My contribution to the debate ‘Are we all ethnomusicologists now?’ (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Diverse Voices of Contemporary Ethnomusicology
Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 2009
Review article: Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert and Richard Middleton (eds), The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2003. vii + 368pp. ISBN 0 415 93845 7. Jennifer C. Post (ed.), Ethomusicology: A Contemporary Reader. New York: Routledge, 2006. xii + 446pp. ISBN 0 415 97204 3. Suzel Ana Reily (ed.), The Musical Human: Rethinking John Blacking’s Ethnomusicology in the Twenty-First Century. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. xi + 220pp. ISBN 0 7546 5138 X. Bruno Nettl, The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-one Issues and Concepts (new edition). Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005. xiii + 514pp. ISBN 0 252 07278 2.
It Was Never Just About the Music: Is Ethnoarts Ethnomusicology’s Next Incarnation?
Early in my PhD studies in ethnomusicology at the University of California, Los Angeles, I posed this question to a professor: “What am I learning to study? How do I decide what ‘music' is?” The response: “You’ll know it when you see it.” This exchange is a symptom of ethnomusicology’s enduringly indefinable nature. Despite decades of reflection and proposals for redefinition, we remain unable to articulate the subject of our research. On one hand, this allows us to engage with any of the astoundingly diverse artistic traditions of the world. I believe, however, that such conceptual imprecision is also one of a few crucial factors keeping us from much more influence in the growth of knowledge and the improvement of human existence. In this article, I outline a path to increased disciplinary thriving through exploration of the young ethnoarts movement. In particular, I propose that we embrace a future in which our subjects are enactors of artistic communication genres, and we view arts, culture, and prosocial intent as inextricably intertwined.
The New (Ethno)musicologies - Introduction
The New (Ethno)musicologies, 2008
Over the last twenty years a range of radical developments have revolutionised Musicology – leading certain practitioners to describe their discipline as ‘New’. What has happened to Ethnomusicology during this time? Do its theories, methodologies and values remain rooted in the 1970s and 1980s or has it also transformed? What directions might or should it take in the new millenium? With contributions from a number of key figures in Ethnomusicology and related disciplines, this volume explores Ethnomusicology’s shifting relationship to other disciplines and to its own ‘mythic’ history, and plots a range of potential developments for its future. It also considers perspectives on Ethnomusicology from ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the ‘discipline’, and its broader contribution and relevance beyond the academy. In a period of particular dynamism and intense technological change, when Music departments, in the UK at least, are increasingly opening their doors to Ethnomusicologists, and valuing the types of skills and approaches they offer, such reflection is particularly timely. In many respects, this volume also offers a European perspective; one that provides some interesting and refreshing contrasts from the North American discourses and institutional dynamics that have tended to dominate Ethnomusicology since the 1950s.
Thoughts on an Interdiscipline: Music Theory, Analysis, and Social Theory in Ethnomusicology
I n an analytical and hortatory article in the Yearbook for Traditional Music about theory in ethnomusicology, and on the nature of ethnomusicological theory, Timothy Rice manifests a telling contradiction regarding music theory as a part of the discipline (2010b). 1 Th e article is quite useful in providing systematic ways of thinking about social theory and its role in ethnomusicology as well as the autochthonous modes of theorizing-about society, about culture, about the world-that we do in our discipline; but where it comes to theorizing about musical sound, Rice is unclear in a way that is at least unhelpful to his argument in the article, and potentially deleterious to our practice as a discipline as we move into the future. 2 On the one hand, he draws on a host of examples of the most signifi cant work in the fi eld in which theorizing about and closely analyzing musical sound plays a central role, but on the other, when he discusses music theory (by which I believe he means the production of generalizations about musical structure in the abstract) he does so in a way that diminishes its currency and importance to ethnomusicology. In this essay, I take the position that we need a metatheoretical perspective on the discipline that recognizes the ongoing signifi cance of close analysis of musical sound in a range of studies and the production of music theory by ethnomusicologists over the past thirty years. Th is work, I argue, is not separate from the "interpretive turn, " as Rice calls the growing importance of social theory in ethnomusicology since the 1980s, but, rather, interconnected with it. As Martin Stokes says in his portion of the entry on "Ethnomusicology" in the New Grove Dictionary, the opposition between "texts and contexts" can be seen as a false one (Pegg et al. n.d.).
