Contemplating Ethnomusicology: What Have We Learned?

Contemplating Ethnomusicology: What Have We Learned?
Author(s): BRUNO NETTL

Source: Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 67. Jahrg., H. 3. (2010), pp. 173-186
Published by: Franz Steiner Verlag
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Contemplating Ethnomusicology: What Have We Learned?
by
BRUNO NETTL
This lecture considers the history of ethnomusicology in German- and English-speaking countries by
contrasting commonalities and changes during the past century. Beginning with a brief survey of seminal
publications of the 1880s, it then takes as a point of departure a major article by Erich von Hornbostel
to discuss developments in several key areas: the origins of music, the concept of authenticity, the need
for preservation and universals, the role of aesthetic issues, and the question of relevance regarding the
study of the various systems of ideas on music. Important landmarks in twentieth-century scholarship are
enumerated, often illustrated by events and projects connected to the author's personal experience. The
conclusion suggests that ethnomusicology has made important strides in some areas, while in others it
has returned in circular fashion to its beginnings. This article was prepared while the author was holding
a Mellon Emeritus Followship, awarded through the University of Illinois, for the study of the history
of ethnomusicology. The author wishes to express his gratitude to the Andrew R. Mellon Foundation for
support of his studies.
I am very honored to address you, particularly as I am speaking as an ethnomusicolo

gist here in the city that more than any other can claim to be the original home of this
field, and I thank my colleague and friend of long standing, Prof. Riethmiiller, for his
invitation. I would like to make a few comments about the history of ethnomusicology,
looking back at its beginnings, to see whether it is possible to make some general state
ments about its progress, asking whether in the century or so of its existence, this field
has learned anything significant of a general sort. At my age, I seem almost constantly
to be observing some significant anniversary or other, so allow me today to take as my
starting point the year 1885, just 125 years ago, when two publications appeared, pub
lications that gave us in ethnomusicology our start. Guido Adler, in his famous article
"Umfang, Methode und Ziel...,"1 sets out a sub-discipline of Musikologie in his category
of systematic musicology, whose purpose is comparative study for ethnographic purposes.
In the text, however, he refers to "vergleichende Musikwissenschaft," possibly for the
first time in an influential publication, and he presents it?remember, this was before
the introduction of sound recording?as "neu und sehr dankenswert." But he separates
it. He places it in the systematic sector with acoustics, psychology, and organology,
not with the historical section that deals with real music; and it is not even really a part
1 G. Adler, ?Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft," Vierteljahrsschrift fiir Musikwis
senschaft 1 (1885), pp. 16-7.
Archiv fiir Musikwissenschaft, Jahrgang 67, Heft 3 (2010)
? Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart
174 Bruno Nettl
of that, but rather a "Nebengebiet des systematischen Teils." Its purpose, according to
Adler, is to compare and to group the music of the world's peoples, providing, I am
presuming, a systematic picture of the world's music.
The other publication of 1885 is Alexander John Ellis's article, "On the Musical Scales
of Various Nations,"2 which, I admit, probably got some things wrong in its collecting
and presentation of data, but which gave us ethnomusicologists an important start as
the relativists and egalitarians of music study. Ellis concludes, "The musical scale is
not one, not Natural, not even founded necessarily on the laws of the constitution of
musical sound...but very diverse, very artificial, and very capricious."
The imperative of these articles is to study all of the world's musics, looking at them
relativistically and from a comparative perspective?to compare, but not in order to
show what is best or worst, but rather to compare in order to show that each music is a
constituent part of a world of musics.
The next publication that to me seems to tell us what to do is now just 105 years old: Erich
M. von Hornbostel's lecture "Die Probleme der vergleichenden Musikwissenschaft,"3
quickly published after it was delivered in Vienna. I shall use it as a major point of de
parture in these remarks. Although by then a good deal about non-Western musics and a
huge amount about European folk music had been published, he seems to have regarded
comparative musicology as a new field just beginning, although he cites Ellis (1885)
as the "father" of comparative musicology. He begins: "Einem jungen Spezialgebiet
einer Wissenschaft fallt die Aufgabe zu, seine Daseinsberechtigung zu erweisen" [A
new area of research in an established field is required to prove its reason for being].
Problems? He informs us about many?fieldwork, transcription, interval measurement,
recording, analysis, interpretation. But just what is this new field trying to accomplish,
what general questions is it trying to answer? In the course of the article, Hornbostel
mentions three main issues that seem to be his ultimate concerns: the discovery of the
origins and evolution (or development) of music; the nature of the musically beautiful;
and the preservation of the world's musical diversity. Surely these issues have been
with us ever since, but as the century progressed, our field's fundamental purposes or
questions have also been stated differently. Here are a couple of milestones.
Jaap Kunst is thought to have been the inventor of the term ethnomusicology, but he
says this: "The study object...is...the traditional music and musical instruments of all
cultural strata of mankind, from so-called primitive peoples to the civilized nations...
Besides, it studies as well the sociological aspects of music, as the phenomena of accul
turation... Western art- and popular music do not belong to its field."4 And he explained
that the term comparative is inappropriate since all fields use comparison. Well, I am
sure Hornbostel already knew that. I think the term comparative was inappropriately
attacked in the 1950s; it seems to me that it was simply a code word for work involving
many or all cultures, for a universal perspective.
2 Journal of the Society of Arts 33 (1885), pp. 526-7.

