Franz Steiner Verlag

Contemplating Ethnomusicology: What Have We Learned?

Author(s): BRUNO NETTL
Source: Archiv fr Musikwissenschaft, 67. Jahrg., H. 3. (2010), pp. 173-186
Published by: Franz Steiner Verlag
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 Contemplating Ethnomusicology: What Have We Learned?

by

BRUNO NETTL

This lecture considers the history of ethnomusicology in German- and English-speaking countries by

contrasting commonalities and changes during the past century. Beginning with a brief survey of seminal

publications of the 1880s, it then takes as a point of departure a major article by Erich von Hornbostel
to discuss developments in several key areas: the origins of music, the concept of authenticity, the need
for preservation and universals, the role of aesthetic issues, and the question of relevance regarding the

study of the various systems of ideas on music. Important landmarks in twentieth-century scholarship are
enumerated, often illustrated by events and projects connected to the author's personal experience. The
conclusion suggests that ethnomusicology has made important strides in some areas, while in others it
has returned in circular fashion to its beginnings. This article was prepared while the author was holding
a Mellon Emeritus Followship, awarded through the University of Illinois, for the study of the history
of ethnomusicology. The author wishes to express his gratitude to theAndrew R. Mellon Foundation for

support of his studies.

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

gist here in the city thatmore than any other can claim to be the original home of this
field, and I thankmy colleague and friend of long standing, Prof. Riethmiiller, for his
invitation. Iwould like tomake a few comments about the history of ethnomusicology,
looking back at itsbeginnings, to see whether it is possible tomake some general state
ments about itsprogress, asking whether in the century or so of its existence, this field
has learned anything significant of a general sort.At my age, I seem almost constantly
to be observing some significant anniversary or other, so allow me today to take as my
starting point the year 1885, just 125 years ago, when two publications appeared, pub
lications that gave us in ethnomusicology our start.Guido Adler, in his famous article
"Umfang, Methode sets out a sub-discipline ofMusikologie
und Ziel...,"1 inhis category
of systematicmusicology, whose purpose is comparative study for ethnographic purposes.
In the text, however, he refers to "vergleichende Musikwissenschaft," possibly for the
first time in an influential publication, and he presents it?remember, thiswas before
the introduction of sound recording?as "neu und sehr dankenswert." But he separates
it.He places it in the systematic sector with acoustics, psychology, and organology,
not with the historical section that deals with real music; and it is not even really a part

1
G. Adler, ?Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft," Vierteljahrsschrift fiir Musikwis
senschaft 1 (1885), pp. 16-7.

Archiv fiirMusikwissenschaft, Jahrgang67, Heft 3 (2010)

? Franz SteinerVerlag, Stuttgart

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 174 Bruno Nettl

of that, but rather a "Nebengebiet des systematischen Teils." Its purpose, according to
Adler, is to compare and to group themusic of the world's peoples, providing, I am
presuming, a systematic picture of theworld's music.
The other publication of 1885 isAlexander JohnEllis's article, "On theMusical Scales
of Various Nations,"2 which, I admit, probably got some thingswrong in its collecting
and presentation of data, but which gave us ethnomusicologists an important start as
the relativists and egalitarians of music study. Ellis concludes, "The musical scale is
not one, not Natural, not even founded necessarily on the laws of the constitution of
musical sound...but very diverse, very artificial, and very capricious."
The imperative of these articles is to study all of theworld's musics, looking at them
relativistically and from a comparative perspective?to compare, but not in order to
show what is best or worst, but rather to compare in order to show that each music is a
constituent part of a world ofmusics.
The next publication that tome seems to tellus what todo isnow just 105 years old: Erich
M. von Hornbostel's lecture "Die Probleme der vergleichenden Musikwissenschaft,"3
quickly published after itwas delivered inVienna. I shall use it as a major point of de
parture in these remarks.Although by then a good deal about non-Western musics and a
huge amount about European folkmusic had been published, he seems to have regarded
comparative musicology as a new field just beginning, although he cites Ellis (1885)
as the "father" of comparative musicology. He begins: "Einem jungen Spezialgebiet
einer Wissenschaft fallt die Aufgabe zu, seine Daseinsberechtigung zu erweisen" [A
new area of research in an established field is required to prove its reason for being].
Problems? He informsus about many?fieldwork, transcription, intervalmeasurement,
recording, analysis, interpretation. But just what is this new field trying to accomplish,
what general questions is it trying answer? In the course of the article, Hornbostel
to
mentions threemain issues that seem to be his ultimate concerns: the discovery of the
origins and evolution (or development) ofmusic; the nature of themusically beautiful;
and the preservation of the world's musical diversity. Surely these issues have been
with us ever since, but as the century progressed, our field's fundamental purposes or
questions have also been stated differently.Here are a couple of milestones.
Jaap Kunst is thought to have been the inventor of the term ethnomusicology, but he
says this: "The study object...is...the traditional music and musical instruments of all
cultural strata of mankind, from so-called primitive peoples to the civilized nations...
Besides, it studies as well the sociological aspects ofmusic, as the phenomena of accul
turation...Western art- and popular music do not belong to itsfield."4 And he explained
that the term comparative is inappropriate since all fields use comparison. Well, I am
sure Hornbostel already knew that. I think the term
comparative was inappropriately
attacked in the 1950s; it seems tome that itwas simply a code word forwork involving
many or all cultures, for a universal perspective.

