folklore thus began to think of their work as applied ethnomusicology, but SEM remained chiefly an organization devoted to communicating research among scholars. It was not until most of the founding generation aged and gradually relinquished leadership that applied ethnomusicology was able to enter SEM in a significant way. But it was not merely a changing of the generations. A significant change within academia resulted from the growing critique of science, fomented by post-structuralist and critical cultural theory, and culminating in the so-called “science wars” of the 1980s. North American graduate students in ethnomusicology during this period—beginning in the late 1960s—could not help being affected, as were cultural anthropologists and folklorists. The result, particularly among those attracted to the study of music as culture, was a turn in ethnomusicology from science toward cultural critique, from the musical object to the musical experience, from analysis to interpretation, from explanation to understanding. As a result, US ethnomusicology took a humanistic turn, and the cultural study of music moved to the forefront until, by the end of the 1980s, ethnomusicology had assimilated the humanistic cultural anthropology of Clifford Geertz, Dennis Tedlock, James Clifford, George Marcus, Vincent Crapanzano, Paul Rabinow, and others, a far cry from the empirical anthropology Herzog had championed. Much of this ethnomusicological humanism eventually achieved theoretical expression in the “new fieldwork” (Barz and Cooley, 1996) of reflexivity, reciprocity, and advocacy. Meanwhile, the scientific ethnomusicologists were in gradual retreat. A review of the essays in Ethnomusicology since about 1976 shows the balance point moving in the direction of music as culture rather than as form and structure. In 2010 the musicological ethnomusicologists came together outside SEM to form their own scholarly association (Analytical Approaches to World Music) with its own journal.⁴

Ethnomusicology’s humanistic turn led a growing number of North American ethnomusicologists toward applied ethnomusicology in one form or another—advocating on behalf of individual musicians, musical communities, and musical life in particular places. The new fieldwork had become experience-centered, with ethnomusicological monographs such as those by Berliner (1978) and Keil (1979) reflecting this first-person turn to reflexivity. Kenneth Gourlay’s 1982 essay in SEM’s journal, “Towards a Humanizing Ethnomusicology,” offered a theoretical basis for the new direction, along with a strongly worded critique of Merriam’s insistence on science (Gourlay 1982). In that same issue of Ethnomusicology, Charles Keil’s essay, “Applied Ethnomusicology and a Rebirth of Music from the Spirit of Tragedy,” charted a path toward work that “can make a difference” through “an insistence on putting music into play wherever people are resisting their oppression” (Keil, 1982: 407). Keil’s 1982 essay caught the spirit of the postcolonialism that was central to cultural critique in the new anthropology, and to critical theory in cultural studies. And because applied ethnomusicology did not become a movement until the era of decolonization, it could (and did) oppose colonialism, orientalism, and other manifestations of the arrogance of Western power, while answering (if not avoiding) the critiques of colonialism that were being (and that continue to be) leveled at applied anthropology. Meanwhile, an ever-increasing number of US ethnomusicologists were becoming involved in public folklore and were realizing that there was much good work to be done for music in the public arena.

A humanized ethnomusicology thus made it possible for a resurgence of a postcolonial applied ethnomusicology, manifesting itself not only in a new fieldwork based in reciprocity leading to advocacy, but also through institutional gains within SEM. Applied ethnomusicology went mainstream within SEM during the 1990s. As the program chair for the 1989 SEM conference, I invited colleagues from my years in the early 1980s as a consultant for the NEA Folk Arts Program to present papers on a pre-planned panel. Entitled “From Perspective to Practice in ‘Applied Ethnomusicology,’ ” the panel included the following presenters and papers: Robert Garfias, “What an Ethnomusicologist Can Do in Public Sector Arts”; Daniel Sheehy, “Applied Ethnomusicology as a State of Mind”; Charlotte Heth, “Getting It Right and Passing It On: The Ethnomusicologist and Cultural Transmission”; and Bess Lomax Hawes, “Practice Makes Perfect: Lessons in Active Ethnomusicology.” When in 1990 I became editor of Ethnomusicology, this panel formed the starting point for a special issue entitled “Ethnomusicology and the Public Interest,” which featured articles by Daniel Sheehy, Bess Lomax Hawes, Martha Ellen Davis, and Anthony Seeger. This was the first time that applied ethnomusicology was featured in the SEM journal. In my introductory article for that special issue, I wrote that ethnomusicology in the public interest “is work whose immediate end is not research and the flow of knowledge inside intellectual communities but, rather, practical action in the world outside of archives and universities” and that “as a way of knowing and doing, fieldwork [which is constitutive of ethnomusicology] at its best is based on a model of friendship between people rather than on a model involving antagonism, surveillance, the observation of physical objects, or the contemplation of abstract ideas” (Titon, 1992a: 315, 321). Sheehy’s article there began the process of constructing an alternative history for ethnomusicology in the United States, one in which applied work was more central (Sheehy, 1992). Hawes was invited to give the plenary Seeger Lecture at the 1993 SEM conference, and this autobiographical talk, meant in part to attract listeners to applied work as a calling, was published two years later in Ethnomusicology (Hawes, 1995). In 1998 Keil, continuing in the vein of postcolonial critique, called in the SEM journal for an “applied sociomusicology” that, by reclaiming participatory music-making “for the vast majority,” would help engender a revolution in consciousness that would overturn the global corporate capitalist world order and reverse the coming eco-catastrophe as we move toward “sustainable futures” (Keil, 1998: 304).

At the 1998 SEM Conference, Doris Dyen and Martha Ellen Davis convened a meeting to assess interest in proposing a standing Committee on Applied Ethnomusicology to the SEM Board. Until that meeting, a single name for this activity had not yet risen to the surface; among those in circulation then were “applied,” “active,” “action,” “practice,” “public,” and “public sector” (Titon, 1992a: 320–321). As applied ethnomusicologists themselves, with experience in the public sector and in the academic world, Davis and Dyen felt the time was opportune for organizing something more formal to bring together those with common interests in working for the benefit of musical communities in the public sphere. Thirty-eight hopeful founders (the editors of this volume among them) attended, their proposal was accepted by the SEM Board, and the Committee was established, with a variety of definitions of applied ethnomusicology. In 2000, Dyen and Davis, who had taken on the role of chairs of the Committee, appointed a deputy chair, Tom Van Buren, and successfully petitioned the Board to recognize the group as the Applied Ethnomusicology Section. Dyen and Davis stood aside in 2002 while appointing co-chairs Ric Alviso and Miriam Gerberg to join Van Buren, who stepped down in 2004 in favor of Mark Puryear. Alviso was succeeded in 2008 by Jeff Todd Titon, Gerberg in 2009 by Kathleen Noss Van Buren, Puryear in 2010 by Maureen Loughran, and Noss Van Buren in 2014 by Michael Bakan.

During the Committee and Section’s first decade, the co-chairs worked to make the group a comfortable space within SEM for ethnomusicologists employed outside of the academic world. To that end, they organized practical panels on non-academic careers for ethnomusicologists, such as the “Ethnomusicologists at Work” series, organized by Gerberg; and on strategies for survival both inside and outside official institutions. Co-chairs Gerberg, Puryear, and Alviso established Section prizes for outstanding presentations at SEM, and awards for travel grants to the conference. In the new millennium, as applied ethnomusicology has become increasingly popular among graduate students and welcomed inside academic institutions, the Section has become an SEM meeting-place and platform for applied ethnomusicologists based both within and outside academia. Most recently, the Section has sponsored panels involving themes such as music and politics, community advocacy, activism and “giving back,” conflict resolution, ethics, repatriation of artifacts from archives and museums, medicine, the environment, and social justice. It also sponsors presentations from guests who do not normally attend the SEM conferences but who have worked in applied ethnomusicology either independently or in extra-academic institutions. For example, at the 2011 conference, Debora Kodish, public folklorist and director of the Philadelphia Folklore Project, led a Section-sponsored discussion among traditional music and dance activists and community scholar-practitioners from the African-American and Asian-American communities in Philadelphia, showcasing a model for ethnomusicologists seeking strategies for work in community-based institutions. With 300 members, Applied Ethnomusicology is now one of the largest and most active among the SEM Sections, exceeded in membership only by the student and the popular music Sections.

As might be expected of a practical endeavor, theorization of applied ethnomusicology lagged behind practice, but recent years have witnessed an increasing number of publications and events centered on applied ethnomusicology itself. These included an international conference on applied ethnomusicology organized by Erica Haskell and Maureen Loughran, at Brown University (Invested in Community 2003), a special issue of Folklore Forum devoted to applied ethnomusicology (Fenn 2003), a section to devoted to applied ethnomusicology in an issue of Ethnomusicology Review (2012), and a book of essays, Applied Ethnomusicology: Historical and Contemporary Approaches (Harrison, Mackinlay, and Pettan, 2010). Rebecca Dirksen authored an excellent overview of contemporary practice, with an emphasis on work by US-based ethnomusicologists, while Timothy Rice’s book-length “very short introduction” to the discipline devotes the last two of nine chapters to what is in effect applied ethnomusicology (Dirksen, 2012; Rice, 2014). This Oxford Handbook continues in this vein, offering a cross-section of contemporary international work in the field.

Concluding this sketch of applied ethnomusicology in the United States, I do not mean to dismiss entirely the critique that applied ethnomusicology may be used for undesirable ends. Knowledge is not innocent; cultural information has a long history of being put to use for military purposes and colonial conquest. Music used in the service of a social or musical benefit may turn out to have negative consequences, or what looks like a benefit to one political entity may be a harm to another. Merriam’s charge that applied ethnomusicologists are engaged in “manipulating people’s destinies” is one way of looking at missionary work, for example, and it is a fact that missionaries have put their knowledge of music to use for that purpose for many centuries. Today, faith-based organizations such as SIL put ethnomusicological knowledge to use in aiding local artists in indigenous communities, with the goal of a “better future: one of justice, peace, joy, physical safety, social continuity and spiritual wholeness” (SIL). Other forces are intervening: corporations, governments, technology, the law, and so forth. Social responsibility requires social justice, cultural equity, and decolonization. I believe there is no self-correcting “invisible hand” in the marketplace or anywhere else that would permit scholars the luxury of research without social responsibility. Nor would scholars be well advised to accumulate knowledge and then supply it to those who in their ignorance would put it to use.

