Ethnomusicology at the Beginning of the 21st Century: Where and How Does Contemporary Music Fit In?
di Adelaida Reyes
1 Selected papers have been published in an Anniversary Issue of Ethnomusicology, the Journal os 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.