2 (page 11)p. 11A bit of history

The ethnomusicological interest in understanding why and how humans are musical clearly has its roots in older ways of thinking about music.

The ancient literate cultures of China and Greece generated philosophical treatises on music because they believed, like modern ethnomusicologists, that music is an extraordinarily important cultural expression with deep cosmological, metaphysical, religious, social, and political implications. Early Greek thinking about music, often personified by Pythagoras (ca. 570–ca. 490 BCE), held that the cosmos and the key to wisdom were governed by ratios of small whole numbers. Once the Greeks demonstrated that musical intervals such as the octave, perfect fifth, and perfect fourth could be explained by ratios of small whole numbers, they concluded that music must be an important cog in the moral universe and the cosmological “harmony of the spheres.” This view is expressed in many variants in the nonliterate cultures ethnomusicologists have studied.

The ethnomusicological literature is filled with arguments that echo the ancient Greeks about whether music helps to construct behavioral, cultural, and psychological patterns or whether (page 12)p. 12preexisting social structures and cultural systems are determinants of musical style and practice. Plato (ca. 429–347 BCE), for example, wrote, in the Republic and elsewhere, that music affected ethical behavior and therefore the political life of a society. He associated the stereotypical ethical qualities of the various Greek subgroups (Phrygians, Ionians, Dorians) with the musical modes (the set of intervals between tones in a scale) they played on their lutes and lyres, and he concluded that playing those modes caused those behaviors, some good and some bad. Thus political leaders, “philosopher-kings,” would be justified in banning certain modes because of their adverse effect on people.

In China, at about the same time, many treatises spoke about the fundamental nature of music in human life. The Chinese sage Confucius (551–479 BCE) was believed to have been a practicing musician. He thought that training in “proper” music, the kind played during rituals, could cultivate good qualities in the ruling class and thus in the state itself, while entertainment music would have the opposite effect. The Chinese were the first to create the idea of fixed pitch, that is, the setting of a pitch to a particular number of vibrations per second (in the West, for example, the idea that the pitch A equals 440 cycles per second). The melodies using these fixed pitches were believed to be so fundamental to political and social functioning that when a new dynasty took power, it would reset the fixed pitches of music to new levels.

In the early Middle Ages, Saint Augustine (354–430) believed that musical performance (musica sonora) was a way for humankind to reach beyond the mundane to contemplate divinity. The Roman writer Boethius (480–524) elucidated Greek ideas about music in his five-volume De institutione musica, including the idea that musical performance had ethical implications. Ethnomusicologists today are familiar with both views.

In India, between the fourth and thirteenth centuries, various forms of practice and knowledge (medicine, theater, and music) (page 13)p. 13needed to be legitimated by logically constructed doctrines and reasoned discourse. The resulting treatises speculate on metaphysical ideas about the sources of creative energy in vibration and the affective link between melodic modes and their use in theatrical scenes to accompany certain moods or actions.

In the Middle East, from the seventh to the thirteenth centuries, important works on music appeared in Arabic. Inspired by reading ancient Greek literature, scholars made music a central topic in their encyclopedias and other works. Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī (872–951) wrote an important treatise on music theory called Kitāb al-mūsīqī al-kabīr (“The Great Book of Music”). Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣbahānī (897–967) compiled the Kitāb al-aghānī (“Book of Songs”), a twenty-four-volume work on the musical practices of the day. It included anecdotes about musical events and the social and cultural practices guiding performances of music, accounts that anticipate contemporary ethnomusicological studies.

The scholars of the ancient and medieval worlds, with a few exceptions, commented on their own musical traditions. This situation changed with the age of exploration and the opening up of the New World to European colonization. In Latin America Jesuit missionaries, as early as the sixteenth century, studied the music of the indigenous people they found there for the purpose of converting them to Christianity. Today’s ethnomusicology, at least that branch of it that has ethnomusicologists from North America, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan traveling the globe to study the music of other people, has some of its roots in colonialism and imperialism. Sir William Jones (1746–94), an English colonial judge in the Supreme Court in Calcutta, may have been the first European to write about India’s classical music.