2 Journal the
of SocietyofArts 33 (1885), pp. 526-7.
3
Zeitschrift der internationalen Musikgesellschaft 7 (1904-5), pp. 85-97.
4
J.Kunst, Ethnomusicology... 3d ed. (The Hague, 1959), p. 1.

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 Contemplating Ethnomusicology: What Have We Learned? 175

But letme continue my sampling. From what I experienced, my teacherGeorge Herzog

did not specify a definition of the field or state itsprincipal task, but in his teaching he
dealt with specific cultures, repertories, and styles, using several approaches, assuming,
I think, thatwe would ourselves synthesize the field.
Alan Merriam may have been the most influential ethnomusicologist inNorth
America, and for him, ethnomusicology was "the study ofmusic in?or as?culture."5
By this he did not mean that one should ignore what we usually call themusic itself,
but he proposed a three-partmodel, suggesting thatmusic, in the large sense, consisted
of ideas about and governing music, of various kinds of behavior that gave music its
existence in society, and of themusic itself; and each of these affects the other two.
But the point is thatMerriam moved gradually from a view of music emphasizing
sound, with the "music in culture" component as a kind ofHilfswissenschaft, to a posi
tion inwhich the study of music as sound is only one component. But in emphasizing
Merriam's importance in promulgating themusic-in-culture approach, Imust mention
here the importance of some scholars who identified themselves as sociologists or who
were sociologically inclined, and who ultimately moved indirections similar to those of
Merriam. Here a major figurewas Kurt Blaukopf, who perhaps differed fromMerriam
in thathe contemplated theworld ofmusic from a perspective derived fromWestern art
and perhaps popular music.6 Merriam, while includingWestern music in his theoretical
purview, approached music from the perspective of anAfricanist and a student ofNative
Americans.

JohnBlacking, an enormously influential scholar, represented a variety of interests

in his sadly much too short career, but I think thathe considered himself an ethnomusi
cologist?although he called himself also an anthropologist, and further,also gave piano
recitals.7 I feel that his notion of the principal tasks of ethnomusicology were: 1) to set
straight a large number of prejudices and misunderstandings about theworld ofmusic;
2) to emphatically include the study ofWestern artmusic and the study of all music as
art; and most importantly 3), to work in a field thatwould somehow?economically,
morally, aesthetically?do theworld's peoples and theworld's musicians some good.
Since ca. 1990, the field of ethnomusicology has become increasingly diverse. There
are scholars who think it should, as a separate field, cease to exist. Many things envi
sioned by scholars a hundred years ago do not need to be done?cannot be done?any
longer. The world ofmusic has changed immeasurably, and theworld of scholarship has
repeatedly turned over new leaves in analytical technologies. The musicians of theworld
are a very different population from the one of 1900. One indication of the changes is
the number of subfields of ethnomusicology thathave lately taken root inNorth Ameri
can and other nations?applied ethnomusicology, historical ethnomusicology, music
education/ethnomusicology, medical ethnomusicology?one result of which, I think, is

5 The and
Anthropology of Music (Evanston, 1964); "Definitions of 'Comparative Musicology'
An Historical-Theoretical Perspective," Ethnomusicology 21 (1977), pp. 202, 204.
'Ethnomusicology':
6
See e.g. his Musik imWandel der Gesellschaft (Mtinchen, 1882).
7
See e.g. his How Musical IsMan? (Seattle, 1973).