SEM has been slow to adopt a more active role, but recognition of the need for the organization to enter the larger political sphere has gradually come. For many years, SEM took the position that while ethnomusicologists were of course free to express their personal political views, the organization itself must not take a public political stand. But in 1976 the SEM Newsletter editor refused to print an employment advertisement from a university representing a government that practiced apartheid, an early harbinger of change. Not long afterward, SEM began endorsing resolutions supporting the rights of scholars detained by governments for political reasons, and the rights of musicians to travel freely internationally. It has passed position statements on rights and discrimination, copyright ownership and sound recordings, and ethical considerations. Finally, in 2007, in response to a request from the SEM Ethics Committee, the SEM Board of Directors approved a “Position Statement against the Use of Music as Torture.” Arising in response to numerous reports of music as part of the torture arsenal employed by US military and intelligence agencies and their allies against suspected terrorist detainees, it reads in part that the Society for Ethnomusicology “calls for full disclosure of US government-sanctioned and funded programs that design the means of delivering music as torture; condemns the use of music as an instrument of torture; and demands that the United States government and its agencies cease using music as an instrument of physical and psychological torture” (SEM Torture). The position statement on music as torture was a significant step in SEM’s evolution. It recognizes that ethnomusicologists are citizens of the world with social responsibilities, and that our professional organization has not only the right but also the duty to represent the profession’s ethical beliefs and act upon them.

In 1975, a documentary film about hunting, Ultime grida dalla savana (internationally known as Savage Man Savage Beast) was released. The authors intended to document the phenomenon of hunting in different spatial and cultural contexts. The viewers can see not only animals hunting animals and humans hunting animals, but also animals hunting humans, and finally, humans hunting humans. The scenes in which lions eat a tourist and in which humans mutilate the bodies of caught humans were received with particular controversy. The filmmakers Antonio Climati and Mario Morra were filming all the scenes with the clear attitude of detached observers, documenting the multifaceted footage in the domain of their professional interest and showing no intention whatsoever to intervene. The basic symbolic standpoint of this film brings up a number of useful questions concerning the attitudes in the field of ethnomusicology in its both temporal and spatial contexts, and highlights the stance of intervention in positioning applied ethnomusicology.⁵

The stance of the above-mentioned filmmakers reflects the attitude prevalent in the ethnomusicological mainstream within the past decades, which can be summarized in the following way: studying music as it is, not as a researcher or anybody else would want it to be. I vividly recall an example from my doctoral studies at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, in which the professor pointed out a music producer of an African music CD, who insisted on removal of those parts from the musical instrument that were responsible for the production of a buzzing sound. The producer’s opinion was that the recording without them would be more pleasing to the ears of international audiences, which would consequently increase the profit expected from the final product. Of course, such an uninformed and disrespectful intervention into the aesthetics of the musicians invoked laughter and criticism among the students, with no need for further discussion. The question, which I considered essential, that is, whether “those who know” (us, the ethnomusicologists) would actually consider making a step beyond the level of an academic debate and try to intervene, by providing the ignorant producer who misused his power over the musicians with arguments against his action, was left unanswered.

The two cases (the film and the CD producer), extreme as they are, raise at least two useful points:

As will be discussed later, definitions may vary according to the parameters such as time, place, research tradition, and individual preference, but the essence is captured in the wording created and accepted at the 39th World Conference of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) in Vienna in 2007, suggesting that “[a]‌pplied ethnomusicology is the approach guided by principles of social responsibility, which extends the usual academic goal of broadening and deepening knowledge and understanding toward solving concrete problems and toward working both inside and beyond typical academic contexts.” Characterization of the ICTM Study Group on Applied Ethnomusicology that follows provides further clarification, suggesting that it “advocates the use of ethnomusicological knowledge in influencing social interaction and course of cultural change.”

The introduction to the book Applied Ethnomusicology: Historical and Contemporary Approaches (Harrison, Mackinlay, and Pettan, 2010) analyzes this definition part by part and also addresses three common misconceptions about applied ethnomusicology, which are worth mentioning in this context:

The introductory article to the above-mentioned volume ends with a quotation of Michael Birenbaum Quintero: “Apply your ethnomusicology or someone else will apply it for you,” which once again points to intervention as a key notion.

There is a rich myriad of opinions about applied ethnomusicology among ethnomusicologists worldwide, from those who claim that all ethnomusicology is in fact applied, to those who feel that applied ethnomusicology does not enjoy necessary respect within the academic discipline and therefore should not be discussed at all. It is easy to agree with Daniel Sheehy’s belief that “all ethnomusicologists have at one time or another been applied ethnomusicologists” (Sheehy, 1992: 323). But “applied ethnomusicology as a conscious practice,” says Sheehy, “begins with a sense of purpose, a purpose larger than the advancement of knowledge about the music of the world’s peoples” (ibid.). This is why I started my part of this Introduction with the crucial question of intervention, or in other words, with the conscious decision-making of a researcher whether or not to step beyond the mere study of the selected phenomenon and affect the researched circumstances. It is the sense of purpose, rather than any specific topic, that defines applied ethnomusicology. There are “sensitive topics,” such as, for instance, the roles of music in the Israeli/Palestinian divide, in which the author of the book (for whatever reason) does not even mention applied ethnomusicology (see Brinner, 2009), and there are seemingly “neutral” topics, for instance the lullabies in Slovenia, which are from their initial conceptualization “applied,” thanks to the author’s strategic intention to incite change with them (for more, see Juvančič, 2010).

There are many more or less known individuals, organizations, projects, and publications known for promoting the use of music for the betterment of human condition. Their work, though inspiring, if not rooted in ethnomusicological research should not be considered “applied ethnomusicology.” Venezuelan musician, activist, economist, and politician José Antonio Abreu and his El Sistema, Argentinian/Israeli/German pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim and his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, Irish musicians and activists Bob Geldof (Live Aid) and Bono (ONE Campaign), Musicians Without Borders, Young at Heart, Studio MC Pavarotti, most articles in the journals such as Music and Arts in Action and Sounds in Europe are just a few examples, among many more.

Some ethnomusicologists express concern about the power imbalance in projects that fit within the realm of applied ethnomusicology (e.g., Hofman, 2010). The title of my first conference paper on the topic, presented in 1995, started exactly with the same notion: “Ethnomusicologist as a Power Holder?” The sentence with the question mark looks even more bizarre in the light of Deborah Wong’s reminder that “[e]‌thnomusicology is marginalized in most music departments because its radical relativism challenges logocentric thinking about music” (2013: 348). In my conference presentation, based on the work with Bosnian refugees in Norway (see below), I addressed the issue of power share with the participants in, to the extent possible, equal, horizontal terms. The (later) article by Samuel Araújo and members of the Grupo Musicultura (2006), inspired by Paolo Freire’s dialogical pedagogy (1970), is a good example of the same intention. There is, however, the other side of the coin, which should not be overlooked. If a certain kind of knowledge and/or access to power holders in a society for the benefit of the people in need is the comparative advantage of an ethnomusicologist, and there is a consensus between the interlocutors and the ethnomusicologist that he or she should use it, I can hardly think of counterarguments. This is how Antony Seeger benefited the Suyá community in Brazil and Ursula Hemetek the Roma people in Austria. In Harris M. Berger’s words, one should be aware of the dual nature of power:

Power is, in one sense, the power to act, the ability to bring forth events in the world. But because our action is always social—always something we achieve because of and with others, past, present, future—the potential for domination is inherent, even ripe, in the entirety of social life, and even the most mundane, equitable, or convivial practice is informed by larger social contexts and the legacies of domination that they entail. This is as true of practices of music making, teaching, research or public sector work as it is of any other kind of activity. Seeing the social life of music as a domain of coordinated practice that is inherently, rather than contingently, political is one way of coming to terms with these difficult issues.

(Berger, 2014: 319).

Just as Salwa El-Shawan Castelo-Branco did in her Epilogue to the seminal volume Music and Conflict (O’Connell and Castelo-Branco, 2010), let me add to this Introduction a personal stance that should define my own position.

In my opinion, every scholar should be free to decide whether to make a step beyond the usual goal of deepening and broadening knowledge, understanding and skills, and consciously intervene into the human and cultural environment of his or her research interest. While doing fieldwork in the 1980s on the East African islands of Zanzibar and Pemba for my B.A. thesis (University of Zagreb, Croatia) and in Egypt for my M.A. thesis (University of Ljubljana, Slovenia), my clear intention was to affect the self-focused folk music research in what was Yugoslavia at the time and to relate it to the much larger international community of ethnomusicologists, which I was learning about mainly from the periodicals (Yearbook for Traditional Music, Ethnomusicology, The World of Music). My goal was clearly not the mere scholarly work based on the data from elsewhere in the world, but the conscious intervention into the essence of the discipline as it was understood in my home country at that time.

Between my B.A. and M.A. studies, I was obliged to serve for a year in the Yugoslav People’s Army. Following my research interests, I asked the military authorities in Croatia to be sent to serve in the multicultural city of Prizren in far-away Kosovo, which was the most politically unstable part of what was Yugoslavia in the early 1980s. After becoming the instructor for cultural affairs, I came to the position not only to conduct fieldwork (by using a military tape recorder), but also to take it a step further: to bring regularly together youngsters from different ethnic communities and fellow soldiers into a choir. Obviously, research was beneficial to the work with the choir, and contacts established through the choir activities had a positive impact on my research.

Following the end of my doctoral studies (University of Maryland) in 1992, I was faced with the dilemma of whether to try to find a position in the safety of American academia or to return to my disintegrating, war-torn country. I decided once again to cross the boundary of intervention and use my capacities not only to study “music and war at home,” but also to explore whether my knowledge, understanding, and skills could in any way confront the growing hatred and help reducing the suffering of the people affected by the war. My interlocutors in Croatia were highly unusual for any type of ethnomusicological inquiry known to me at that time: they included refugees and internally displaced people, soldiers, people in shelters, representatives of NGOs, radio editors, producers and sellers of music cassettes under both official and black market circumstances, members of the diasporas, and nonetheless musicians—amateur and professional, representatives of diverse musical genres and with diverse political orientations. Popular music was at the forefront, but my research encompassed folk and art music, as well. What was the essence of my intervention beyond the limits of research? My ethnomusicology students in both Zagreb and Ljubljana received assignments to work on joint performances with refugees in refugee camps in order to develop a sense of compassion and togetherness, and their seminar projects—for instance, one about music in various local religious communities at the time of political calls for unification (one ethnicity, one religion, one language, one territory)—clearly aimed for more than a mere broadening and deepening of knowledge.

