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The Diverse Voices of Contemporary

Ethnomusicology
Abigail Wood
Published online: 03 Nov 2009.

To cite this article: Abigail Wood (2009) The Diverse Voices of Cont emporary Et hnomusicology,
Journal of t he Royal Musical Associat ion, 134:2, 349-364, DOI: 10.1080/ 02690400903109117

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 Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Vol. 134, no. 2, 349
364

Review Article
The Diverse Voices of Contemporary Ethnomusicology

ABIGAIL WOOD
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The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction . Edited by Martin Clayton, Trevor
Herbert and Richard Middleton. New York and London: Routledge, 2003. vii368pp.
ISBN 0 415 93845 7.

Ethnomusicology: A Contemporary Reader . Edited by Jennifer C. Post. New York and

Abingdon: Routledge, 2006. xii446 pp. ISBN 0 415 97203 5.

The Musical Human: Rethinking John Blacking’s Ethnomusicology in the Twenty-First Century .
Edited by Suzel Ana Reily. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. xi220 pp. ISBN 0 7546 5138 X.

Bruno Nettl, The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-One Issues and Concepts. Second, revised
edition. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005. xiii514 pp. ISBN 0 252 03033 8.

IT is now well over two decades since New Musicologists began to urge greater recognition of
the culturally situated nature of all music. One effect of this recognition was to spur
widespread interest in ethnomusicology, previously considered by many musicologists to be a
somewhat marginal subdiscipline. Since this time, the landscape of both disciplines has
changed significantly. Ethnomusicology courses have grown in curricular prominence and
scholarly societies have thrived. Ethnomusicologists have become more confident in their
disciplinary identity: hand-wringing over the definition of the discipline in the 1980s has
given way to a flowering of new literature embracing many of the hot topics of recent
anthropology: diaspora, urbanism, gender and technology, to name just a few. Meanwhile, it
is now commonplace for scholars in musicology to straddle interdisciplinary boundaries: at a
British Forum for Ethnomusicology meeting in 2001, Nicholas Cook asserted that ‘we are all
(ethno)musicologists now’. Nevertheless, a mutual interest in music as embedded in culture
has not led musicology and ethnomusicology to collapse into a single field of scholarship, as
was predicted by some. Rather, if anything, both disciplines have become increasingly diverse
and fragmented.
The present review considers four contrasting recent volumes which together illustrate the
diversity of recent thought in ethnomusicology and related disciplines. The first three are

ISSN 0269-0403 print/ISSN 1471-6933 online

# The Royal Musical Association
DOI: 10.1080/02690400903109117
http://www.informaworld.com
 350 ABIGAIL WOOD

multi-author volumes: Clayton, Herbert and Middleton’s The Cultural Study of Music: A
Critical Introduction considers the relationship between music and culture in its broadest
form, encompassing contributions from musicology, ethnomusicology, sociology and
anthropology; Jennifer C. Post’s Ethnomusicology: A Contemporary Reader presents 24 essays
which represent some of the best recent writing in the discipline; and Suzel Ana Reily’s The
Musical Human: Rethinking John Blacking’s Ethnomusicology in the Twenty-First Century
presents a series of contemporary responses to the work of the late British scholar John
Blacking. Finally, Bruno Nettl’s The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-One Issues and Concepts
gives a personal portrait of the discipline, grounded in a survey of the last 50 years of research
in ethnomusicology. All are worthy of inclusion on the scholarly bookshelf, and all offer
useful teaching resources.
These volumes are linked by the multiplicity of approaches and viewpoints they represent,
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both internally and in relation to one another. A reader seeking an easy, static summary of the
contemporary state of ethnomusicology will undoubtedly be disappointed; rather, the
portrait here is of a discipline in constant dialogue with itself and the academic fields that
surround it. Nevertheless, it is perhaps this diversity and dialogue that best characterize
today’s ethnomusicology. The time for grand statements is over: instead, a multi-layered and
vibrant idea of the discipline emerges from reading a cross-section of scholarly work.
Of the four volumes under review, the most explicit response to the evolution of
musicology over the past two decades comes in The Cultural Study of Music, edited by
Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert and Richard Middleton. The makeup of the editorial
team
specialists in, respectively, ethnomusicology, musicology and popular music
in itself
points to the interdisciplinary focus of this book. Intriguingly, this volume begins from a
position of disciplinary disquiet: ‘In recent years we have, one might suppose, seen the
publication of more than enough navel-gazing collections exploring the current state of the
disciplines of music studies. Why another?’ (Middleton, Introduction, pp. 1
15 (p. 1)). This
sense of unease continues as Middleton observes that even the modestly optimistic vision of a
new disciplinary paradigm described in the proposal for this book has been slower in fruition
than expected. While the members of the Musics and Cultures Research Group at the Open
University, whose discussions prompted this volume, predicted that the increasing intensity
of engagement between different strands of musicology interested in ‘culture’ would lead to
some kind of change within the discipline as a whole, five years later Middleton suggests that
this statement was ‘premature’, observing with disappointment that ‘in the discipline at large,
the process of reconfiguration seems to have slowed markedly’ (p. 2).
It is hard to imagine a less effusive introduction to a volume whose list of contributors reads
like a musicological Who’s Who: the editors aside, the names include Gary Tomlinson, Philip
Bohlman, Lawrence Kramer, Jeff Todd Titon, Nicholas Cook, Kofi Agawu and Mark Slobin.
It is clear that this volume is designed for maximum impact. The length of contributions is
kept deliberately short (the longest is 14 pages) and footnotes are omitted, in an attempt to
broaden the appeal of the book and make it ‘accessible to readers outside the academic
establishment’ (p. 9).
While the overall content of the book was clearly carefully planned by the editors, they
thoughtfully avoid overshaping the reader’s engagement with its constituent texts, which,
Middleton notes, ‘do not serve some overbearing model of the relationship between music
and culture so much as reveal a patchwork of distinct, but also overlapping and
complementary, conceptions of that relationship’ (p. 9). The table of contents is simply
 REVIEW ARTICLE 351