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 176 Bruno Nettl

a certain lack of cohesion. There are no longer things thatwe can expect all ethnomusi

cologists to know, a situation quite different from some fortyyears ago, when I began
to teach graduate students. Indeed, to give one example of the direction of organizations
take, the Society for Ethnomusicology has avoided defining the field or specifying its
purposes. Its official representations state that itwas founded "to promote the research,
study, and performance of music in all historical periods and cultural contexts." And
it is "dedicated to the study of all forms of music from diverse humanistic and social
scientific perspectives." And its journal states that itpublished "original articles in the
field of ethnomusicology, broadly defined." I am sometimes surprised to find that a
society with such a vague conception of itsfield can be so successful. But successful it
now is,with over 1800 individual members.
As you can see, the field of ethnomusicology changed its perspectives and its con
ception of its tasks, even its name, substantially over the past 125 years. I could have
given much more evidence. Can we who are in ethnomusicology claim that the field, as
a whole?and not just in accumulating data on individual cultures and repertories?has
learned anything? I have no broad statements by way of an answer, but I would like
to comment on some areas inwhich something has been learned, using Hornbostel's
article of 1905 as a point of departure. Iwould like to say a few words about the origins
of music, about authenticity, universals, and ideas about music, about some aspects of
aesthetics, and provide a few illustrations frommy personal experience.

Origins

Speculating on the origins ofmusic was amajor issue early on. Richard Wallaschek's8
and Carl Stumpf's9 books?the earliest?about music of tribal societies were named
Anfdnge (Beginnings) in 1903 and 1911 respectively. By beginnings these authors meant
the earliest music, whose nature can be discovered through the ostensibly simplest music
of contemporary tribal societies. At the same time, the late nineteenth century produced
several theories setting forthmotivations for the coming-into-being, or, ifyou will, the
invention of music. They are stillwell known, though perhaps now regarded as rather
old-fashioned: music developed from speech?whether emotional or expressive; music
developed as the human version of themating calls of animals and birds; from the need
to communicate over long distances?something easier with the sustained tones of sing
ing than simply with loud speaking; from the need to provide a vehicle for rhythmic
work in groups; or for the need to have a special form of communication, a language,
ifyou will, for addressing the supernatural.10
I do not want to comment on these in detail. But one thing strikesme as interesting:
All of these theories assume that some kind of human culture already existed before

8 R.
Wallaschek, Anfdnge der Tonkunst (Berlin, 1903).
9 C. Die AnfdngederMusik (Leipzig, 1911).
Stumpf,
10
For a summary, see B. Nettl, The Study of Ethnomusicology (Urbana, 2005), pp. 259-63.

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 Contemplating Ethnomusicology: What Have We Learned? 177

music could come about, and that humans saw a need thatwas, or could be, satisfied
by music. Music is not seen as fundamental to human culture, but as something brought
about to enhance culture. These theories stem from research by earlier scholars, but as
a group they also reflect the role of music among the domains of culture as seen by the
denizens ofWestern society.
In contrast, there are societies?some American Indian peoples, for example?whose
world view puts singing earlier in human history. The Havasupai ofArizona believed
that spirits that existed before the coming of humans communicated with each other by
singing.11A number of peoples inNorth and South America see the bringing of music
by a mythic cultural hero as the change of human behavior from chaotic and savage to
civilized.12
But in ethnomusicology, interestingly, concern with the origins ofmusic had waned
by the middle of the twentieth century. I remember a conversation with my friend
Alan Merriam around 1960 about what ethnomusicology students should be learning.
"There's no point in the concern about origins ofmusic; we will never know anyway,"
he said emphatically. And most books concerned with our field published in the 1960s
and 1970s do not mention the subject.13
At the end of the twentieth century the subject returned, stimulated more by biolo
gists, psychologists, animal communications scholars, and linguists than by ethnomu
sicologists. Again, there is a group of parallel hypotheses: music came about through
the perception in utero of sounds made by a mother; music is the primordial expression
of social solidarity in a group; music is a biological adaptation coming from the use of
sounds to prove ability to be an attractive, able, imaginative, flexible, energetic, and
well-organized individual worthy of mating. There ismore emphasis on genetic than
on cultural factors. Parallel developments in the animal world?species that differen
tiate between two kinds of sound communication, possibly analogous to speech and
music?suggest the existence of music before the development of the rest of culture.
For myself, I have to ask, how can the knowledge of world cultures, and of music
in culture, the field of ethnomusicology, contribute to this issue? I have come to feel,
however, that a single course toward the development of music may not provide an
adequate explanation. Looking at theworld's simplest music or the simplest compo
nents of any repertoire,well, yes, thatmight tell us something about theworld's earliest
music?perhaps. But tome, more interesting is the fact that there is no interculturally
or universally valid conception of music, and thatmany of theworld's societies have
no term that encompasses all of music as we inWestern (and some other) cultures do.

11 of Illinois, and Havasupai a Lin

Leanne Hinton, unpublished paper, University 1967-8; Songs,
guistic Perspective (Tubingen, 1984).
12
Nettl, op. cit., 261-2.
13 I
have inmind A. P.Merriam's Anthropology ofMusic (Evanston, 1964), J.Blacking's How Musical
Is Man? (Seattle, 1973), and M. Hood, The Ethnomusicologist (New York, 1971); but also more recent
works such as W. Suppan, Der musizierende Mensch (Mainz, 1984) and S. Arom and F. Alvarez-Pereire,
Precis d'ethnomusicologie (Paris, 2007).

