Ethnomusicology

Jaap Kunst, early ethnomusicologist and creator of the term 'ethno-musicology', plays the Indonesian triton, beside other traditional Indonesian instruments.

Ethnomusicology (from Greek ἔθνος ethnos 'nation' and μουσική mousike 'music') is the multidisciplinary study of music in its cultural context. The discipline investigates social, cognitive, biological, comparative, and other dimensions. Ethnomusicologists study music as a reflection of culture and investigate the act of music-making through various immersive, observational, and analytical approaches. This discipline emerged from comparative musicology, initially focusing on non-Western music, but later expanded to embrace the study of all different music.

Definition

Ethnomusicology combines perspectives from folklore, psychology, cultural anthropology, linguistics, comparative musicology, music theory, and history. This resulted in various definitions. In 1956, Rhodes called it a theoretical and empirical study amalgamating musicology and anthropology. Titon offered ethnomusicology as the study of "people making music".

The word is a portmanteau of 'ethno' (people), and 'musicology' (study of music).

Typical definitions include elements such as a holistic approach, cultural context, music theory, sonic, and historical perspectives. In other words, ethnomusicology is the study of music as a social and cultural phenomenon.

The practice of ethnomusicology replies on direct engagement and performance, in addition to academic study. Many ethnomusicological studies incorporate ethnographic fieldwork among those who make the music, learning local languages and culture as well as the music. Ethnomusicologists can become participant observers, learning to perform in a different musical tradition, a practice Hood termed "bi-musicality". Fieldworkers also collect recordings and contextual information. Printed or manuscript sources are not the primary source of epistemic authority. Instead, the focus is on qualitative research.

The term informant is used to identify those whom fieldworkers observe, members of the community under study. Informants may or may not represent an entire musical culture, or the ideal of that culture.

Sakakeeny observed that ethnomusicology since the 1980s has focused increasingly on politics.

History

This section is an excerpt from History of ethnomusicology.[edit]

Frances Densmore at the Smithsonian Institution in 1916 where she was recording Blackfoot chief Mountain Chief for the Bureau of American Ethnology. In this picture, Mountain Chief is listening to a recording.

The history of ethnomusicology describes the evolution of the discipline of ethnomusicology, which integrates the cultural and social roles and influences of the people who make it. Oskar Kolberg is one of the earliest ethnomusicologists who began by collecting Polish folk songs in 1839. Comparative musicology, the primary precursor to ethnomusicology, emerged in the late 19th century and early 20th century. The International Musical Society in Berlin in 1899 acted as one of the first centers for ethnomusicology. Comparative musicology and early ethnomusicology tended to focus on non-Western music, but later, the field expanded to embrace Western music.

When ethnomusicology first emerged in Western academic circles, its focus was primarily on non-Western music. This often neglected European and Western musical traditions, creating a contrast with conventional musicology, which centered on Western art music. This approach led to criticism for imposing Western biases on non-Western music, which prompted scholars to shift from "comparative musicology" to "ethnomusicology" in the 1950s. The new term aimed to emphasize a descriptive, culture-sensitive approach that respected each musical tradition on its own terms.

Over time, the scope of ethnomusicology broadened to encompass the study of music from all cultural contexts, including Western traditions. This reflects a more human-centric approach, where music is seen as both an art form as a social and a cultural phenomenon deeply connected to identity, tradition, and daily life.

Folklorists, who began preserving and studying folklore music in Europe and the US in the 19th century, are considered the precursors of the field prior to the Second World War. Oskar Kolberg is regarded as one of the earliest European ethnomusicologists as he first began collecting Polish folk songs in 1839. The International Musical Society in Berlin in 1899 acted as one of the first centers for ethnomusicology.

Objectivity

As the study of music across cultures developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, scholars began applying scientific methods to analyze musical structures systematically. Foundational work in this period established techniques that would later underlie the field. Alexander J. Ellis introduced methods for measuring musical pitch and scale structures in his 1885 paper, "On the Musical Scales of Various Nations". Ellis provided a basis for the objective analysis of musical systems, allowing for cross-cultural comparison and reducing subjective biases.

Comparative musicology, a precursor to ethnomusicology, was largely driven by the efforts of early 20th-century scholars such as Carl Stumpf and Erich M. von Hornbostel. Stumpf, a psychologist and philosopher, founded the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv, which became one of the first archives dedicated to the systematic collection and preservation of non-Western music. This archive enabled researchers to record and analyze diverse musical forms.

Hornbostel, a student of Stumpf, emphasized objective analysis of elements such as pitch, rhythm, and timbre across musical traditions. He promoted the use of standardized transcription and recording techniques, which allowed for detailed comparisons. Hornbostel's methods were instrumental in formalizing comparative musicology as a recognized academic discipline.

While these methods introduced rigor, later scholars attempted to balance objectivity with cultural interpretation. This integration helped shape ethnomusicology into an interdisciplinary field that values both precision and cultural understanding.

Approaches

Ethnomusicologists apply theories and methods from other social science disciplines such as cultural anthropology, cultural studies and sociology. While some ethnomusicologists primarily conduct historical studies, the majority practice long-term participant observation. Therefore, ethnomusicological work brings intensive ethnographic methods to the study of music. Two approaches to ethnomusicological studies are common: the anthropological and the musicological.

Anthropological

Those using the anthropological approach study how culture affects music. Charles Seeger differentiated the two approaches, describing the anthropology of music as attempting understand music as a part of culture and social life, while musical anthropology "studies social life as a performance", examining the way "music is part of the very construction and interpretation of social and conceptual relationships and processes."

Ethnomusicologists following the anthropological approach included scholars such as Steven Feld and Alan Merriam. The anthropological ethnomusicologists stress the importance of field work and using participant observation. This can include a variety of distinct fieldwork practices, including personal exposure to a performance tradition or musical technique, participation in a native ensemble, or inclusion in a myriad of social customs. In the past, local musical transcription was required to study music globally, due to the lack of technology such as phonographs or videographing technology. Similarly, Alan Merriam defined ethnomusicology as "music as culture," and stated four goals of ethnomusicology: to help protect and explain non-Western music, to save "folk" music before it disappears in the modern world, to study music as a means of communication to further world understanding, and to provide an avenue for wider exploration and reflection for those who are interested in primitive studies. This approach emphasizes the cultural impact of music and how music can be used to further understand humanity.

Musicological

Those who practice the musicological approach study how music affects culture.

Charles Seeger and Mantle Hood adopted the musicological approach. Hood stressed that his students must learn to play the music they studied. Prompted by a student's letter, he recommended that students undertake substantial musical training in the field, a competency that he termed "bi-musicality". This was intended to combat ethnocentrism and transcend Western analytical conventions. Similar to Hood, Seeger valued the performance component of ethnomusicology.

Analysis

Top-down vs bottom-up

Analytical and research methods have changed over time, taking two primary paths. Top-down, deductive analysis looks for musical universals that apply across cultures. Implicit in such an approach is that analysts must be aware of any cultural frames that may underlie analytical methodologies. By contrast, some scholars adopt subjective, inductive, bottom-up methodologies tailored to a specific music and culture.

Authors such as Mieczyslaw Kolinski and Marcia Herndon differed strongly on the subject. Herndon backed "native categories" and induction from the particulars of a culture. Kolinski defended the benefits of analysis, arguing for the validity of objective musical facts and laws.

Kofi Agawu claimed that scholarship on African music emphasizes difference by developing new systems of analysis; he proposed the use of Western notation to reveal similarities to other cultures and bring African music into mainstream scholarship.

Analytical methodologies

Ethnomusicology has yet to establish standards for analysis, despite efforts by analysts such as Kolinski, Béla Bartók, and von Hornbostel.

Perhaps the first attempt was the development of the cent as a unit of pitch by phonetician and mathematician Alexander J. Ellis (1885). Prior to this invention, pitches were described by measurements of frequency, judged inferior since the frequency distance between two notes varies across the octaves (pitch spectrum).

