Ethnomusicology at the Beginning of the 21st Century: Where and How Does Contemporary Music Fit In?
di Adelaida Reyes
Introduzione
The past as prologue
The point of departure
Ethnomusicology on the move
The road to the 21st century
Emerging into the 21st century
Reference cited
Mention contemporary music and ethnomusicology is seldom, if ever, the first thing that comes to mind. The title of the symposium "Ethnomusicology and Contemporary Music", (for which this paper was written), therefore provokes speculation. Was the symposium intended to challenge conventional ways of thinking about ethnomusicology, its parameters, its biases, and its relations with the world of music? Was it an invitation to explore relations between what at first glance seems an unlikely pair, in the belief that such exploration can energize ethnomusicologists as well as others who have an interest in ethnomusicology and contemporary music? This paper responds to these as related questions; addressing one implicates the other.
For virtually all of its history, ethnomusicology has been involved with contemporary musics, those that are current, in use, and serve a function in their respective societies. These musics were amenable to study in situ and in real time, initially only in principle and subsequently in practice. They inhabited a designated present, a particular point in time. In these respects, contemporary musics have been at the center of what the discipline studied from the time it was known as vergleichende Musikwissenschaft, and for decades after its emergence as ethnomusicology.
How then did this close and long-standing (though tacit) relationship between discipline and subject matter
arrive at its current problematic state? With what consequences for both at the beginning of the 21st century? These questions, delimited versions of the broad-ranging ones with which this paper started, strongly suggest looking to history for much-needed insights into the issues involved.
The past as prologue
A complex tapestry of interweaving narratives, history can reveal patterns that vary depending on the viewer's vantage point. That from which this exploration begins derives from papers delivered and discussions that came up on the occasion of the American Society for Ethnomusicology's celebration of the 50th anniversary of its founding.
In November 2005 at the Society's meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, some one thousand attendees from all over the world, representing both the humanities and the social sciences, gathered to revisit the past, cast a critical eye on the present, and anticipate the challenges that the future might have in store. Ethnomusicology's European origins were invoked the better to assess the consequences of transplantation to an American environment and thence, to other parts of the world. A wide range of issues topical, theoretical, methodological were given an airing and discussed from a variety of regional and national perspectives. The result was a wide-angle view of the discipline with commentary on significant figures and events by some of today's leading scholars (1).
Bruno Nettl seemed to discern a pattern that is especially relevant to this paper. He remarked that since the founding of the Society, its members have repeatedly addressed certain fundamental issues. The process has brought to light what Nettl called myths, beliefs that may have been taken as established fact, but which, upon closer examination, proved unsustainable as such.
Many myths end up in the dustbin of history. But some linger as reminders of a time when they had the status of truth. Some have proven difficult to abandon; they continue to influence scholarly work despite persuasive evidence of their dubious value. Others persist because they harbor kernels of legitimacy so that, when re-conceptualized, revised, or transformed, they become useful to scholarship once again. Tracing the metamorphosis through which apparent fact becomes established fact, and then conventional wisdom, and subsequently either myth or gateway to new knowledge can thus be a form of historical account. It can yield valuable insights not only into intellectual history but just as important, into the subjectivities that can be powerful enough to influence the course that a discipline takes.
Among the issues that members of the American Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM) have repeatedly raised, one of the most fundamental has been ethnomusicology's subject matter. This, after all, has held an important key to the discipline's definition. It drew the boundaries around what the discipline took its terrain to be. And as the discipline evolved and as the contexts within which it operated changed, what it studies, as concept and as perceptible reality, inevitably change as well. It is, therefore, through an examination of this fundamental issue, the discipline's subject matter and the transformative forces that have acted upon it that one is most likely to arrive at an understanding of how the relations between contemporary music and ethnomusicology evolved, of how contemporary musics came to occupy an ambiguous position among today's subjects for ethnomusicological study after having been virtually coterminous with it.
In 1905, Erich M. von Hornbostel's article, "Die Probleme der vergleichende Musikwissenschaft" appeared in Zeitschrift der internationalen Musikgesellschaft. Twenty years had elapsed since Guido Adler's well-known "Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft" had located vergleichende Musikwissenschaft or Comparative Musicology in the general musicological scheme. Hornbostel's delineation of subject matter in his article was thus no longer just a proposal awaiting validation. His views had already found acceptance in academic circles.
Hornbostel's reference to "exotic music," "primitive musics" and foreign (i.e., non-European) musics underscored cultural distance as a principal marker of Comparative Musicology's subject matter. The "unaccustomed intervals and rhythms" ([1905] 1975:251) that tended to characterize these musics (at least as far as Western ears are concerned), called for a new methodology. Hornbostel suggested that this begin with a careful selection of materials for study. They must be "authentic", "genuine musical products of foreign cultures [that must] be collected before they become irretrievably spoiled by Europeanisms" (ibid.:253; 263). With the difficulty of travel making it highly impractical to collect music from its native environment and to study the music in situ, the objectification of music, and its treatment as strictly sonic, decontextualized phenomena became accepted if not standard practice.