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 178 Bruno Nettl

Even in some Western cultures, there is a bit of ambivalence about the unity of music,
as inCzech between the terms hudba and muzika, or between musiqi and khandan in
Persian.

So, say thatmusic originated as mating calls, or as group expressions of

ifwe
solidarity, or as expressive speech, or as a function of mother/child relations, or as a
way for people to communicate with the gods, then I would be inclined to say, well,
probably all of them.We, today,would consider all of these as various kinds ofmusic,
but early human societies, and some more recent ones, would regard them as separate
phenomena. Individually theymay have led, possibly, tomusical forms thatwe now
recognize?virtuosic solos, military music, church rituals, musical drama, etc. etc. But
only in some societies were they eventually combined, conceptually, into a single idea
called music. So Iwould guess that itwas not one phenomenon that led to a simple music
like that of some small tribal societies, which eventually developed into a great variety
of forms, but rather something like this great variety of forms, a group of separate types
of sound communication which fulfilled different needs, and which eventually came to
be conceptually unified into a concept of a unified phenomenon.
I think I have learned that; I hope I learned it right.We will never know. But if this
change from a single origin to a kind of multigenesis becomes acceptable to scholars
and scientists inmany fields, it is because of the kinds of things that ethnomusicologists
have learned about theworld's musical cultures.

Authenticity, theUniversal Language, and Universals

In 1905 Hornbostel warned that the spread of European culture would devour even
the last vestiges of foreign song.14We must save, he said, what can be saved before
airplanes supplement the automobile and the electric train, and all ofAfrican music has
become Tararabumdieh. Did ithappen? Well, not exactly. Ethnomusicologists did save,
by documentation; and in some cases theirarchives became useful inhelping non-western
societies reconstruct earlier musical culture. But of course, theworld's music ismuch
more a cultural mix thanHornbostel would have liked. He would have wished, I think,
to preserve authentic music of each society. So would many in his generation and later
ones as well.

When I was a student, a half century afterHornbostel, my teacher George Herzog,

a Hungarian immigrant to USA via Berlin, was very concerned with the
authenticity
of themusic he taught.151 think I can synthesize his beliefs and those of many of his
contemporaries: Each society has a musical language of its own, which consists of a

14
Hornbostel, "Die Probleme der vergleichenden Musikwissenschaft," pp. 96-7.
15 For a
discussion of the significance of the concept of authenticity see Herzog, "Song" inM. Leach,
ed., Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend vol. 2 (New York, 1950).
S. Thompson, ed., Four Symposia on Folklore (Bloomington, 1950); and C. Seeger, Studies inMusicol
ogy 1935-1975 (Berkeley,1977),pp. 51-3.

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 Contemplating Ethnomusicology: What Have We Learned? 179

relatively stable repertory defined by a musical style or, ifyou wish, musical grammar
or vocabulary, and while it is open to outside influence, this influence comes slowly and
selectively. The various mixes thatHerzog encountered?in African-American music,
inmodernized American saw as anomalies, and the various mixes of
Indian music?he
cultures thatmade up modern popular music ought best to be ignored.An authentic song
was one thatwas recognized by the responsible components of a society as truly itsown.
Some of his attitude came from his association with Bela Bartok, who in his collecting
and publications made a point of emphasizing the importance of older Hungarian folk
songs, in contrast toRoma songs, taken by many to be the true ethnic Hungarian music.
What have we learned since then?Well, ifyou look at the contents of any of our
European and American journals that publish ethnomusicology, you quickly note that
much?well, I dare say most?of the content is concerned in one way or another with
the relationship of cultures as expressed inmusic: be itwith styles of popular music
that combine Western, African, Middle Eastern, Eastern European, and Indie elements;
how a music absorbs a foreign music (usually Western) or defends its integrityagainst
it; or how the components of music?the sound of music itself, the institutions that
involve behavior such as concerts, schools, and themedia, or the concepts and ideas
about music that govern these?respond differentially to an outside music. These kinds
of things are now, for better or worse and in one way or another, themost typical of
ethnomusicological study.One does not frequently encounter theword authenticity any
more.