3 Zeitschrift der internationalen Musikgesellschaft 7 (1904-5), pp. 85-97.
4 J. Kunst, Ethnomusicology... 3d ed. (The Hague, 1959), p. 1.
Contemplating Ethnomusicology: What Have We Learned? 175
But let me continue my sampling. From what I experienced, my teacher George Herzog
did not specify a definition of the field or state its principal task, but in his teaching he
dealt with specific cultures, repertories, and styles, using several approaches, assuming,
I think, that we would ourselves synthesize the field.
Alan Merriam may have been the most influential ethnomusicologist in North
America, and for him, ethnomusicology was "the study of music in?or as?culture."5
By this he did not mean that one should ignore what we usually call the music itself,
but he proposed a three-part model, suggesting that music, in the large sense, consisted
of ideas about and governing music, of various kinds of behavior that gave music its
existence in society, and of the music itself; and each of these affects the other two.
But the point is that Merriam moved gradually from a view of music emphasizing
sound, with the "music in culture" component as a kind of Hilfswissenschaft, to a posi
tion in which the study of music as sound is only one component. But in emphasizing
Merriam's importance in promulgating the music-in-culture approach, I must mention
here the importance of some scholars who identified themselves as sociologists or who
were sociologically inclined, and who ultimately moved in directions similar to those of
Merriam. Here a major figure was Kurt Blaukopf, who perhaps differed from Merriam
in that he contemplated the world of music from a perspective derived from Western art
and perhaps popular music.6 Merriam, while including Western music in his theoretical
purview, approached music from the perspective of an Africanist and a student of Native
Americans.
John Blacking, an enormously influential scholar, represented a variety of interests
in his sadly much too short career, but I think that he considered himself an ethnomusi
cologist?although he called himself also an anthropologist, and further, also gave piano
recitals.7 I feel that his notion of the principal tasks of ethnomusicology were: 1) to set
straight a large number of prejudices and misunderstandings about the world of music;
2) to emphatically include the study of Western art music and the study of all music as
art; and most importantly 3), to work in a field that would somehow?economically,
morally, aesthetically?do the world's peoples and the world's musicians some good.
Since ca. 1990, the field of ethnomusicology has become increasingly diverse. There
are scholars who think it should, as a separate field, cease to exist. Many things envi
sioned by scholars a hundred years ago do not need to be done?cannot be done?any
longer. The world of music has changed immeasurably, and the world of scholarship has
repeatedly turned over new leaves in analytical technologies. The musicians of the world
are a very different population from the one of 1900. One indication of the changes is
the number of subfields of ethnomusicology that have lately taken root in North Ameri
can and other nations?applied ethnomusicology, historical ethnomusicology, music
education/ethnomusicology, medical ethnomusicology?one result of which, I think, is
5 The Anthropology of Music (Evanston, 1964); "Definitions of 'Comparative Musicology' and

