Ethnomusicology


Ethnomusicology is the multidisciplinary study of music in its cultural context. The discipline investigates social, cognitive, biological, comparative, and other dimensions. Ethnomusicologists study music as a reflection of culture and investigate the act of music-making through various immersive, observational, and analytical approaches. This discipline emerged from comparative musicology, initially focusing on non-Western music, but later expanded to embrace the study of all different music.
The practice of ethnomusicology relies on direct engagement and performance, as well as academic work. Fieldwork takes place among those who make the music, engaging local languages and culture as well as music. Ethnomusicologists can become participant observers, learning to perform the music they are studying. Fieldworkers also collect recordings and contextual data.

Definition

Ethnomusicology combines perspectives from folklore, psychology, cultural anthropology, linguistics, comparative musicology, music theory, and history. This resulted in various definitions. In 1956, American ethnomusicologist Willard Rhodes called it a theoretical and empirical study amalgamating musicology and anthropology. as well as explaining and emphasizing if it were to be seen and "interpreted" in its "broadest sense" it would be seen as "the total music of humankind, without limitations of time and space." Which he captures and emphasizes more of ethnomusicology's double concept between this anthropology aspect and a musicology aspect. In 1992, Jeff Todd Titon summarized ethnomusicology as the study of "people making music": people make the sounds called music, and people also make music into a cultural domain, with associated ideas, activities, and material culture.
The word is a portmanteau of 'ethno', and 'musicology'.
Typical definitions include elements such as a holistic approach, cultural context, music theory, sonic, and historical perspectives. In other words, ethnomusicology is the study of music as a social and cultural phenomenon. Alan P. Merriam defined ethnomusicology as the study of "music as culture," and offered four goals of ethnomusicology:
  • help protect and explain non-Western music;
  • save "folk" music before it disappears in the modern world;
  • study music as a means of communication to further world understanding;
  • provide an avenue for wider exploration and reflection for those interested in primitive studies.
The term informant is used for those whom fieldworkers observe, members of the community under study. Informants may or may not represent an entire musical culture, or the ideal of that culture. More recently, ethnomusicologists have preferred terms like "consultant" to "informant," while "primitive" has been replaced with "Indigenous."
Matt Sakakeeny observed that ethnomusicology since the 1980s has focused increasingly on politics.
Scholars such as Willard Rhodes were one of a majority who argued that the field of ethnomusicology should mainly be defined as a field that explores all musical communities, as well as situating styles and practices with their cultural and social contexts. Throughout Rhodes's time period, he helped capture the definition of ethnomusicology during that time: a scientific discipline that holds on to the humanity aspect it has through the lives of communities.

History

Approaches

Ethnomusicologists apply theories and methods from other social science disciplines such as cultural anthropology, cultural studies, and sociology. While some researchers primarily conduct historical studies, the majority practice long-term participant observation. Ethnomusicological work brings intensive ethnographic methods to the study of music. Two approaches are common: anthropological and musicological. Those using the anthropological approach study how culture affects music. Seeger differentiated the two approaches, describing the anthropology of music as attempting understand music as a part of culture and social life, while musical anthropology considers social life as a performance.
Alan P. Merriam and Mantle Hood expanded on Seeger's framework and sought to integrate culture in the study of music. Merriam built upon the foundation of the anthropology of music by defining ethnomusicology as "the study of music as culture", emphasizing that scholars should analyze not only sound but the social behavior and meaning surrounding musical practice. Hood advocated for more of a musicological approach to ethnomusicology, arguing that researchers should learn to perform the music they study to understand it from within the culture's own system of knowledge, a concept he called "bi-musicality".

Anthropological

Anthropological ethnomusicologists stress the importance of fieldwork and using participant observation in order to study music as culture. This can include a variety of fieldwork practices, including personal exposure to a performance tradition or musical technique, participation in a native ensemble, or inclusion in social customs. In the past, local musical transcription was required to study music globally, due to the lack of recording technology. This approach emphasizes the cultural impact of music and how music can be used to further understand humanity.

Musicological

Those who practice a musicological approach study both musical structure and relationships between music and culture, often comparatively. In practice, this involves learning to perform the music under study. This is intended to combat ethnocentrism and transcend Western analytical conventions.