Invited to teach for a term at the University of Oslo in Norway in the mid-1990s, I took the opportunity to implement a project, together with my senior host Professor Kjell Skyllstad. A few years earlier he envisioned and carried out a project named The Resonant Community (Skyllstad, 1993), the first case in my experience that had all elements of an applied ethnomusicology project. In the period from 1989 to 1992 music of various origins (African, Asian, European, and Latin American) had been successfully used in some elementary schools in Norway in order to foster “interracial understanding.” Included and affected by this project were the teachers, pupils, and their parents, for whom teaching kits were created; some of the best musicians from four continents shared their arts with them. The evaluated and confirmed impact of The Resonant Community inspired us to put together the Azra project, an innovative proactive attempt, with the focus on Bosnian refugee musicians and Norwegian music students, which has been already presented elsewhere (e.g., Pettan, 1996; Skyllstad, 1997; Pettan, 2010), and thus not need to be described here. Therefore, I will dedicate just a few words to its methodological aspects.

I believe the Azra project fits into what Sheehy refers to as “conscious practice” and “sense of purpose.” It is a “horizontal” (not “top-down”) project, driven by the clear wish for intervention by well-intended scholars and their collaborators who together, in Angosino’s words, “had a concern for using their knowledge for the betterment of the human condition” (Angrosino, 1990: 106). The goals of the project were as follows: (1) strengthening Bosnian cultural identity among the refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina in Norway, and (2) stimulating mutually beneficial cross-cultural communication between the Bosnians and the Norwegians involved. The project was envisioned as a triangle consisting of three principal domains: research, education, and music-making. Its realization was carried on in four stages: (1) recognition of the problem and definition of the goals and basic strategies; (2) collection and analysis of data, plus refinement of the strategies; (3) intervention; and (4) evaluation of the results.

Work on this project made me aware of two distinctive types of mediation, which I termed indirect and direct. Indirect mediation means that the scholar gives the results of his or her research to those in a position to apply them. Direct mediation means that scholar himself or herself actively participates in the application of scholarly knowledge, understanding, and skills. Skyllstad and I used both categories in the Azra project. While mediating indirectly through conference papers, lectures, articles, and interviews, using the synthesis of empirical fieldwork and relevant literature to encourage other people to act, we reached the limits with no insight into the consequences of our involvement. Direct mediation proved to be more useful and far-reaching. For instance, within the Azra project, Skyllstad and I were able to shape its goals and contents, observe its flow and modify it when needed, and evaluate all its stages, including the final results.

My series of publications in different formats (books, articles, CD-ROM, film), accompanied by proactive lectures and picture exhibitions (all dedicated to Roma people, largely silenced victims of the war in Kosovo in the 1990s), can be seen as yet another application of ethnomusicological knowledge, understanding, and skills. The publications include those with scholarly rigor and those aimed at communication with general audiences (more in Pettan, 2010). One of the professional involvements that I highly value, but have never written an article about, is my role in the advisory committee at the Slovenian annual state review titled “Let’s sing, let’s play musical instruments, let’s dance” for children and youngsters with special needs.

To summarize, like many other fellow ethnomusicologists, I am involved in projects of public interest. Not everything I do in ethnomusicology has an applied extension. In my invited lectures on applied ethnomusicology, I often encourage scholars in the audience to think of research that goes beyond the broadening and deepening of knowledge in the direction of benefiting the people they study. Some become inspired, while others simply do not want to think in these terms. And it is right to be so. For me, this is the clear line between ethnomusicology and applied ethnomusicology.

It is a common practice that scientific and scholarly disciplines have their applied domains. To mention just some, there are applied mathematics, applied physics, applied biology, applied geography, applied sociology, applied anthropology, and then (surprisingly seldom) applied musicology, partly substituted by the category of applied music. If hydrology, for instance, is the study of water and encompasses “the interrelationships of geologic materials and processes of water” (Fetter, 2001: 3), then “applied hydrogeologists are problem solvers and decision makers. They identify a problem, define the data needs, design a field program for collection of data, propose alternative solutions to the problem, and implement the preferred solutions” (ibid., 11). Applied sociology refers to “any use of the sociological perspective and/or its tools in the understanding of, intervention in, and/or enhancement human social life” (Price and Steele, 2004), while applied anthropology refers to “any use of anthropological knowledge to influence social interaction, to maintain or change social institutions, or to direct the course of cultural change” (Spradley and McCurdy, 2000: 355).

Curiously, neither the International Musicological Society nor the American Musicological Society have sections focused on applied musicology. UCLA musicologist Elisabeth Le Guin points out that the reason might be that “in the institutional structure of the discipline’s most prestigious academic society,⁹ a stigma lingers around the idea of ‘putting music to use,’ as the SEM describes applied ethnomusicology: a ghost of the old idea, coeval in its origins with my undergraduates’ obdurately anti-verbal Romanticism, that music should amount to something more than its use-value” (LeGuin 2012; http://ethnomusicologyreview.ucla.edu/journal/volume/17/piece/599).

A recent book with applied musicology in its title refers to “using zygonic theory to inform music education, therapy, and psychology research” (Ockelford, 2013). According to The Oxford Companion to Music, applied music is an American term for a course in performance studies, as opposed to theory.

It is worth inquiring about the independent scientific and scholarly societies that have the adjective “applied” in their names, which implies that they have already answered the “ultimate aim” in Merriam’s terms, that is, whether “one is searching out knowledge for its own sake, or is attempting to provide solutions to practical applied problems” (Merriam, 1964: 42–43) in favor of the latter. In general, “applied societies” are international and are far from being small outfits of the main disciplinary bodies; some count their members in the thousands.¹⁰ Although the aims of these societies are defined in the disciplinarily determined ways, the great majority of them make clear that they promote the outcomes of their disciplines with the intention that the public benefits from their efforts.¹¹ This is particularly clearly emphasized by the Society for Applied Anthropology, active since 1941, whose “unifying factor is a commitment to making an impact on the quality of life in the world” (www.sfaa.net).

It is quite fascinating to observe engaged scholarship within the Australian ethnomusicological realm, from Catherine Ellis (1985) to the newest books of Grace Koch (2013) and Catherine Grant (2014). High ethical stands and participatory work promoted by the research institutions focused on indigenous people of Australia, such as Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), as well as the active/activist involvement in Aboriginal rights issue by several leading Australian ethnomusicologists, provide inspiring lessons for applied ethnomusicologists worldwide (see Newsome, 2008). The contributions by Elisabeth Mackinlay (Chapter 11), Dan Bendrups (Chapter 1), and Huib Schippers (Chapter 4) in this volume make a strong Australian contribution to the applied work with the Aborigines, other minorities, and carriers of music cultures in various parts of the globe.

“The practice of ethnomusicology has been central in the professional lives of ethnomusicologists in Southeast Asia,” claims Tan Sooi Beng in her article about activism in Southeast Asian ethnomusicology, pointing to a project of empowerment of youth in Penang, Malaysia, to revitalize traditions and bridge cultural barriers (2008: 69). For her, and for many colleagues elsewhere in Asia, to be an ethnomusicologist means not only involvement in scholarly activities such as teaching, documenting, publishing, and organizing conferences, but also application of the ethnomusicological knowledge toward solving particular cultural problems “so as to bring about change in their respective societies” (ibid.: 70). Terada Yoshitaka provides yet another good example of sensitive work in various formats (e.g., 2005, 2008, 2010, 2011). In this volume, Tan and Zhang Boyu present Asian views and approaches from within, while John Morgan O’Connell, Joshua Pilzer, and Zoe Sherinian complement them from outside, covering at least some other parts of the world’s largest continent.

Practical aspects of ethnomusicology are very much present in Africa, too, from indigenous teaching approaches to music education, preservation of cultural roots, building of musical instruments, to diverse uses of music against xenophobia and prejudices related to HIV/AIDS. The work of Daniel Avorgbedor (1992), Angela Impey (2002), Bernhard Bleibinger (2010), Kathleen Van Burren (2010), along with Andrew Tracey, David Dargie, and Patricia Opondo, to mention just a few, points to a rich diversity of approaches. In this volume, Jeffrey Summitt and Brian Schrag provide their own views and experiences in applied ethnomusicology in Africa.

South America is certainly the site of some of the major ongoing developments in applied ethnomusicology. This is the case thanks to two extraordinary thinkers in the field, Brazilian Samuel Araújo and US-based Anthony Seeger, whose particularly important work and scholarly formation is related to Brazil. Araújo intends “to highlight the political substance and epistemological consequences of new research contexts and roles as one area with potentially ground-breaking contributions toward the emergence of a more balanced social world, i.e. one in which knowledge will hopefully emerge from a truly horizontal, intercultural dialogue and not through top-to-bottom neo-colonial systems of validation” (Araújo, 2008: 14). Seeger’s work could justifiably be discussed in any geographic context, as his articles and keynote addresses resound on all continents (2006, 2008). In this volume, dedicated US ethnomusicologist Holly Wissler demonstrates how applied ethnomusicological projects affect two South American communities, one in the Andes, and the other in the Amazon.

Maureen Loughran noted that some leading ethnomusicologists in the North American context, such as Alan P. Merriam (1964), Mantle Hood (1971), and Bruno Nettl (1964, 1983) largely ignored the work of applied ethnomusicologists while presenting the major developments within the discipline.¹² The co-editor of this volume, Jeff Todd Titon, has presented in Section 1 of this Introduction the history of ethnomusicology in North America from his perspective, as he lived and lives it, adding previously unknown aspects and enriching the general understanding of the discipline. Besides him, several other authors refer to various extents to applied ethnomusicology in the North American contexts, including Klisala Harrison, Jeffrey Summitt, Michael Bakan, Susan Oehler Herrick, Patricia Shehan Campbell, Clifford Murphy, and Alan Williams.

My own firsthand experiences are largely linked to Europe, where I was born and where I live and practice ethnomusicology. This is why the following section will be about Europe. The authors linked in various ways to Europe in this volume include Ursula Hemetek, Erica Haskell, Britta Sweers, Lee Higgins, and Dan Lundberg.