Here we see the methodological grounds for an emphasis on measurement of pitches, intervals, duration, intensity and other such measurable attributes. Alexander Ellis's groundbreaking 1885 article, "On the Scales of Various Nations" had already offered an impressive demonstration of the productiveness of measurements. Carl Stumpf's "Lieder der Bellakula Indianer," published in 1886 and based on an 1885 study, had illustrated the pioneering nature of work on an "exotic" subject. Hearing of a group of Bella Coola Indians who had been brought to Germany from Canada by Fillip Jacobsen, "a Norwegian collector of ethnographic material" (Kolstee 1982:101), Stumpf arranged to have one of the Indians sing for him over a period of four days while he (Stumpf) transcribed the songs. He collected seven songs in this manner, to which he added two more that had been transcribed by Franz Boas. Focusing on intonation and scale, Stumpf then proceeded to implement the comparative aims of what Guido Adler had called Musikethnologie by comparing the Bella Coola materials with Zulu samples in the hope of tracing both to a common Asiatic source (ibid.) (2).
The essentially synchronic thrust of Stumpf's comparative work was complemented by the diachronic intent that motivated the study of so-called "primitive music." Hornbostel made clear the expectations from such studies. They were to shed light "on the remotest, darkest past" (269) so that we might have a glimpse of what modern homo sapiens was like at an earlier stage of our evolution. This aspiration reflected the powerful social and intellectual interest in evolution that was salient in European circles at the time. Efforts to make Hornbostel's (among others') aspiration reality, however, hardly rose above the level of speculation.
These were among the early steps taken by the very young discipline, Comparative Musicology. Nonetheless, Hornbostel's work was already putting into clearer focus and reinforcing a view of subject matter consistent with what Guido Adler had formally proposed twenty years earlier. Hornbostel was contributing to the systematization of practices that were eventually to mark a discipline. He was underscoring, refining, and demonstrating already-existing theoretical and methodological objectives appropriate to the nature of the discipline's subject matter as it was then conceived. He was reaffirming the legitimacy of a model that was already on its way to becoming the dominant paradigm in ethnomusicological methods for decades to come on both sides of the Atlantic.
We thus have, by the time of Hornbostel's 1905 article, a fairly clear fixed point from which to trace changes as the discipline evolved. The article synthesized what had gone before and provided firm ground for analytic and comparative purposes. But more important for present purposes, it also makes possible the extraction of features that were reflected in the selection and treatment of subject matter at the time. Those features were: 1) a bias in favor of the culturally distant; 2) a conception of authenticity that required faithful adherence to an ur-form or some presumably primeval form from the culture in question a conception that until well into the 20th century, took freedom from Western influence to be a necessary condition; and 3) a view of music as an autonomous object defined essentially if not wholly by its acoustic properties. These features were stamped on Comparative Musicology's subject matter, music that answers to the label, contemporary, i.e., of a particular present (3).
Over time, the impact of each of these features on the discipline's subject matter would come to vary. The culturally distant, for example, specifically when it was associated with the "primitive", was to lose its hegemony over what ethnomusicology studies. Authenticity, on the other hand, would persist in ethnomusicological accounts even as its meaning and its manifestations underwent transformation. Debates over the autonomy of music were to create fissures in the ethnomusicological landscape that would have powerful effects on the practice of ethnomusicology. It would therefore be revealing to look at each of the features separately for the part that each played in the evolution of the discipline. Such examination must wait, however, because early on, these features were linked. They functioned as a set or an ensemble and must be taken as a bundle that jointly marked the music that Comparative Musicology and later, ethnomusicology, studied.
Ethnomusicology on the move
In the decade or so following Hornbostel's article, the intellectual lineage that it represented was transplanted across the Atlantic to North America by European scholars and their students. That legacy took root in American soil, and its longevity and fruitfulness in the new environment were further ensured by American scholars who had studied in Europe and who, upon their return to the States, were in a position to incorporate their training into academic curricula. In both subject matter and approach to subject matter, ethnomusicology was a European transplant.
But it was not long before forces of change began to make themselves felt in the new environment. As interest in ethnomusicology grew, plans to organize gained momentum among its practitioners. In 1955, the founding of the Society for Ethnomusicology foregrounded a major re-examination of the discipline's subject matter. This issue was raised in no small part to clarify what the Society stood for. But beyond clarification, it soon became evident that a considerable expansion of the field was being envisioned. A radical departure from the then-conventional view of ethnomusicology's subject matter, essentially that described by Hornbostel, with the subsequent addition of folk music and the art music of the non-Western world, was proposed by one of the Society's founders, Willard Rhodes. He advocated studying "the total music of man, without limitations of time or space" (1956:460), a view that he consistently maintained (4).
As with most fundamental issues in scholarly disciplines, resolution is slow and incremental. It is effected less through debate and more through what the historian of science Thomas Kuhn called research activity, what individual scholars do. The time lag between proposal and large-scale implementation can be considerable.
By the 1950s, for example, the terms "exotic" and "primitive" were coming into disfavor; but they continued in use for many years more. And even as their usage became virtually taboo, the culturally and geographically distant with which those kinds of music had been associated maintained its grip on the ethnomusicological imagination until the third quarter of the 20th century, aided and reinforced by post-World War II conditions. The American economy was strong and funding was relatively easy to obtain. Modern means of transport and tools for documentation made research in the remotest parts of the world more feasible than it had ever been. And an interest in foreign cultures that had been kindled in members of the armed forces when they served abroad during the war enjoyed a resurgence as veterans went abroad, this time to do fieldwork for academic research with the help of the GI Bill of Rights (5).