divided into two broad parts, ‘Music and Culture’ and ‘Issues and Debates’; the latter part of
Middleton’s introduction alerts the reader to common strands of engagement among
the various contributions. The effect of this organization is to reinforce the notion that
the ‘answer’ to the question of music’s interrelationship with culture is not to be found in the
words of any one scholar, but rather is an emergent property of the engagement of multiple
voices and perspectives with this question. Further, the reader is not permitted to remain
aloof from the debates at hand, since the very emergence of such themes relies upon the
presence of the reader’s gaze.
Middleton closes his introduction by urging the reader against a reductive or reified
approach to the issue of culture, suggesting instead that we ‘might do well to regard the
concept of culture (and especially its apparent hegemony) as a staging post: full of important
leads, still indispensable to thinking, but always overambitious, never fully identical to its
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objects, part of a movement that we need to push past, while retaining what is valuable in its
patrimony’ (p. 15). Nevertheless, if Middleton’s introduction sets the project of this book
within an ambivalent framework, on the whole his fellow contributors avoid excessive hand-
wringing over the subject of culture. Rather, the 26 essays serve as a kaleidoscopic voyage
through contemporary musicology, ranging from ‘Music and Evolution’ (Ian Cross, pp. 19

30) through ‘Globalization and the Politics of World Music’ (Martin Stokes, pp. 297
308)
to ‘Music and the Market’ (Dave Laing, pp. 309
20). The best of them combine a succinct
yet personal introduction to one strand of musicology with penetrating critique. While a
single review is clearly insufficient to do justice to such a varied collection, the following were
some personal highlights.
Simon Frith (‘Music and Everyday Life’, pp. 92
101) addresses an area until recently
largely overlooked by ethnomusicologists and musicologists alike: the role of music and
sound in our everyday lives. Beginning from a point that undermines the reverence for music
which is a given for the majority of musicological scholarship, he notes that in 2000 Robert
Key, the Conservative MP for Salisbury, proposed a Parliamentary bill banning the playing
of recorded music in certain public places. Quoting the Chartered Institute of Environmental
Health, Key observed that ‘the commonest type of offending noise is not pneumatic drills,
cars, or aircraft but music’ (p. 92).
Building from Key’s comments, Frith observes that the boundaries between music and
noise have been challenged during recent times. While avant-garde composers made music
out of ‘noise’ and rock musicians built an aesthetic of distortion, so-called ‘canned’ music
pervades everyday life. Lest the artistic establishment feel themselves immune to this
phenomenon, Frith notes that ‘our ears are as likely to be assaulted these days by classical
music as by pop’. Silence, not music, has now become ‘the indicator of an unusual intensity
of feeling
emotional intensity in the Hollywood film; public solemnity in the two-minute
silence on Veterans’ Day; the one-minute silence before kickoff in which to honor someone’s
death’ (p. 93).
These observations force a radical reconfiguration of the place of music in society: in a
world where music can invade personal space, the ability to screen out unwanted music
becomes an important life skill. Music can help to structure our lives and mark out personal
space, but can also be used aggressively: Frith reports ‘classical music being played in railroad
stations to make them unsuitable as youth hangouts’ (p. 99). He ends on an upbeat note,
asserting that we have not yet ‘lost the sense that music, the musical experience, is special , that
it is a way of one person reaching another without deceit’ (p. 101). However, the damage has
 352 ABIGAIL WOOD

been done, and ultimately this essay serves as an unsettling challenge to musicologists and
other cultural commentators: where are the boundaries of musical engagement?
This sense of challenge to the discourses of contemporary musicology is echoed
throughout the book, albeit from radically different angles. Rob C. Wegman (‘Historical
Musicology’, pp. 136
45) critiques the perceived incompatibility of ‘positivistic’ archive-
based historical enquiry with a move to a culture-focused musicology, acutely aware of the
subjective status of its scholars. Diagnosing a sense of melancholia and ‘merciless self-
criticism’ (p. 142) in contemporary scholarship, Wegman frames these two approaches not as
separate branches of enquiry, but rather in a mutual relationship of legitimation: the only
way to accept the inevitable failings of historical enquiry is to embrace the essential
subjectivity of all human knowledge. Doing so, he suggests, is the first step towards the
revaluation of historical musicology. The second step is the acceptance of imperfection:
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notwithstanding the flaws of subjective scholarship, history, argues Wegman, adds ‘a rich
dimension’ to our world and therefore to musicology.
If Wegman pleads for a reappraisal of the place of historical scholarship in contemporary
musicology, the chapter by Trevor Herbert which follows (‘Music History and Social
History’, pp. 146
56) shows us how this can neatly be integrated into a culture-centred
approach. Considering a musical phenomenon usually given scant treatment in standard
music histories
the development of valved brass instruments
Herbert illustrates how the
methodologies of social history, itself a fairly new subdiscipline within the academic field of
history, can uncover radical insights behind the superficial historical ‘facts’ of traditional
textbook accounts. Observing that valves were invented in the second decade of the
nineteenth century, Herbert points out that valved instruments were nonetheless little used
during the first quarter of a century after their invention. However, during the 1840s ‘social
and economic factors combined to initiate one of the most momentous changes to the idiom
of a family of instruments in the history of Western music’ (p. 153). A chance encounter
between a group of musicians and Belgian inventor Adolphe Sax created the concept of the
working men’s brass band. A massive new international musical phenomenon swung into
motion via the businesslike intervention of a handful of musical entrepreneurs and the happy
confluence of music technology, social values and a booming transport industry. A new
musical idiom was born, using the newly invented valved instruments as a catalyst to
virtuosity.
This large-scale socio-musical revolution is just one example of those culturally based
phenomena which have been overlooked in a tradition of music scholarship that has tended
to focus on a few exceptional individuals rather than wider musical society. Like Wegman,
Herbert asserts that an acknowledgement of the essential subjectivity of scholarship is vital to
the reinvigoration of historical musicology. However, he situates this revitalization not in the
painful acceptance of inevitable partiality, but rather in the embracing of the subjective as a
path to open advocacy: ‘what is needed now are social histories of music that are both
intimate and red in tooth and claw’ (p. 155).
Traditional musicology is not the only subdiscipline subjected to critique in this volume.
Ethnomusicologist Jeff Todd Titon (‘Textual Analysis or Thick Description?’, pp. 171
80)
uses recent technology as a catalyst to consider strategies in which ethnographers might
overcome the limitations of previous approaches to writing. Admiring anthropologist
Clifford Geertz’s influential concept of ‘thick description’, he nonetheless notes that Geertz’s
own writings minimize the position of the cultural insider: we see Balinese culture through
 REVIEW ARTICLE 353