(page 14)p. 14European interest in the music of others was also stimulated in eighteenth-century France by the Enlightenment, which was about, among other things, the acquisition of universal knowledge unfettered by dogma and tradition. Works in this vein include Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s (1712–78) Dictionnaire de musique, which provided notations of Native American and Chinese music, and Jean Joseph Marie Amiot’s (1718–93) Mémoire sur la musique des Chinois. Another example in this spirit was the work of the Englishman Charles Burney (1726–1814), a pioneer of historical musicology who traveled to the Continent and wrote a number of books that might be considered, in today’s terms, ethnographies of musical life there.

The Enlightenment interest in music of the Other was paralleled by the rise of Romantic nationalism. Nationalism, the belief that each ethnic group (called under this doctrine a “nationality”) has a right to its own state, arose in Europe in the late eighteenth century and became arguably the dominant political ideology of the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman, and Russian Empires, the latter succeeded by the former Soviet Union, dissolved into nation-states, while many of the city-states and principalities of central and southern Europe became the nation-states of Germany and Italy. To help create the idea of nation and the cultural life of new nation-states, there arose the view, first promulgated by Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), that national identity and spirit was most authentically expressed in rural speech, folktales, and folksong lyrics and melodies. To support the search for a nation’s patrimony, “musical folklorists” began to collect “folk songs” from peasant villagers in the countryside. Transcriptions of these songs in musical notation were compiled in books that took their place alongside the ostensibly great works of literature and art music in the nation’s libraries. Classically trained composers, often the collectors themselves, used the peasants’ melodies to (page 15)p. 15write “national music,” typically orchestral tone poems, rhapsodies, and operas that expressed the national spirit for an urban bourgeois audience. This political impetus to study the music of ourselves generated enormous amounts of valuable scholarship on rural musical traditions under threat from urbanization, education, and industrialization.

Each nation had its indefatigable collectors and activists, among the most famous of whom were Cecil Sharp (1859–1924), Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958), and Percy Grainger (1882–1961) in England; Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908) in Russia; and Béla Bartók (1881–1945) and Zoltán Kodály (1882–1967) in Hungary. In 1947 the need for international cooperation, manifested in the creation of the United Nations, had its parallel in European folklorists’ creation of the International Folk Music Council (IFMC), a UNESCO-affiliated organization, with Ralph Vaughn Williams as its first president. In the 1960s, as new states in Africa and elsewhere threw off imperial domination, the impetus to study national forms of music spread to nearly every corner of the world and to genres of music not properly understood as “folk.” In 1981 the IFMC changed its name to the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM), and it continues to flourish today as an important institution supporting an international dialogue among scholars studying primarily the music of their own nations.

In the United States the impetus to collect traditional music was linked not to nationalism but to ethnological studies of Native Americans. Alice Cunningham Fletcher (1838–1923), trained in ethnology at the Peabody Museum at Harvard University, began fieldwork among the Lakota in 1881 and published more than forty monographs, many with descriptions of songs, dances, games, and stories. Frances Densmore (1867–1957), trained in music at Oberlin College, made many recordings on wax cylinders for the Bureau of American Ethnology and published books on a host of tribal musical traditions.

In nineteenth-century Europe the rise of nationalism and its concern with the music of a national self overshadowed the Enlightenment and colonialist fascination with music of the Other. However, those preoccupations were relaunched in the late nineteenth century when the Austrian scholar Guido Adler (1855–1941) published his 1885 outline of a new field of study called Musikwissenschaft, musical science or, in English, musicology. Arguing that its purpose was the “discovery of the true and advancement of the beautiful,” he divided musicology into two main branches, historical and systematic. The first was concerned primarily with the history of European art music. The systematic branch, on the other hand, was divided into a plethora of subfields, including music theory, pedagogy, aesthetics, and comparative musicology. In this conception, comparative musicology and historical musicology were subfields of a broadly conceived musicology. Since that time the term “musicology” has come to refer, principally though not exclusively, to the historical (page 17)p. 17study of European art music. Ethnomusicology is no longer one of its subfields.