Many of the same conditions made scholarly traffic in the opposite direction possible. Students and scholars from places where training in ethnomusicology had not yet been established were invited or sought entry into the United States. Musicians from other cultures were brought to the States to teach and perform over extended periods of time. This direct experience of non-Western music performance in American venues became part of academic training in many institutions and, combined with extensive first-hand exposure to music in the field, enhanced the attractiveness of the culturally distant and their synchronic study.
As work in situ became almost a sine qua non in ethnomusicological research (6) music came to be seen increasingly as a dynamic phenomenon that responds to and is shaped by the social forces in the milieu of which it is a part. The experience of music in its native environment underscored that dynamism, supporting a re-conceptualization of music that was to have strong methodological repercussions. One consequence was the concept of bi-musicality pioneered by Mantle Hood, which held that a certain level of proficiency in the performance of the music under study was essential to understanding it. Introduced into ethnomusicology curricula, bi-musicality and its influence eventually spread throughout the United States and beyond.
Other developments were afoot. One of the most significant came out of ethnomusicology's close relations with anthropology particularly in the United States. The subject matter of the two disciplines had covered similar territory, the exotic and primitive, the simple and self-contained. Ethnomusicology had shared with anthropology a common interest in such issues as cultural relativism, and cultural conservation. Two of the four founders of the American Society for Ethnomusicology were trained anthropologists (two were musicologists). The first meeting called to organize the Society for Ethnomusicology was announced "at an American Anthropological Association meeting in Boston" (Nettl 2006:180), and, as David McAllester put it in his "Reminiscences..." for the Anniversary volume, "the Society began under the wing of anthropology. At Columbia University, Franz Boas, German-born and educated, and by then dean of American Anthropology, hired George Herzog" (2006:199) who was trained in both anthropology and musicology and had been educated in Europe and in the United States. Melville Herskovits, American anthropologist who became best-known for his studies of African American and African cultures was a student of Boas. Together, these scholars became a core group of those who saw music as integral part of a culture. Alan P. Merriam, an anthropologist whose work was to revolutionize the way ethnomusicology would define its subject, was a student of Herskovits.
Thus began the lineage that produced what has been called an anthropologically-oriented ethnomusicology. Its best-known testament was Alan Merriam's Anthropology of Music (1964), the principal argument of which was that music is not just sound but a "complex of behavior." Music, Merriam argued, is sound and social act. It involved not just those who made music, but also those who were its users or listeners. Except for purposes of analysis, therefore, music cannot be dissociated from its human agents and from its social context.
The exact nature of the relationship between the anthropological or social scientific and the musicological in ethnomusicology, however, has frequently been a matter of contention. David McAllester had described them as "uneasy bedfellows." (1980:306). But the influence of anthropology on ethnomusicology was unmistakable in the ethnomusicological literature, in ethnomusicology curricula, and in the receptivity of programs in ethnomusicology to instruction from graduates with Ph.D.s in anthropology. And as the ramifications of Merriam's work spread out like a seismic shock to other parts of the world, the bundle of features that had marked contemporary music as a descriptive term, applicable to what comparative musicology/ ethnomusicology studied, began to unravel.
The road to the 21st century
The widening scope of ethnomusicology's subject matter had steadily eroded the insistence on primitive, exotic, and eventually folk and traditional music. The aversion to doing fieldwork in "one's own backyard", the flip side of seeking the culturally and geographically distant, had finally been overcome in the years leading to the acceptance of urban ethnomusicology (7). Authenticity was thrown open to question as population movements brought massive numbers of folk out of so-called folk societies, making adaptation to urban or urbanized environments inevitable. And as the idea that music is human behavior and social act gained adherents, the notion of music as autonomous and as strictly acoustic product came under serious attack.
Over the course of a century, the field of ethnomusicology had been transformed most particularly in the scope and nature of what it studies. Contemporary music, initially understood primarily in temporal terms and associated with the music of culturally and geographically distant societies had had such legitimacy almost an inevitability that, as subject of study in ethnomusicology, it was taken for granted. Until the middle of the 20th century that music hardly needed the label "contemporary." Until then, the place of contemporary music on the ethnomusicological map was secure, central, and unspecified but understood.
Now, its position in ethnomusicological thought seems to have become tenuous. The word, contemporary, when used as a modifier for music, vacillates from its strictly literal, descriptive meaning (of the present, synchronous) to a multiplex one that encompasses a set of attributes that define a musical category, one in which temporality amounts to a necessary but far from sufficient condition. Most of the events that led to this state of affairs, the changes in the scope and conceptualization of subject matter principal among them, were internal to the discipline. But just as decisive in bringing it about, I think, has been the evolving relations between ethnomusicology and musicology.
Ethnomusicology and musicology: the blurring of boundaries. As ethnomusicology broke free from the strictures of "primitive," folk and non-Western musics to occupy an ever-widening field, the distinction between ethnomusicology and musicology based on subject matter began to blur. In 1963, Mantle Hood wrote that ethnomusicology studied "all kinds of music not included [...] in the study of cultivated music in the Western European tradition" (Harrison, Palisca and Hood 1974[1963]:217). In the 2005 Atlanta conference, Nettl rephrased this statement, to reflect the view from outside the discipline: American anthropologists "innocent of [Jaap] Kunst" have always understood ethnomusicology to study "all of music that had been neglected by Western scholars" (2006:180). But the exclusion of Western music and, in particular, Western art or cultivated music was beginning to give way as well.