Geertz’s eyes, not through those of the Balinese. Here, Titon considers the use of multimedia
computer-based hypertext technology as an alternative medium for the presentation of
research outputs. Such media allow a more active engagement between reader and text,
mirroring the recent movement of ethnomusicological writing towards multivocality:
Multimedia hypertext represents the partial, the contested, the ambiguous, the complex structures
and symbols of cultural life; and for the cultural study of music it requires one to become far more
active as a participant-observer. It encourages the student of music to be not simply a spectator
looking over an ethnographic shoulder but also an ethnomusicologist drawing interpretive
conclusions. (p. 180)
Rather than echoing Middleton’s cultural angst, the essays of this book by and large predict
a lively future for the study of music. The best of them, as illustrated above, use the discursive
energy of contemporary debates around music and culture as a springboard both to offer a
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penetrating critique of their own subdiscipline and to point to new, creative ways forward.
The interaction of subdisciplines is also an emergent quality of this volume, which invites the
reader to zigzag through the perspectives of fields other than his or her own. This comes at a
price: it must be said that, despite the good intentions of the editorial team, the book is not an
easy read. The short length of each chapter is deceptive: each deserves and requires a detailed
reading; the authors’ energetic critiques make the experience of reading through the whole
book somewhat akin to spending a week at a conference composed only of keynote papers.
Further, many of the debates presented here will be little accessible to those who are not
already familiar with the wider disciplinary trajectories of musicology and ethnomusicology.
Nevertheless, in boldly presenting the debates of musicology in a series of short, footnote-free
position pieces, Clayton, Herbert and Middleton have performed a remarkable service to our
discipline(s) and challenge all of us to broaden our scholarly horizons.
A different approach to the construction of a multi-author volume is taken by Jennifer C.
Post’s Ethnomusicology . This volume, as its subtitle suggests, is a collection of previously
published material; its 24 essays, originally published between 1993 and 2003, were chosen
to represent ‘the best new writing in the field’ (back cover). The authors include both
younger and more established scholars; while the majority are based in the USA, a not
insubstantial contribution is made by scholars from other English-speaking countries and
from continental Europe.
One might question the need for such a volume in an age when digital publication has
become commonplace: indeed, over half of the essays included in this collection are available
via JSTOR (among other web archives). Nevertheless, the success of this volume points to the
primary weakness of the digital domain: greater accessibility does not necessarily imply ease
of choice. Post’s able curation has produced a volume filled with thought-provoking work of
extremely high quality. The volume is thoughtfully structured: the essays are loosely grouped
under nine thematic headings, framed by an introduction, a glossary and a substantial section
on research resources. The last, comprising a bibliography of ‘some of the most widely cited
sources in contemporary ethnomusicological research’ (p. 419), an annotated discography, a
list of video recordings and a thematic guide to web resources, is another key asset of this
book. If this volume is clearly well suited to form the backbone of a reading course in
ethnomusicology, it is also useful for anyone involved in the discipline: perhaps the greatest
compliment I can offer this book is that my review copy is already dog-eared from frequent
use.
 354 ABIGAIL WOOD

Set alongside the essays it introduces, Post’s Introduction (pp. 1
13) is rather
underwhelming. Clearly aiming it at a student entering the discipline rather than at the
scholarly community, Post briefly outlines modern developments in the field of
ethnomusicology, explains the headings under which she structures the volume and
summarizes the content of the individual essays. Post’s readable, accessible style, coupled
with her reference to other works which deal with similar theoretical issues, is useful.
Nevertheless, I could not help feeling that an opportunity for critical engagement was lost
here: in the end, this volume remains a collection of essays, albeit an excellent one, rather
than in itself an intervention into the issues and debates of modern ethnomusicology.
Many of the individual essays do, however, fully engage with current debates in the
discipline. Opening the volume, Jonathan H. Shannon’s essay ‘Sultans of Spin: Syrian Sacred
Music on the World Stage’ (pp. 17
32) interrogates some of the commonplaces of world-
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music marketing. Analysing the international stage performances by Syrian ensembles of the
mawlawiyya dhikr (‘Whirling Dervish’ rite), he considers the construction of the ‘sacred’ and
the ‘Sufi’ within the world-music industry, suggesting that musical traditions may be
‘sacralized’ purely by their presentation in festivals of sacred music. Shannon critiques the
seemingly arbitrary assignation of the title ‘sacred’ in the description of contemporary world
musics
he notes that the World Music Institute categorizes ‘sacred’ as a style of music
alongside other styles ranging from ‘vocals’ to ‘cross cultural’ (p. 23), and locates the creation
of this ‘sacred’ style in a reaction to perceived inauthenticities of commercial world music.
This analysis might be taken still further. Shannon notes that the desire for ‘sacred’ music
is a peculiarly Western phenomenon; nevertheless, one might also ask what kind of reality the
use of the word ‘sacred’ has even in this context, given the substantial semantic gap between
the English term ‘sacred’ and its Middle Eastern equivalents. A similar question might be
asked of Tong Soon Lee’s observation that ‘in almost every Islamic community today, the
loudspeaker, radio and television have become essential in the traditional call to prayer, a
remarkable juxtaposition of high media technology and conservative religious practice’
(‘Technology and the Production of Islamic Space: The Call to Prayer in Singapore’, pp.
199
208 (p. 199)). What is really more ‘remarkable’ here: the adoption of new technologies
by Islamic communities throughout the world, or the unquestioned assumption that new
technologies should somehow stand in opposition to ‘traditional’ religious practices? Both
these essays, among others, pave the way for the deconstruction of the Western liberal-secular
scholarly gaze
now very much current within the anthropology of Islam
to enter the
discourses of ethnomusicology.
In ‘Folk Festival as Modern Ritual in the Polish Tatra Mountains’ (pp. 67
83), Timothy
J. Cooley considers the question of authenticity in staged musical performances from a
different perspective: the yearly International Festival of Mountain Folklore in Podhale, a
folk region near Poland’s border with Slovakia. Cooley traces the history of folk festivals as
embedded in the political history of Poland
including the adoption of folk music as a
national symbol by the Communist party
and notes the economic role played by today’s
folk festivals in local culture. Adopting Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s model of the
continual recreation of heritage via its own performance, Cooley suggests that ‘with over
a century of heritage exhibits for tourists in Podhale, one can observe the circular nature of
heritage. Performed tradition becomes the tradition; the representation becomes the
actuality. Heritage begins to reference heritage’ (p. 74).
 REVIEW ARTICLE 355