The cents system allowed any interval to have a fixed numerical representation, regardless of its specific pitch level. His system divided each octave into 1200 cents (100 cents separating each semitone). This allowed precise comparisons of music that used different, often individual- or culture-specific, pitch systems. Pitch systems in countries such as India, Japan, and China varied "not only [in] the absolute pitch of each note, but also necessarily the intervals between them". He concluded that the real pitch of a musical scale can only be determined when "heard as played by a native musician" and even then, "obtain that particular musician's tuning". Ellis's study was an early example of comparative fieldwork.

Alan Lomax's method of cantometrics analyzed songs to model human behavior in different cultures. He cited a correlation between musical traits and those of the native culture. Cantometrics involved qualitative scoring based on song characteristics, seeking commonalities.

Kolinski measured the distance between the initial and final tones in melodic patterns. Kolinski used this approach to reject the early binary of European and non-European. He observed markers of "basic similarities in the psycho-physical constitution of mankind". Kolinski employed his method to disprove von Hornbostel's hypothesis that European music generally had ascending melodic lines, while other music featured descending melodic lines.

Feld conducted descriptive ethnographic studies treating "sound as a cultural system" in his studies of Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea, instead opting for sociomusical methods.

Fieldwork

Fieldwork involves observing music where it is created and performed. Ethnomusicological fieldwork differs from anthropological fieldwork because it requires gathering detailed information about the mechanics of music production, including recording, filming, and written material. Ethnomusicologist fieldwork gathers data. experience, texts (e.g. tales, myths, proverbs), and information on social structures. Ethnomusicological fieldwork principally involves social interaction and requires establishing personal relationships.

History

From the 19th century through the mid-20th century, European scholars (folklorists, ethnographers, and some early ethnomusicologists) who attempted to preserve disappearing music cultures, collected transcriptions or audio recordings on wax cylinders. Many recordings were archived at the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv at the Berlin school of comparative musicology, founded by Carl Stumpf, his student von Hornbostel, and medical doctor Otto Abraham. These recordings formed the foundation of ethnomusicology. Stumpf and Hornbostel did little fieldwork themselves, insted relying on other.

Vinko Žganec, a Croatian ethnomusicologist, did most of his fieldwork in Međimurje County.

Ethnomusicology transitioned from analysis of scores and recording to fieldwork in the period following World War II. Fieldwork emphasized face-to-face interaction to improve the quality of observations.

Stumpf and Hornbostel were not the only scholars to avoid fieldwork. For example, in Hungarian Folk Music, Béla Bartók analyzes Hungarian folk songs. While drawing from recordings he had made, Bartók also relied on others' transcriptions, such as those of Vikar Béla, Zoltán Kodály, and Lászo Lajtha.

In 1935, the journal American Anthropologist published an article titled "Plains Ghost Dance and Great Basin Music," authored by George Herzog. Herzog was an assistant to von Hornbostel and Stumpf. Herzog drew from transcriptions by James Mooney for the Bureau of American Ethnology; Natalie Curtis, and Alice C. Fletcher to analyze Ghost Dance songs.

A pioneering fieldwork of Navajo music study was conducted by David McAllester, particularly the music of the Enemy Way ceremony. McAllester sought to identify Navajo cultural values based on analysis of attitudes toward music. McAllester gave his interviewees a questionnaire, which included items such as:

• Some people beat a drum when they sing; what other things are used like that?
• What did people say when you learned how to sing?
• Are there different ways of making the voice sound when we sing?
• Are there songs that sound especially pretty?
• What kind of melody do you like better: (illustrate with a chant-like melody and a more varied one).
• Are there songs for men only? [for women only? for children only?]

In The Anthropology of Music (1964), Alan Merriam criticized the quality of contemporary fieldwork as thoughtlessly gathering musical sound and relying on laboratory workers to analyze and contextualize it. Later, Nettl echoed this concern, describing early 20th-century fieldwork as extraction. Between 1920 and 1960, however, fieldworkers began to move beyond collection to mapping entire musical systems while in the field. After the 1950s, some began to participate with local musicians.

Merriam listed several areas of fieldworkinquiry:

• Musical material culture: classification and cultural perception of musical instruments
• Song texts
• Categories of music as defined by locals
• Musician training, opportunity, and perceptions by others
• Uses and functions of music in relation to other cultural practices
• Music sources

By the 1970s Hood was in the field learning from Indonesian musicians about sléndro scales, and to play the rebab.

By the 1980s, participant-observer methodology became the norm, at least in the North American tradition of ethnomusicology.

Ethical concerns became more prominent in the 1970s as they did within anthropology. Ethical fieldwork must protect performers' rights. The fieldworker must obtain informed permission to record the performer(s), according to the conventions of the host society. Ethicals also requires the observer to avoid ethnocentric remarks. Seeger interpreted this to rule out exploring how singing came to exist within Suyá culture, instead examining how singing creates culture, and how social life can be seen through musical and performative lenses.

Ideal vs ordinary

Music appears in a given culture at multiple levels, from informal to elite. E.g., ethnomusicology can focus on music from informal groups or the Beatles or ignore such distinctions as biased. Would the same methodology apply to the study of each?

Objectivity

The question of whether a standard approach to fieldwork is possible/beneficial recapitulated a similar discussion about ethnomusicology. Various authors rejected efforts to systematize the practice.

Ethnomusicology relies on both data and personal relationships, which often cannot be quantified by statistical data. It tends to emphasize the thrid of Bronisław Malinowski's categories of anthropological data (texts, structures, and imponderables of everyday life). This is because it captures the ambiguity of experience that cannot be captured well through writing.

Anthropologist Morris Friedrich organized field data in fourteen categories. A myriad of factors, many of which exist beyond the researcher's comprehension, prevent a precise and accurate representation of what one has experienced in the field.

Merriam in 1964 characterized ethnomusicological fieldwork as primarily concerned with the collection of facts. He described ethnomusicology as both a field and a laboratory discipline. He advocated a combination of a standardized and more free-form approaches because he had found that to be his most fruitful work.

In 1994 Rice rejected the possibility of objective perception. Relying on Heidegger, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, he claimed that human perception is inherently subjective because humans interpret perceptions only through symbols. Human preconceptions influence the way these symbols are interpreted. Applying that theory to music, Rice equated musicology to objectivity and musical experience to subjectivity. He claimed that experience of music was only an interpretation of preconceived symbols, and thus not factual. Thus, chasing objectivity by systematizing fieldwork is futile. Instead, Rice asserted that engaging with someone else's musical experience is impossible, confining fieldwork to individual analysis.

Barz and Cooley claimed that a researcher's field work is always personal because a field researcher in ethnomusicology, unlike a field researcher in the natural sciences, becomes a participant in the group they are researching just by their presence. To illustrate the disparity between those participatory experiences and what typically gets published, Barz and Cooley distinguish the intent of field research from field notes. While field research attempts to characterize reality, field notes record perceptions. However, the content of field notes are often omitted from published work.

Best practices

Later ethnomusicologists have paid greater attention to ensuring that their fieldwork provides a holistic sense of the culture under study.

The majority of ethnomusicologists are Westerners, including those who study non-Western music. This opened them to the criticism that wealthy, white individuals were taking advantage of their privilege and resources to dominate the discipline. Researchers responded by attempting to change the perception that they are exploiting poorer and less economically advanced communities, treating musicians as test subjects, and then publishing dismissive reports about native music. This critique of ethnocentrism may extend to local researchers studying their home country. For example, a Nigerian Yoruba may be perceived as an outsider by Nigerian Hausa.

Over time, more researchers from other cultures began to examine Western music and societies, at once easing the earlier concerns, while possibly presenting similar issues in reverse.

Nettl, in a 2005 paper, counseled patience for Westerners studying other communities — in his case, a Native American community. For example, he consented to a Native American man's request to "come back and see me next Tuesday," even though the man was not busy and could sing in the moment.

Ethnomusicologists attempt to bridge gaps in perspective by conducting long-term, residential studies. In 1927, Herzog spent two months with the Pima tribe in Arizona, judged insufficient by later standards, which suggest engaing for more than one year. Herzog recorded several hundred songs there, establishing a precedent for extending fieldwork. Working with Blackfoot people, Nettl evolved from seeking out ostensibly representative singers to deciding that the community was non-homogeneous, requiring singer to be understood on their own terms.