Comparative musicologists, many trained in psychology, were musical ethnologists. In 1886 Carl Stumpf (1848–1936), a psychologist and philosopher, wrote one of the first musical ethnographies on the Bella Coola Indians of British Columbia, who had been invited to travel to Berlin and twenty-one other European cities in 1885. Today comparative musicologists are principally remembered for comparing data provided in accounts of local musical practices by missionaries, diplomats, and travelers. Their work was aided immensely by—and indeed the field of ethnomusicology depends on—the invention of the phonograph in 1877. (The earliest recordings of “world music” are usually attributed to Walter Fewkes [1850–1930], an American anthropologist who, in 1890, made the first recordings of Native American music.) Their comparisons focused on five principal issues: (1) the origins of music; (2) musical evolution; (3) understanding the distribution of musical styles and artifacts around the world; (4) musical style analysis and comparison; and (5) the classification and measurement of musical phenomena such as pitch, scales, and musical instruments. They assumed, for example, that what they called “primitive music” was a survival of humankind’s earliest music, and so it could be used to answer the question of music’s origins. Studies of musical evolution, whose authors were influenced by the social Darwinism of Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), tried to demonstrate how musical elements such as scales and modes, rhythms, harmonies, forms, and musical instruments evolved from simple to complex, from a few tones in a scale to many, and from a single line of melody to multipart polyphony. They imagined a universal music history culminating in European art music.

Comparative musicologists argued about whether the distribution of similar musical features and instruments around the world was due to monogenesis, that is, their invention in one place followed (page 18)p. 18by their distribution to many places, or to polygenesis, that is, their invention in many places. One theory, borrowed from German ethnologists of the period and known as “culture-circle theory,” used distribution studies to claim that the more widespread a form was, the older it was. So, for example, the wider distribution around the world of end-blown whistle flutes, like the recorder, compared to the transverse flute was taken as evidence that whistle flutes were a more ancient instrument type than the transverse flute. Their musical style analysis and comparison reduced dynamic, temporal musical processes to a fixed product made up of “elements” such as melody, rhythm, texture, and form. While European musical folklorists were subjecting their own traditions to this sort of analysis in order to discover the nature of their particular national musical style or its regional variants or dialects, comparative musicologists were doing the same for musical styles around the world.

Because they were studying musical phenomena in all its global variety, comparative musicologists needed a way to write about them that would transcend the categories and classifications of European music. They needed, in other words, comparative methods. The two most influential and enduring projects were a system for comparing pitch intervals and a system for classifying musical instruments. Ethnomusicologists still use both of them today.

The interval-comparison technique, called the “cents” system, was invented in the 1880s by the English philologist and mathematician Alexander John Ellis (1814–90). The cents system was designed to overcome the problem of comparing pitch intervals using the ratio of frequencies of each pitch. When the numbers are small, comparing the sizes of intervals is relatively easy: 2:1 is obviously greater than 3:2. When the numbers become much larger, comparison of what are geometrical relationships becomes very difficult. So Ellis employed a logarithmic function to transform the geometric ratios of frequencies to an easily (page 19)p. 19understood arithmetic scale. He divided the octave into 1,200 units so that each equal-tempered half-step was 100 units or “cents.” Comparing music from all over the world with this new tool, Ellis discovered that tuning systems were far too varied to be explained by a mathematical theory such as numerical ratios or a natural phenomenon such as the harmonic series, the complex set of pitches that sound when a musical tone is sung or played. His new measuring tool allowed him to contradict Pythagoras and all the others after him who claimed that musical scales can be explained mathematically or naturally as opposed to culturally. Although Ellis did not employ a theory of culture, he demonstrated that musical scales are “very diverse, very artificial, and very capricious.” They must result from human intervention and choice rather than from nature, a position modern ethnomusicologists share.

The ability to compare things is greatly aided by systematic analytical methods and classificatory frameworks into which particular instances can be placed. Simple examples in music theory include melodic modes, which can be classified by the number of tones in the octave (pentatonic, heptatonic, octatonic) and meters (duple, triple, additive). Ethnomusicologists routinely use these sorts of schemes to talk about music. Comparative musicologists elaborated them to a great extent, and one that continues to be used today is a system for the classification of musical instruments created by Curt Sachs (1881–1959) and Erich von Hornbostel (1877–1935) in Berlin, and published in 1914. Known as the Sachs-Hornbostel system, it divides musical instruments into four groups according to the primary vibrating material: air (aerophones), string (chordophones), skin (membranophones), and solids (idiophones). Each major class was further subdivided in ways appropriate to it: aerophones by the method of “excitation” (flutes, reeds, and horns); chordophones by the geometry of the neck and body (lutes, harps, zithers, and lyres); membranophones by the shape of the resonator (barrel, cylinder, kettle, vase, hourglass); and idiophones (page 20)p. 20by the material (wood, stone, metal). Originally designed so that instruments in museum collections could be cataloged like books, the system remains in use among ethnomusicologists, who prefer to call an instrument from another culture either by its actual name, say bouzoukee, or by its Sachs-Hornbostel classificatory description, “long-necked, fretted, pear-shaped, plucked lute,” rather than using an ethnocentric culture-to-culture comparison like “Greek guitar.”