The fact that there is no single, ultimate definition of ethnomusicology suggests that we may consider the coexistence of ethnomusicologies, not only in different parts of the world, but also within a single, no matter how small, location. For instance, while I may find the definition proposed by my US colleague Jeff Todd Titon (“the study of people making music”) acceptable, my Slovenian colleague, folklorist Marko Terseglav, defines it very differently, as “a discipline, researching spontaneous folk vocal and instrumental music, its characteristics and development” (Terseglav, 2004: 124).

In a sharp contrast to Vienna in neighboring Austria, which figures as one of the two cradles of comparative musicology¹³ and is at the same time home to the lasting legacy of folk music research, ethnomusicology in Slovenia is rooted exclusively in folk music research. Table I.1 points to the major distinctions between the two and relates them to the current ethnomusicological mainstream.¹⁴

In an article, in which she compares the features of comparative musicology and folk music research in Vienna in the early twentieth century, Ursula Hemetek points to some other important distinctions, for instance, recording with phonograph by the former and notation by ear by the latter; music as text with no context versus music as text with context; interdisciplinarity related mainly to natural sciences versus interdisciplinarity related mainly to humanities; and (particularly important in this context) the association of comparative musicology with the academia-based “ivory tower” versus folk music research’s “highly motivated volunteers outside academia” and application of (research) results (Hemetek, 2009: 62).

The multitude of languages and nation-state ideologies affected research within the European space differently than in North America and Australia. By far, not all of the European countries came under the umbrella of comparative musicology, but all contributed to the legacy of folk music research. Distinctive developments of the discipline in politically, geographically, historically, demographically, economically, linguistically, religiously, and nevertheless culturally diverse national contexts within Europe inspired studies that testify primarily about the specifics of European ethnomusicologies; put together, they enable comparisons and insights into common features. Interestingly, with a few exceptions (e.g., Clausen, Hemetek, and Saether, 2009; Ling, 1999), Europe was encompassed as a whole primarily by ethnomusicologists from North America (e.g., in Bohlman, 1996, 2004; Rice, Porter, and Goertzen, 2000). Some authors discussed them within the theoretical frame of nationalism (e.g., Bohlman, 2011), some pointed to the shared developmental periods (e.g., Elschek, 1991); yet others inverted the historical trends by placing those seen in Europe a century ago as the inferior Others (Roma and Jews; comp. Wallaschek, 1893) to the forefront of contemporary Europe by naming them “transnational ethnic groups” (Rice, Porter, and Goertzen, 2000).

In the post–Cold War Europe of the 1990s, national ethnomusicologies received considerable attention, including those of Denmark (Koudal et al., 1993), Finland (Moisala et al., 1994), Latvia (Boiko, 1994), Italy (Giuriati, 1995), Spain (Marti, 1997), Croatia (Pettan et al., 1998), and many more. This research trend continued in the 2000s, as reflected in the symposium National Ethnomusicologies: The European Perspective (Cardiff University, 2007) and the plenary roundtable under the same name at the ICTM World Conference (Vienna, 2007), both organized by one of the authors in this volume, John Morgan O’Connell.

Let us now take a closer look at the micro-plan of Croatia and Slovenia, since 1992 two neighboring independent European countries, which spent the period of the formation of ethnomusicology first as the parts of the multiethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire (1867–1918), and then as the constituent parts of what later became known as Yugoslavia. As in many other parts of Europe, ethnomusicology in Croatia and Slovenia grew from the national awakening of the nineteenth century and the sense of importance of a nation’s “own” folk song for the creation and affirmation of national identity. The characteristic procedure, through the first half of the twentieth century, included extensive fieldwork, notation and analysis of the collected songs, publishing collections, and writing syntheses based on the analysis of collected materials. The aim was to define specific national features, different from those of the neighboring peoples, which would in turn provide the basis for the development of national culture. In Croatia, the key figures, such as Franjo Kuhač (1834–1911) and Božidar Širola (1889–1956), were musicians, to whom the novelties in the field of comparative musicology were known. Kuhač was interested in collecting and writing about folk songs of South Slavs (not exclusively Croats), comparing their features with those of non-Slavs (Germans, Italians, Turks). Širola, himself a composer, even earned a doctorate under the mentorship of comparative musicologist Robert Lach in Vienna, and used comparative methodological procedures in dealing with Croatian folk music. In the Slovenian cultural space, at about the same time, the initiative was taken by two widely trained linguists with Viennese doctorates and an interest in ethnology: Karel Štrekelj (1859–1912) and Matija Murko (1861–1952). Just like their predecessors, as far back as the late eighteenth century, they focused primarily on language in the folk songs. In contrast to Štrekelj’s emphasis on Slovenian repertoire, Murko did research (with phonograph) of sung epic poetry in Bosnia, as well.

The next generations of principal researchers included Vinko Žganec (1890–1976) and Jerko Bezić (1929–2010) in Croatia, and France Marolt (1891–1952) and Zmaga Kumer (1924–2008) in Slovenia. Žganec, doctor of law and musician, and Marolt, himself a musician, were typical representatives of folk music research in a cultural historic sense, who institutionalized the discipline in Croatia and Slovenia, respectively. Kumer and Bezić earned their doctorates within the discipline. In contrast to Kumer, who became one of Europe’s best and latest representatives of the folk music research domain, Bezić was systematically broadening the scope of ethnomusicology in Croatia by opening the space for research of urban music phenomena and in general of influences from abroad. Thanks to the interaction with his multidisciplinary institutional colleagues in Zagreb, influenced by both American (e.g., Alan Dundes, Dan Ben Amos) and Russian (Kiril Chistov) folklorists, he defined the subject of ethnomusicology as the so-called “folklore music,” referring to musical communication in small groups (more in Marošević, 1998). The next (current) generation of ethnomusicologists in both countries is actively involved in what can be called mainstream ethnomusicology.

Within what was Yugoslavia, practically each constituent republic had its own “school of ethnomusicology,” with unquestionable commonalities, but also distinctive features. Each of these “schools” was thematically focused primarily on the material from within its own political unit and its own people in the ethnic sense. While the folk music research paradigm was the unquestionable basis, each “school” had a different stance toward the developments of ethnomusicology elsewhere and used the results of the “mainstream” at different paces.

Aware of the discrepancy caused by the lack of comparative musicology at home and even more by the lack of their own interest in studying the Others, Serbian ethnomusicologists decided to translate, with a considerable delay, two books rooted in comparative musicology. The translation of Fritz Bose’s Musikalische Völkerkunde (1953) was published in 1975, and Curt Sachs’s The Rise of Music in the Ancient World East and West (1943) as late as 1980 (Saks 1980).¹⁵ These books became a window to “folk music from other parts of the world” for generations of students of ethnomusicology in Serbia. The translation of John Blacking’s How Musical Is Man? (1973) was intended to be a contribution to/from the Sarajevo “school” in Bosnia-Herzegovina (Bleking, 1992).¹⁶ In Slovenia, the translations include Curt Sachs’s Eine Weltgeschichte des Tanzes (1933) in 1996, Roberto Leydi’s L’ altra musica (1991) in 1995, and Alan P. Merriam’s The Anthropology of Music (1964) in 2000. The other “schools” felt self-sufficient and did not translate any foreign books with a wider scope of the discipline.

According to Bohlman, “Folk music and folk song as objects have not disappeared from the practices of European musicians and scholars, but have instead provided them with complex ways of connecting tradition to modernity, and of emblematizing the past in the present” (1996: 106). Elschek suggests that in this process, “cooperation with anthropology and ethnology has been more successful than with historical musicology” (1991: 101).

One could argue whether various colonial expositions and other showcases involving comparative musicologists should be identified as a part of the early history of applied ethnomusicology and to what extent comparative musicology in general contributed to the “public sector” of the discipline.¹⁷ At the same time, it is clear that the other branch of European ethnomusicology—folk music research—was throughout the previous century linked to the applied domain. The principal goal of many folk music researchers, that of protection of their national heritage, implied practical application of their findings. Besides scholarly procedures that usually included field research, transcription, analysis, archiving, and publication, they often actively engaged in the popularization of folk music and dance. Important channels for this were state-sponsored folklore ensembles in Eastern Europe and less formalized revival ensembles in Western Euruope. Ethnomusicologists assumed various roles in these processes: providing the ensembles with musics and dances collected in the field, writing musical arrangements and/or choreographies, singing, playing instruments and/or dancing, leading the ensembles, and touring with them.

An increasing influx of immigrants in Western Europe in the second half of the twentieth century gradually raised interest in their musical cultures among ethnomusicologists. In addition to important studies on immigrant musics (e.g., Ronström, 1991) and cultural policies (Baumann, 1991), several ethnomusicologists, particularly in Sweden, became involved in applied projects such as the Ethno camp for young musicians in Falun and music-making within the ensembles such as the Orientexpressen.¹⁸ In Norway, Kjell Skyllstad initiated the above-mentioned three-year project named The Resonant Community in several elementary schools in the Oslo area in 1989, bringing together ethnomusicology and music education in paving the way to better appreciation between Norwegians and the immigrants from Africa, Asia, and Latin America through their respective musics (Skyllstad, 1993). Multicultural education, which in the United States “grew out of the ferment of the civil rights movement of the 1960s” (Banks and McGee Banks, 2001: 5), gradually became recognized and also debated in Europe. Krister Malm was actively involved in two relevant events in the 1990s: the European Music Council’s conference Aspects on Music and Multiculturalism in Falun in 1995 (Malm et al., 1995)¹⁹ and in the first world conference on music and censorship in Copenhagen in 1998, where the organization Freemuse was established (Korpe and Reitov, 1998). Ursula Hemetek was beginning applied work with various minorities in Austria (Hemetek, 1996), which would later lead to official political recognition of the Romani people in Austria (Hemetek, 2006). My applied work with refugees from Bosnia-Herzegovina in Norway, Croatia, and Slovenia, with the internally displaced victims of the war in Croatia, and with Romani victims of the war in Kosovo has been presented earlier.

In 2003 Italian ethnomusicologists organized the ninth international seminar in ethnomusicology in Venice, titled Applied Ethnomusicology: Perspectives and Problems. While recognizing that “setting up museums, service within administration of colonial empires, organization of concerts, divulgence by means of publication of writings and recordings”… were part of the professional profile of comparative musicologists at the beginnings of the 20th century, they also noticed recent “significant developments” and pointed to issues such as intercultural education, music in relation to diaspora, immigration, and refugees, “spectacularization” of traditional music, and cultural cooperation projects.²⁰ One of the curiosities of this seminar is the absence of folk music research.