'Ethnomusicology': An Historical-Theoretical Perspective," Ethnomusicology 21 (1977), pp. 202, 204.
6 See e.g. his Musik im Wandel der Gesellschaft (Mtinchen, 1882).
7 See e.g. his How Musical Is Man? (Seattle, 1973).
176 Bruno Nettl
a certain lack of cohesion. There are no longer things that we can expect all ethnomusi
cologists to know, a situation quite different from some forty years ago, when I began
to teach graduate students. Indeed, to give one example of the direction of organizations
take, the Society for Ethnomusicology has avoided defining the field or specifying its
purposes. Its official representations state that it was founded "to promote the research,
study, and performance of music in all historical periods and cultural contexts." And
it is "dedicated to the study of all forms of music from diverse humanistic and social
scientific perspectives." And its journal states that it published "original articles in the
field of ethnomusicology, broadly defined." I am sometimes surprised to find that a
society with such a vague conception of its field can be so successful. But successful it
now is, with over 1800 individual members.
As you can see, the field of ethnomusicology changed its perspectives and its con
ception of its tasks, even its name, substantially over the past 125 years. I could have
given much more evidence. Can we who are in ethnomusicology claim that the field, as
a whole?and not just in accumulating data on individual cultures and repertories?has
learned anything? I have no broad statements by way of an answer, but I would like
to comment on some areas in which something has been learned, using Hornbostel's
article of 1905 as a point of departure. I would like to say a few words about the origins
of music, about authenticity, universals, and ideas about music, about some aspects of
aesthetics, and provide a few illustrations from my personal experience.
Origins
Speculating on the origins of music was a major issue early on. Richard Wallaschek's8
and Carl Stumpf's9 books?the earliest?about music of tribal societies were named
Anfdnge (Beginnings) in 1903 and 1911 respectively. By beginnings these authors meant
the earliest music, whose nature can be discovered through the ostensibly simplest music
of contemporary tribal societies. At the same time, the late nineteenth century produced
several theories setting forth motivations for the coming-into-being, or, if you will, the
invention of music. They are still well known, though perhaps now regarded as rather
old-fashioned: music developed from speech?whether emotional or expressive; music
developed as the human version of the mating calls of animals and birds; from the need
to communicate over long distances?something easier with the sustained tones of sing
ing than simply with loud speaking; from the need to provide a vehicle for rhythmic
work in groups; or for the need to have a special form of communication, a language,
if you will, for addressing the supernatural.10
I do not want to comment on these in detail. But one thing strikes me as interesting:
All of these theories assume that some kind of human culture already existed before
8 R. Wallaschek, Anfdnge der Tonkunst (Berlin, 1903).

9 C. Stumpf, Die Anfdnge der Musik (Leipzig, 1911).
10 For a summary, see B. Nettl, The Study of Ethnomusicology (Urbana, 2005), pp. 259-63.
music could come about, and that humans saw a need that was, or could be, satisfied
by music. Music is not seen as fundamental to human culture, but as something brought
about to enhance culture. These theories stem from research by earlier scholars, but as
a group they also reflect the role of music among the domains of culture as seen by the
denizens of Western society.
In contrast, there are societies?some American Indian peoples, for example?whose
world view puts singing earlier in human history. The Havasupai of Arizona believed
that spirits that existed before the coming of humans communicated with each other by
singing.11 A number of peoples in North and South America see the bringing of music
by a mythic cultural hero as the change of human behavior from chaotic and savage to
civilized.12
But in ethnomusicology, interestingly, concern with the origins of music had waned
by the middle of the twentieth century. I remember a conversation with my friend
Alan Merriam around 1960 about what ethnomusicology students should be learning.
"There's no point in the concern about origins of music; we will never know anyway,"
he said emphatically. And most books concerned with our field published in the 1960s
and 1970s do not mention the subject.13
At the end of the twentieth century the subject returned, stimulated more by biolo
gists, psychologists, animal communications scholars, and linguists than by ethnomu
sicologists. Again, there is a group of parallel hypotheses: music came about through
the perception in utero of sounds made by a mother; music is the primordial expression
of social solidarity in a group; music is a biological adaptation coming from the use of
sounds to prove ability to be an attractive, able, imaginative, flexible, energetic, and
well-organized individual worthy of mating. There is more emphasis on genetic than
on cultural factors. Parallel developments in the animal world?species that differen
tiate between two kinds of sound communication, possibly analogous to speech and
music?suggest the existence of music before the development of the rest of culture.
For myself, I have to ask, how can the knowledge of world cultures, and of music
in culture, the field of ethnomusicology, contribute to this issue? I have come to feel,
however, that a single course toward the development of music may not provide an
adequate explanation. Looking at the world's simplest music or the simplest compo
nents of any repertoire, well, yes, that might tell us something about the world's earliest
music?perhaps. But to me, more interesting is the fact that there is no interculturally
or universally valid conception of music, and that many of the world's societies have
no term that encompasses all of music as we in Western (and some other) cultures do.
11 Leanne Hinton, unpublished paper, University of Illinois, 1967-8; and Havasupai Songs, a Lin
guistic Perspective (Tubingen, 1984).
12 Nettl, op. cit., 261-2.
13 I have in mind A. P. Merriam's Anthropology of Music (Evanston, 1964), J. Blacking's How Musical
Is Man? (Seattle, 1973), and M. Hood, The Ethnomusicologist (New York, 1971); but also more recent
works such as W. Suppan, Der musizierende Mensch (Mainz, 1984) and S. Arom and F. Alvarez-Pereire,
Precis d'ethnomusicologie (Paris, 2007).
178 Bruno Nettl
Even in some Western cultures, there is a bit of ambivalence about the unity of music,
as in Czech between the terms hudba and muzika, or between musiqi and khandan in
Persian.
So, if we say that music originated as mating calls, or as group expressions of
solidarity, or as expressive speech, or as a function of mother/child relations, or as a
way for people to communicate with the gods, then I would be inclined to say, well,
probably all of them. We, today, would consider all of these as various kinds of music,
but early human societies, and some more recent ones, would regard them as separate
phenomena. Individually they may have led, possibly, to musical forms that we now
recognize?virtuosic solos, military music, church rituals, musical drama, etc. etc. But
only in some societies were they eventually combined, conceptually, into a single idea
called music. So I would guess that it was not one phenomenon that led to a simple music
like that of some small tribal societies, which eventually developed into a great variety
of forms, but rather something like this great variety of forms, a group of separate types
of sound communication which fulfilled different needs, and which eventually came to
be conceptually unified into a concept of a unified phenomenon.
I think I have learned that; I hope I learned it right. We will never know. But if this
change from a single origin to a kind of multigenesis becomes acceptable to scholars
and scientists in many fields, it is because of the kinds of things that ethnomusicologists
have learned about the world's musical cultures.
Authenticity, the Universal Language, and Universals
In 1905 Hornbostel warned that the spread of European culture would devour even
the last vestiges of foreign song.14 We must save, he said, what can be saved before
airplanes supplement the automobile and the electric train, and all of African music has
become Tararabumdieh. Did it happen? Well, not exactly. Ethnomusicologists did save,
by documentation; and in some cases their archives became useful in helping non-western
societies reconstruct earlier musical culture. But of course, the world's music is much
more a cultural mix than Hornbostel would have liked. He would have wished, I think,
to preserve authentic music of each society. So would many in his generation and later
ones as well.
When I was a student, a half century after Hornbostel, my teacher George Herzog,
a Hungarian immigrant to USA via Berlin, was very concerned with the authenticity
of the music he taught.151 think I can synthesize his beliefs and those of many of his
contemporaries: Each society has a musical language of its own, which consists of a
14 Hornbostel, "Die Probleme der vergleichenden Musikwissenschaft," pp. 96-7.