So, should I say that a basic assumption of early ethnomusicology?that each society
has itsmusic?has been abandoned? During much of their history, ethnomusicologists
have been fighting the romantic and perhaps beneficent conception ofmusic as the uni
versal language. Uttered by poets and philosophers who perhaps did not worry about
theway the term universal language might be interpretedby musicians innon-Western
societies, this concept supported thosewho saw all musics as subject to the same aesthetic
standards. Carl Stumpf, a kind of grandfather of ethnomusicology, claimed in 1886, in
an article about the Bellacoola Indians of the Pacific coast, thatWesterners like himself
could easily understand Bellacoola music.16 But this rather ethnocentric view?he did
not think the obverse, thathis Bellacoola friendwould appreciate Bach?had in certain
respects been contradicted a year earlier by Alexander John Ellis in his article, "On
theMusical Scales of Various Nations," quoted above. Even so, about fiftyyears later,
George Herzog found it necessary to contradict the universal language concept in an
-
article entitled "Music's Dialects a Non-Universal Language."17
The conception of music as a universal language was gradually supplanted by the
widespread notion of theworld ofmusic consisting of a world ofmusics. In theEnglish
speaking world, therewas a lot of resistance to the use of terminology such as "musics";

16 2 (1886),
C. Stumpf, "Lieder der Bellakula-Indianer," Vierteljahrsschrift fur Musikwissenschaft
p. 426.
17
G. Herzog, "Music's Dialects?a Non-Universal Language," Independent Journal of Columbia
University 6 (1939), pp. 1-2.

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 180 Bruno Nettl

I do not know how well itfares inGerman?Musik Itmay sound awkward,

andMusiken.
but in fact ithas been used by some authors, one being Christian Kaden.18 But it finds
support from several sides: the linguist's notion of languages; anthropologists' insistence
that there are cultural boundaries marking insiders and outsiders; and closer to home,
the development of the bimusicality concept, which is the belief that to understand a
foreign music one must develop speech-like competence. Perhaps most influential is
the acceptance of theworld ofmusic as a plethora ofmusics by the profession ofmusic
education.19

Well, we have won, we victorious ethnomusicologists might say, our approach to

theworld ofmusic has been adopted by others. But wait: Typically, study around 1900
focused on themusical style of an individual society while assuming a high degree of
homogeneity. I know these were first attempts, but the desire was to show what was
typical or normal in each musical culture?the Thompson River Indians, Thailand,
Japan, Tunisia, India. These scholars were not naive, theyknew that all musics had their
internal diversity. But to them,what was important about these repertories, what was
important to show, was its center.
Consider the typical projects in ethnomusicology after 1990. Almost everything deals
with recent change, or what is at the borders of nations, ethnic and religious groups, so
cial classes, and repertories.We are less involved in showing that theBlackfoot Indians
have a distinct musical culture than inwhat they are doing in theirmusic to cope with
social and economic change. We are less interested in showing the unique character of
Persian classical music than in theway musicians contend with the nation's exposure
toWestern, Arabic, and Indian music, and with themusical culture of Iranian musicians
living abroad. The typical study of the last years somehow concerns relationships among
musical cultures, usually about a musical culture and what has come into itfromEurope
or North America?though once in a while the opposite direction is also examined.
I learned about these issues when Iwas quite young. When Iwas five years old, with
an average musical upbringing, Iwould probably have taken easily to the notion ofmu
sic as a universal language. Actually, my father, though a devoted historian of music in
the Czech lands and Austria, one day brought home the historically significant album
of 78-rpm records entitledMusik des Orients, and began to play Balinese, Japanese,
Indian, and Arabic music, exhibiting considerable interest and respect for these strange
sounds, but seeing them as fairly exotic. So when I came tomusical diversity inmy first
exposure to non-Western music in the courses of George Herzog, Iwas not surprised. If
someone at the time asked me why Iwas studying comparative musicology, my answer
was clear: itwas theworld's musical diversity that turnedme on. I think for a long time,
thiswould have been the ethnomusicologist's typical attitude.What was great about the
world's musics is that theywere so different.

18
B. Nettl, "Music" in The New Grove Dictionary ofMusic and Musicians, 2d ed., vol. 17 (London,
2001), pp. 428-31; C. Kaden, Das Unerhdrte und das Unhdrbare (Kassel, 2004), pp. 19-39.
19 For a see Patricia Shehan Campbell,
representative publication, Lessons from the World (New
York, 1991).

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 Contemplating Ethnomusicology: What Have We Learned? 181

So I was astonished when ethnomusicologists in the 1970s began to talk about uni
versals. Particularly when a new student came and toldme thather purpose was to study
universals. Well, articles dealing directly with universals are a feature of the 1970s and
1980s, but theyhave a legacy. The most typical study these days is somehow concerned
with commonalities. The theoretical approach underlying many studies have this impli
cation: I am looking at this event, this ceremony, thismusician, this genre combining
a tradition andWestern music, in a particular way, and I do this because itmay tellme

something about the behavior of music and musicians everywhere.