The further conference-related developments of applied ethnomusicology in Europe are largely linked to the framework of the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM). They will be systematically presented later in this text.

Let us now, just as in the previous section, turn our attention to the micro-plan of Croatia and Slovenia in order to discuss the stances of the most representative Croatian and Slovenian researchers toward application. Certainly, the publication of national folk song collections was not the final aim of the researchers. Either the early musically trained researchers themselves or other musicians harmonized (e.g., Kuhač) or otherwise “improved” the songs in order to create nationally distinctive art music. Marolt was known for arranging the collected songs for his acclaimed choir and for adjusting the collected dances for the staged performances by his own and other folklore ensembles. Application was somehow seen as a natural extension of research by many of these early ethnomusicologists. In fact, Jerko Bezić in Croatia and Zmaga Kumer in Slovenia were the first ones who restrained from applications, trying “to affirm ethnomusicology as an autonomous discipline based on fieldwork, theorizing, evidence and debate, detaching it from requisite utilitarity” (the original quotation is referring to Bezić only; Ceribašić, 2004: 6).²¹ Today’s ethnomusicologists in both countries complement their research activities by serving in juries at the reviews of folklore preformances at local, regional, and national levels; serving in the organization of festivals, symposia, and other discipline-related events; Croatians are involved in the UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage agendas..

Staff at the research institutes in both Zagreb and Ljubljana comprises specialists in several disciplines, including ethnochoreologists. Inspired by the developments in applied ethnomusicology, at least one researcher, Tvrtko Zebec, theorizes about applied ethnochoreology (Zebec, 2007). Joško Ćaleta, an ethnomusicologist in Zagreb, in whose work research and performing applications are closely intertwined, claims that applied activities are often paying his research activities (interview, July 14, 2014), which is a meaningful point to be taken into consideration.

This section ends with a complementing view from the other side of Europe, from the United Kingdom. In the words of Kathleen Van Buren, “Ethnomusicologists need to think more deeply about how to serve others, not just ourselves, through our work. This means listening to people within communities where we live and work, allowing their perspectives to help guide our choice of our topics and activities, trying to collaborate and respond to their needs when we can, and empowering them rather than ourselves” (2010: 219).

Perhaps the most efficient access to applied ethnomusicology in the global arena is through the principal international association of ethnomusicologists, which is the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM), with current representation in more than 100 countries and regions on all continents. The association was established in London in 1947 under the name International Folk Music Council (IFMC). We should keep in mind that the establishment of IFMC precedes Kunst’s book Musicologica: A Study of the Nature of Ethno-musicology, Its Problems, Methods, and Representative Personalities (1950) and the wide acceptance of the term ethnomusicology that followed.²² It was an era of comparative musicology and folk music research paradigms, which were affecting each other in various ways and to various extents in various places.

IFMC’s roots are clearly in the folk music research paradigm, which is evident from the following description:

In her capacity as Honourable Secretary of the International (Advisory) Folk Dance Council, Maud Karpeles (1885–1976) organized the International Conference on Folk Song and Folk Dance, held at the Belgian Institute in London, 22–27 September 1947. Delegates from twenty-eight countries participated, mostly appointed by the governments of their respective nations, as well as a UNESCO representative…. On the afternoon of Monday, 22 September 1947, the Vice Chairman of the conference, Stuart Wilson (1889–1966), proposed “that an International Folk Music Council be formed.”

(www.ictmusic.org; see also Karpeles, 1971).

The article in which Karpeles offered her reflections on the 21 years of existence of the Council says a lot about its intellectual climate, including the sentences “In all parts of the world the traditional practice of folk music is disappearing—gradually in some regions and rapidly in others—and if we are to save our musical heritage for the benefit of our own and future generations, it is necessary to act quickly. Collecting activities are, of course, being carried on, but these must be intensified if precious material is not to be lost. As the saying goes, ‘It is later than we think’ ” (Karpeles, 1971: 29). The attitudes of this kind were later largely discredited in the mainstream of the discipline as “salvage ethnomusicology,” pointing to “romanticism, paternalism, and hegemony” (see also Grant, 2014: 80). Cultural relativism and the absence of value judgments became, at different paces in different parts of the world, the sine qua non of modern ethnomusicology.²³

The objectives of IFMC were the following: (1) to assist in the preservation, dissemination, and practice of the folk music of all countries; (2) to further the comparative study of folk music; and (3) to promote understanding and friendship between nations through the common interest of folk music.²⁴ What matters particularly from the point of view of applied ethnomusicology, besides the applied overtones in the presented objectives, is the envisioned work of the newly established Council. The list of proposals included “the holding of conferences and festivals; the publication of a catalogue of recordings, bibliographies, a manual for collectors, and an international collection of folk songs; the promotion of national and international archives; the institution of a general method of dance notations; and the development of a guide to the classification of folk tunes” (Karpeles, 1971: 17). In the course of 1950s and 1960s, IFMC indeed published several catalogues, bibliographies, dictionaries, manuals, collections, statements, and songbooks. In order to accomplish these aims, the structure of IFMC included not only National Committees, but also the Radio Committee, Folk Dance Committee, and more, the names being subject to change from time to time.

The intention of the IFMC in the post–World War II years was to bring together composers, researchers, and other specialists interested in folk music and dance into a truly international association; even the intention to be related to UNESCO was there from the very inception of the Council. Maud Karpeles’s principal source of inspiration was Cecil Sharp, the founding father of folklore revival in England in the beginning of the twentieth century. Within the newly established Council she became secretary under the presidency of Ralph Vaughn Williams, renowned art music composer and English folk song collector. Members of the first Executive Board likewise included various specialists—by far, not all of them researchers—each from a different country. While referring to legacies of the previous editors, the new editor of the Yearbook of the IFMC, Bruno Nettl, noted their determination to “present scholarship of the highest quality and to exhibit samples of what was emanating from research carried on in all parts of the world” and that “[s]‌cholars from the many nations and cultures of the world do not always think, study, and write in the same style, and the editor of an international publication must tread the thin line between rigid standardization and chaotic diversity” (Nettl, 1974: 7). He intended to broaden the coverage of research to those parts of the world that had not been represented in the Yearbook and its predecessor the Journal of IFMC thus far.

A particularly important shift that must be mentioned here is the change of the name of the Council after more than three decades of its existence, strongly argued within a heated discussion by the new Secretary General Dieter Christensen at the 26th World Conference in Seoul, Republic of Korea, in 1981. Erich Stockmann recalls the consequences of this change: “It worked like magic and opened up doors in regions where the word ‘folk music’ had a somewhat pejorative ring” (Stockmann, 1988: 8).²⁵ The immediate result was new members in countries on all continents (see also H. M., 1983: 3).

The current official presentation of ICTM ends up with the sentence significant for this Introduction: “By means of its wide international representation and the activities of its Study Groups, the International Council for Traditional Music acts as a bond among peoples of different cultures and thus serves the peace of humankind.” The year 1947 marked the start of both the Council and the Cold War period. Until the end of the Cold War in 1991, ICTM was actively involved in crossing the political, administrative, economic, lingual, cultural, and other boundaries set by the two military alliances, while also including in its framework those countries that proclaimed themselves “neutral” and “nonaligned.” The Council authorities, including the Presidents, were from any of these politically delineated territories, and the World Conferences, Study Group Symposia, and Colloquia were intentionally taking place in all four of them (NATO, the Warsaw Pact, Neutral, Nonaligned).

Let me document this practice with two extraordinary examples. The first of them takes us to a symposium on Traditional Music in Asian Countries, organized as a joint venture with the International Music Council in 1983. The symposium took place in Pyongyang, DPR Korea, and was attended by scholars from Afghanistan, China, India, Indonesia, Japan, DPR Korea, Mongolia, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, the USSR, and PR Yemen. The second example refers to the 28th World Conference, hosted jointly by Stockholm (Sweden) and Helsinki (Finland). Its closing ceremony took place on the other side of the Iron Curtain, in Leningrad (USSR; today’s St. Peterburg in Russia). The older members of the Council are aware of this legacy and for a good reason proud of it.

Out of the total of 42 World Conferences, 17 took place outside Europe: two in Africa (Ghana, South Africa), six in Asia (Israel, Republic of Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, twice in China), five in North America (three in the US, two in Canada), one in Central America (Jamaica), two in South America (Brazil), and one in Australia. Of those taking place in Europe, four took place in the countries on the Eastern side of the Iron Curtain (Romania, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, German Democratic Republic), one in the nonaligned Yugoslavia, and six in the neutral countries Switzerland, Austria (twice), Finland and Sweden (jointly). The sites of smaller-size IFMC/ICTM gatherings, such as the Colloquia and Symposia of the Study Groups, point to the inclusion of many more countries from the world’s political spectrum (e.g., Cuba, Oman, Tunisia). Serving as a communicational channel across any boundaries continues to be the conscious strategy of the Council, which justifies the view that the Council itself is a project in applied ethnomusicology. The ongoing enlargement of the ICTM World Network is a part of the same frame of thought.

Despite its international aspirations, IFMC was for a long time considered a primarily European association. Europe was the place of its foundation and residence, and Europe was home to most of its members, conferences,²⁶ and publications²⁷—even “folk music” in its name was largely seen as a European marker. As suggested earlier, the name change from “folk” (IFMC) to “traditional” (ICTM) broadened the acceptability of the Council worldwide in the 1980s. The current frame of interests within the ICTM clearly exceeds “traditional” music, but the name of the Council remains the same, for better or worse.²⁸

Search for the first mention of applied ethnomusicology in any ICTM context led to the 27th World Conference in 1983 in New York, where Ghanaian ethnomusicologist Daniel Avorgbedor presented a paper titled “The Effects of Rural-Urban Migration on a Village Musical Culture: Some Implications for Applied Ethnomusicology.”²⁹ The next instance took place six years later, at the 30th World Conference in 1989 in Schladming (Austria), where German ethnomusicologist Artur Simon presented his paper “The Borneo Music Documentation Project (Northern Nigeria). Aspects of Documentation, Field Research in Africa, and Applied Ethnomusicology.”