15 For a discussion of the significance of the concept of authenticity see Herzog, "Song" in M. Leach,
ed., Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend vol. 2 (New York, 1950).
S. Thompson, ed., Four Symposia on Folklore (Bloomington, 1950); and C. Seeger, Studies in Musicol
ogy 1935-1975 (Berkeley, 1977), pp. 51-3.
relatively stable repertory defined by a musical style or, if you wish, musical grammar
or vocabulary, and while it is open to outside influence, this influence comes slowly and
selectively. The various mixes that Herzog encountered?in African-American music,
in modernized American Indian music?he saw as anomalies, and the various mixes of
cultures that made up modern popular music ought best to be ignored. An authentic song
was one that was recognized by the responsible components of a society as truly its own.
Some of his attitude came from his association with Bela Bartok, who in his collecting
and publications made a point of emphasizing the importance of older Hungarian folk
songs, in contrast to Roma songs, taken by many to be the true ethnic Hungarian music.
What have we learned since then? Well, if you look at the contents of any of our
European and American journals that publish ethnomusicology, you quickly note that
much?well, I dare say most?of the content is concerned in one way or another with
the relationship of cultures as expressed in music: be it with styles of popular music
that combine Western, African, Middle Eastern, Eastern European, and Indie elements;
how a music absorbs a foreign music (usually Western) or defends its integrity against
it; or how the components of music?the sound of music itself, the institutions that
involve behavior such as concerts, schools, and the media, or the concepts and ideas
about music that govern these?respond differentially to an outside music. These kinds
of things are now, for better or worse and in one way or another, the most typical of
ethnomusicological study. One does not frequently encounter the word authenticity any
more.
So, should I say that a basic assumption of early ethnomusicology?that each

has its music?has been abandoned? During much of their history, ethnomusi
have been fighting the romantic and perhaps beneficent conception of music as t
versal language. Uttered by poets and philosophers who perhaps did not wor
the way the term universal language might be interpreted by musicians in non-
societies, this concept supported those who saw all musics as subject to the same
standards. Carl Stumpf, a kind of grandfather of ethnomusicology, claimed in 1
an article about the Bellacoola Indians of the Pacific coast, that Westerners like h
could easily understand Bellacoola music.16 But this rather ethnocentric view
not think the obverse, that his Bellacoola friend would appreciate Bach?had i
respects been contradicted a year earlier by Alexander John Ellis in his art
the Musical Scales of Various Nations," quoted above. Even so, about fifty years l
George Herzog found it necessary to contradict the universal language conce
article entitled "Music's Dialects - a Non-Universal Language."17
The conception of music as a universal language was gradually supplanted
widespread notion of the world of music consisting of a world of musics. In the
speaking world, there was a lot of resistance to the use of terminology such as "
16 C. Stumpf, "Lieder der Bellakula-Indianer," Vierteljahrsschrift fur Musikwissenschaft