Theoretical issues and debates

Universals

Musicologists have long pondered the question of universals in music. Music has long been seen as a "universal language". However, scholars have yet to describe characteristics that all music has in common. If universals were identified, all music could be characterized accordingly.

Ethnomusicologists initially started to question the possibility of universals because they were searching for a new approach to explain musicology that differed from Guido Adler's. Ethnomusicologists worldwide have realized that culture has an important role in shaping aesthetic responses to music. This realization sparked controversy in the community, with debates questioning what people consider music, and whether perceptions of consonance and dissonance have a biological or cultural basis.

Belief in universal traits was characteristic of nineteenth-century musicology. Longfellow wrote that music is the universal language of mankind. Wilhelm Wundt tried to prove that "all 'primitive' peoples have monophonic singing and use intervals. Most musicians and even some teachers of Wundt's time believed that music was a universal language. Scholarship at the time was limited to European music and treated all other as its (possibly distant) relatives.

By the 1990s the notion of universals was widely accepted. Seeger, for instance, categorized his interpretation of musical universals by using Venn diagrams to create five universals qualities of music. Harwood claimed that looking for causality relationships and "deep structure" (as advanced by Chomsky) is a fruitless way to look for universals. Nettl asserted that music is not universal and is instead particular because culture's influence takes music in so many different directions. He claimed that while music is not universal, types of music are not as mutually unintelligible as human languages. He thus adopted the term dialect rather language. He stated that despite music's wide variety, the ways in which people sing and play bear significant similarities. Other ethnomusicologists also denied the existence of musical universals, including List and McAllester. Eventually, the search shifted from universals to near-universals. McAllester put qualities such as tonal center, a course, an ending, and the ability to stimulate feelings and performers. Music's universality is its ability to affect the mind. McAllester highlights music's ability to generate out of body experience, religion, and sex.

In response to McAllester, Wachsmann countered that even near-universals were oversimplifications. Wachsmann claimed that mere resemblance may be how people distinguish music from other things. He attempted to create an amalgam of relations for sound and psyche:

• the sounds' physical properties
• the physiological response to the sound
• the perception of sounds as selected by the human mind based on previous experiences,
• the response to transient environmental pressures.

Wachsmann's belief was echoed by another researcher who shared the belief that the universal lies in the specific way music reaches the listener. Music communicates to the members of the in-group only. This relativity goes to prove that people are used to thinking of a certain phenomenon that marries indescribable components that we resemble to what we know as music from our reference. It is also here that Wachsmann acknowledges that part of the problem of identifying universals in music is that it requires a set definition of music, but he does not think that the lack of a definition does not need to "disturb us unduly because usage will decide whether the emphasis is on primarily utilitarian speech or on speech that creates "special time" in a culture. And in any case, phenomena do have a way of belonging to more than one kind of continuum at the same time".

List stated that music possesses significance only to the group that it is produced by/around: "to members of the in-group only". He also stated that since music is not the sole producer of heightened experience (which applies equally well to other arts), it therefore cannot be a music universal. Nettl disputes this logic, saying that lack of exclusivity does not mean that a trait is not universal.

Dane Harwood, approached the question of universality in music from a psychological perspective. His view is that universals in music are basic human cognitive and social processes. He calls this an "information processing approach" and considers music as a complex auditory stimulus that affects the human perceptual and cognitive system. This suggests that stimuli that do not produce such effects do not qualify as music.

Note the number of Western and non-Western tunings that occur within the valid tuning range of the syntonic temperament.

One aspect of music is tuning. Many musical traditions' tuning's notes align with their dominant instrument's timbre's partials and fall on the tuning continuum of syntonic temperament, suggesting that syntonic temperament tunings (and closely related temperaments) may be a potential universal.

Linguistics and semiotics

In 1949, anthropologist Leslie White wrote, "the symbol is the basic unit of all human behavior and civilization", and that use of symbols is a distinguishing human characteristic. Once symbolism was at the core of anthropology, scholars sought to examine music as a symbol or system of signs or symbols, leading to the establishment of musical semiotics. Nettl discussed issues relating ethnomusicology to semiotics, including the variety of culturally dependent, listener-derived meanings attributed to music and the problems of authenticity in assigning meaning to music. Some of the meanings associated with musical symbols relate to emotion, culture, and behavior, in much the same way as linguistic symbols.

The presence of symbolism in anthropology, linguistics, and musicology generated various analytical outlooks: anthropologists traditionally conceived of cultures as systems of symbols, while musicologists tended to explore symbols within particular repertories. Structural approaches seek to uncover interrelationships among symbolic human behaviors.

In the 1970s scholars including Seeger and semiotician Nattiez, proposed repurposing methodology employed in linguistics as a way to study music. This approach, influenced by de Saussure, Peirce, and Lévi-Strauss, among others, focused on finding underlying symbolic structures in cultures and their musics.

In a similar vein, Alton and Judith Becker theorized the existence of musical "grammars" in their studies of Javanese gamelan music. They proposed that music could be studied as symbolic and that it bore many resemblances to language, making semiotic study possible. Nattiez suggested that classifying the study of music as a humanity rather than a science and taking a linguistic approach might prove more effective.

Blacking also sought a parallel to linguistic analysis models by uncovering the grammar which he coined the Cultural Analysis of Music, that could generate all existing and all possible music. He wanted to "explain both the form, the social and emotional content, and the effects of music". Like Nattiez, Blacking saw a universal grammar as necessary for giving ethnomusicology a distinct identity. He felt that ethnomusicology was merely a place where anthropology and music overlapped, and lacked a distinguishing characteristic in scholarship. He urged others to consider non-musical processes that occur in the making of music, as well as its foundation in any given culture.

Some musical languages have been identified as more suited to linguistically related analysis than others. Indian music, for example, has been linked more directly to language than music of other traditions. Critics of musical semiotics and linguistic-based analytical systems, such as Feld, argue that music only bears significant similarity to language in certain cultures and that linguistic analysis may ignore cultural context.

Comparison

Some research features analytical comparisons. Different kinds of comparative studies display a varying degree of understanding between them. Beginning in the late 60s, comparative ethnomusicologists typically used Alan Lomax's idea of cantometrics. Some cantometric measurements are relatively reliable, such as wordiness, while others are not, such as precision of enunciation.

Feld's approach deals with pairwise comparisons about competence, form, performance, environment, theory, and value/equality. Nettl noted in 2003 that comparative study had fallen in and out of style, noting that whatever its validity, it attracts criticism over ethnocentrism.

Insider/outsider epistemology

The relevance and implications of insider and outsider distinctions within ethnomusicological writing and practice has been a subject of debate, covered by Nettl, Rice, and others.

The debate is over the qualifications needed to research the music of a specific culture. Must the researcher be a member of that culture? If not, what rules apply? Ethnomusicology began with largely Western ethnomusicologists examining the music of other cultures, often finding it to be inferior to Western music. Thia led musicians in those "host" cultures to object to such researchers, with claims of "musical colonialism".Nettl wrote about three conceptions common in host cultures:

• The intentions of Western ethnomusicologists are not to understand other music in its own terms, but to compare it to Western music.
• Western ethnomusicologists want to apply their own methodologies, which are not appropriate for local music.
• Ethnomusicologists ignore subtle differences across different regions.

Nettl discusses personal and global issues pertaining to field researchers, particularly Westerners. Considering that ethnomusicology intersects with other fields, it is appropriate to consider McDougall's phrase "making the unfamiliar, familiar". As in social psychology, the "unfamiliar" is encountered in three ways:

• Two cultures come into contact with elements that are not immediately explicable to the other;
• Experts within a society produce knowledge, which must then be communicated to the public;
• Active minorities attempt to communicate their perspective to the majority.

Nettl has been vocal about the effect of subjective understanding on research. As he describes, a fieldworker might attempt to immerse themselves into a host culture to increase understanding. This, however, can blind the researcher and compromise objectivity. The researcher begins to feel like an expert when, in fact, they remain an outsider no matter the amount of research, because they are from a different culture.