So there is a paradox: We got away from "music is theuniversal language" to "what is
importantabout theworld's music is itsdiversity," but, having accepted thisdiversity as a
point of departure,we now expend great energy looking forcommonalities and regularities.
Most of these commonalities concern not the sound and style ofmusic but the conception
thatpeople have ofmusic. And so I come towhat seems to be a really important thingwe
have learned, and that is the overwhelming interestand significance of a society's system
of ideas about music as something to be studied, and to questions about its role in the
context of preservation, which was so important toHornbostel in 1905.

Ideas about Music

After I sat through a year of Professor Herzog's lectures, I got a job as his assistant,
and since the university had employed a Native American to help with American Indian
language research, Iwas asked to approach him about recording whatever songs he would
be willing to sing. One must remember that thiswas at the beginning of reel-to-reel tape
recorders, only some ten years after people had finally stopped using cylinders. Any
opportunity to record was a rare treasure. But, I was told, do not just ask him to sing.
Ask him to tell you what kind of a song it is,where he learned it, and anything else he
will tell. I tried to be a good student, and so our recording sessions sometimes turned
into long conversations which, to be honest, were much more interesting than the rather
homogeneous repertory of songs he sang.
I am confident many others had this kind of experience. But the idea of formalizing
this approach to study did not come until somewhat later. I am not certain who said what
first,but one landmark would be David McAllester's study of values inNavajo Indian
music, a book about songs thatdoes not analyze thembut explains what theymean in their
people's lives.20More systematically, a few years later came Alan Merriam's three-part
division of the concept of music: ideas, behavior, and sound. And finally there arrived
the concept of the complete account of musical culture, the notion that a comprehensive
as illustrated
study of themusic of a society should include an account of all three sectors,
inMerriam's book, The Ethnomusicology of theFlathead Indians.21

20
David McAllester, Enemy Way Music (Cambridge, Mass., 1954).
21 Indians (Chicago,
Alan P. Merriam, Ethnomusicology of the Flathead 1967).

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 182 Bruno Nettl

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

North America andWestern Europe turned its interest to the study of music in culture.
The statistical and typological study ofmusical styleswe saw in thework ofHornbostePs
time and inmost works of Herzog and Mieczyslaw Kolinski was to a great degree
supplemented or replaced by studies of music in relationship to culture, or to the rest
of culture.
This also has to do with the concept of ethnography?an old word thatbegan to change
inmeaning in the 1970s. The word technically means thewriting or the description of
culture. From the pre-1950s view?when ethnography was merely description, in con
trast to themore theoretical "ethnology"?the concept of ethnography in general, even
when taken over by other disciplines, became the interpretation of an aspect of culture,
hopefully in relation to a number of cultural domains. Musical ethnography?the pres
entation of an aspect of music ormusical life in the context of the rest of culture?was
a microcosm within this. So, Steven Feld's Sound and Sentiment looks at the taxonomy
of musics among theKaluli people of New Guinea in relation to the classification of
sounds of all kinds.22 And The Soul ofMbira by Paul Berliner relates an instrument
to ritual, social organization, and transmission in Shone culture. In the 1970s, I tried
my hand at itwith the classical musicians of Iran, analyzing theRadif the repertory of
about 300 pieces musicians memorize as a basis for improvisation and composition.
I tried to show that the relationship between its various components?modes, pieces,
rhythmic types, motifs?reflected important elements of Persian social behavior and
social relations, including the tension between hierarchy and equality, the importance of
surprise, and the relative position of themost importantperson in a group or of an event
in a series in both informal and ritual situations.23 There are many such examples?one
might even claim that the typical ethnomusicological monograph since the 1980s rep
resents in one way or another this approach to ethnography. Ifmusical ethnography is
what ethnomusicologists mostly do, what has become of some of the early conceptions
of its center? When I was a student, "comparative musicology" was the study of non
Western and folk traditions; also, some said, itwas the study of a musical culture from
an outsider's perspective. And further, itwas the study ofmusics in oral tradition?but
always from an outside perspective. Now we saw ethnomusicologists from India and
Japan studying Indian and Japanese music, and therewas the occasional Asian scholar
looking atWestern musical culture. And the study ofAsian artmusics, though not no
tated in the kind of detailed read during performance by European musicians, cannot
simply be dismissed as "oral tradition" without further elaboration. So, what was now
the ethnomusicologist's unique venue of study?24

22 Steven
Feld, Sound and Sentiment (Philadelphia, 1982); Paul Berliner, The Soul ofMbira (Berkeley,
1978).
23 B.
Nettl, "Musical Values and Social Values: Symbols in Iran," Journal of the Steward Anthropo
logical Society 10, no. 1 (1978), pp. 1-23.
24
For elaboration, see B. Nettl, The Study of Ethnomusicology, pp. 232-43.