p. 426.
17 G. Herzog, "Music's Dialects?a Non-Universal Language," Independent Journal of Columbia
University 6 (1939), pp. 1-2.
180 Bruno Nettl
I do not know how well it fares in German?Musik and Musiken. It may sound awkward,
but in fact it has been used by some authors, one being Christian Kaden.18 But it finds
support from several sides: the linguist's notion of languages; anthropologists' insistence
that there are cultural boundaries marking insiders and outsiders; and closer to home,
the development of the bimusicality concept, which is the belief that to understand a
foreign music one must develop speech-like competence. Perhaps most influential is
the acceptance of the world of music as a plethora of musics by the profession of music
education.19
Well, we have won, we victorious ethnomusicologists might say, our approach to
the world of music has been adopted by others. But wait: Typically, study around 1900
focused on the musical style of an individual society while assuming a high degree of
homogeneity. I know these were first attempts, but the desire was to show what was
typical or normal in each musical culture?the Thompson River Indians, Thailand,
Japan, Tunisia, India. These scholars were not naive, they knew that all musics had their
internal diversity. But to them, what was important about these repertories, what was
important to show, was its center.
Consider the typical projects in ethnomusicology after 1990. Almost everything deals
with recent change, or what is at the borders of nations, ethnic and religious groups, so
cial classes, and repertories. We are less involved in showing that the Blackfoot Indians
have a distinct musical culture than in what they are doing in their music to cope with
social and economic change. We are less interested in showing the unique character of
Persian classical music than in the way musicians contend with the nation's exposure
to Western, Arabic, and Indian music, and with the musical culture of Iranian musicians
living abroad. The typical study of the last years somehow concerns relationships among
musical cultures, usually about a musical culture and what has come into it from Europe
or North America?though once in a while the opposite direction is also examined.
I learned about these issues when I was quite young. When I was five years old, with
an average musical upbringing, I would probably have taken easily to the notion of mu
sic as a universal language. Actually, my father, though a devoted historian of music in
the Czech lands and Austria, one day brought home the historically significant album
of 78-rpm records entitled Musik des Orients, and began to play Balinese, Japanese,
Indian, and Arabic music, exhibiting considerable interest and respect for these strange
sounds, but seeing them as fairly exotic. So when I came to musical diversity in my first
exposure to non-Western music in the courses of George Herzog, I was not surprised. If
someone at the time asked me why I was studying comparative musicology, my answer
was clear: it was the world's musical diversity that turned me on. I think for a long time,
this would have been the ethnomusicologist's typical attitude. What was great about the
world's musics is that they were so different.
18 B. Nettl, "Music" in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2d ed., vol. 17 (London,
2001), pp. 428-31; C. Kaden, Das Unerhdrte und das Unhdrbare (Kassel, 2004), pp. 19-39.
19 For a representative publication, see Patricia Shehan Campbell, Lessons from the World (New
York, 1991).
So I was astonished when ethnomusicologists in the 1970s began to talk about uni
versals. Particularly when a new student came and told me that her purpose was to study
universals. Well, articles dealing directly with universals are a feature of the 1970s and
1980s, but they have a legacy. The most typical study these days is somehow concerned
with commonalities. The theoretical approach underlying many studies have this impli
cation: I am looking at this event, this ceremony, this musician, this genre combining
a tradition and Western music, in a particular way, and I do this because it may tell me
something about the behavior of music and musicians everywhere.
So there is a paradox: We got away from "music is the universal language" to "what is
important about the world's music is its diversity," but, having accepted this diversity as a
point of departure, we now expend great energy looking for commonalities and regularities.
Most of these commonalities concern not the sound and style of music but the conception
that people have of music. And so I come to what seems to be a really important thing we
have learned, and that is the overwhelming interest and significance of a society's system
of ideas about music as something to be studied, and to questions about its role in the
context of preservation, which was so important to Hornbostel in 1905.
Ideas about Music
After I sat through a year of Professor Herzog's lectures, I got a job as his assistant,
and since the university had employed a Native American to help with American Indian
language research, I was asked to approach him about recording whatever songs he would
be willing to sing. One must remember that this was at the beginning of reel-to-reel tape
recorders, only some ten years after people had finally stopped using cylinders. Any
opportunity to record was a rare treasure. But, I was told, do not just ask him to sing.
Ask him to tell you what kind of a song it is, where he learned it, and anything else he
will tell. I tried to be a good student, and so our recording sessions sometimes turned
into long conversations which, to be honest, were much more interesting than the rather
homogeneous repertory of songs he sang.
I am confident many others had this kind of experience. But the idea of formalizing
this approach to study did not come until somewhat later. I am not certain who said what
first, but one landmark would be David McAllester's study of values in Navajo Indian
music, a book about songs that does not analyze them but explains what they mean in their
people's lives.20 More systematically, a few years later came Alan Merriam's three-part
division of the concept of music: ideas, behavior, and sound. And finally there arrived
the concept of the complete account of musical culture, the notion that a comprehensive
study of the music of a society should include an account of all three sectors, as illustrated
in Merriam's book, The Ethnomusicology of the Flathead Indians.21
20 David McAllester, Enemy Way Music (Cambridge, Mass., 1954).