Critiquing the tendency of ethnographers to repeat ‘the dichotomous view that cultural
practice is either authentic, or its opposite, spurious’ (p. 73), Cooley instead suggests that
tourist festivals be regarded as ‘rituals, not unlike other more traditionally recognised
calendric rituals that define a people’s relationship to their universe and ensure their
continued livelihood’ (p. 67). A particular strength of Cooley’s essay is his seamless
integration of scholarly theoretical debate with the discourses and practices of those involved
in contemporary festivals, supported by visual and musical examples, a strategy which again
helps to erase false dichotomies of the ‘spurious’ versus the ‘authentic’.
A further key issue explored by several contributors to this volume is the enaction of
gender and sexuality in musical performance. While this topic is hardly a stranger to
contemporary musicology, the diversity of approaches represented by the authors collected
here invites comment. The section on ‘Gender and Sexuality’ opens with an essay by
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Deborah Wong, who writes from an insider’s perspective about the experiences of Asian
American women who perform in the Japanese taiko drum tradition (‘Taiko and the Asian/
American Body: Drums, Rising Sun , and the Question of Gender’, pp. 87
96). ‘Taiko’,
notes Wong, ‘excites an expectation of the foreign in the White American spectator, and I
have played in all too many performances where this was precisely what was counted upon’
(p. 87).
Wong begins her discussion with an analysis of the use of taiko music to underscore the
violent sexual conquest of a White woman by a Japanese man in the Japan-themed American
film Rising Sun (1993). Taiko , here ‘visually and sonically constructed as both masculine and
sinister’ (p. 89), serves as a means of reinforcing racist and gendered stereotypes relating to
Japanese culture. How then do the predominantly female players of taiko in America interact
with this stereotype? Wong suggests that while Japanese American women ‘are drawn to taiko
for empowerment’, they do not ‘attempt to map the masculine/menacing onto themselves’
(p. 92). Rather, Wong argues that ‘part of taiko ’s appeal lies in its redefinition of the Asian
American woman’s body. [ . . .] Taiko opens up the body: the legs are wide apart and the
movement of the arms commands a large personal space. How many of us were taught to
keep our knees together and to speak softly?’ (p. 93).
Other perspectives on female engagement with highly gendered ‘masculine’ musical
traditions are given by Cheryl L. Keyes (‘Empowering Self, Making Choices, Creating
Spaces: Black Female Identity via Rap Music Performance’, pp. 97
108) and Leslie C. Gay Jr
(‘Acting Up, Talking Tech: New York Rock Musicians and their Metaphors of Technology’,
pp. 209
21). Keyes presents four persona-types of black female rappers who, not unlike their
Japanese American counterparts, ‘use their performances as platforms to refute, deconstruct,
and reconstruct alternative visions of their identity’ (p. 105). Illustrating the interdependence
of electronic technologies and contemporary concepts of popular music, Gay takes the reader
behind the exterior of a well-known popular music scene. He explores the relationship of
female rock musicians with the equipment they use, noting in particular that the bass guitar
offers some women an inroad into the musical core of the rock band while bypassing the
baggage associated with lead guitar or the ‘girly’ image of keyboards.
If these explorations of urban American musical scenes are fairly typical contributions to
the literature on music, gender and sexuality, Veronica Doubleday’s ‘The Frame Drum in the
Middle East: Women, Musical Instruments and Power’ (pp. 109
33) offers a complete
stylistic contrast. The wide geographical and temporal scope of this essay, its informational
style and its highly structured presentation mean that it reads more like an encyclopaedia
 356 ABIGAIL WOOD

entry than a book chapter. Nevertheless, by presenting the frame drum within a rich social,
historical and religious context, Doubleday illustrates the kind of rich interplay of musicology
and social history proposed by Trevor Herbert in the previous volume reviewed here. Ably
intertwining material from her own fieldwork and from the work of other contemporary
scholars, she is able to make overarching comments which draw together common musical
practices of the Middle East, while also including insights from individual performers.
The interaction between politics and music is another topic frequently encountered within
this collection. Mark Mattern’s ‘Cajun Music, Cultural Revival: Theorizing Political Action
in Popular Music’ (pp. 371
82) stands out as a particularly noteworthy contribution.
Diagnosing a representational bias in popular-music scholarship, he observes that much of
the literature concerning popular music and politics tends to emphasize ‘confrontational’
political action, privileging the discourses of opposition, resistance and struggle over other
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forms of political action and interaction. Mattern illustrates the inadequacy of such
approaches with reference to his work on Cajun music:
Although it makes at least some sense to portray the [Cajun] preservationists in confrontational
terms as resisting and opposing change and cultural assimilation, we should be wary of generalizing
this interpretation. Most Cajuns, preservationists included, live comfortably in both francophone
and Anglo worlds. More profoundly, contemporary Cajun identity includes a significant Anglo
component, as Cajuns selectively adopt some of the beliefs and practices that characterize
Anglo culture and identity. It thus makes little sense to argue that Cajuns are opposing or resisting
Anglo culture, since this would imply that they are at least partly at war with themselves.
(pp. 378
9)
Mattern proposes, then, a more fluid understanding of the interaction of music and politics,
taking into account deliberation, accommodation, adaptation and compromise. Rather than
theorizing a ‘mutually exclusive choice between preservation and change’, we are encouraged
to consider instead ‘how much change is appropriate in order to keep a culture vital and
resilient without tearing the culture away from its historical moorings’ (p. 379).
Mattern’s critique illustrates one of the key strengths of this collection. While the picture
of ethnomusicology presented here focuses on the discipline’s engagement with current
theoretical issues
rather than, for example, presenting a geographical survey of
contemporary research
the simultaneous use of case studies helps to reinforce the validity
of the arguments presented. Other equally important discussions include popular music in
diaspora (Tina K. Ramnarine, ‘‘‘Indian’’ Music in the Diaspora: Case Studies of Chutney in
Trinidad and in London’, pp. 275
92) and ethnomusicology as advocacy (Angela Impey,
‘Culture, Conservation, and Community Reconstruction: Explorations in Advocacy
Ethnomusicology and Participatory Action Research in Northern KwaZulu Natal’, pp.
401
11).
Finally, one of the joys of a collection of this kind is the breadth of writing it represents.
Marina Roseman’s ‘The Canned Sardine Spirit Takes the Mic’ (pp. 147
60) and Richard
Jones-Bamman’s ‘From ‘‘I’m a Lapp’’ to ‘‘I am Saami’’: Popular Music and Changing Images
of Indigenous Ethnicity in Scandinavia’ (pp. 351
67) stand out as really excellent examples
of ethnographic writing. Aside from providing ample material for the discussion of
theoretical issues, in bringing together material originally published in ten different journals,
including both music-focused and wider publications, this volume provides models, useful to
 REVIEW ARTICLE 357