The author of the first mention of applied ethnomusicology in the Bulletin of the ICTM was John Baily. In his report on the UK National Committee, he included the following, published in April 1988:

Members of ICTM UK have a particular interest in music in the multi- (or inter-) cultural school curriculum, and we have established a sub-committee to look into the question of teaching resources available in the UK… . With the same objectives we are represented on the UK Council for Music Education and Training, which is in the process of setting up a standing committee to look into the place of non-Western music in our education system… . Ethnomusicologists, like all other academics in contemporary Britain, have to look to their “performance indicators”; and seek to justify their existence, in part, through this form of applied ethnomusicology.

The next instances were my report on ethnomusicology in Croatia (Bulletin of the ICTM #90 from April 1997), in which applied ethnomusicology was related to organization of folklore festivals and amateur musical life; and Cynthia Tse Kimberlin’s and Pirkko Moisala’s In memoriam (Bulletin of the ICTM #91 from October 1997), where they indicated applied ethnomusicology as one of the areas of interests of Marcia Herndon.

The first article with applied ethnomusicology in its title published in the Yearbook for Traditional Music was authored by the Austrian scholar Ursula Hemetek: “Applied Ethnomusicology in the Process of the Political Recognition of a Minority: A Case Study of the Austrian Roma” (Yearbook for Traditional Music, vol. 38, 2006). The next major development was the special section, with a group of eight authors, on Music and Poverty, put together by the Finish/Canadian ethnomusicologist Klisala Harrison (Yearbook for Traditional Music, vol. 45, 2013). One should of course be aware that the lack of the wording “applied ethnomusicology” does not imply the absence of the articles relevant for the current discussion in the earlier years, with Angela Impey’s 2002 essay “Culture, Conservation and Community Reconstruction: Explorations in Advocacy Ethnomusicology and Action Research in Northern KwaZulu” serving as a convincing evidence.

As far as the ICTM scholarly gatherings are concerned, the 15th Colloquium, titled Discord: Identifying Conflict within Music, Resolving Conflict Through Music, organized by John Morgan O’Connell in Limerick, Ireland, in 2004 can be interpreted as anticipation of what is to follow. Although music and conflict make a suitable ethnomusicological topic and applied ethnomusicology was not particularly emphasized in the colloquium documents, several presentations pointed to “ethnomusicology as an approach to conflict resolution.” The articles developed from this event form the representative ethnomusicological volume on music and conflict (O’Connell and Castelo-Branco, 2010).

The 38th World Conference of the ICTM that took place in Sheffield, England, in 2005 featured applied ethnomusicology and ethnochoreology as one of the themes, pointing to “situations in which scholars put their knowledge and understanding to creative use to stimulate concern and awareness about the people they study.”³⁰ Presenters were invited to consider issues of advocacy, canonicity, musical literacy, cultural property rights, cultural imperialism, majority-minority relations, application of technologies such as the Internet and their effects on music and dance. One plenary session explicitly featured applied ethnomusicology,³¹ and yet another plenary session considered it among the other subjects.³²

A symposium titled Ethnomusicology and Ethnochoreology in Education: Issues in Applied Scholarship took place in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 2006. The members of the ICTM’s Executive Board, who came to Ljubljana for their regular annual meeting, and the other invited scholars presented and evaluated their immediate experiences and visions of the efficient transfer of scholarly knowledge into educational domains. Presentations from contexts around the globe discussed modalities of connections between theory and practice, methods of promoting, teaching, and learning of traditional music and dance, and the strategies of preparing textbooks, recordings, and other materials for various stages of educational processes (see the report by Kovačič and Šivic, 2007).

The ICTM’s 39th World Conference in Vienna in 2007 featured two important events: a double panel, The Politics of Applied Ethnomusicology: New Perspectives, with six participants, each from a different continent,³³ and a meeting at which 44 members agreed to establish a study group with a focus on applied ethnomusicology.³⁴ Following the adoption of the definition and mission statement, the Study Group on Applied Ethnomusicology was approved at the Executive Board’s meeting in Vienna on July 12, 2007.

The next year, in 2008, Ljubljana hosted the first symposium of the newly established Study Group on Applied Ethnomusicology, which was well attended by scholars from all continents. Anthony Seeger delivered the keynote address. This event featured the history of the idea and understandings of applied ethnomusicology in worldwide contexts; presentation and evaluation of individual projects, with an emphasis on theory and method; and applied ethnomusicology in situations of conflict. It is worth mentioning the use of the Native American “talking circles” as one of the means of communication within this Study Group.

The international intentions of the Study Group continued at the symposia in 2010 in Hanoi, Vietnam (jointly with the Study Group Music and Minorities), in 2012 in Nicosia, Cyprus, and in 2014 in East London—Hogsback—Grahamstown, South Africa.³⁵

Thematic frames of the symposia are trustworthy indicators of the dynamics of the Study Group and, to a smaller extent, of the interests of local organizers. In Hanoi, the emphasis was on definitions and approaches to applied work in various geographical contexts; on proactive roles that ethnomusicology can play in contributing to the sustainability of performing arts through archiving, disseminating, contributing to policies, understanding socioeconomic factors, developing audiences and markets, and empowering communities to forge their own futures; and on performing arts in building peace, negotiating power relationships, and strengthening identities through formal and informal education. Note that the use of the term “performing arts” is a manner of paying respect to the perspective, which is widely shared in Southeast Asia.

The symposium in Nicosia featured applied ethnomusicology in the contexts of social activism, censorship, and state control; in relation to various types of disability, pointing to human rights and the making of disability politics and including disability research, special education, and music therapy; and in relation to diverse social configurations of conflict, including interpersonal and intergroup, interethnic, interreligious, and interclass, with emphasis on the divided island of Cyprus.

The symposium on three locations in South Africa opened up the question of institutions, usually associated with formal and informal rules, procedures, and norms, from schools and festivals to large international bodies such as UNESCO, including instituting and institutionalization issues; and the question of media and their social, political, and cultural impacts on applied work.

As far as the publications related to ICTM are concerned, two edited volumes can be recommended to the readers. First, the earlier mentioned double panel that took place at the ICTM World Conference in Vienna in 2007 inspired the creation of the thematic issue of the Muzikološki zbornik/Musicological Annual, 46(2), entirely dedicated to applied ethnomusicology (Pettan, 2008).³⁶ Five ethnomusicologists reflect on their experiences linked to Brazil, Australia, the United States, Malaysia, and former Yugoslavia; the volume also serves as a Festschrift on the 80th birthday of the aforementioned Norwegian scholar Kjell Skyllstad, an important early thinker in applied ethnomusicology.

The second edited volume resulted from the inaugural Study Group’s symposium in Ljubljana and is titled Applied Ethnomusicology: Historical and Contemporary Approaches (Harrison, Mackinlay, and Pettan, 2010). Its 13 essays, by authors from Africa, Australia, Europe, and North America, are widely used and quoted, in this volume as well, so no additional presentation is needed here.

How else could ICTM contribute to better comprehension of the emerging field? By means of its wide international representation, it can provide us with the perspectives from different geographic and cultural environments. The answers to my five essential questions were provided by five ethnomusicologists, each from a different continent.³⁷ Some of them are more inclined to applied ethnomusicology than the others, but together, they provide a useful global myriad of perspectives about the field. I asked for anonymous, individual views, therefore they are indicated as “A view from Australia,” “A view from Asia,” and so on.

A view from Australia: The application of ethnomusicological method and theory to addressing practical issues.

A view from Asia: If we define applied ethnomusicology as research activities with social conscience and political involvement, I think whatever we do as ethnomusicologists should be applied ethnomusicology at least in some ways.

A view from South America: I can only see a matter of degree in its definition, acknowledging an aspect, which is inherent to any research, namely its potential to be applied to different purposes. However, in most of what has been termed as such in the humanities one finds embedded ideals of social justice and equity, sometimes of reparation and/or reconciliation, all of which also subject to different and even contradictory perspectives.

A view from Africa: Generally, how our practical work in the field is applied in an academic environment. Music is not taught in an European or abstract way, that is, by explaining music with words, but holistically, by doing—listening, imitating, and playing. Based on that experience we teach African music theory practically on instruments. It is much more appropriate and easier for people to understand musical concepts doing it that way.

A view from Europe: I do not subscribe to the term “applied ethnomusicology,” although I understand why it is necessary. I think the engagement of scholars with the communities they work with should be/is a given.

Australia: Preparing indigenous people’s land claim is the obvious example, that is, applying knowledge of their musical culture to demonstrate rights over land using an indigenous conceptual system. I was one of three researchers (with an anthropologist and a linguist) who prepared one of the largest such claims. During the hearing of the case (by a Supreme Court judge) songs and dances were performed to demonstrate ownership of the land according to their own system of land ownership.

Asia: Following what I mentioned above, I would like to think all my projects are within the realm of applied ethnomusicology.

South America: They have ranged from short-term documentation projects related to safeguarding and revitalizing traditions perceived to be vanishing to long-term horizontal collaborations with grassroot organizations, forming research groups working on music and social justice among residents of areas affected by patterns of injustice and inequity.

Africa: We also understand applied ethnomusicology as offering of our expertise to people in order to develop a musical environment. This can be in form of workshops, teaching in schools, music projects, community outreach, and curriculum development, which takes the background of people and local needs into consideration. In our current curriculum African music components are for instance compulsory. We just brought new streams and modules to respond to local needs; for instance the course Basic Music Literacy for students from villages who have problems with music theory and music literacy, and the streams Music Technologies and Production and Music and Arts Administration. The two streams aim at providing students with practical skills which make them more employable, and which enable them to start their own business within the music industry. We hope that these two new streams will in the future help to improve the musical infrastructure in the region.

Europe: I was involved in the application of projects to the UNESCO representative list of Intangible Cultural Heritage and served on an advisory committee to the Ministry of Culture on ICH matters. For over 20 years, I also promoted the founding of a national sound archive. Finally, I consider the publication of an encyclopedia—an all-encompassing research project with a wide outreach among musicians, cultural politicians and scholars—as “applied ethnomusicology.”

Australia: When I worked at the institute it was required of researchers to demonstrate the benefit of the proposed research to the community. This resulted in a blending of scholarly and applied research. Later, when I was working in the university environment, there was much more emphasis on scholarship for its own sake, and the application of research results was not highly valued.

Asia: There are theorists so to speak who are mainly concerned with the refinement of theoretical explorations. I respect such endeavors as long as they have applicable dimension. The “applied” domain has been treated unfairly as activities conducted by less qualified/serious scholars, partly because of the narrow definition of the “academic” domain, but also due to the inability on the part of “applied” ethnomusicologists to advance a new vision of theory construction.