21 Alan P. Merriam, Ethnomusicology of the Flathead Indians (Chicago, 1967).
182 Bruno Nettl
After Merriam's significant works of the 1960s, the direction of ethnomusicology in

North America and Western Europe turned its interest to the study of music in culture.
The statistical and typological study of musical styles we saw in the work of HornbostePs
time and in most works of Herzog and Mieczyslaw Kolinski was to a great degree
supplemented or replaced by studies of music in relationship to culture, or to the rest
of culture.
This also has to do with the concept of ethnography?an old word that began to change
in meaning in the 1970s. The word technically means the writing or the description of
culture. From the pre-1950s view?when ethnography was merely description, in con
trast to the more theoretical "ethnology"?the concept of ethnography in general, even
when taken over by other disciplines, became the interpretation of an aspect of culture,
hopefully in relation to a number of cultural domains. Musical ethnography?the pres
entation of an aspect of music or musical life in the context of the rest of culture?was
a microcosm within this. So, Steven Feld's Sound and Sentiment looks at the taxonomy
of musics among the Kaluli people of New Guinea in relation to the classification of
sounds of all kinds.22 And The Soul of Mbira by Paul Berliner relates an instrument
to ritual, social organization, and transmission in Shone culture. In the 1970s, I tried
my hand at it with the classical musicians of Iran, analyzing the Radif the repertory of
about 300 pieces musicians memorize as a basis for improvisation and composition.
I tried to show that the relationship between its various components?modes, pieces,
rhythmic types, motifs?reflected important elements of Persian social behavior and
social relations, including the tension between hierarchy and equality, the importance of
surprise, and the relative position of the most important person in a group or of an event
in a series in both informal and ritual situations.23 There are many such examples?one
might even claim that the typical ethnomusicological monograph since the 1980s rep
resents in one way or another this approach to ethnography. If musical ethnography is
what ethnomusicologists mostly do, what has become of some of the early conceptions
of its center? When I was a student, "comparative musicology" was the study of non
Western and folk traditions; also, some said, it was the study of a musical culture from
an outsider's perspective. And further, it was the study of musics in oral tradition?but
always from an outside perspective. Now we saw ethnomusicologists from India and
Japan studying Indian and Japanese music, and there was the occasional Asian scholar
looking at Western musical culture. And the study of Asian art musics, though not no
tated in the kind of detailed read during performance by European musicians, cannot
simply be dismissed as "oral tradition" without further elaboration. So, what was now
the ethnomusicologist's unique venue of study?24
22 Steven Feld, Sound and Sentiment (Philadelphia, 1982); Paul Berliner, The Soul ofMbira (Berkeley,
1978).
23 B. Nettl, "Musical Values and Social Values: Symbols in Iran," Journal of the Steward Anthropo
logical Society 10, no. 1 (1978), pp. 1-23.
24 For elaboration, see B. Nettl, The Study of Ethnomusicology, pp. 232-43.
I am not sure how it came about, but in the 1980s, scholars in the Western world who
called themselves ethnomusicologists began to contemplate the musical culture from
which they had come, that is, the culture of Western classical music. Now, let's be honest.
There have for a long time been scholars who contemplated Western art music culture,
past but more typically present, from a perspective quite related to that of ethnomusicol
ogy. They associated themselves with sociology, psychology, or simply musicology at
large. I have already referred to Curt Blaukopf, a prominent name, who saw himself as
a sociologist among them.25 And Christopher Small, who considered himself a music
educationist.26 And of course the many-sided Theodor Adorno, perhaps best described
as a philosopher of music.27 So when European and American ethnomusicologists began
to look at their own culture, did their contribution have a uniqueness? Perhaps in this
way: They saw Western musical culture as one of many of the world, and they tried to
look at the musical sector of culture as one of several sectors.
Let me again illustrate with my personal experience, and allow me this time to go
into some detail. Having tried to gain some insight into the system of ideas about music
in cultures in which I was a foreigner, I began to wonder what I would find if I asked
those same questions in my own culture, the culture of Western art music. But where
would be a point of entry into this vast field? I determined to study a type of institu
tion with which I was particularly well acquainted, the school of music in midwestern
universities in the United States. My gathering of data as I spoke to many people and
observed events and relationships was to an extent like that of the participant observer