In the same volume where Mantle Hood had made his claim, the musicologist Frank LI. Harrison proposed a move in the direction of ethnomusicology. He argued against regarding music as "autonomous" and urged investigating the "function, social meaning and manner of performance of every type of musical work." "[I]t is" he said, "the function of all musicology to be in fact ethnomusicology, that is, to take its range of research to include material that is termed 'sociological'."(ibid.: 78-80; emphasis added). The musicologist, Jacques Handschin's proposal was a more sweeping one: the true subject of musicology in his view is "not music but man" (op. cit. 1963:79).
The boundaries formalized by Guido Adler in 1885 that had kept the subject matter of historical musicology and Musikethnologie mutually exclusive had thus become fluid and permeable. The invitation to the Twelfth Congresss of the International Musicological Society (IMS) in Berkeley, California in 1977 expressly stated the Congress's intent to "concern itself with the music of the whole world" and to see to the integration of musicology and ethnomusicology.
This integration, of course, has not as yet come to pass, but the growing overlap in musicology's and ethnomusicology's subject matter has made it necessary to draw some basic distinctions particularly when both disciplines share common terms as is the case with contemporary music.
Ethnomusicology's strong inclination towards the study of contemporary music is reflected in the preponderance of synchronic studies in ethnomusicology. To a large extent, this is an extension of the discipline's early interests and practice. But the nature of the music under study and the nature of synchrony itself are important considerations.
In the days of comparative musicology and early ethnomusicology, the majority of musics that were studied, were presumed to be orally transmitted. This attribute, added to the geographical and cultural distance of the music's native environment, made the data necessary for diachronic studies difficult if not impossible to access and to collect. As a result, "we really have no way of telling just what happened in the musical history of all the world's cultures" (Nettl 1973 [1965]:2) Synchronic study thus became the more defensible if not the only option. It also became closely associated with contemporary music as a description of what ethnomusicology studied at the time.
Synchrony, in turn, imposes its own conditions. Being concerned with a state (rather than how it came to be) the researcher, at least for the duration, "must [...] ignore diachrony [...] [since] the intervention of history can only falsify [the researcher's] judgment" (de Saussure 1966 [1959]:81). In the emphasis on synchrony, therefore, ethnomusicological studies have sometimes been described (misleadingly) as a-historical. This perception, arguable though it may be, is nonetheless useful in this context: it serves to highlight the contrast between ethnomusicological and musicological conceptions of contemporary music.
Compared to the by-now-global, cross-cultural or culturally ambiguous musics that ethnomusicology would shelter under the umbrella of contemporary music, the musical corpus that musicology labels contemporary music is more identifiably Western in the organization of its musical resources. And even when not overtly or explicitly historical, musicological studies of contemporary music assume the historicity of its subject. This assumption comes from a long tradition of Western art music scholarship. The nature of the study object and the materials that constitute evidence for its study have supported a view of contemporariness as only the topmost level of a deep temporal continuum that refers the present to the past. More readily than can be done in ethnomusicology, the contemporary in musicology can be seen as either an extension of the past or a break away from it.
The distinctions in the usage of the term contemporary music outlined above, are thus based on culture-specificity and on the degree to which historical continuity can be assumed. But it is also worth remembering that ethnomusicology has not taken on the label, contemporary music, as a terminological issue. To ethnomusicology, contemporary music has not represented a musical category or a bounded repertory characterized by specific temporal, cultural, and musical attributes. Rather, ethnomusicology has always taken contemporary music as a loosely applicable, taken-for-granted designation the initial grounds for which have now been rendered dubious by a better understanding of the nature of the musics ethnomusicology studies. Thus, the contemporary music that had been associated with the culturally distant Other by early ethnomusicology now answers more commonly to the name, "world music", with or without the discipline's imprimatur. In today's ethnomusicology, contemporary music, lacking clear parameters that would identify it as a distinctly ethnomusicological entity, has become an ambiguous presence. This is the situation I had alluded to at the beginning of this paper, a situation in which contemporary music and ethnomusicology seem to have become dissociated from each other.
Yet, it can be argued that the appearance of dissociation is either deceptive or groundless. Contemporary music in any of the above senses is being studied by ethnomusicologists more than ever before as societies, from the least to most complex, from the most culturally and geographically distant to the closest, become parts of the global village. Rhodes's redefinition of ethnomusicology's subject matter, "the total music of man" which has steadily gained acceptance since the last decades of the 20th century, has left nothing that is music off limits to ethnomusicological study.
This all-inclusiveness in subject matter means that ethnomusicology's distinctiveness as a discipline no longer rests on the kinds or genres or cultural origins of the musics that it studies. The burden of distinctiveness has now shifted to the way the musics are approached and to the kinds of explanation sought. The pertinent question is thus not whether contemporary music still belongs to the ethnomusicological field. The question rather is how best to frame, describe, and explain in ethnomusicological terms (8) a study subject that has been radically transformed in scope and in conception. Put in these terms, the issue becomes a conceptual and methodological one, and the discussion must now be re-directed to the concepts and methods that have guided ethnomusicological study in the past for the sake of shedding light on present practice. To this end, we return to each of the features that distinguished comparative musicology's subject matter in Hornbostel's time.