The background of each individual influences the focus of study because of the comfort level with the material. Nettl characterizes the majority of outsiders as "simply members of Western society who study non-Western music, or members of affluent nations who study the music of the poor, or maybe city folk who visit the backward villages in their hinterland." This points to possible ethnocentric origins of researching foreign and exotic music. Unequal power relations come into focus.

Nettl asserted a binary that roughly equates to Western and Nonwestern. He pointed out what he feels are flaws in Western thinking through the analyses of multiple societies, and promotes the notion of collaborating, with a greater focus on acknowledging the contribution of native experts. He writes, "The idea of joint research by an 'insider' and an 'outsider' has been mentioned as a way of bridging the chasms." Such joint research has been limited and the degree to which this can solve the insider/outsider dilemma is questioned. Nettl claimed that every concept is studied through a personal perspective, but "a comparison of viewpoints may give the broadest possible insight".

The position of ethnomusicologists as outsiders looking in on a music culture, was discussed in terms of Said's theory of Orientalism. Said claimed that Westerners are trapped in an imagined or romanticized view of "the Other", situated within a colonial mindset. According to Nettl, three beliefs of insiders and members of the host culture lead to adverse results:

• "Ethnomusicologists come to compare non-Western musics or other "other" traditions to their own... in order to show that the outsider's own music is superior",
• "Ethnomusicologists want to use their own approaches to non-Western music;
• "They come with the assumption that there is such a thing as African or Asian or American Indigenous music, disregarding boundaries obvious to the host."

Nettl argued that some of these concerns are no longer valid, as ethnomusicologists purged orientalist approaches that homogenize and totalize music. He explored further intricacies within the insider/outsider dichotomy by deconstructing the notion of insider, contemplating what geographic, social, and economic factors distinguish insiders from outsiders. He noted that scholars of "more industrialized African and Asian nations" see themselves as outsiders in regard to their own rural communities. Even though these individuals are in the minority, and ethnomusicology and its scholarship is generally written from a western perspective, Nettl disputed the notion of the native as the eternal other and the outsider as a westerner by default.

Rice discussed his experience as an outsider trying to learn Bulgarian music. He had a difficult time because of his Western perspective. He then worked to learn the music from a Bulgarian perspective. Although the Bulgarian people said that he learned well, he admitted that "areas of the tradition (...) elude my understanding and explanation. (...) Some sort of culturally sensitive understanding (...) will be necessary to close this gap."

Ultimately, Rice argued that despite the impossibility of objectivity, ethnomusicologists may still learn from self-reflection. He stated the world is constructed with preexisting symbols that distort any "true" understanding of the world. He suggested that no ethnomusicologist can come to an objective understanding or understand foreign music in the same way that a native would understand it. In other words, an outsider cannot become an insider. However, an ethnomusicologist can still come to a meaningful understanding of that music. Rice suggested "five principles for the acquisition of cognitive categories in this instrumental tradition" among Bulgarian musicians. However, as an outsider, Rice noted that his "understanding passed through language and verbal cognitive categories" whereas the Bulgarian instrumental tradition lacked "verbal markers and descriptors of melodic form" so "each new student had to generalize and learn on his own the abstract conceptions governing melodies without verbal or visual aids." With these two methods for learning music, an outsider searching for verbal descriptions versus an insider learning by imitation, represent the essential differences between Rice's culture and the Bulgarian culture.

Relatedly, how should an insider analyze music? Nettl's approach would be to use categories defined by the host culture. In this way, one can distinguish themselves from the outsider using some slight insider insight.

Kingsbury asked, assuming it is impossible to study music outside of one's culture, what if that culture is your own? He decided to apply fieldwork techniques to study an American conservatory. He attempted to approach the conservatory as an outsider, doing his best to repress his experiences and prior knowledge of American conservatory culture. He analyzed conservatory conventions that he might otherwise have overlooked, such as the way announcements are disseminated, to make cultural assertions. For example, he concluded that the institutional structure of the conservatory was "strikingly decentralized". Based on professors' absences, he questioned the conservatory's commitment to certain subjects. His analysis featured four main observations:

• a high premium on teacher individuality,
• teachers' role as nodal points that reinforce a patron-client-like system of social organization,
• enforcement of the aural traditions of musical literacy,
• the conflict between this client/patron structure and the school's administrative structure.

Ultimately, Kingsbury found the conservatory system to be inherently flawed. In 1997, Kingsbury continued his critical examination of the field arguing that the discipline is weakened by the tendency of researchers to study music from various cultures through the lens of their own.

Craft interviewed dozens of (mostly) Americans of all ages, genders, ethnicities, and backgrounds, who answered questions about the role of music in their lives. Each interviewee had their own internal organization of the music they knew. Some cared about genre, others the artist. For some, music was deeply important while others had no interest.

Applied ethnomusicology

Applied ethnomusicology uses music as a device to build bridges and create positive change. Titon thinks of ethnomusicology as the study of people making music, where applied ethnomusicology is "a music-centered intervention into a particular community whose purpose is to benefit that community, for example a social improvement, a musical benefit, a cultural good, or an economic advantage".

The first appearance of the term in an official SEM publication was in 1964 when Merriam wrote "The ultimate aim of the study of man involves the question of whether one is searching knowledge for its own sake or is attempting to provide solutions for practically applied problems." Applied ethnomusicology's purpose is knowledge for the sake of positive impact on society. One part of applied ethnomusicology is advocacy. This includes working with a community to move social initiatives forward, and "acting as an intermediary between cultural insiders and outsiders". The became widely known in the 1990s, but many fieldworkers were already practicing it. For example, McAllester and Nettl's fieldwork on Enemy Way music showed how applied ethnomusicology can increase understanding for the betterment of the Navajo Nation. Fieldwork is a crucial part of applied ethnomusicology. McAllester described his role after conducting fieldwork, "And my experience, once I got among the Navajos, caused me to drop out of anthropology. I dropped the scientific point of view to a large extent, and I became…um, an advocate of the Navajos, rather than an objective viewer. And I was certainly among those in ethnomusicology who began to value… the views of the people who make the music, more than the value of the trained scholars who were studying it."

Ethnomusicology and Western music

Early in the history of ethnomusicology, debate focused on whether ethnomusicology applied Western music. Some early scholars, Hood, argued that ethnomusicology had two potential foci: all non-European art music, and music found in a given geographical area.

However, by the 1960s some ethnomusicologists were proposing that ethnomusicological methods applied to Western music. Merriam defined ethnomusicology simply as the study of music in culture, without regard to geography.

This argument won the battle. Pace claimed that questions regarding ethnomusicology's cultural scope purview tend to be political rather than scholarly.

Despite the increased acceptance work on Western music, ethnomusicologists continue to focus on non-Western music. One of the few major ethnomusicological examinaters of Western art music, is Henry Kingsbury. Kingsbury studied a conservatory in the northeastern United States. He applied many traditional fieldwork methods; even though he was studying a group to which he belonged. He attempted to think of his own culture as primitive and tribal to create some distance, citing Weatherford's ethnography of the US Congress as a model.

Nettl addressed symbolism in Western music culture. He cited an example of an analyst interpreting Beethoven in a literal fashion according to specific pieces of literature. The analyst assigned meanings to motifs and melodies according to the literature. Nettl stated that this reveals how members of Western music culture are inclined to view art music as symbolic.

Some ethnomusicological work focuses less on specific cultures. For example, Stokes' work on aspects of identity encompassed many cultures, both Western and non-Western. He wrote about gender as it relates to music, analyzing the common phenomena of music gender-connected events, or how a culture may seek to "desex" musicians as a form of control. Stokes' insights do not exclude any culture. Stokes wrote extensively on identity, nationality, and location and how this manifests in Western music. He noted the presence of Irish music in migrant communities in England and American as a way for individuals to locate themselves in a different part of the world.

Ethnomusicology encompasses various approaches to the study of music and emphasizes their cultural, social, material, cognitive, and biological dimensions beyond the aural, which applies to all music. This approach has been called urban ethnomusicology.