of modern ethnography, but it was also unique in the sense that I myself was a principal
"native informant." In my presentation I assumed three voices: that of an experienced
ethnomusicologist able to compare music schools with institutions in other cultures; as
the authoritative cultural insider; and as a scholar whom I labelled the ethnomusicologist
from Mars, that is, the absolute outsider who observes everything with utmost naivete
and takes nothing for granted.
I first contemplated making this book heavy with data, counting ensembles, students,
professors, composers, telling everything that happens on a given day, following one stu
dent around for a week.281 was reminded of the advice given by Bronislaw Malinowski,
a classic figure in anthropological fieldwork: collect three kinds of information.29 These
are 1) texts?in nonliterate cultures he meant things like tales, myths, life histories, and
elsewhere various kinds of writings, and in my study, also pieces of music; 2) structures,
by which he meant abstract principles of behavior such as rules about social organiza
tion, property, power relations, and perhaps for me, rules for structures of concerts, for
social contexts of performances, or relationships between leaders and followers, between
25 C. Blaukopf, Die Musik im Wandel der Gesellschaft (Kassel, 1952); also Musiksoziologie (Wien,
1951).
26 C. Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performance and Listening (Hanover, 1998).
27 T. W. Adorno, Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie (Frankfurt, 1962).
28 B. Nettl, Heartland Excursions: Ethnomusicological Reflections on Schools of Music (Urbana, 1995).
29 B. Malinowski, Magic, Science, and Religion, and other Essays (New York, 1954), p. 317.
184 Bruno Nettl
teachers and students; and 3) the unique approach of the anthropologist, what he called
the "imponderabilia of everyday life"?who speaks to whom, body language in social
relationships, when do people laugh, how do teachers behave; you can imagine how this
translates into a musical context. But Malinowksi warned: Do not just accumulate data,
but constantly interpret. Thus, instead of amassing a lot of data, which should certainly
be done, I decided that I might best contribute something by taking an interpretive per
spective.
So I decided to look at a school of music as societies in four senses of the word. I
claim that the inhabitants of the school?students, teachers, and administrators?imagine
their world as a group of societies. First, the classical music system is most importantly
seen as a group of composers, the greatest of which are a kind of pantheon, and like
the pantheons of European mythology, they are also families whose members interre
late with each other: a pair of central siblings?the genius Mozart, who did everything
right the first time, and Beethoven, who had to labor mightily to achieve his greatness;
there is Bach the serious grandfather, who looks over everyone's shoulder and to whom
composers refer in fugue and variation when they want to show their zealousness; then
there is Wagner the innovator with a touch of evil, maybe the Loge of his Ring. The
second society concerns the way school inhabitants see themselves as a society with
contesting and conflicting subdivisions: constant competition between students, teach
ers, and administrators; competition between vocal and instrumental forces, between
scholars and performers, between music education and everyone else, between strings
and winds, between the orchestra and the wind band, and so on. Stereotypes of social
and racial groups are set into the music school's structure.
Third, there's the music school as a meeting place of many musics. But Western art
music is central, and other kinds of musics must enter by way of the door of musicology.
That is, we had courses about African music before we had ensembles performing it,
courses about Renaissance music before we had a music collegium, courses about jazz
history before a jazz performance program. And the newly admitted musics must adhere
to the rules of the central music?one-hour lessons and rehearsals and concerts of ninety
minutes with an intermission. The fourth type of society is almost unexpected, but let
me suggest it for your contemplation. I believe that we think of our musical repertory
as an interrelationship of materials?works, genres, and styles?that has the overtones
of a society: instruments exist in families; the four-part chorus is an analogue to parents
and two children; orchestras?and particularly their most popular productions, concertos
and operas?parallel social organizations.
I better stop this far too detailed account. Let me say that ethnomusicologists have
gradually learned that the study of the world's music and the study of music from an
anthropologist's perspective can help us understand our own musical culture.
The Beautiful
In 1905 Hornbostel placed the quest for the essence of musical beauty among the
fundamental issues of comparative musicology.30 What has happened to that? Again, this
is a broad subject on which I can say only a word. Let me mention a curious paradox. It
seems to me that the nineteenth-century collectors of folk songs such as Franz Magnus