1. The bias in favor of the culturally distant. Cultural and geographical distance, insularity, and internal homogeneity were the premises upon which arose a powerful and all-embracing methodological structure. Centered on acoustic phenomena, in search of distinctive musical traits and musical systems, and fueled by theories prevalent at the time (e.g., evolution, diffusion), the resulting paradigm came to dominate ethnomusicological method for at least the next fifty years.
That structure was formidable, in no small part because as the French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville observed, "no one can resist with impunity the spirit of the times". But the structure was not without adaptive capabilities. When it became increasingly possible to do fieldwork in situ, the structure accommodated the growing body of ethnographic data, giving it a corroborative though not-necessarily-essential role in explanation. When it became evident that music could not be contained within the boundaries of a given culture, concepts and theories such as borrowing, diffusion, and acculturation were adopted from anthropology and given a place in ethnomusicology's armamentarium of explanatory ideas.
Adaptability, however, cuts both ways. On the one hand, it opens the door to innovation; on the other, it serves to rationalize the status quo thereby slowing if not stifling innovation. Against the background of ethnomusicology's belief in the insularity of cultures, for example, acculturation, was an innovative and useful idea in the 1950s. By the 1970s, however, its explanatory power had waned in the face of rapid urbanization and the creation of new nation-states, with the attendant and accelerating breakdown of conventional boundaries. Still, acculturation remained prominent in the work of ethnomusicologists into the 1980s (9).
The tenacity of the paradigm built on the culturally distant is easy to understand when geographic distance was part of the equation. But even when, in the decades following World War II, migration, technology and the media were bringing peoples and musics from remote areas to cities and to more accessible places, the paradigm held (10). The new realities were ignored, overlooked or rationalized. Ethnomusicologists continued to seek out musics in distant places and strongly resisted the idea of studying music and the musical life around them. And even when at last the resistance was overcome and ethnomusicologists turned to studying the diverse culture groups in their midst, these continued to be studied as though they were isolates, analogs of the insular groups that had long been the discipline's customary unit of investigation.
It would take the confluence of many factors to challenge the continued applicability of the old paradigm. But by the end of the 20th century, technology, the acceleration of travel both by human beings and musics across all kinds of boundaries; globalization, the commodification of music; and social, political, and cultural forces finally built up enough pressure to effectively challenge ethnomusicologists' bias in favor of the culturally and geographically distant. The exclusivity of the insular and the distant gave way to the inclusivity that had been envisioned by Rhodes and C. Seeger, and subsequently, by F.LI. Harrison. Insularity as a distinctive feature of the musics ethnomusicology studied faded into the realm of myth, and the search for new paradigms was on. It continues to the present day.
2. A conception of authenticity that required faithful adherence to an ur-form or a primordial form of the musical culture in question.
We have seen how the geographical distance of music's cultures of origin and the myths that distance helps to maintain supported the assumption that music is autonomous and static (11). Studying music away from its own sociocultural context made music's function or meaning elusive. The material form of the music, its sound or the components of what linguists call the expression system therefore, became the sole measure of authenticity.
As fieldwork assumed an ever-larger role in ethnomusicological method, and as sociocultural context revealed functions that sound alone could not, authenticity became more than mere fidelity to perceptible form. Like vessels that hold content, form can change even as its content remains in essence the same. Similarly, a music's meaning or function may be unaltered despite changes in the sound phenomena that are their material form. In fact, as a number of studies has shown, changes in form as response to changing circumstances can be adaptive and can help conserve rather than destroy what the music has been and is intended to stand for (12).
In recent years, this sense of the authentic as transcending or outlasting fixed acoustic forms, has come increasingly to be conflated with issues of identity (13). Questions of authenticity are reframed to incorporate new findings on form, function, meaning, and identity. For example: Can Korean rap, created and performed by Koreans in the United States or some other location outside Korea, using Korean musical instruments as well as electronic sound sources, be identified as authentically Korean? In the great diversity of its sounds and forms, and given the great value that Americans place on newness and change, how does one identify "authentic" American music? What features or attributes serve to identify or authenticate "contemporary musics"?
Thus, unlike the primitive that has just about faded into myth, the authentic has become a fundamental issue in ethnomusicology that is being re-conceptualized so that it can accommodate transformations in meaning. Like the word "identity" with which authenticity is increasingly associated or by which it is at times replaced, the authentic, in its demands for information that transcend sound phenomena, has enriched what ethnomusicology considers significant data. It has also stimulated a reconsideration of authenticity as a concept far more complex than mere duplication of external form.
3. A view of music as a product assumed to be static and defined essentially if not wholly by its acoustic properties. Although this feature, in some of its facets, overlaps with the preceding, its methodological implications set it apart.