Ethnomusicology as the Study of People Making Music ([1989] 2020)
Toward a Sound Ecology, 2020
Ethnomusicology is the study of people making music. People make sounds that are recognized as music, and people also make “music” into a cultural domain. This 1989 conference paper defined ethnomusicology and contrasted music as a contingent cultural category with earlier scientific definitions that essentialized music as an object. It was published for the first time in Musicology Annual (2015). Here it is as reprinted, with a new introduction, in my book Toward a Sound Ecology: New and Selected Essays (Indiana University Press, 2020). The book is available from IU Press, the usual online sources, and your favorite independent bookstore.
Ethnomusicology, 2001
I. Ethnomusicology, Ethnographic Method, and "Non-Western" Music In an introduction to a special issue of the Journal of the American Musicological Society (JAMS) published in 1995, Regula Qureshi discussed the relationship between anthropology, history, and a broader musicology that includes ethnomusicology. Qureshi characterizes the "anthropologizing of music history," the primary and most productive relationship to date of anthropology and historical musicology, as beginning with "a recasting of the musical product into the realm of experience" (Qureshi 1995:335). The four essays that follow Qureshi's introduction interrogate music in culture through highlighting the notions of "dialogue, de-essentializing, and difference" (Qureshi 1995:339). Indeed, the specialJAMS issue builds on historical musicology's growing engagement with a range of anthropological theories that have served to enliven and enrich the musicological palette, forecast earlier in writings by Tomlinson (1984) and Treitler (1989). Ethnomusicologists, of course, have drawn freely on anthropology; indeed, they have spent much of the second half of the twentieth century trying to remake their own discipline in its image. To note just a few milestones, one might cite Merriam's Anthropology of Music (1964), Alan Lomax's Cantometrics (1976), Timothy Rice's remodeling of ethnomusicological theory (1987) based on readings of Clifford Geertz, and Mark Slobin's schema for transnational musics (1993) which draws upon Arjun Appardurai's notion of "ethnoscapes" (Appadurai 1990). Ethnomusicological research and writing have further interacted closely with a number of different streams of anthropological thought, ranging from structuralism, to symbolic, linguistic, and reflexive anthropology. While none of these efforts has resulted in a new theory that moves beyond its anthropological model, there have been, particularly recently, a number of increasingly nuanced case studies. Yet there is one area allied to anthropology in which ethnomusicologists alone have innovated. I have earlier suggested (Shelemay 1996b) that the domain of ethnographic method is where ethnomusicologists have most successfully and creatively occupied a disciplinary space midway between anthropology and musical scholarship. One is tempted to dub this a true "anthromusicology." But since terminology is already so problematic, I will draw instead on a distinction made over a decade ago by Anthony Seeger (1987). While historical musicologists are now beginning to participate actively in an "anthropology of music," bringing the "concepts, methods, and concerns of anthropology" to studies of music history, ethnomusicologists have in the meantime moved much more aggressively toward what Seeger has termed a "musical anthropology," exploring the way[s] "musi
Rhodes, Willard. 1956. Towards a Definition of Ethnomusicology
HE increasing interest in music and awareness of its significance as a T revealing expression of man and his culture have given a fresh impetus to ethnomusicological research and investigation. Employing the techniques and methods of cultural anthropology and musicology, the discipline has struggled along these past seventy years as a stepchild of both parents, a second class citizen in the society of the social sciences and the humanities. This unenviable position results in part from the cross-relationship of ethnomusicology and the demands which it imposes on the student and scholar, for he must have a working knowledge and facility with the theoretical and empirical aspects of both disciplines if he would deal adequately with his material. The ethnologist with a basic training in musicology is as rare as the musicologist who has worked seriously in anthropology. The progress of ethnomusicology has been limited by the small number of workers who have been able to meet the double qualifications of the discipline.
New Directions in Ethnomusicology: Seven Themes toward Disciplinary Renewal
The New (Ethno) musicologies. Europea: …, 2008
This paper offers a set of reflections on trends in current ethnomusicological research that might move closer to the mainstream in the near future. Seven areas are selected, forming a cross-section of the discipline more broadly: music analysis (including its role as a tool that can critically interrogate fieldwork observations); criticism (noting our role as expert commentators on individual musical performers, recordings or works); writing (and the questions of genre and voice); history (and the implications for the discipline of historical research); research of urban and professional musics (noting the methodological implications of these genres); research in applied ethnomusicology and by the so-called native ethnomusicologist; and comparison (raising questions about the role in the discipline of the broader frame of reference).