South America: No.

Africa: A distinction between academic and applied work is still there (for instance when you have to teach different research methodologies or history of ethnomusicology), but the boundaries are quite blurred. A lot of our academic research is based on applied work and—as explained earlier—theory is thought practically (which is the direct application of knowledge obtained in the field).

Europe: I try to avoid making this distinction. But, in my institution we have many projects that can be classified as applied: museum expositions, digitization, community work, projects in schools, etc. I would say 40% applied.

Australia: I always tried to show the relationship between applied and theoretical ethnomusicology.

Asia: Whenever I teach I emphasize the importance of socially engaged research activities.

South America: Yes, in the obligatory bibliographies of both undergraduate and graduate courses as well as in systematic outreach and research programs.

Africa: We do not offer a degree program or specific modules on applied ethnomusicology. Yet, as already explained, indigenous music is compulsory, theory is taught practically, and articles on applied ethnomusicology are discussed in class. Thus, although not formalized in terms of specific modules, applied ethnomusicology is a reality here.

Europe: In my seminars, I discuss researchers’ social responsibilities and the many spheres of ethnomusicological work. But, we do not have a course on “applied ethnomusicology.”

Australia: No.

Asia: There may be, but not that I know of.

South America: No, but I know several universities that offer opportunities to both graduate and undergraduate students to engage in applied research in the sense I outlined before, as well as portions of their curricular components devoted to applied approaches.

Africa: This is a tricky question. Applied approaches differ from institution to institution, and the motives and conditions are hardly comparable. Unlike other universities in the country, our Music Department had hardly any resources. We had to build up from zero, which means that applied ethnomusicology was a necessity and therefore a reality. At another university, applied ethnomusicology was simply understood as building up an African ensemble. Elsewhere, there was some teaching of indigenous instruments, but not applied ethnomusicology in our understanding. At Kwazulu Natal you find a completely different situation with Patricia Opondo, who is a very focused and an internationally trained academic. Applied ethnomusicology is officially part of the curriculum.

Europe: No.

What can we make of the replies of these five ethnomusicologists? All of them are well established as professionals and work in either university or research institute settings. Their representativeness is balanced in terms of geography and gender, as well, but none of them belongs to a young generation of scholars, which is seeking for more radical solutions, such as active involvement in applied projects as a part of the study curricula. At this point I would like to add that a course in applied ethnomusicology, which counts to the obligatory master level courses, exists for the third consecutive academic year at the Department of Musicology of the University of Ljubljana.

In contrast to the eight years younger Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), which is defined as “a U.S.-based organization with an international membership” (www.ethnomusicology.org), IFMC/ICTM was envisioned in international terms in all respects. Its Secretariat moves its base periodically from one country to another; it has so far been based in the United Kingdom, Denmark, Canada, the United States, Australia, and Slovenia. Both past and current membership figures suggest that SEM, which is the US National Committee of ICTM, is larger than ICTM, but also that the single country with the largest number of members in ICTM is the United States. Several accounts point to the historical difference between the financially unstable IFMC and the SEM, which grew up in a rich country. More important for the present discussion is the difference in intellectual histories and the resulting theoretical and methodological paradigms. In words of Dieter Christensen,

SEM and ICTM are both unique in their roles, and they complement each other; SEM as the regional organization in North America that represents the interests of professional, academic ethnomusicologists in the USA and Canada, and at the same time serves the field of ethnomusicology world-wide through its publications; and the ICTM as the international organization in the domain of traditional music including ethnomusicology that serves scholarship with an emphasis on the mutual recognition and understanding of diverse inquiring minds.

(Christensen, 1988:17).

IFMC/ICTM cherished various languages in its scholarly publications until 1985, when the last article so far in a language other than English was published in the Yearbook for Traditional Music. From 2006 on, the Yearbook’s general editor Don Niles reintroduced the practice of adding abstracts in native languages of those people who are the principal subjects of the articles. This practice was originally introduced in the 1980s, following Yoshihiko Tokumaru’s proposal.

Jeff Todd Titon has described in Section 1 of this Introduction how the four founders of SEM, led by Alan P. Merriam, rejected Maud Karpeles’s invitation to join IFMC and instead decided to keep SEM as an independent society. IFMC reported about the new society in the following manner in its 11th Bulletin from 1957: “On November 18th, 1955, at the 54th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Boston, the Society for Ethno-musicology was founded for the purpose of establishing communication among persons in primitive, folk, and oriental music, and for furthering research and scholarship in these fields. The Society plans to continue publication of the Ethno-Musicology Newsletter three times yearly, to meet annually in conjunction with societies of anthropologists, folklorists and musicologists, and to engage in other activities of benefit to members” (Anon., 1957: 6).

According to Erich Stockmann, one of the Presidents of the Council, Maud Karpeles was sensitive to occasional criticisms and used to ask him anxiously several times in the course of the 1950s: “Are we really not ‘scientific’ enough? She knew my answer” (Stockman, 1988: 5). Dieter Christensen, Secretary General of the Council for 20 years, noted that the “American issue” and the “scientific issue” were clearly related (Christensen, 1988: 14).

There are several important connections between the two societies that should be mentioned here. At the inauguration of IFMC in 1947, seven US “correspondents” were identified, among them Curt Sachs, Percy Grainger, and Alan Lomax. The “Liaison officer” (single national representative) of the United States in the IFMC for 10 years (1952–1962) was Charles Seeger, one of the SEM’s founding fathers. Following Seeger’s mandate, the United States was uninterruptedly represented in the IFMC/ICTM by the “National Committee” until 1999, starting with Charles Haywood and ending with Ricardo Trimillos. After a five-year break, Timothy Rice, then the SEM President, re-established the connection and SEM became officially recognized as the ICTM’s US National Committee.

The first SEM President, Willard Rhodes, later became ICTM’s fourth President, while councillor in the first SEM nomenclature Bruno Nettl later served in a variety of roles in both societies, as did (and still do) many other scholars, from the United States and from the other countries.

It is appropriate to complete this section of the Introduction by pointing to a joint Forum, scheduled for September 2015 in Limerick, which is expected to bring together the two major ethnomusicological associations—ICTM and SEM—around the theme of importance for applied ethnomusicology: Transforming Ethnomusicological Praxis through Activism and Community Engagement. This historical event, an applied ethnomusicological initiative by Beverley Diamond, is the first such collaboration between ICTM and SEM.

The Forum will focus on ethnomusicological praxis and collaborative strategies in different international contexts and political situations. While there is now a long history in ethnomusicology of initiatives that have sought to address problems of inequality, disparity and oppression, and a shorter history pertaining to such matters as health and environmental change, the symposium will focus, not on the problems per se, but on the methodologies that could best enable our work to have greater social impact. We are interested in critically assessing and finding strategies and best practices of collaboration, communication and policy formulation.

(from the Call for papers)

The envisioned joint event convincingly testifies about the current intellectual climate in both major associations of ethnomusicologists, which is very much in tune with the ideas presented in this Handbook.

In the Introduction we have identified several activities of contemporary applied ethnomusicologists. The chapters in this volume illustrate a range of these. Cultural policy interventions are discussed by Murphy, Haskell, and Zhang as they review the role of government agencies, NGOs, and the arts in the United States, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and in China. Since the early twentieth century, US government agencies have supported the arts, including traditional music. Murphy’s Chapter 20 chronicles the work of the ethnomusicologist-as-public-folklorist in the United States, explores disciplinary connections between applied ethnomusicology and public folklore, and asks the question, “How can an applied ethnomusicologist work meaningfully within the institutional and intellectual framework of public folklore?” Haskell’s Chapter 13 concerns cultural policies in relation to the arts when communities recover from conflicts and natural disasters. In their wake, cultural aid workers bear much needed resources for music and other expressive cultural activities as they facilitate conflict resolution and cultural development. Zhang’s Chapter 21 offers a lively discussion of cultural policies surrounding traditional music in China. Properly balancing the inheritance, protection, development, and utilization of Chinese traditional music has been the subject of discussion among Chinese scholars for a long period of time. This has led to increased attention and effort from government at all levels, a development that reflects the distinctive nature of applied ethnomusicology. His chapter addresses the application of ethnomusicology in China from the perspective of ethnomusicology’s social practices (the macro level) and personal practices (the micro level).

Many of the authors discuss cultural policy interventions through UNESCO’s initiatives in safeguarding intangible cultural heritage; these include Wissler (Chapter 12, Peru), Zhang (Chapter 21, China), Hemetek (Chapter 7, Austria), Schippers (Chapter 4, Australia), and Titon (Chapter 5, chiefly theoretical). The mixed record of success is leading applied ethnomusicologists to agree that the best outcomes occur in small-scale projects resulting from long-term partnerships and mutual goals. Local and regional cultural differences require that policies adapt to varying conditions. Top-down, bureaucratic solutions are apt to be less successful and more likely to have negative consequences. Such best practices have characterized most, if not all, successful applied ethnomusicology projects, whether cultural policy interventions or not.

Advocacy for social justice underpins most of the contributions to this volume. Merriam’s “white knight” critique of ethnomusicologists who feel it is their duty to champion the music and music-cultures they research mocked the impulse to sound the trumpet for musical justice, but it is social justice that characterizes much applied work today, while musical and cultural equity is understood as a given. Bakan’s Chapter 8 reveals how music may become part of an agenda for social justice among autistic youth. He proposes an ethnographic model of disability as a potential alternative and complement to the existing social and medical models, arguing in turn that the ethnographic and relativistic tenets of applied ethnomusicology hold the potential to effectively promote neurodiversity and autism acceptance. Summit’s Chapter 6 shows how musical activism can become peace activism based on economic cooperation. He asks what happens when our experiences in the field conjoin with ethical, moral, and religious imperatives to pursue social justice and give back to the people with whom we work. His chapter addresses issues and offers a framework for ethnomusicologists to consider when moved to partner with the people whose music we study, who so generously help us and sometimes become our teachers and our friends. Chapter 9 by Schrag and Chapter 12 by Wissler reveal how musical advocacy can bring about mutual social and political benefits. Schrag urges ethnomusicologists to re-engage with practitioners of multigenerational artistic traditions among ethnolinguistic minorities. Many of these art forms are at risk because of globalized communication. He guides arts-in-culture scholars through an approach anchored to event analysis and relationships, leaning toward enactments of traditional genres rather than liminal fusions. He offers practical tools that communities may use in their steps toward more lively artistic futures. Wissler shows that collaborative applied ethnomusicology projects based in shared experience and executed in small groups are just as valid and often are more effective than large-scale organizational projects. Two case studies show how grassroots approaches support the effectiveness of indigenous voice and representation in regard to the uses of traditional music in tourism, safeguarding, and music ownership via CD production. Sherinian, in Chapter 10, shows advocacy’s potential as a revolutionary political force that can not only aid the politically oppressed but also re-center marginalized musics within ethnomusicology itself. Using phenomenological methods and dialogical processes from two case studies of Tamil Dalit (former outcaste or untouchable) folk music from her fieldwork and ethnographic filmmaking in India, Sherinian argues that engagement with the meaning and value of marginalized South Asian music forces us to recognize and deconstruct local hegemonies of musical style and ethnomusicology’s contributions to the perpetuation of them, not only in fieldwork, but also in teaching content and academic/community programming. She examines methods (including filmmaking and participant activism) to approach contexts where the oppressed use music to assert identity and cultural politics of revaluation against local hierarchies of musical value that contribute to Dalit Action Theory: that is, politicized agency of the oppressed asserted through the arts, necessitating an activist ethnographic methodology focused on collaboration, dialogue, and reciprocity. Transformation often accompanies advocacy, not just musical, social, and political but also personal, as Bakan’s and Summit’s chapters reveal.