Analysis

Top-down vs bottom-up

Analytical and research methods have changed over time, taking two primary paths. Top-down, deductive analysis looks for musical universals that apply across cultures. Implicit in such an approach is that analysts must be aware of any cultural frames that underlie analytical methodologies. By contrast, some scholars adopt subjective, inductive, bottom-up methodologies tailored to a specific music and culture.

Methodologies

Ethnomusicology has yet to establish standards for analysis, despite efforts by analysts such as Kolinski, Béla Bartók, and von Hornbostel.
The cent as a unit of pitch provides a fixed numerical representation for intervals, independent of its specific pitch level. This allowed precise comparisons of music that used different, often individual- or culture-specific, pitch systems. Pitch systems in countries such as India, Japan, and China vary "not only the absolute pitch of each note, but also necessarily the intervals between them". He concluded that the real pitch of a musical scale can only be determined when "heard as played by a native musician" and even then, "obtain that particular musician's tuning".
Alan Lomax's method of cantometrics analyzes songs to examine human behavior in different cultures. He cited a correlation between musical traits and culture. Cantometrics involves qualitative scoring based on song characteristics.
Kolinski used the distance between the initial and final tones in melodic patterns to reject the early binary of European and non-European and refuted von Hornbostel's hypothesis that European music generally had ascending melodic lines, while other music featured descending melodic lines.
Feld conducted descriptive ethnographic studies treating "sound as a cultural system" in his studies of Kaluli people, instead opting for sociomusical methods.

Fieldwork

Fieldwork involves observing music where it is created and performed. Ethnomusicological fieldwork differs from anthropological fieldwork because it requires gathering detailed information about the mechanics of music production, including recording, filming, and written material. Ethnomusicological fieldwork involves gathering musical data, experience, texts, and information on social structures. Ethnomusicological fieldwork principally involves social interaction and requires establishing personal relationships.
Music appears in a given culture at multiple levels, from informal to elite. E.g., ethnomusicology can focus on music from informal groups, on the Beatles, or ignore such distinctions as biased.

History

From the 19th century through the mid-20th century, folklorists, ethnographers, and early ethnomusicologists attempted to preserve disappearing music cultures. They collected transcriptions or audio recordings on wax cylinders. Many recordings were archived at the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv at the Berlin school of comparative musicology. These recordings formed the foundation of ethnomusicology.
File:Vinko Žganec.JPG|thumb|236px|Vinko Žganec, a Croatian researcher, did most of his fieldwork in Međimurje County.
Ethnomusicology transitioned from analysis of scores and recording to fieldwork following World War II.
Early fieldwork included transcriptions of Hungarian folk music transcribed by, Zoltán Kodály, and Lászo Lajtha.
In the 1930s James Mooney for the Bureau of American Ethnology; Natalie Curtis, and Alice C. Fletcher were in the field to transcribe Ghost Dance songs that were part of various Native American belief systems.
McAllester conducted a pioneering fieldwork study of Navajo music study, particularly the music of the Enemy Way ceremony. He sought to identify Navajo cultural values based on analysis of attitudes toward music. McAllester used a questionnaire that included items such as:
  • Some people beat a drum when they sing; what other things are used like that?
  • What did people say when you learned how to sing?
  • Are there different ways of making the voice sound when we sing?
  • Are there songs that sound especially pretty?
  • What kind of melody do you like better:.
  • Are there songs for men only?
Merriam and later Nettl criticized the quality of contemporary fieldwork as thoughtlessly gathering musical sound. Between 1920 and 1960 fieldworkers began to move beyond collection to mapping entire musical systems from the field. After the 1950s, some began to participate with local musicians.
Merriam listed several areas of fieldwork inquiry:
  • Musical material culture: classification and cultural perception of musical instruments
  • Song texts
  • Categories of music as defined by locals
  • Musician training, opportunity, and perceptions by others
  • Uses and functions of music in relation to other cultural practices
  • Music sources
In the 1970s Hood was learning from Indonesian musicians about sléndro scales, and to play the rebab. By the 1980s, the participant-observer methodology became the norm, at least in the North American tradition of ethnomusicology.
Ethical concerns became more prominent in the 1970s, seeking to protect performers' rights by, e.g., obtaining informed permission to make recordings, according to the conventions of the host society. Ethics also requires the observer to show respect for the host culture, e.g., by avoiding ethnocentric remarks. Seeger interpreted this to rule out exploring how singing came to exist within Suyá culture, instead examining how singing creates culture, and how social life can be seen through musical and performative lenses.