The impulse to study music beyond one’s own borders was not limited during this period to Europeans. In Japan Kishibe Shigeo (1912–2005) and his colleagues established a Society (and journal) for Research in Asiatic Music in 1936, and in 1945 scholars in Chile founded Revista musical chilena, dedicated to the study of Chilean and Latin American music.

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

(page 21)p. 21The name change from comparative musicology to ethnomusicology initiated a gradual decline in the salience of the musicological problems that characterized the older field. Instead, the new discipline moved in the direction of studies of “music as culture.” Such studies view music as a human activity linked to other aspects of culture such as religion, art, language, politics, dance, crafts, and social institutions. The new discipline, with its roots in musicology and anthropology, suggested new questions that the older discipline had not asked. Why do people in particular places sing and play and dance the way they do? To what purposes has humankind put music? If music making can be regarded as a social behavior as well as an artistic behavior, then how is it embedded within societies and their social structures? Is musical behavior consistent or coherent with other social behaviors and cultural patterns, or does it challenge them in some way? What social and cultural issues are at stake in the teaching and learning of music? Can music and its constituent elements have culturally shared meanings associated with them and, if so, what are those meanings? This new discipline captured the spirit of the long history, going back to the ancient Chinese and Greeks, of scholarly fascination with music’s significance in human life.

When the word “ethnomusicology” burst on the scene in the 1950s, it completely erased the name “comparative musicology,” and along with it that discipline’s grand theories of musical origins, universal music history, musical evolution, and culture-circle distribution of musical traits. Although some early ethnomusicologists argued against comparison in favor of more detailed ethnographic work in particular cultures, comparative musical analysis and the scientific impulse that drove it did not immediately subside. Bruno Nettl, in his 1954 North American Indian Musical Styles, analyzed structural similarities and differences between the music of neighboring tribes in order to create a classification of regional musical styles. Mieczyslaw Kolinski (1901–81), born in Poland and an immigrant to the United States and Canada, invented an extraordinarily elaborate system to classify melodic shapes (page 22)p. 22in the 1960s. In 1971 Mantle Hood (1918–2005), founder of the ethnomusicology program at UCLA, published a comparative tool he called “hardness scales” so that ethnomusicologists could compare maximum and minimum ranges of such musical features as loudness, pitch, timbre, and density (pulse per minute).

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

Although musicological analysis was never completely abandoned, the anthropological study of musical cultures was sparked to a large degree when, in 1964, Alan Merriam published The Anthropology of Music. Merriam argued that the study of the “music sound itself” was but one “analytical level” in the ethnomusicological study of “music in culture.” In other words, the “ethno” part of ethnomusicology required two other analytical levels, “conceptualization about music [and] behavior in relation to music,” levels that had not been worked out at that time in (page 23)p. 23the same detail as musicological analysis and comparison had been. Apart from this three-part model of ethnomusicological analysis, Merriam’s most important contribution was a list of twelve “areas of inquiry” and “problems” that would characterize an ethnomusicology true to its double nature as both a form of anthropology and a form of musicology, both in pursuit of knowledge about humans as makers of music.

The twelve areas of inquiry were

Merriam carefully reviewed the literature to provide overviews of each of these topics. He hoped to stimulate ethnomusicologists to adopt new approaches to research on music, and indeed he did.