The conception of music as product is rooted in a complicated issue that goes back to the fundamental question of what music is. Is it strictly sound or is it additionally, as Merriam had argued, a complex of human behaviors? Does it have meaning outside of itself or does it, as the celebrated 19th-century critic, Eduard Hanslick had insisted, refer "to nothing but itself and thus [...] the 'meaning' of a piece is nothing but the music itself" (Hofstadter 1997:38)? We are all familiar with the debates surrounding these issues. I will therefore limit myself to what is pertinent to this discussion.
The term "product" has strong connotations of an object that has been completed such that it can be seen as having an existence of its own. Weaned from its maker or producer, its disposition is contingent on the pleasure or judgment of a user, be that user an individual, a group of scholars, or a community. This sense of "product" had been particularly compelling at the time when comparative musicology was limited to the study of what was then called primitive and exotic musics. It allowed Hornbostel, for example, to hope that travelers might be encouraged to collect music the way artifacts are collected to be brought back for study by scholars. From this perspective, music is a decontextualized set object, the meaning of which can draw as much if not more from what an investigator who is a cultural Other brings to its analysis as from its culture of origin.
The road from that point in the discipline's history to the present has had its twists and turns. But one of the most fundamental transformations in the conception of ethnomusicology's subject matter gained momentum in the 1960s. From being regarded as object or product in the above sense, music came increasingly to be taken as a living organism, capable of adapting to context and environment. The conceptual change that this represents has altered the way music is studied. The methodological ramifications led to what Bruno Nettl (2006) and Bonnie Wade (2006) have called a bifurcation a fork on the road with one side deemed to be anthropologically-oriented, the other music-oriented.
Its initial effect on the discipline was similar to that of a schism; (14) ethnomusicologists were described as adherents of either one orientation or the other. Nettl wondered whether the bifurcation was fundamental, creating "two ethnomusicologies" each with its own orientation. Wade described the relationship between the anthropological and the musicological or between the more broadly social scientific and the humanistic emphases in ethnomusicology as either competitive or as a question of precedence. Does one study the culture first and then "plug in" music, she asks, or does one learn about "music first and foremost" and then plug in what one has learned into the "cultural 'whole'" (2006:191-192)?
Emerging into the 21st century
By the end of the 20th century, the factionalism had subsided, and even as it continued to reverberate, faintly in some quarters, strongly in others, there began to emerge a growing consensus that the opposing views are not irreconcilable and that their reconciliation is, in fact, not only possible but desirable and even necessary (15). Anthony Seeger, in his Seeger Lecture, the centerpiece of the 2005 proceedings, put the case forward forcefully: "[O]ne of the great challenges facing ethnomusicology is avoiding getting caught up in one facet or another of the music, the sociology without attention to sounds, analysis of performances without attention to social processes, the study of music that ignores movement, and so forth." (2006:229). For A. Seeger, music is simultaneously sounds, history, and values" (ibid., emphasis added).
To date, the realization of the vision articulated by A. Seeger continues to be a work in progress. A vast intellectual terrain has opened up for exploration and discovery. But an inescapable implication of music as "sounds, history and values" is interdisciplinarity, an amorphous concept the validity of which becomes visible only when demonstrated in concrete instances. Hence, the following brief digression into linguistics for illustrative purposes.
The opposing views of music either as product, or as dynamic organism and social act are paralleled by opposing views of language that have been labeled with the Greek terms ergon, or "made object," and energeia or activity. Ergon includes "a corpus of ready-made formulas and patterns that speakers of a language learned by rote." It includes "a stock of words and forms [that are] at the core of language structure" (Shapiro 1983:8-9). Its emphasis is on fixed forms, on patterning, and codedness. Energeia, on the other hand, emphasizes freedom and innovation in the use of language. It manifests itself in language that is "in actual use." It implicates speakers as they take elements from a language structure and create new combinations. Energeia foregrounds intentionality on the part of the speaker who makes his or her choices in response to social context. Thus, unlike ergon which focuses on the product as static and autonomous, energeia underscores contemporary activity and human agency. Ergon can be likened to that upon which the music-oriented focuses; energeia to that which constitutes the initial focus of the "anthropologically-oriented."
But in linguistics, the opposition between ergon and energeia, between made object and activity creates not autonomous units that re-affirm the opposition but mutually dependent ones that resolve or reconcile the opposition. Ergon and energeia are a pair bound by what linguists call their "complementary restrictedness" (ibid.:9). The freedom inherent in energeia and the innovations that it produces may rub against the fixedness of ergon, but the friction enhances rather than undermines language's capacity to mean because energeia's freedom is not unbridled. It is restricted by ergon and the system of rules that guards against anarchic use and ensures the intelligibility of language. This relationship between ergon and energeia underlies von Humboldt's description of language that Noam Chomsky has often quoted: language "is a system which 'makes infinite use of finite means'" (16)
The conjoining of ergon and energeia in language made possible by their complementary restrictedness suggests the possibility of reconciling the view of music-as-product (=ergon) and that of music-as-activity (=energeia ). Taking a cue from linguistics, ethnomusicology can explore the possibility of finding the equivalent of complementary restrictedness, the mutual dependence of what have been taken to be opposing concepts and orientations. In the process, the musicological and the social scientific components of ethnomusicology can become a complementary pair, and the integrated, over-arching methodology that has proven elusive thus far can be brought closer to reality.