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 Contemplating Ethnomusicology: What Have We Learned? 183

I am not sure how it came about, but in the 1980s, scholars in theWestern world who
called themselves ethnomusicologists began to contemplate themusical culture from
which theyhad come, that is, the culture ofWestern classical music. Now, let's be honest.
There have for a long time been scholars who contemplated Western artmusic culture,
past butmore typically present, from a perspective quite related to thatof ethnomusicol
ogy. They associated themselves with sociology, psychology, or simply musicology at
large. I have already referred to Curt Blaukopf, a prominent name, who saw himself as
a sociologist among them.25And Christopher Small, who considered himself a music
educationist.26 And of course themany-sided Theodor Adorno, perhaps best described
as a philosopher ofmusic.27 So when European and American ethnomusicologists began
to look at their own culture, did their contribution have a uniqueness? Perhaps in this
way: They sawWestern musical culture as one ofmany of theworld, and they tried to
look at themusical sector of culture as one of several sectors.
Let me again illustrate with my personal experience, and allow me this time to go
into some detail. Having tried to gain some insight into the system of ideas about music
in cultures inwhich Iwas a foreigner, I began towonder what I would find if I asked
those same questions inmy own culture, the culture ofWestern artmusic. But where
would be a point of entry into this vast field? I determined to study a type of institu
tionwith which Iwas particularly well acquainted, the school of music inmidwestern
universitiesin theUnited States. My gathering of data as I spoke tomany people and
observed events and relationships was to an extent like that of the participant observer
ofmodern ethnography, but itwas also unique in the sense that Imyself was a principal
"native informant." Inmy presentation I assumed three voices: that of an experienced
ethnomusicologist able to compare music schools with institutions in other cultures; as
the authoritative cultural insider; and as a scholar whom I labelled the ethnomusicologist
fromMars, that is, the absolute outsider who observes everything with utmost naivete
and takes nothing for granted.
I first contemplated making this book heavy with data, counting ensembles, students,
professors, composers, telling everything thathappens on a given day, following one stu
dent around for a week.281 was reminded of the advice given by Bronislaw Malinowski,
a classic figure in anthropological fieldwork: collect three kinds of information.29These
are 1) texts?in nonliterate cultures he meant things like tales, myths, lifehistories, and
elsewhere various kinds ofwritings, and inmy study, also pieces ofmusic; 2) structures,
by which he meant abstract principles of behavior such as rules about social organiza
tion, property, power relations, and perhaps forme, rules for structures of concerts, for
social contexts of performances, or relationships between leaders and followers, between

25 also Musiksoziologie
C. Blaukopf, Die Musik imWandel der Gesellschaft (Kassel, 1952); (Wien,
1951).
26 and Listening
C. Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performance (Hanover, 1998).
27 in die Musiksoziologie
T. W. Adorno, Einleitung (Frankfurt, 1962).
28
B. Nettl, Heartland Excursions: Ethnomusicological Reflections on Schools ofMusic (Urbana, 1995).
29 B.
Malinowski, Magic, Science, and Religion, and other Essays (New York, 1954), p. 317.

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 184 Bruno Nettl

teachers and students; and 3) the unique approach of the anthropologist, what he called
the "imponderabilia of everyday life"?who speaks towhom, body language in social
relationships, when do people laugh, how do teachers behave; you can imagine how this
translates into a musical warned: Do not just accumulate data,
context. But Malinowksi
but constantly interpret.Thus, instead of amassing a lot of data, which should certainly
be done, I decided that Imight best contribute something by taking an interpretive per
spective.
So I decided to look at a school of music as societies in four senses of theword. I
claim that the inhabitants of the school?students, teachers, and administrators?imagine
theirworld as a group of societies. First, the classical music system ismost importantly
seen as a group of composers, the greatest of which are a kind of pantheon, and like
the pantheons of European mythology, they are also families whose members interre
latewith each other: a pair of central siblings?the genius Mozart, who did everything
right the first time, and Beethoven, who had to labormightily to achieve his greatness;
there isBach the serious grandfather,who looks over everyone's shoulder and towhom
composers refer in fugue and variation when theywant to show their zealousness; then
there isWagner the innovator with a touch of evil, maybe the Loge of his Ring. The
second society concerns the way school inhabitants see themselves as a society with
contesting and conflicting subdivisions: constant competition between students, teach
ers, and administrators; competition between vocal and instrumental forces, between
scholars and performers, between music education and everyone else, between strings
and winds, between the orchestra and thewind band, and so on. Stereotypes of social
and racial groups are set into themusic school's structure.
Third, there's themusic school as a meeting place of many musics. But Western art
music is central, and other kinds ofmusics must enter by way of the door ofmusicology.
That is,we had courses about African music before we had ensembles performing it,
courses about Renaissance music before we had a music collegium, courses about jazz
history before a jazz performance program. And the newly admitted musics must adhere
to the rules of the central music?one-hour lessons and rehearsals and concerts of ninety
minutes with an intermission. The fourth type of society is almost unexpected, but let
me suggest it for your contemplation. I believe thatwe think of our musical repertory
as an interrelationship of materials?works, genres, and styles?that has the overtones
of a society: instruments exist in families; the four-part chorus is an analogue to parents
and two children; orchestras?and particularly theirmost popular productions, concertos
and operas?parallel social organizations.
I better stop this far too detailed account. Let me say that ethnomusicologists have
gradually learned that the study of theworld's music and the study of music from an
anthropologist's perspective can help us understand our own musical culture.