students and academics alike, for the effective presentation of research materials in essay
format.
Perhaps the boldest project of the four books under review is represented by The Musical
Human , edited by Suzel Ana Reily. As its subtitle suggests, this volume represents a response
to the work of British ethnomusicologist John Blacking (1928
90) over 30 years after the
publication of his seminal volume How Musical is Man? (1973). The nine essays which
constitute this book are drawn from papers presented at the European Seminar for
Ethnomusicology in 2000, and represent an intimate assessment of the ways in which John
Blacking
the man and the scholar
influenced those who followed him.
It is rare for a volume in the field of ethnomusicology to engage with the work of a
previous scholar in such depth, especially, perhaps, a figure who is just one scholarly
generation distant from some of the contributors to this volume: Reily herself spent time
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studying under Blacking as a doctoral student. A more-than-passing familiarity with

Blacking’s work is assumed of the reader, without which it is difficult to make full sense of
the material here. This applies equally to the music examples cited and to the commentary on
Blacking’s work: for example, it is not until page 128 that the oft-mentioned domba dance is
actually described for the reader.
Multivocality is yet again a feature of this volume, which interweaves a number of strands:
an appreciation of Blacking’s work; a critique of this work with the benefit of temporal
distance; and the presentation of new research following on or drawing ideas from Blacking’s
work. Some of the latter work considers case studies in South Africa similar to those on which
Blacking based his work; other essays apply his ideas to very different musical contexts.
Reily begins by outlining Blacking’s idiosyncratic approach to the study of music:
The musical human: without a doubt, this vision of the human species as naturally musical has
become the most enduring legacy that John Blacking bequeathed to ethnomusicology. The image
aptly embodies his preoccupations, which integrated theoretical and methodological issues within
the discipline with a deep concern for the physical and psychological well-being of humanity.
Blacking sincerely believed in the power of music and he contended that people’s general health
depended on the musical opportunities made available to them. For this reason, he placed great
importance on ethnomusicology, the discipline that investigates the way in which different societies
around the world organize their musical activities and the impact of these diverse alternatives on the
people involved in them (p. 1).
The impact of Blacking’s work receives even-handed treatment. Reily observes (p. 2) that
his work has been criticized for its ‘bold and sweeping assertions on sometimes rather slender
evidence, and occasionally none at all, about the innate musical capacities of humankind’.1
She notes, however, that this image of a ‘man of ideas’ has frequently masked Blacking’s
meticulous approach to ethnography. Reily’s introduction continues with a biographical
portrait of Blacking, exploring the context within which his work was produced. The depth
this adds to the reader’s understanding of material subsequently covered in the book
highlights the way in which engagement with the authorial personality is frequently sorely
missed from the academic reading experience.

1
Reginald Byron, ‘The Ethnomusicology of John Blacking’, John Blacking, Music, Culture, and
Experience: Selected Papers of John Blacking , ed. Byron (Chicago, IL, 1995), 1
28 (pp. 17
18).
 358 ABIGAIL WOOD

The eight essays which follow Reily’s introduction approach Blacking’s legacy from a variety
of perspectives. Keith Howard (‘Memories of Fieldwork: Understanding ‘‘Humanly
Organized Sound’’ through the Venda’, pp. 17
36) considers the relationship of Blacking’s
exacting fieldwork to his wider writings. Using his own interviews with Blacking as a basis,
Howard offers four defences for Blacking’s continued reference to his fieldwork with the Venda
in support of his wider statements, varying from personal circumstances (for political reasons,
Blacking was not permitted to return to South Africa to update his data) to theoretical
considerations (following Malinowski, Blacking emphasized ‘fine-grain’ ethnography) to
ideology (Blacking stated that ‘nobody who still writes about Bach, Schubert or Schumann has
to defend themselves’; Blacking, personal communication, cited by Howard, p. 25).
A contrasting personal perspective forms the foundation of John Baily’s essay (‘John Blacking
and the ‘‘Human/Musical Instrument Interface’’: Two Plucked Lutes from Afghanistan’, pp.
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107
24). Baily collaborated with Blacking on field techniques, exploring motor patterns in the
performance of stringed instruments including the Afghan dutar.
Further essays place Blacking’s work within wider contextual circles. Both Jaco Kruger
(‘Tracks of the Mouse: Tonal Reinterpretation in Venda Guitar Songs’, pp. 37
70) and
Deborah James (‘Black Background: Life History and Migrant Women’s Music in South
Africa’, pp. 71
86) explore contemporary case studies parallel to those considered by
Blacking. In comparing Blacking’s observations about the structure of traditional Venda
music to his own analyses of the melodic and harmonic features of contemporary Venda
guitar music, Kruger critiques our tendency to hear the homogenizing forces of globalization
in music, suggesting instead that features which on the surface seem to reflect Westernization
may actually represent a redeployment of traditional materials. In this case, a seemingly
‘Western’ three-chord pattern is not simply lifted from Western pop, but rather represents a
reworking of the tonal shift that Blacking observed to be a fundamental principle of older
African music (p. 50).
Deborah James analyses and builds on Blacking’s work concerning music in the lives of
young women. While, as James observes, Blacking’s ‘view of music as having an almost
heroic capacity to alter the world, or at least to reconstruct it satisfactorily in settings of
extreme harshness and intractability’ has impacted considerably on music studies in southern
Africa, she claims that a parallel aspect ‘in which music demonstrates or confirms apparently
unchanging social/structural relations, rather than transcending these’ (p. 74) has been
relatively neglected. Building on the tension implicit in this juxtaposition, she points out
that, whereas Blacking claims that different kinds of music occupy these two roles, her own
work on the musical culture of girlhood suggests an intrinsic linking of the two functions.
Discussing Northern Province migrant women working on the Witwatersrand who met
regularly to sing and dance in a traditional style called kiba , she observes that while the
women associated their performance of kiba with memory of home, these women had not
actually met before they came to the Witwatersrand. Rather, their performance of kiba
illustrated a new form of urban ethnic organization: the group of dancers expanded and
began to provide wider support to each other including financial aid and help in finding
employment.
Three further chapters take a comparative approach to Blacking’s work, setting his Venda
field studies alongside very different comparators: musical behaviours among Japanese
nursery children (Fumiko Fujita, ‘Musicality in Early Childhood: A Case from Japan’, pp.
87
106); the roles of pleasure and pain in the experiences of European ballet dancers (Helena
 REVIEW ARTICLE 359