The potential for disciplinary cross-fertilization that this example has sought to illustrate is not new to ethnomusicology. A variety of disciplinary orientations has been part of ethnomusicology from the earliest days of vergleichende Musicwissenschaft. Ethnography, for example, has always been implicit in Guido Adler's use of the term Musikethnologie. And interdisciplinary perspectives are evident in the evolutionary and comparative interests of ethnomusicology's "founding fathers" who themselves represented a wide range of disciplines.
But the use of ideas or techniques from other disciplines in those early days was more circumstantial and incidental rather than strategic. A scholar's options were constrained by accessibility of information about findings from other disciplines that answer to the needs of subject matter. Ethnomusicologists have been exploring interdisciplinary possibilities in the last few decades, but interdisciplinarity has yet to take its place in what Thomas Kuhn called normal practice.
Thus there is, for instance, the lingering uncertainty over what role or how much of a role to give to ethnographic data in ethnomusicological studies. In many quarters, people still ask how much space can be given to the ethnographic before a study becomes less ethnomusicological and more anthropological or sociological. The question confuses allocation of space and time with significance which is the crucial methodological issue. We see disciplinary compartmentalization, not integration or systematization, in the tendency to use labels such as "anthropology of music" or "sociology of music", etc. to mark off those parts of ethnomusicological studies that are not "music-oriented," i.e., not directly concerned with sound or its production.
True interdisciplinarity is the logical consequence of responding to whatever the subject matter needs if it is to be properly and if possible, richly accounted for. It is the use of other disciplines and what they have to offer when a description or explanation would otherwise be flawed, wanting, or impoverished without them. When these conditions are met, what comes from other disciplines may still be recognizable as such, but they are subsumed by ethnomusicological method and, in that sense, become integrated into the ethnomusicological.
Music can thus be understood and explained in ethnomusicological terms as the transformed subject it has become: a composite of sound, human behavior, social act, symbolic system, and bearer of cultural meaning.
Tracing the conceptual and methodological threads running through each of the features that were salient at the time of Hornbostel to the present indicate the complexity of arriving at a good fit between the needs of subject matter and methodological responses to them. Sometimes the impediments are historical, social, and cultural in nature. The demands of knowledge acquisition and the role of trial and error in the process always have to be taken into consideration. But in the brief overview of the developmental paths followed by method as it responded to changing concepts of what ethnomusicology studied, two factors emerge that are particularly relevant to contemporary music in an ethnomusicological context.
The first is human agency not the few "giants" of the discipline but the scholars or researchers whose work embodies what might be called common practice. Although they play a crucial part in the development of the discipline, they have been largely overshadowed by events and by misconceptions about their role as scholars.
The second is contemporary music itself which, although it has been in the spotlight throughout this account, has been mostly a passive presence speculated about but given no defined role. These concluding paragraphs hope to put these two within the framework of ethnomusicology today and to suggest that the 21st century has a more demanding role in store for them.
Human agency. John Gray, professor of European Thought in the London School of Economics, gives the rationale for locating the researcher or scholar at the core of certain kinds of studies:
"Social objects are not
like stars or stones which exist independently of how humans think
about them; social objects are partly created by human perceptions and
beliefs,
And when these beliefs and social perceptions
change, social objects change with them [...]. [W]e can never have
objective knowledge of society, if only because our shifting beliefs
are continuously changing it." (2006:22)
Robert Murphy, like Franz Boas, a chairman of Columbia University's Department of Anthropology for many years, liked to say that those who do fieldwork would do well to have themselves psychoanalyzed first. He was referring to the self as the researcher's principal instrument. Just as we need to know a tool well so that we can get it to perform efficiently, so too must we know not only our capabilities but also and just as important, our biases and predilections.
Objectivity as absence of bias, formerly upheld as requisite to good scientific work, is now regarded as myth (17). So too the image of the researcher as a knowledgeable but thoroughly detached, self-effacing instrument whose presence as an individual, was to intrude as little as possible if at all in the account of his or her study. Now supplanting this image is that of someone who acts vis-à-vis what he or she studies not just according to training or the dictates of the mind, but as a human being not immune to belief, biases, and habits of heart. As is evident from the preceding discussion, these subjectivities leave their mark on the study of "social objects" a general category to which music belongs. Subjectivities have thus become significant information to the researcher for whom they can be conditioning factors, and to the value that the study, when completed, will be given as a contribution to scholarship.
Contemporary music. Ethnomusicology has been consistent in putting the temporal and the latitudinal dimensions of its subject at the forefront of what it considers contemporary music. What has changed over time is the range of subject matter. Assumptions applied to what was then virtually the sum total of what ethnomusicology studies, assumptions that their histories were not accessible on the one hand, and assumptions that they could be clues to human evolution on the other no longer apply to many segments of today's subject matter. As a modern-day, global phenomenon, contemporary music has become an anomaly in the ethnomusicological sphere, ill-defined as a musical corpus, ambiguous as to cultural identity, and difficult to delineate as object of study. In all these respects, it is an anomaly in the sense in which the historian of science, Thomas Kuhn, and the philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce, use the term: it calls attention to the unexpected, and by challenging established norms, acts as countervailing force to the ossification of knowledge. Anomalies keep alive the intellectual curiosity, the discontent, if you will, that fuels inquiry and opens the door to new knowledge.