Ethics

Ethics is defined by Merriam-Webster as, "the principles of conduct governing an individual or a group." Ethical concerns in fieldwork must inform interactions between cultures. Ethically, each party must be comfortable with the process and ensure that all parties are compensated fairly. In particular, complete permission must be obtained from performer(s) under study, while the music-related rights and obligations in the host society must be respected. Blacking claimed that ethnomusicologists working in other cultures are obligated to seek outcomes that benefit the host culture.

Ethnocentrism (judging one culture by the values and standards of another) is another hazard. Ethnomusicology emphasizes the necessity of understanding the music of each culture in its own terms, particularly during fieldwork, and not subjecting participants to invidious comparisons. Many scholars, including Ravi Shankar and V. Kofi Agawu, have criticized ethnomusicology for ethnocetntrism, effectively dismissing non-European music as quaint or exotic.

Slobin observed that discussion on ethics is founded on several assumptions, namely that:

• "Ethics is largely an issue for 'Western' scholars working in 'non-Western' societies";
• "Most ethical concerns arise from interpersonal relations between scholar and 'informant' as a consequence of fieldwork";
• "Ethics is situated within...the declared purpose of the researcher: the increase of knowledge in the ultimate service of human welfare." (a reference to Ralph Beals);
• "Discussion of ethical issues proceeds from values of Western culture."

Slobin remarked that ethics also varies across nations and cultures, and that the ethics from the cultures of both researcher and informant matter in fieldwork settings.

Some scenarios are ethically ambiguous, such as:

• The discovery of a rare musical instrument leads to the debate of whether it should be preserved in a museum or left in its native culture to be played, but not necessarily preserved.
• Video recordings may require consent from the subjects and may require the producers' presence to address questions from viewers.
• Appropriately dividing the proceeds and other benefits from a musical production.
• Possible need to censor factual negative information about a subject.
• Possible need to censor a musician who wants to perform something that the ethnomusicologist believes inappropriately represents local culture

Many ethical rules established by Westerners apply to Westerners studying in non-Western countries. These may not apply to ethnomusicologists studying their own culture, beyond concerns that "arise from interpersonal relations between scholar and 'informant'". However, indigenous researchers risk "expos[ing] the vital organs of their culture" as much as an outsider.

While copyright law is the primary method of protecting artistic works in Western society, other protections may be required for non-Western works, because their origin in oral tradition may not qualify them for copyright. Furthermore non-Western artists may lack familiarity with copyright law, leaving them at a disadvantage.

The Society of Ethnomusicology Committee on Ethics publishes an official position statement on ethics.

Gender

Later researchers criticize historical ethnomusicology for gender-bias and androcentric models that distorted reality. Early research often focused on male musicians, in line with the greater attention paid to men in most domains at the time. This implicitly relied on the presumption that male musical practices were reflective of music of the whole society. In some societies, women were not allowed/encouraged to perform in public, reducing their participation in music and making it tougher for researchers to find female musicians. Further, men initially dominated fieldwork and related institutions and tended to prioritize the experiences of men. Koskoff claimed that this bias complicates understanding the musical culture of a society.

Women contributed to ethnomusicological fieldwork from the 1950s onward, but women's and gender studies in ethnomusicology took off in the 1970s as it did in other domains. Koskoff articulated three stages in women's studies within ethnomusicology:

• filling the gaps in the knowledge of women's contributions;
• discussing the relationships between women and men as expressed through music;
• integrating the study of sexuality, performance, semiotics, and other forms of meaning-making.

In the 1990s, ethnomusicologists began to consider fieldworker identity, including gender and sexuality. Feminist ethnomusicology emerged in the late 1980s (driven by third wave feminism), as women began conducting fieldwork instead of interpreting works recorded by men.

Koskoff claimed that gender is a useful lens for viewing the musical practices of a society. She claimed parallels between the sexual binary and others such as private/public, feeling/action, and sacred/profane. In some cultures, women's music is not viewed as music. Treatment of music thus can support or subvert gender roles. Koskoff further claimed that musical instruments' shapes and playing motions reflect gender roles. Koskoff also claimed that female musical behavior is affiliated with heightened sexuality, and that different cultures hold similar criteria of eroticized dance movements (e.g. "among the Swahili...all-female gathering where learn the 'right' sexual movements). Koskoff claimed that in certain cultures, public female musical performance is linked to female sexuality and to implied or actual prostitution that is not typically part of private performance.

She claimed that public music performance by single women of child-bearing age was typically associated with sexuality, while that of older/married women downplayed or even denied their sexuality. This reflects the traditional view that a woman's sexuality decreases with age/marriage.

In cultures that hinder women's public performance, women-centric performance spaces may offer women a way to express female identity outside the age/marriage sexuality binary. In some cultures, women have encoded symbolic behavior and language into their performances to protest an unwanted marriage, mock a suitor, or express homosexuality that is not apparent to men in the audience. As such, music performance may maintain, protest, or challenge gender norms. Koskoff claimed that women who become popular in mainstream culture may take on masculine-coded qualities, even their expression of femininity initially helped them.

Doubleday claimed that men may attempt to dominate their instruments, while women do not. If a female's allure is more important for her success than her music, the latter may not sustain her. Doubleday defines "suitable" instruments for women as those that require no physical exertions which do not disrupt the graceful stereotype of a woman.

Schreffler described the role of Punjabi women in music in the context of migration. Women are often the bearers of tradition in Punjabi culture, performing in many traditional Punjabi rituals, including musical rituals, which help enable emigrants to connect with Punjabi culture wherever they may be. Schreffler claimed that as a result of migration, bhangra music allowed women to mingle with men in non-traditional ways.

Similarly, a 2026 study of gender dynamics within Orthodox Jewish culture documented how partnership minyanim dance reinterpreted Orthodox Jewish religious law to establish a new context for women's performance, escaping the tradition of excluding women from religious music for reasons of female modesty. and across cultures. Orthodox men insisted that it was impossible for a man to hear a woman singing without experiencing it as a sexual provocation, while male partnership minyan participants concluded instead that considerations of modesty were not applicable in the context of their prayer. Therefore, a woman's singing could be considered an act of rebellion against Orthodox power structures. Dale stated that women's music initiatives such as Indonesian women chanting from the Qur'an, requires Orthodoxy to create a new religious space in which men and women can express themselves. While restrictions on female roles in worship mean that minyanim must focus more on partnership than equality, partnership minyanim can forge a prayer space that encourages women's voices. He described one interaction with an older woman who was uncomfortable leading religious worship, but appreciated observing other women in that role. Singing alongside women in an unrestrained manner was a comfortable and fulfilling way for her to practice feminism.

Efforts to document and preserve women's contributions to ethnomusicology have increased, including collecting ethnomusicological works and related literature that address gender inequities within musical performance and musical analysis.

In reflexive ethnography, researchers critically consider how their identity may impact their work and the societies and people they study. For example, Hagedorn described how her race, gender, and home culture afforded her luxuries out of reach of her Cuban counterparts in her research on santeria. Her identity put her in an "outsider" position with respect to Cuban culture. Unlike her Cuban female counterparts who faced stigma, she was allowed to play the bata drum and thus advance her research.

The Gender and Sexualities Taskforce within the society for ethnomusicology works to increase the presence and stature of gender/sexuality/LGBTQ/feminist scholarship. The Society of Ethnomusicology awards the Marcia Herndon Prize honoring exceptional ethnomusicological work in gender and sexuality including works that focus upon lesbian, gay, bisexual, two-spirited, homosexual, transgendered and multiple gender issues and communities, as well as to commemorate Herndon's contributions in promoting works by women that compare the philosophies and behaviors of male and female ethnomusicologists and musicians, along dimensions of spirituality, female empowerment, and culturally-defined gender-related duties.

Mass media

In the first chapter of his book Popular Music of the Non-Western World, Peter Manual examines the effect technology has had on non-western music by discussing its ability to disseminate, change, and influence music around the world. He begins with a discussion about definitions of genres, highlighting the difficulties in distinguishing between folk, classical, and popular music, within any one society. By tracing the historical development of the phonograph, radio, cassette recordings, and television, Manuel shows that, following the practice set in the western world, music has become a commodity in many societies, that it no longer has the same capacity to unite a community, to offer a kind of "mass catharsis" as one scholar put it. He stresses that any modern theoretical lens from which to view music must account for the advent of technology.