Wulff, ‘Experiencing the Ballet Body: Pleasure, Pain, Power’, pp. 125
42), and transcendent
experiences in Haitian vodou singing (Rebecca Sager, ‘Creating a Musical Space for
Experiencing the Other-Self Within’, pp. 143
70).
A final thread, perhaps of particular interest to readers of this journal, is the discussion of
Blacking’s statements about and attitudes towards the study of Western art music, in which
Blacking had significant background as a performer and in his early education. This issue is
introduced by Keith Howard and taken up again by Britta Sweers (‘Bach in a Venda Mirror:
John Blacking and Historical Musicology’, pp. 171
92). Both Howard and Sweers begin
from critiques of Blacking’s work by musicologists, most notably the provocative remarks of
Joseph Kerman:
We need [ . . .] waste little time with Blacking’s rather portentous claim that only after understanding
Venda music of the Transvaal has he been able to understand Western music properly. One is glad
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for Blacking; but he has not done anything to help us with Western music, however much he may
have helped us with the repertory of Venda children’s songs.2
Howard answers Kerman with a balanced critique of Blacking’s engagement with Western art
music. He begins by substantiating Kerman’s criticisms, noting that Blacking did not apply
the same degree of rigour and scrutiny to his statements concerning Western art music as he
did to his fieldwork and publications on the Venda. In particular, Howard critiques
Blacking’s reliance on popular general musicological texts. He gives several examples of places
where Blacking ‘juxtaposes generalized information on European music with specific
information on the Venda’ (p. 27), either failing to apply a similar analysis to primary
sources relating to Western composition as he does to his Venda materials, or relying on his
own experience as a pianist to make generalized statements about physicality in performance.
Nevertheless, Howard places Blacking among the precursors of critical musicology. In
particular, in placing classical works alongside his Venda fieldwork, Blacking challenged the
deification of the composer and the emphasis placed upon music analysis by musicologists.
While Howard acknowledges continuing criticism of Blacking’s ‘grand statements’ and
observes that his thought was very much a product of its time, he also suggests that Blacking’s
work helps to illuminate contemporary questions in ethnomusicology. In particular, in
incorporating Western art music
in which he personally was fluent as a performer
into his
work as an ethnomusicologist, Blacking questioned the assumption that ethnomusicologists
should focus their gaze exclusively on the ‘other’.
Like Howard, Sweers begins by addressing critiques of Blacking’s work from the
musicological community; for Sweers, however, this becomes an inroad leading to a
consideration of the much broader question of ethnomusicology’s relevance to historical
musicology. As evidenced by much recent work, including the volumes reviewed here, this
continues to be a timely issue in both disciplines. However, in adopting a general focus rather
than concentrating on the figure of Blacking, Sweers’s chapter is rather over-ambitious in its
scope: at this point in time, this question is perhaps simply too wide to address in a single
essay. Sweers surveys a number of perspectives; particularly important is her inclusion of
continental European figures alongside Anglo-American scholars. Nevertheless, there is not a
clear focus to her approach, and much of the work cited here is old; modern

2
Joseph Kerman, Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (Cambridge, MA, 1985), 167, quoted
by Sweers, p. 171.
 360 ABIGAIL WOOD

