History

Ethnomusicology | Issues |Music Pages

The History of Ethnomusicology   As long as there has been interaction with people belonging to distant lands, there has been an interest in the music and culture of other peoples.  The colonial period brought about much interaction with people of varying cultural backgrounds.  This interaction caused multiple effects for both the colonizer and the colonized in the following areas including (but not limited to): trading, manufacturing goods, the harvesting of raw materials, marriage, religion, political governance, slavery, economic dominance/dependency, etc...  This interaction between peoples allowed peoples from Western Europe an opportunity to experience the lives of others.  This interaction is not always negative, although the vast majority of this interaction was one sided with the ultimate benefit gained by Western European colonizers.  There has been since the age of colonialism individuals who appreciate the importance of other cultures and wanted to document their art, history, language, and music for posterity.           One of the problems faced by ethnomusicologists is how to record music that previously was only passed onto others in an oral way. The musical systems of other cultures usually do not typically conform with the Western system of notation. The invention of the phonograph by Thomas edison greatly aided in the recording and collecting of these types of songs.  While being able to reproduce the exact sound of the musical event is quite an honest an fairly unbiased medium for collecting data, the interpretation of data was still  based on western notation.  Early comparative musicologist typically took the position that Western European music was the most evolutionarily advanced because it was the most complex and orderly.  However, this was a Western bias which led to the misleading proposition that tribal and ethnic music from abroad was somehow less musically refined or meaningful because it did not fit well with the Western model.  The development of the cents system by Alexander J. Ellis aided in recording music which does not following Western traditions. In the cents system, the octave is divided into 1200 equal units, which makes it possible to objectively measure non-Western scales.  It wasn't until the last half of the 19th century that we began to see the beginnings of what became known as Ethnomusicology.  Click on the links below to learn more about Early Ethnomusicologist. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________   Early Comparative Musicologist/Ethnomusicologists: Béla Bartók Zoltán Kodály Frances Densmore Vinko Žganec Carl Stumpf Erich von Hornbostel Curt Sachs Alexander J. Ellis   _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________   20th Century   In the early 1950's comparative musicology would undergo a major change in thinking.  Jaap Kunst became the first person to redefine the study of comparative musicology to ethnomusicology.  The reason for doing this was to demonstrate that this was not just the study of exclusively non-western societies but that it was the study of human music making.  To this day ethnomusicology does tend to focus on documenting non-western indigenous music traditions, typically those existing in an oral tradition.  The important distinction is that non-Western music is no longer compared exclusively to the Western musical tradition.  The value attributed to the music is based on the society from which it originated.  The concept of Universalism in the human musical experience was an idea that saw many adherents in the early comparative musicologist but not so amongst the early ethnomusicologists.  With the establishment of the discipline came an incredible amount of research which seemed to demonstrate the vast diversity of human musical experience.  However in recent years the subject of universals has become an area of interest again.  We are coming to find many aspects of the human musical phenomena that are fairly universal (for more info visit the Universals Vs. Relativism page).   _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________    Important Ethnomusicologists of the 20th Century: Jaap Kunst Robert Garfias Bruno Nettl Mantle Hood Alan P. Merriam Erich von Hornbostel Robert E. Brown Paul Berliner Jaime de Angulo Erica Azim _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Written and edited by Thomas Heffernan (08/09)