Martin Stokes uses his book Ethnicity, Identity and Music to examine how the presence of records, tapes, and CD's, and the ability to listen to music removed from its social setting affects identity and social boundaries. Stokes mentions how modernity and new technology has created a separation between place or "locale" (referring to the physical setting of social activity as situated geographically) and space (the location from where the music is being played and listened to.) Stokes calls the separation from space and place, "relocation" and refers to it as an "anxiety ridden process." Stokes believes that music plays an essential role to how individuals "relocate" themselves, claiming that music is unmatched by any other social activity in its ability to evoke and organize collective memory. Stokes also claims that the presence of records, tapes and CD's creates the ability to present experiences of specific places "with an intensity and power and simplicity unmatched." Stokes also touches upon the differences and social boundaries that each "place" holds. Claiming that each "place" organizes "hierarchies of moral and political order" and with each specific evocation of "place," defines the moral and political community to relation to the space in which the listener finds themselves. The possibility of the instant evocation of musical "place" allows individuals to "locate," and identify themselves in a plurality of ways, allowing a unique mix of places and social boundaries. Stokes also goes on to mention how the control of media systems by state-controlled governments, through ownership of its channels is a tool which authoritarian states use. Such control is not certain, as the meanings cannot be totally controlled and the citizens of said state can simply turn off the radio state or tune into another. Stokes believes the technological advancements in sound reproduction has democratized recording and listening, and thus, "weakened the grip of state and music industry monopolies."

The book Music and Technocultures by René T. Lysloff and Leslie C. Gay Jr. speaks upon the nature of the rise of technology. They believe that as technology increases, as does its social consequences. Such technologies do not change the social configurations which existed before new technologies, but instead the people that engage with and use these technologies change, instead. Lysloff and Gay use the emergence of the use of MP3s as an example. The MP3 file format can be combined with other software's to give tools that link online communities of music consumers with vast databases of music files, which individuals then have easy access to gigabytes of digital information. The existence of MP3s and these software's then allows for the new possibilities for the exchange of music and gives greater control to the selection of music to the end user, undermining the power of the popular music industries. Such technologies also allow unsigned artists to distribute their own recordings on an unthinkable scale. Later within the book Gay and Lysloff go on to speak on the effects of technological control on consumer practices. Gay and Lysloff go on to say that "Popular music musicians today are shaped first as 'consumers of technology,' in which musical practices align with consumer practices. Even within the "architectonic" structure of malls and acoustic spaces, they are built to connect with consumer practices, defining territory and motivating shoppers.

Copyright

Copyright is defined as "the exclusive right to make copies, license, and otherwise exploit a literary, musical, or artistic work, whether printed, audio, video, etc." It is imperative because copyright is what dictates where credit and monetary awards should be allocated. While ethnomusicologists conduct fieldwork, they often must interact with the indigenous people since the purpose of being in a particular country is to collect information to make conclusions. Such researchers typically leave their countries of interest with data that include interviews, videos, and text, along with multiple other sources of value. Rights surrounding music ownership are thus often left to ethics, and cultural differences have produced complex legal traditions worldwide surrounding music ownership and heritage protection, including for instance in China and India.

The specific issue with copyright and ethnomusicology is that copyright is an American right; however, some ethnomusicologists conduct research in countries that are outside of the United States. For example, Anthony Seeger details his experience while working with the Suyá people of Brazil and the release of their song recordings. The Suyá people have practices and beliefs about inspiration and authorship, where the ownership roots from the animals, spirits, and "owned" by entire communities. In the American copyright laws, they ask for a single original author, not groups of people, animals, or spirits. Situations like Seeger's then result in the indigenous people not being given credit or sometime into being able to have access to the monetary wealth that may come along with the published goods. Seeger also mentions that in some cases, copyright will be granted, but the informant-performer, the researcher, the producer, and the organization funding the research–earns the credit that the indigenous people deserve.

Martin Scherzinger mentions how copyright is dealt with in the Senegal region of Africa. The copyright benefits, such as royalties, from music are allocated to the Senegalese government, and then the government in turn hosts a talent competition, where the winner receives the royalties. Scherzinger offers a differing opinion on copyright, and argues that the law is not inherently ethnocentric. He cites the early ideology behind copyright in the 19th century, stating that spiritual inspiration did not prohibit composers from being granted authorship of their works. Furthermore, he suggests that group ownership of a song is not significantly different from the collective influence in Western classical music of several composers on any individual work.

A solution to some of the copyright issue that the ethnomusicology is having is to push for the broadening of the copyright laws in the United States. To broaden is equivalent to changing who can be cited as the original author of a piece of work to include the values that specific societies have. In order for this to be done, ethnomusicologists have to find a common ground amongst the copyright issues that they have encountered collectively.

Identity

The origins of music and its connections to identity have been debated throughout the history of ethnomusicology. Thomas Turino defines "self," "identity," and "culture" as patterns of habits, such that tendencies to respond to stimuli in particular ways repeat and reinscribe themselves. Musical habits and our responses to them lead to cultural formations of identity and identity groups. For Martin Stokes, the function of music is to exercise collective power, creating barriers among groups. Thus, identity categories such as ethnicity and nationality are used to indicate oppositional content.

Just as music reinforces categories of self-identification, identity can shape musical innovation. George Lipsitz's 1986 case study of Mexican-American music in Los Angeles from the 1950s to the 1980s posits that Chicano musicians were motivated to integrate multiple styles and genres in their music to represent their multifaceted cultural identity. By incorporating Mexican folk music and modern-day barrio influences, Mexican rock-and-roll musicians in LA made commercially successful postmodern records that included content about their community, history, and identity. Lipsitz suggests that the Mexican community in Los Angeles reoriented their traditions to fit the postmodern present. Seeking a "unity of disunity", minority groups can attempt to find solidarity by presenting themselves as sharing experience with other oppressed groups. According to Lipsitz, this disunity creates a disunity that furthermore engenders a "historical bloc," made up of numerous, multifaceted, marginalized cultures.

Lipsitz noted the bifocal nature of the rock group Los Lobos is particularly exemplary of this paradox. They straddled the line by mixing traditional Mexican folk elements with white rockabilly and African American rhythm and blues, while simultaneously conforming to none of the aforementioned genres. That they were commercially successful was unsurprising to Lipsitz–their goal in incorporating many cultural elements equally was to play to everyone. In this manner, in Lipsitz's view, the music served to break down barriers in its up front presentation of "multiple realities".

Lipsitz describes the weakening effect that the dominant (Los Angeles) culture imposes on marginalized identities. He suggests that the mass media dilutes minority culture by representing the dominant culture as the most natural and normal. Lipsitz also proposes that capitalism turns historical traditions of minority groups into superficial icons and images in order to profit on their perception as "exotic" or different. Therefore, the commodification of these icons and images results in the loss of their original meaning.

Minorities, according to Lipsitz, cannot fully assimilate nor can they completely separate themselves from dominant groups. Their cultural marginality and misrepresentation in the media makes them aware of society's skewed perception of them. Antonio Gramsci suggests that there are "experts in legitimization", who attempt to legitimize dominant culture by making it look like it is consented by the people who live under it. He also proposes that the oppressed groups have their own "organic intellectuals" who provide counter-oppressive imagery to resist this legitimization. For example, Low riders used irony to poke fun at popular culture's perception of desirable vehicles, and bands like Los Illegals provided their listening communities with a useful vocabulary to talk about oppression and injustice.