ethnomusicology is much more diverse than Sweers suggests: see, for example, the range of
perspectives presented in Jennifer Post’s volume, several of which straddle the insider/
outsider distinction critiqued here.
In summary, this volume again represents a multifaceted approach to the modern field of
ethnomusicology. While, unlike the other books under review here, Reily’s does not seek
primarily to illustrate or define a disciplinary area, the diversity of the papers and the breadth
of research they represent mean that, even without the common reference to Blacking, this
would be a strong collection of essays. Nevertheless, perhaps the unique contribution of this
collection is its role as a case study showing the development of scholarly thought. The essays
here illustrate not only the development of ethnomusicology itself over the course of several
decades, but also the relationship between scholarship as expressed in widely read published
works and scholarship as expressed in local scholarly traditions and scholarly ‘families’: here
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we trace relationships between colleagues, Ph.D. students and mentors. Links are made both
backwards and forwards; changing perspectives are brought into focus via personal snapshots
of the influence of Blacking on those who followed him and via in-depth analysis of the
criticisms he faced, now themselves critiqued.
A contrasting approach to the re-evaluation of older work in ethnomusicology is offered by
the final volume under review: Bruno Nettl’s The Study of Ethnomusicology . This is a
substantially revised edition of his The Study of Ethnomusicology: Twenty-Nine Issues and
Concepts , originally published in 1983. This first edition is probably familiar to many readers,
having been a staple introductory text in ethnomusicology for over two decades. The present
edition is not simply a repackaging: Nettl includes four entirely new chapters, and other
material is substantially revised and updated.
As its subtitle suggests, this volume is a collection of 31 essays, each devoted to a single
issue or concept in ethnomusicology, which together stand as a snapshot of the discipline as
seen through Nettl’s own eyes. Remarkable eyes these are, too: how many scholars can offer a
first-hand account of 50 years of the development of a discipline? Nettl surveys historical and
current thinking in ethnomusicology, moving easily from the debates of the 1950s to the
debates of the new millennium across everything in between. His grasp of ethnomusicological
literature is phenomenal: there are over 900 items in the bibliography, and he makes
consistent, detailed reference to scholarship new and old. As in Reily’s book, this breadth
gives a rare sense of perspective: it is particularly refreshing to see the theoretical
developments of the last couple of decades placed firmly within historical context and
recognized as just one more of the changing faces of (ethno)musicology.
In his preface to the first edition, Nettl makes a case for his issue-based approach, which
was at that time clearly linked to a perceived need to justify the place of ethnomusicology in
the academy:
The task I have set myself here is to discuss the field of ethnomusicology in terms of a number of its
central issues and problem areas of general concern that have for several decades been and continue
to be subjects of debate and controversy, in the belief that such issues most clearly characterize an
academic field. [ . . .] My purpose is not to argue that ethnomusicology is a separate discipline. But
I hope to show that it is a field of learning with an identity, characteristic problems and approaches,
and a history of its own.3

3
Bruno Nettl, The Study of Ethnomusicology: Twenty-Nine Issues and Concepts (Urbana, IL, 1983), ix
x.
 REVIEW ARTICLE 361

That the revised edition contains no such justification is a sign of the times: Nettl notes that
‘the first edition tries frequently to justify what we do, perhaps with a bit of a chip on the
shoulder; I hope I’ve thrown out the chip, as we are now far better established’ (p. xiii).
Neither is there now a grand statement about the purpose of the book; rather, the very brief
preface outlines the revisions made in the new edition before moving straight into the body
of the discussion.
In his opening chapter, ‘The Harmless Drudge: Defining Ethnomusicology’ (pp. 3
15),
Nettl reflects on the discipline, incorporating both theoretical descriptions of the field and
descriptions of what ethnomusicologists actually do. He follows with what is perhaps the
central theoretical statement of the book: a ‘credo’ of ethnomusicology, which he divides into
four parts, and which is worth quoting at length:
1. For one thing, ethnomusicology is the study of music in culture . A concept that has its problems [ . . .]
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but in the end I think it holds up. Ethnomusicologists believe that music must be understood as part
of a culture, as a product of human society, and while many pieces of research do not directly
address the problem, we insist on this belief as an essential ingredient of our overall approach. [ . . .]
2 . Just as important, ethnomusicology is the study of the world’s musics from a comparative and
relativistic perspective . We endeavour to study total musical systems and, in order to comprehend
them, follow a comparative approach, believing that comparative study, properly carried out,
provides important insights. But we study each music in its own terms, and we try to learn to see it
as its own society understands it. [ . . .]
3 . Principally, ethnomusicology is study with the use of fieldwork . We believe that fieldwork, direct
confrontation with musical creation and performance, with the people who conceive of, produce,
and consume music, is essential, and we prefer concentration on intense work with small numbers of
individual informants to surveys of large populations. [ . . .]
4 . Ethnomusicology is the study of all of the musical manifestations of a society . Although we take into
account a society’s own hierarchy of its various kinds of music, and its musicians, we want to study
not only what is excellent but also what is ordinary and even barely acceptable. We do not privilege
elite repertories, and we pay special attention to the musics of lower socio-economic classes,
colonized peoples, oppressed minorities. We believe that we must in the end study all of the world’s
music, from all peoples and nations, classes, sources, periods of history. We just haven’t yet got
around to all of it. (pp. 12
13)
Nettl adds two corollaries to his ‘credo’: first, that ethnomusicologists ‘vacillate between a
view of music as a unified human phenomenon and as an emblem of the infinite variety of
human cultures’ and second, that ethnomusicologists are fundamentally ‘egalitarians’ who
‘believe that all musics are capable of imparting much of importance to the peoples to whom
they belong, and to the world, and thus naturally also to the scholars who study them’
(p. 14).
This ‘credo’ is slightly revised from the first edition of the book: points 1 and 2 have been
reversed, ‘egalitarians’ replace ‘relativists’, and the notes on each point have been updated. At
the time of first publication, judging from its very brief discussion in reviews at the time, it
seems that this credo, while recognized as the statement of an individual, was relatively
uncontroversial. Is this still the case? Undeniably a pragmatist, Nettl would probably argue
that this definition of the field encompasses most of what ethnomusicologists do
and he
would be right. Nevertheless, some modern ethnomusicologists might struggle to find their
own work reflected in this description. Elaborating point 2, Nettl states that ‘our area of
concentration is music that is accepted by an entire society as its own, and we reserve a lesser
 362 ABIGAIL WOOD

role for the personal, the idiosyncratic, the exceptional, differing in this way from historians
of music’ (p. 13). I would contend that this applies less and less as ethnomusicologists explore
the lives of exceptional musicians, and engage with urban musics which may be important to
a few, yet outside the everyday realm of many in the relevant society. Indeed, the definition of
‘society’ is also frequently contentious, and becomes somewhat redundant in cases where
musical affiliation becomes a primary factor in group membership.
Conversely, some of Nettl’s comments perhaps underplay certain concerns of con-
temporary ethnomusicology. For example, under point 3, he observes that ‘we hope that this
association will lead to some kind of benefit for the people from whom we learn’. Questions
of benefit and exploitation have loomed large in the discourses of recent ethnomusicology,
especially since the boom of the world-music industry. Further, the dynamics of the power
relationship between ethnomusicologist and informant vary wildly: while some recent
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scholars have explored ethnomusicology as a tool of political activism on behalf of oppressed