In the wake of Merriam’s The Anthropology of Music and influential writings by John Blacking, the African ethnomusicologist J. H. Kwabena Nketia (b. 1921), and others, scholars in the new field of ethnomusicology slowly but surely began to create a rapprochement between the poles inherent in the discipline’s name by writing more sophisticated and (page 24)p. 24detailed studies of particular music cultures’ musical sounds, conceptions, and behaviors. In 1980, at the twenty-fifth annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology at Merriam’s home institution, Indiana University, the organizers were confident enough to proclaim ethnomusicology’s “coming of age.” This newly mature ethnomusicology understood musical performance as fundamentally social. It had succeeded in erasing the distinction in early ethnomusicology between musicological and anthropological approaches to the study of music. Since then, the social-scientific and philosophical underpinnings of ethnomusicology have been strengthened, and the move away from the study of the “music sound itself” as an autonomous aesthetic domain has been decisive. As Christopher Waterman put it, “The irreducible object of ethnomusicological interest is not the music itself, a somewhat animistic notion, but the historically situated human subjects who perceive, learn, interpret, evaluate, produce, and respond to music.” Even though lengthy analyses and characterizations of musical style, with associated transcriptions, have decreased, careful attention to musical detail still characterizes the best ethnomusicological research because, after all, the social is expressed in musical forms, structures, and performances.

If early ethnomusicology championed the study of supposedly older, “authentic” forms of traditional, world music uncontaminated by modern life, mature ethnomusicology, since 1978 or so, has moved enthusiastically toward the study of urban, popular, and hybrid forms of music. Today rap and reggae, norteño and Serbian turbofolk, Puerto Rican salsa and Jamaican dub, jazz improvisation and country music, the Eurovision song contest and piped-in music at the Mall of America, and new popular-music fusions in the world-music marketing category are as central to ethnomusicological inquiry as Japanese gagaku, Bulgarian folk music, Javanese gamelan, Hindustani classical music, and Native American drumming, dancing, and singing. By embracing modern musical practices, ethnomusicologists are better able to provide convincing answers to the question of why and how humans are musical.

(page 25)p. 25Although ethnomusicology got its start when scholars from past and present imperial powers began to study music in all its variety the world over, another group of researchers entered the field intent on studying their own music as one step on the path to better self-understanding. Some of the earliest moves in this direction flowed from the civil rights and feminist movements of the 1960s and the resulting identity politics that sought a place at the scholarly table for minorities and women. In the United States, African Americans, Chicana/os, women, and Asian Americans began to ask new questions about their own music and its history and meaning from the perspectives of critical theory and cultural studies. Why, for example, is our music, the music of women, say, left out of the standard histories of music or the ethnographies of particular music cultures? Can we find the African roots of African American music in genres as diverse as the blues, gospel, soul, jazz, and rap? These scholars launched critiques of the ethnomusicological study of the Other, especially the way they contribute to structures of power and hegemony in the academy. They demanded that new methods and perspectives from inside their own cultures become part of the conversation.

In another development, ethnomusicologists’ interest in all music and “music as culture” began to affect the work of scholars around the world who pursue studies of their own music. Many local traditions of musical scholarship focused principally on an analysis of musical sound structures and still do. Today, in addition to these once dominant musicological paradigms for the study of local traditional music, scholars in many parts of the world, some of them trained in American, British, and Australian universities, are turning to questions about the meaning and function of music in their own societies, to the notion of “music cultures.” They are embracing multiculturalism, respect for other cultures, and the study of the music of ethnic minorities. In some locales these two approaches now exist in some tension, but elsewhere local and international forms of ethnomusicology are coming together (page 26)p. 26to create fascinating dialogues on the question of why and how human beings are musical.

Since 1980, the comparative impulse of early ethnomusicology has receded into the background. Ethnomusicologists’ desire to study human musical behavior in all its forms has tended to take the form of idiographic studies of particular musical cultures, genres, and scenes. To answer the big questions about why and how humans are musical, ethnomusicologists have spent the bulk of the last thirty years in an effort to champion, reveal, show respect for, understand, and document music in all its particular forms around the world.

Since about 2000, however, an interest in comparison may be reasserting itself. The evidence for this can be seen in books with titles such as Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing, Music as Social Life, and Music and Technoculture. Overview works like these, usually on particular themes, invite comparisons rooted in social or scientific theory rather than in comparative methods. In fact, comparative or generalizing studies are necessary if ethnomusicologists are to keep in balance their fascination with the way music works in particular cultures and their goal of contributing to a general understanding of human musicality.

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