Michael M.J. Fisher breaks down the following main components of postmodern sensibility: "bifocality or reciprocity of perspectives, juxtaposition of multiple realities-intertextuality, inter-referentiality, and comparisons through families of resemblance." A reciprocity of perspectives makes music accessible inside and outside of a specific community. Chicano musicians exemplified this and juxtaposed multiple realities by combining different genres, styles, and languages in their music. This can widen the music's reception by allowing it to mesh within its cultural setting, while incorporating Mexican history and tradition. Inter-referentiality, or referencing relatable experiences, can further widen the music's demographic and help to shape its creators' cultural identities. In doing so, Chicano artists were able to connect their music to "community subcultures and institutions oriented around speech, dress, car customizing, art, theater, and politics." Finally, drawing comparisons through families of resemblance can highlight similarities between cultural styles. Chicano musicians were able to incorporate elements of R&B, Soul, and Rock n' Roll in their music.

Music is not only used to create group identities, but to develop personal identity as well. Frith describes music's ability to manipulate moods and organize daily life. Susan Crafts studied the role of music in individual life by interviewing a wide variety of people, from a young adult who integrated music in every aspect of her life to a veteran who used music as a way to escape his memories of war and share joy with others. Many scholars have commented on the associations that individuals develop of "my music" versus "your music": one's personal taste contributes to a sense of unique self-identity reinforced through the practices of listening to and performing certain music.

As part of a broader inclusion of identity politics (see Gender), ethnomusicologists have become increasingly interested in how identity shapes ethnomusicological work. Fieldworkers have begun to consider their positions within race, economic class, gender, and other identity categories and how they relate to or differ from cultural norms in the areas they study. Katherine Hagedorn's 2001 Book Divine Utterances: The Performance of Afro-Cuban Santería is an example of experiential ethnomusicology, which "...incorporates the author's voice, interpretations, and reactions into the ethnography, musical and cultural analysis, and historical context." The book received the Society for Ethnomusicology's prestigious Alan P. Merriam prize in 2002, marking a broad acceptance of this new method in the institutions of ethnomusicology.

Nationalism

Main article: Musical nationalism § Ethonomusicological perspectives

Ethnomusicological inquiries frequently involve a focus on the relationship between music and nationalist movements across the world, necessarily following the emergence of the modern nation-state as a consequence of globalization and its associated ideals, in contrast to a pre-imperialist world.

In the latter half of the 19th century, song collectors motivated by the legacy of folkloric studies and musical nationalism in Southern and Eastern Europe collected folk songs for use in the construction of a pan-Slavic identity. Collector-composers became "national composers" when they composed songs that became emblematic of a national identity. Namely, Frederic Chopin gained international recognition as a composer of emblematic Polish music despite having no ancestral ties to the Polish peasantry. Other composers such as Béla Bartók, Jean Sibelius, Edvard Grieg, and Nikolai Rimsky Korsakov utilized as well as contributed to the growing archives of recorded European folk songs to compose songs for the benefit of the nationalist governments of their respective countries. The French musicologist Radolphe d'Erlanger undertook a project of reviving older musical forms in Tunisia in order to reconstruct "Oriental music," playing on instruments such as the ud and ghazal. Performing ensembles using such instruments were featured at the 1932 Congress of Arab Music in Cairo.

Globalization

Towards the end of the 20th century, ethnomusicology had blossomed in American academia. With racial and ethnic demographics evolving rapidly in institutions around the country, the demand for a new type of curricula that focused on teaching students about cultural differences only grew stronger. Incorporating ethnomusicology into the American curriculum allows for students to explore other cultures, and it provides an open space for students with varying cultural backgrounds. Thankfully, recordings of music from around the world began to enter the Euro-American music industry because of the advancements made in technology and musical devices. In addition to these advancements, many scholars were receiving funding in order to go abroad and perform research following the end of the Cold War. This type of research allowed scholars to learn firsthand about cultures they aren't familiar with—including hearing testimonies about customs, observing social and cultural norms, and learning how to play the instruments from a culture.

Timothy Taylor discusses the arrival and development of new terminology in the face of globalization. The term "World Music" was developed and popularized as a way to categorize and sell "non-Western" music. The term "world music" began in the 1990s as a marketing term to classify and sell records from other parts of the world under a unified label. Different styles of this world music began making appearances on the Billboard charts, in Grammy Award nominations, and through participation of new immigrants looking to get involved as musicians and audience members. The Billboard Charts and the Grammy's came to be used as a great indicator for trends happening in music and to let people know who and what is selling. The Billboard music charts can be thought of as a marker of day-to-day activities of the music industry, and the Grammy awards can be thought of as an indicator of what sells and excels. The term "world beat" was also employed in the 90s to refer specifically to pop music, but it has fallen out of use. The issue that these terms present is that they perpetuate an "us" vs. "them" dichotomy, effectively "othering" and combining musical categories outside of the Western tradition for the sake of marketing.

Turino proposes the use of the term "cosmopolitanism" rather than "globalization" to refer to contact between world musical cultures, since this term suggests a more equitable sharing of music traditions and acknowledges that multiple cultures can productively share influence and ownership of particular musical styles. Another relevant concept is glocalization, and a typology for how this phenomenon impacts music (called "Glocal BAG model") is proposed in the book Music Glocalization.

The issue of appropriation has come to the forefront in discussions of music's globalization, since many Western European and North American artists have participated in "revitalization through appropriation," claiming sounds and techniques from other cultures as their own and adding them to their work without properly crediting the origins of this music. Steven Feld explores this issue further, putting it in the context of colonialism: admiration alone of another culture's music does not constitute appropriation, but in combination with power and domination (economic or otherwise), insufficient value is placed on the music's origin and appropriation has taken place. If the originators of a piece of music are given due credit and recognition, this problem can be avoided.

Feld criticizes the claim to ownership of appropriated music through his examination of Paul Simon's collaboration with South African musicians during the recording of his Graceland album. Simon paid the South African musicians for their work, but he was given all of the legal rights to the music. Although it was characterized by what seems to be fair compensation and mutual respect, Feld suggests that Simon should not be able to claim complete ownership of the music. Feld holds the music industry accountable for this phenomenon, because the system gives legal and artistic credit to major contract artists, who hire musicians like "wage laborers" due to how little they were paid or credit they were given. This system rewards the creativity of bringing the musical components of a song together, rather than rewarding the actual creators of the music. As globalization continues, this system allows capitalist cultures to absorb and appropriate other musical cultures while receiving full credit for its musical arrangement.

Feld also discusses the subjective nature of appropriation, and how society's evaluation of each case determines the severity of the offense. When American singer James Brown borrowed African rhythms, and when the African musician Fela Kuti borrowed elements of style from James Brown, their common roots of culture made the connection more acceptable to society. However, when Talking Heads borrow style from James Brown, the distancing between the artist and the appropriated music is more overt to the public eye, and the instance becomes more controversial from an ethical standpoint. Thus, the issue of cycling Afro-Americanization and Africanization in Afro-American/African musical material and ideas is embedded in "power and control because of the nature of record companies and their cultivation of an international pop music elite with the power to sell enormous numbers of recordings."

Gibb Schreffler also examines globalization and diaspora through the lens of Punjabi pop music. Schreffler's writing on bhangra music is a commentary on the dissemination of music and its physical movement. As he suggests, the function and reception of Punjabi music changed drastically as increasing migration and globalization catalyzed the need for a cohesive Punjabi identity, emerging "as a stopgap during a period that was marked by the combination of large-scale experiences of separation from the homeland with as yet poor communication channels." In the 1930s, before liberation from British colonial rule, music that carried the explicit "Punjabi" label primarily had the function of regional entertainment. In contrast, Punjabi music of the 1940s and 50s coincided with a wave of Punjabi nationalism that replaced regionalist ideals of earlier times. The music began to form a particular genteel identity in the 1960s that was accessible even to Punjabi expatriates.

During the 1970s and 80s, Punjabi pop music began to adhere aesthetically to more cosmopolitan tastes, often overshadowing music that reflected a truly authentic Punjabi identity. Soon after, the geographic and cultural locality of Punjabi pop became a prevalent theme, reflecting a strong relationship to the globalization of widespread preferences. Schreffler explains this shift in the role of Punjabi pop in terms of different worlds of performance: amateur, professional, sacred, art, and mediated. These worlds are primarily defined by the act and function of the musical act, and each is a type of marked activity that influences how the musical act is perceived and the social norms and restrictions to which it is subject. Punjabi popular music falls into the mediated world due to globalization and the dissemination of commercial music separating performance from its immediate context. Thus, Punjabi popular music eventually "evolved to neatly represent certain dualities that are considered to characterize Punjabi identity: East/West, guardians of tradition/embracers of new technology, local/diaspora."