peoples, others work with international musical stars, with whose wealth and political clout
the ethnomusicologist cannot hope to compete.
The book is loosely divided into four parts, structured around the four parts of Nettl’s
credo (taken out of order): ‘The Musics of the World’ (pp. 1
130; chapters include ‘The
Music Concept’, ‘The Creative Process’, ‘Universals of Music’ and ‘Transcription’); ‘In the
Field’ (pp. 131
212; ‘Essentials of Fieldwork’, ‘Archives and Preservation’, ‘Ordinary and
Exceptional Musicians’ and ‘The Host’s Perspectives’); ‘In Human Culture’ (pp. 213
354;
‘Music in Culture’, ‘Uses and Functions’, ‘On the Origins of Music’ and ‘Signs and
Symbols’); and ‘In All Varieties’ (pp. 355
454; ‘Musical Taxonomies’, ‘Instruments’,
‘Teaching and Learning’ and ‘Some Minorities’). The four new chapters focus on fieldwork
in one’s own culture, the writing of ethnography, organology, and women’s music and
scholarship (p. xii). Other chapters have been revised significantly rather than merely
updated: examples of substantial new additions include Nettl’s discussion of value judgments
(pp. 374
5) and his discussion of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ ethnomusicologists (pp. 158
60).
While this new edition is somewhat longer than its predecessor, there have been excisions as
well as additions: some of the material on Western folk music, for example, has been
concatenated here. A further
small yet significant
improvement is Nettl’s assignation of
descriptive chapter titles alongside the whimsical appellations of the previous volume: while
chapters called ‘Apples and Oranges’ and ‘It was Bound to Happen’ put a smile on the
reader’s face, these titles made the previous edition notoriously difficult to navigate.
Aside from its comprehensive survey of the field, one of the assets of this volume is Nettl’s
ability to make complex theoretical debates accessible to his readers. Excellent examples
include his discussion of the Kulturkreis school (pp. 323
5), his disentangling of biological
and racial factors and critique of race-based theory (p. 244) and his discussion of signs and
symbols (pp. 304
7). In each of these cases, Nettl gives an extremely useful overview of the
development of thought in the area, pointing out common concerns in older and
contemporary work while critiquing problematic ideas.
Nettl’s tone is light and personal, and the reader is given the impression of being led
through the debates covered in the book by an avuncular mentor. Theoretical discussions are
frequently illustrated by case studies taken from Nettl’s own fieldwork in Native American
(northern Plains), Persian classical, South Indian and Western classical musics. Limiting the
field of primary musical reference does much to lend coherence to the book, but references to
other musical traditions are made where relevant, giving the book breadth of scope. The
 REVIEW ARTICLE 363

pages are liberally sprinkled with anecdotes from fieldwork to cocktail-party conversations,
increasing the sense of authorial intimacy as well as illustrating theoretical points. Nettl’s
account of beginning his fieldwork in the northern Plains is particularly memorable in its
frank description of a situation surely shared by all those who have undertaken field research:
I have arrived in the ‘field’. It’s a little town in the northern Plains of the United States, on the
surface hardly different from many other crossroads I’ve just driven through. When I stop at a filling
station a bit of a chill crawls up my neck: the attendant is a Native American, one of the people with
whom I now wish to spend some months, whose music and musical culture I wish to study and
describe. He is an old man with a tattered shirt, speaking English with a tiny bit of an accent. I’ve
arrived, I would like to say to him, I’m here because I want to learn what you know, because you
have something to offer that is different from all I’ve learned before, because you live and think
differently. This is a great moment for me: I have finally made it into the ‘field’, and fate somehow
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selected you to be the one to introduce me. I am wondering how to put these thoughts into more
informal words, can’t quite get up the nerve, and he just says, ‘Three dollars, please; don’t look like
you need any oil’, and starts attending to another customer (p. 133).

As in the previous edition, Nettl comes across as an exceptionally mild-mannered scholar:

many colleagues win his generous praise, and few are directly criticized. This lack of surface
critique can lead to the impression of naivety. To a reader used to the theoretically charged
landscape of contemporary scholarship, it is at times frustrating that Nettl generally describes

rather than intervenes in
contemporary scholarly debates. Further, while Nettl’s infectious
enthusiasm for the discipline is compelling, he tends to view the role of the ethnomusicol-
ogist through rose-tinted
and decidedly Western
spectacles. His observation (pp. 14
15)
that ethnomusicologists frequently engage in political activism on behalf of the peoples they
study and, at home, try to combat ethnocentricism, is perhaps true. He continues, however:
Intellectually neutral in their quest for knowledge of musical cultures, they nevertheless have a
passion for showing that music of the oppressed people of the world, of lower classes in rigidly
stratified societies, of isolated, indigenous, technically developing peoples, is something innately
interesting, something worthy of attention and respect
indeed, something truly magnificent.
(p. 15)
This statement seems problematic in several ways. Surely no contemporary scholar can
reasonably claim to be ‘intellectually neutral’. Furthermore, while sentiments such as those
expressed here are certainly well intentioned, they also embody a stratified view of society
firmly embedded within a Western liberal world-view, which is itself only now beginning to
be recognized by scholars. This is not the only statement which might have benefited from a
more critical editing process. Another glaring example is Nettl’s speculation about ‘third-
world scholars’ engaging in ethnomusicological research (p. 158): aside from the fact that the
term ‘third world’ is now generally obsolete, his implication that our colleagues from India
(among others) form part of this group might not go down too well among Indian
ethnomusicologists.
Nevertheless, while such examples grate in the reader’s mind, to pay excessive attention to
the occasional seemingly outmoded or idiosyncratic view is to miss the point of this volume.
Put simply, it has virtually no comparator in the ethnomusicological literature. Nettl’s easy
style means that even his most theoretical discussions should be easily comprehensible by
undergraduates, while the sheer breadth of his knowledge of the discipline means that this
book is equally useful to seasoned ethnomusicologists seeking an overview of contemporary
 364 ABIGAIL WOOD

debates in the discipline. Perhaps an equally important contribution, however, is the role
model Nettl presents as a scholar. In a generation where the scholarly imagination is
frequently jaded by ‘publish or perish’ deadlines, Nettl forces his reader to remember why he
or she does this work in the first place, and gently reminds us that scholarly weight is not best
expressed in the criticism of the work of one’s colleagues. For this alone, this book deserves to
remain on the bookshelf for the foreseeable future.
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