Education is a concern of many of the contributors. Herrick, in Chapter 16, discusses strategies for success in educational institutions where partnerships with cultural organizations require collaborative decision-making for successful outcomes that link formal instruction to daily life. Strategies negotiated among collaborative decision-makers may most effectively apply ethnomusicology in horizontal pathways that dialogically engage and respond to varied social communities, particularly in areas where large, urban public school districts face substantial challenges. The context of Cleveland, Ohio, provides an example, where partnerships for arts education in the city’s public schools date to 1915, and twenty-first-century programs for arts integration have drawn national attention. Her argument asserts that strategic process is central to both definitions of applied ethnomusicology and educators’ efforts to link formal instruction to music in daily life. Murphy’s review of applied ethnomusicologists working in the world of public folklore also includes partnerships among educational and cultural institutions to provide community “artists in the schools” and broaden the educational curriculum to include the music of local ethnic groups. In Chapter 18, Campbell and Higgins extend educational applications into college and conservatory levels of instruction, and also to a practice in “community music,” a specialized terminology not to be confused with the looser way in which applied ethnomusicologists utilize the phrase to describe music among a group that shares commonalities. They address ways in which ethnomusicologists blend musical and cultural understanding into educational practice, and they describe cases that illustrate facets of their linkages into, and facilitation of, community music activity as these are relevant to learning and teaching—with particular attention paid to North American and United Kingdom–based circumstances, settings, and sensibilities. In Chapter 6, Summit also describes an educational initiative in a Jewish community in Uganda that is characterized by long-term reciprocity, contrasting it with failed projects that resulted from well-meaning but short-term visits and superficial understandings. O’Connell, in Chapter 17, develops a hermeneutic approach to music education by exploring the relationship between music and humanity, based on the Aga Khan Humanities Project educational program in Central Asia. Following a precedent in ecology, the Project recognized music as a sustainable art in its balanced promotion of economic development and ecological conservation. O’Connell envisions the space for applied ethnomusicology in particular under war-affected circumstances, when music furnishes a humanistic locus for understanding conflict and a “humane-istic” focus for promoting conflict resolution. Educational aspects play an important role in the approaches of several other authors as well. Sweers, in Chapter 15, points to the importance of intercultural education, and to the efficiency of the didactic teaching aid against right-wing extremism, which raised the attention of local teaching institutions, political institutions, and even the parliament, to her activist project Polyphonie der Kulturen. Hemetek, Lundberg, Mackinlay, and Pilzer (Chapters 7, 19, 11, and 14) also recognize the activist aspect of education. For Schippers (Chapter 4), the educational realm is identified as one of five clusters in his ecosystems of music model. Harrison (Chapter 2) recognizes teaching as one of her four principal ethnomusicological activities. Tan (Chapter 3) realizes the importance of non-formal education in Asia in addressing the issues, such as conflict resolution, peace building, gender sensitization, raising awareness about social inequality, heritage conservation, health campaigns such as AIDS prevention, and more.

Peace, conflict resolution, and cooperation among peoples is another area that appeals to many of the contributors. Summit (Chapter 6) discusses how he helped promote the work of an Ugandan fair trade coffee cooperative that brought together Jewish, Christian, and Muslim growers in an interfaith operation in common cause. Haskell’s Chapter 13, centered in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the recent postwar period, offers lessons from resilience efforts in the face of conflicts and disasters, where international development prioritizes socioeconomic and political issues while neglecting cultural landscapes. Important aspects of conflict management are imbedded in the studies provided by Harrison (class conflict and conflict of values), Hemetek (with focus on three distinctive minority cases), Sweers (conflicts caused by xenophobia and right-wing extremism on the one hand and a marginalization of the victims on the other), and O’Connell.

Medical ethnomusicology, in which ethnomusicologists ally themselves with health-related therapeutic interventions, has a separate Handbook in the Oxford series, which readers are advised to consult. The name is a formation derived from the subfield of medical anthropology, considered a branch of applied anthropology. Given its established identity and a growing literature of its own, the editors have not emphasized it in this volume; nevertheless, examples here include Bakan’s work in the area of music and autism (Chapter 8), and Pilzer’s work with survivors (Chapter 14), which inspires us to go beyond the specific case of Japanese military “comfort women” system in Korea and engage in work with survivors of wars, domestic violence, child abuse, and sexual violence, to mention just a few.

What should be the approaches in applied ethnomusicology to the pertinent issues rooted in colonial history and attitudes? Contributors such as Bendrups (Chapter 1), Harrison (Chapter 2), Tan (Chapter 3), Sherinian (Chapter 10), Mackinlay (Chapter 11), Pilzer (Chapter 14), and O’Connell (Chapter 17), remind us in various ways, to various extents, and in various contexts that work under postcolonial circumstances still requires immense sensitivity from the researcher. This notion is particularly emphasized in Mackinlay’s chapter, based on her work with the indigenous people of Australia, in which the distinctive form of presentation contributes to the strength of her discourse. Pilzer’s argumentation refers to the period of Japanese colonialism in Korea (1910–1945), which more than half a century later still leaves some wounds open. O’Connell and Tan point to the consequences of the presence of Russian and British rulers in Central Asia and Malaysia respectively in the not so distant past, while Bendrups excercises a critical approach to neocolonial attitudes of Chile toward its “dislocated property” Rapanui. Harrison’s work with indigenous peoples also fits in here and forms one of the useful contexts for her proposed model for studying value systems, reconsideration of the value judgments, and an envisioned ethnomusicology of values.

Nationalism is yet another phenomenon that applied ethnomusicologists have to consider. Lundberg, in Chapter 19, discusses its formative aspects and its impact on research and documentation, with the Folk Music Committee’s value scale, which many of us would easily recognize in a number of different national contexts. Tan, in Chapter 3, is convincing in her critique of the concept of national culture in Malaysia. The second smallest continent, Europe figures as the second continent according to the number of nation-states, and remains the location of the most devastating wars in human history. Ever increasing migrations from other continents create new challenges to which applied ethnomusicology, as demonstrated by Hemetek and Sweers, has some efficient replies.

A short-term, temporary form of migration, tourism, has offered a major opportunity and challenge for applied ethnomusicologists. Many have been employed as consultants and culture workers in bringing traditional music to an audience extrinsic to the musical community, as music plays an important role in cultural tourism, which many think can be a driver of local and regional economies while it also sustains older layers of music that are in danger of losing, or have lost, their original cultural contexts. Not only in Europe and the Americas, but also in China, musical tourism is thought to constitute a creative economy, but here the applied ethnomusicologist has played the role of critic as well as consultant and advocate. Tourism often has followed UNESCO’s safeguarding initiatives, which single out particular musical communities for preservation efforts. But ethnomusicological knowledge is sometimes at odds with the kinds of publicity that attracts tourists, while it may also be incomplete and unreliable, as occurred when the Chinese guqin tradition was designated as a masterpiece of intangible cultural heritage (Yung, 2005). Related to the tourist industry is music as commercial product in general, which has had an unsavory reputation among ethnomusicologists who traffic in authenticity. It has also led to an important branch of applied ethnomusicology involving music and law, forensic ethnomusicology. Commodification is anathema to those ethnomusicologists who believe that music has a cultural and artistic value that must remain beyond price. But, as Williams argues in Chapter 22, properly utilized it can be a valuable ally for the applied ethnomusicologist seeking to create social and economic capital for underserved communities.

Finally, sustainability is a theme that unites most of the chapters in this volume. Musical, and sometimes also cultural, sustainability is a goal of many arts policy initiatives today. It is often one of the ends of advocacy, and has long been one of the chief reasons for music education. For example, advocacy based on cultural equity and musical rights moves toward sustainability and a kind of musical justice as well as social justice. Schippers’s Chapter 4 is far-reaching in this respect, laying out a model for sustainability strategies. Global implications of these strategies were tested within the framework of a mega-project, Sustainable Futures for Music Cultures: Towards an Ecology of Musical Diversity, encompassing the range from Australian Aboriginal music to Western classical opera. Titon’s chapter builds on his pioneering work in music and ecology, which he began by likening music cultures to ecosystems; that is, the flow of music within music cultures may be conceptualized as like the flow of energy in ecosytems (Titon, 1984: 9). In Chapter 5 of this volume, Titon discusses sustainability both in terms of its forerunner ideas (preservation, conservation, and safeguarding, with particular attention to their implementation in the US) and by re-examining the uses of sustainability in the two discourse universes where it is most prominent: environmentalist conservation ecology, and economics (Titon, 2009a, 2009b). Pointing out that sustainability is a goal rather than a strategy, he concludes by proposing resilience theory as the appropriate strategy for achieving musical sustainability, and offers two case studies that examine those characteristics which make particular music cultures resilient and therefore sustainable. Sustainability is a recent concept for ethnomusicologists, while resilience is even newer. Their widespread use (and abuse) today requires that applications in various fields of endeavor be undertaken with great care, while values from the humanities provide an appropriate context for thinking about sustainability and resilience in all contexts (see O’Connell, Chapter 17 of this volume).