Boehme and Cecil J. Sharp, or the composers who carried out analytical studies of folk
music such as Colin McPhee and Bela Bartok, or perhaps scholars attracted first by re
ligion and philosophy such as Alain Danielou, are examples of early ethnomusicologists
who were moved by the sound of the music they studied. But looking at the writings of
the mainstream of early comparative musicology?the small group who called themselves
comparative musicologists: Stumpf, Hornbostel and his students, sometimes referred
to as the Berlin school, which incidentally included George Herzog?these scholars
showed hardly any sign of taking an interest in enjoying the music they were studying.
In my years of study with Herzog, I remember no instance in which he said anything
like, "I hope you are enjoying listening to these songs," or "that African chorus we just
heard in my class, that is a real masterpiece." Indeed, I sometimes had the feeling that
he would consider it a mistake to become somehow emotionally involved in the sound
of the music, that there was something unscholarly about this. He certainly did not talk
about the experience of hearing music in the field as an aesthetic experience.
Things are very different now. Ethnomusicologists do not have a theory of musical
aesthetics, except perhaps that there would be no agreement upon criteria, but it seems
likely to me that most ethnomusicologists today approach their object of study from
a viewpoint of being "turned on" by the music. I think this is a result from two main
changes in their lives. First, is the concept of bimusicality?the idea that this strange
music I am hoping to understand is something I could also learn to perform. Secondly, a
great many students experience, hear, and see music in the field, and live in its cultural
context before having ever heard of ethnomusicology. In any event, if one had asked
students of my generation what motivated them, it would be abstract questions like "I
am interested in the world's musical diversity." More recently, it would probably be, "I
want to study and learn to perform this music that sounds so attractive to me." Music
in culture? That comes later, though in time it may come to dominate.
But?and my final point?the thing that ethnomusicologists have learned more than
anything else since the early and middle twentieth century is a different conception of
music, especially of non-Western and folk traditions. Once, these seemed as unchanging
bodies of music that maintained their consistency. But now we see that what Hornbostel
feared?that the world's musics would become an unholy mix?has come to pass; as
individuals we can make our personal judgments about it, but as ethnomusicologists we
must accept and interpret it. I think my teacher Herzog would have wished to stay away
from this music, almost to pretend that it did not exist. Most of us now involved in this
30 Hornbostel, "Die Probleme der vergleichenden Musikwissenschaft," p. 85.
186 Bruno Nettl
field think of music, like culture as a whole, as constantly changing and the world of
music as one of constant change. Ethnomusicologists have on the whole changed from
being principally students of products to being students of processes.
And finally: Herzog, and according to him, Hornbostel as well, thought of compara
tive musicology as a field with a single main methodology?one that included a sepa
ration of the activities of collecting, preserving, transcribing, and analysis, that used a
comparative method as the principal technique, and expected in both training and in the
research process a set of stages through which everyone should pass. Their pioneering
work, however, has led us eventually to a field in which there is enormous diversity, in
which there are many, many kinds of valid approaches to ethnomusicological research,
and in which the boundaries between the various musicologies have begun to lose their
significance. On this last point, I want to say that at least I hope so.
Anschrift: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, School of Music, 1114 W Nevada Street, Urbana, IL 61801, USA

Contemplating Ethnomusicology: What Have We Learned?

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Contemplating Ethnomusicology: What Have We Learned?

Author(s): BRUNO NETTL

I am very honored to address you, particularly as I am speaking as an ethnomusicolo

2 Journal of the Society of Arts 33 (1885), pp. 526-7.

5 The Anthropology of Music (Evanston, 1964); "Definitions of 'Comparative Musicology' and

8 R. Wallaschek, Anfdnge der Tonkunst (Berlin, 1903).

Authenticity, the Universal Language, and Universals

14 Hornbostel, "Die Probleme der vergleichenden Musikwissenschaft," pp. 96-7.

So, should I say that a basic assumption of early ethnomusicology?that each

16 C. Stumpf, "Lieder der Bellakula-Indianer," Vierteljahrsschrift fur Musikwissenschaft

Ideas about Music

20 David McAllester, Enemy Way Music (Cambridge, Mass., 1954).

After Merriam's significant works of the 1960s, the direction of ethnomusicology in

30 Hornbostel, "Die Probleme der vergleichenden Musikwissenschaft," p. 85.

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