Recognizing the anomalous nature of contemporary music means identifying the problems it presents so that these can be effectively addressed (18). This linkage of human agent and subject matter and their interdependence will determine to a large extent the usefulness to ethnomusicology of contemporary music as anomaly. If ethnomusicologists provoke a healthy confrontation between the paradigmatic and the innovative, they will have contributed hugely toward the vibrancy of ethnomusicology as a discipline. For what contemporary music offers to ethnomusicology is what Clifford Geertz (after Ludwig Wittgenstein) metaphorically calls rough ground. As paradigms and habits of mind smooth the disciplinary road and make it slippery ground, progress becomes labored and may even come to a halt. Contemporary music's rough ground provides the traction that ethnomusicology needs so that it can move forward toward a better understanding not only of contemporary music in its many forms but also of its disciplinary context, ethnomusicology itself.
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NOTES
1 Selected papers have been published in an Anniversary Issue of Ethnomusicology, the Journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology, vol. 50, no. 2 (2006).
2 According to Anton F. Kolstee who did fieldwork among the Bella Coola in the mid-1970s and whose work was the only one following Stumpf's, "only six of Stumpf's transcriptions were of Bella Coola songs. Two of the remaining three were borrowed from the Kwakiutl while the third was acknowledged to be a Haida melody" (1982:1).
3 This usage borrows from Ferdinand de Saussure and his distinction between synchrony and diachrony. I draw a parallel between the contemporary and the synchronic which, to Saussure refers to the state of a language at a given point in time. This is clarified through contrast with diachrony which refers to successive states that represent development through time (1966[1959]: 81; 99-100).
4 Charles Seeger, also a founder of SEM, supported an all-inclusive view of ethnomusicology's subject matter. This is evident in his writings but perhaps most explicitly in Seeger 1933 and 1961.
5 The GI Bill of Rights, enacted after World War II, gave former American servicemen substantial support for education.
6 "Armchair ethnomusicologist", i.e., ethnomusicology not supported by fieldwork, came to be looked upon condescendingly.
7 The first Ph.D. dissertation on urban ethnomusicology was dated 1975.
8 By this I mean the description and explanation of music as expressive culture, as part of that complex of symbolic systems through which members of a community communicate with each other and depict collective experience. It is concerned with cultural meaning, that to which access is gained only through knowledge of the culture. It answers to a group sensibility (Geertz 1983:99) and places the ethnoaesthetic (Geertz 2000:209) over personal taste. Speaking of music in ethnomusicological terms places the emphasis less on relata (e.g., musical sounds, musical events, human behavior, etc.) than on relations between them. It answers to Anthony Seeger's view of music as simultaneously acoustic, social and cultural phenomenon (2006:229).
9 In his book Anthropology of Music, Alan Merriam offers a brief summary of ethnomusicological thinking on acculturation (1964:313-317). At about the same time, the anthropological literature was seeing acculturation more as problem than as explanation. By the 1970s, the term had begun to disappear from the indexes of textbooks in anthropology. In ethnomusicology, however, the term continued in use. William Malm, in Music Cultures of the Pacific, the Near East, and Asia (1977 [1967]), defines the term as a process by which "foreign and native elements are combined (p. 21)." Bruno Nettl, in his Folk and Traditional Music of the Western Continents (1973 [1965]), the (Western hemisphere) counterpart of Malm's book, as well as in his 1985 volume, The Western Impact on World Music, used the term in a similar, very general sense which subsumes other processes such as syncretism.
10 For more on this topic, see also Reyes 2007:19-20.
11 I use this term as a derivation from "state", a usage I borrow from linguistics and the description of synchrony as a study of a "language-state".
12 Examples of radical changes in heard phenomena for the sake of conserving tradition are in Reyes 1999. One of the richest and most comprehensive sociological demonstrations of the adaptive power of change to conserve tradition is Shils 1981.
13 An early example is Charles Seeger's "Versions and Variants of the Tunes of 'Barbara Allen'" (1977) which admittedly borrowed heavily from the methods of Comparative Musicology, but which at the same time updates the underlying concepts. Seeger demonstrates the inevitability of variation in oral tradition, despite which or perhaps because of which the song in question ("Barbara Allen") has enjoyed a long life. Originally published in 1966, one of the article's main concerns is identity. More recently, the incursions of authenticity and identity into each other's terrain is exemplified in Authenticity and Cultural Identity. Performing Arts in Southeast Asia edited by Yoshitaka Terada (2007).
14 "[T]he dynamics [...] felt like a struggle over the soul of the discipline" (Wade 2006:191).
15 In addition to Nettl 2006 and Wade 2006, see also Reyes 2007 and Reyes Schramm 1982.
16 From the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica.
17 In addition to John Gray above, see also Gunnar Myrdal's Objectivity in Social Research (1988 [1969]).
18 Consider, for example, that contemporary music by definition shares the time, and in more ways than one, the space of the observer/researcher. This proximity brings with it ethnographic advantages: products and processes can be directly observed at relatively close range. At the same time, the very closeness of the researcher to the study subject can stand in the way of a perspective from which to distinguish between the ephemeral and the essential, the trivial and the significant. The researcher's awareness of the effects that distance can have on the way she or he can perceive an object becomes a strong determinant of how he or she will then proceed in the study of that object.