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 Contemplating Ethnomusicology: What Have We Learned? 185

The Beautiful

In 1905 Hornbostel placed the quest for the essence of musical beauty among the
fundamental issues of comparative musicology.30 What has happened to that?Again, this
is a broad subject on which I can say only a word. Let me mention a curious paradox. It
seems tome that the nineteenth-century collectors of folk songs such as Franz Magnus
Boehme and Cecil J. Sharp, or the composers who carried out analytical studies of folk
music such as Colin McPhee and Bela Bartok, or perhaps scholars attracted firstby re
ligion and philosophy such as Alain Danielou, are examples of early ethnomusicologists
who were moved by the sound of themusic they studied. But looking at thewritings of
themainstream of early comparative musicology?the small group who called themselves
comparative musicologists: Stumpf, Hornbostel and his students, sometimes referred
to as the Berlin school, which incidentally included George Herzog?these scholars
showed hardly any sign of taking an interest in enjoying themusic theywere studying.
In my years of study with Herzog, I remember no instance inwhich he said anything
like, "I hope you are enjoying listening to these songs," or "thatAfrican chorus we just
heard inmy class, that is a real masterpiece." Indeed, I sometimes had the feeling that
he would consider it a mistake to become somehow emotionally involved in the sound
of themusic, that therewas something unscholarly about this.He certainly did not talk
about the experience of hearing music in the field as an aesthetic experience.
Things are very different now. Ethnomusicologists do not have a theory of musical
aesthetics, except perhaps that therewould be no agreement upon criteria, but it seems
likely tome thatmost ethnomusicologists today approach their object of study from
a viewpoint of being "turned on" by themusic. I think this is a result from two main

changes in their lives. First, is the concept of bimusicality?the idea that this strange
music I am hoping to understand is something I could also learn to perform. Secondly, a
great many students experience, hear, and see music in the field, and live in its cultural
context before having ever heard of ethnomusicology. In any event, if one had asked
students ofmy generation what motivated them, itwould be abstract questions like "I
am interested in theworld's musical diversity." More recently, itwould probably be, "I
want to study and learn to perform thismusic that sounds so attractive tome." Music
in culture? That comes later, though in time itmay come to dominate.
But?and my final point?the thing that ethnomusicologists have learned more than
anything else since the early and middle twentieth century is a different conception of
music, especially of non-Western and folk traditions.Once, these seemed as unchanging
bodies ofmusic thatmaintained their consistency. But now we see thatwhat Hornbostel
feared?that theworld's musics would become an unholy mix?has come to pass; as
individuals we can make our personal judgments about it,but as ethnomusicologists we
must accept and interpret it. I thinkmy teacher Herzog would have wished to stay away
from thismusic, almost to pretend that itdid not exist. Most of us now involved in this

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

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 186 Bruno Nettl

field think of music, like culture as a whole, as constantly changing and theworld of
music as one of constant change. Ethnomusicologists have on thewhole changed from
being principally students of products to being students of processes.
And finally: Herzog, and according to him, Hornbostel as well, thought of compara
tivemusicology as a field with a single main methodology?one that included a sepa
ration of the activities of collecting, preserving, transcribing, and analysis, that used a
comparative method as the principal technique, and expected inboth training and in the
research process a set of stages throughwhich everyone should pass. Their pioneering
work, however, has led us eventually to a field inwhich there is enormous diversity, in
which there are many, many kinds of valid approaches to ethnomusicological research,
and inwhich the boundaries between the various musicologies have begun to lose their
significance. On this last point, I want to say that at least I hope so.

Anschrift: University of Illinois atUrbana-Champaign, School ofMusic, 1114W Nevada Street,Urbana, IL 61801, USA

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