In some instances, different groups of people in a culture rely on the globalization of music as a way to sustain themselves and their own culture. For example, author, scholar, and professor in the Department of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, George Lipsitz analyzes how the fusion of global cultures play out on American soil through his study of Mexican American culture in Los Angeles. Lipsitz unpacks a lot of cultural issues found within the Mexican American communities during the late 1900s by answering a question Octavio Paz poses on the whereabouts of the Los Angeles Mexican culture. Octavio Paz, a Mexican poet and diplomat, once visited Los Angeles and noted that the culture of Mexico seems to float around the city. The culture never quite exists nor does it seem to vanish. Some of the manifestations of the Mexican-American culture in Los Angeles can be found in what Lipsitz called a "historical bloc". This historical bloc refers to a group of different affinity groups that relate to each other through "counter-hegemonic". The groups bond over their bifocal existence in between spaces, their juxtaposition of multiple realities, and their families of resemblance.

Particularly in Chicano music, the musicians in this culture were strongly encouraged to take on an identity separate from themselves, if they wanted to achieve success in the world. Success might look different depending on the artists. One form of success might be selling tons of record while another form of success might be receiving respect from Anglo-American as real contributors to the "masterpieces" of music. This was definitely not an easy task to achieve, and often required some extra work. For example, Lipsitz writes about the first successful Los Angeles Chicano rock-and-roll songs and what the band members had to do to in order to achieve. The Don Tostino's Band reflected on how difficult it was for them to present Chicano music while not losing their identity. A band member stated that they wanted to play Chicano music instead of looking like clowns. This was a response to their audience's initial expectation that the band would arrive on stage in sombreros, tropical outfits, and other stereotypes attributed to Chicano people.

Another example of globalization in music concerns cases of traditions that are officially recognized by UNESCO, or promoted by national governments, as cases of notable global heritage. In this way, local traditions are introduced to a global audience as something that is so important as to both represent a nation and be of relevance to all people everywhere.

Cognition

Main article: Culture in music cognition

See also: Music psychology

Cognitive psychology, neuroscience, anatomy, and similar fields have endeavored to understand how music relates to an individual's perception, cognition, and behavior. Research topics include pitch perception, representation and expectation, timbre perception, rhythmic processing, event hierarchies and reductions, musical performance and ability, musical universals, musical origins, music development, cross-cultural cognition, evolution, and more.

From the cognitive perspective, the brain perceives auditory stimuli as music according to gestalt principles, or "principles of grouping." Gestalt principles include proximity, similarity, closure, and continuation. Each of the gestalt principles illustrates a different element of auditory stimuli that cause them to be perceived as a group, or as one unit of music. Proximity dictates that auditory stimuli that are near to each other are seen as a group. Similarity dictates that when multiple auditory stimuli are present, the similar stimuli are perceived as a group. Closure is the tendency to perceive an incomplete auditory pattern as a whole—the brain "fills in" the gap. And continuation dictates that auditory stimuli are more likely to be perceived as a group when they follow a continuous, detectable pattern.

The perception of music has a quickly growing body of literature. Structurally, the auditory system is able to distinguish different pitches (sound waves of varying frequency) via the complementary vibrating of the eardrum. It can also parse incoming sound signals via pattern recognition mechanisms. Cognitively, the brain is often constructionist when it comes to pitch. If one removes the fundamental pitch from a harmonic spectrum, the brain can still "hear" that missing fundamental and identify it through an attempt to reconstruct a coherent harmonic spectrum.

Research suggests that much more is learned perception, however. Contrary to popular belief, absolute pitch is learned at a critical age, or for a familiar timbre only. Debate still occurs over whether Western chords are naturally consonant or dissonant, or whether that ascription is learned. Relation of pitch to frequency is a universal phenomenon, but scale construction is culturally specific. Training in a cultural scale results in melodic and harmonic expectations.

Cornelia Fales has explored the ways that expectations of timbre are learned based on past correlations. She has offered three main characteristics of timbre: timbre constitutes a link to the external world, it functions as perceptualization's primary instrument and it is a musical element that we experience without informational consciousness. Fales has gone into in-depth exploration of humankind's perceptual relation to timbre, noting that out of all of the musical elements, our perception of timbre is the most divergent from the physical acoustic signal of the sound itself. Growing from this concept, she also discusses the "paradox of timbre", the idea that perceived timbre exists only in the mind of the listener and not in the objective world. In Fales' exploration of timbre, she discusses three broad categories of timbre manipulation in musical performance throughout the world. The first of these, timbral anomaly by extraction, involves the breaking of acoustic elements from the perceptual fusion of timbre of which they were part, leading to a splintering of the perceived acoustic signal (demonstrated in overtone singing and didjeridoo music). The second, timbral anomaly by redistribution, is a redistribution of gestalt components to new groups, creating a "chimeric" sound composed of precepts made up of components from several sources (as seen in Ghanaian balafon music or the bell tone in barbershop singing). Finally, timbral juxtaposition consists of juxtaposing sounds that fall on opposing ends of a continuum of timbral structure that extends from harmonically based to formant-structured timbres (as demonstrated again in overtone singing or the use of the "minde" ornament in Indian sitar music). Overall, these three techniques form a scale of progressively more effective control of perceptualization as reliance on the acoustic world increases. In Fales' examinations of these types of timbre manipulation within Inanga and Kubandwa songs, she synthesizes her scientific research on the subjective/objective dichotomy of timbre with culture-specific phenomena, such as the interactions between music (the known world) and spiritual communication (the unknown world).

Cognitive research has also been applied to ethnomusicological studies of rhythm. Some ethnomusicologists believe that African and Western rhythms are organized differently. Western rhythms may be based on ratio relationships, while African rhythms may be organized additively. In this view, that means that Western rhythms are hierarchical in nature, while African rhythms are serial. One study that provides empirical support for this view was published by Magill and Pressing in 1997. The researchers recruited a highly experienced drummer who produced prototypical rhythmic patterns. Magill and Pressing then used Wing & Kristofferson's (1973) mathematical modeling to test different hypotheses on the timing of the drummer. One version of the model used a metrical structure; however, the authors found that this structure was not necessary. All drumming patterns could be interpreted within an additive structure, supporting the idea of a universal ametrical organization scheme for rhythm.

Researchers have also attempted to use psychological and biological principles to understand more complex musical phenomena such as performance behavior or the evolution of music, but have reached few consensuses in these areas. It is generally accepted that errors in performance give insight into perception of a music's structure, but these studies are restricted to Western score-reading tradition thus far. Currently there are several theories to explain the evolution of music. One of these theories, expanded on by Ian Cross, is the idea that music piggy-backed on the ability to produce language and evolved to enable and promote social interaction. Cross base his account on the fact that music is a humanly ancient art seen throughout nearly every example of human culture. Since opinions vary on what precisely can be defined as "music", Cross defines it as "complexly structured, affectively significant, attentionally entraining, and immediately—yet indeterminately—meaningful," noting that all known cultures have some art form that can be defined in this way. In the same article, Cross examines the communicative power of music, exploring its role in minimizing within-group conflict and bringing social groups together and claiming that music could have served the function of managing intra and inter-group interactions throughout the course of human evolution. Essentially, Cross proposes that music and language evolved together, serving contrasting functions that have been equally essential to the evolution of humankind. Additionally, Bruno Nettl has proposed that music evolved to increase efficiency of vocal communication over long distances, or enabled communication with the supernatural.

Decolonizing ethnomusicology

Ethnomusicologists have used decolonial approaches for diverse purposes, including: (a) showing how nations from outside "the west" use music projects to renegotiate international relations under postcolonial conditions, and (b) as a basis for methods to promote equality and transparency in intercultural music performance projects. The idea of decolonization is not new to ethnomusicology. As early as 2006, the idea became a central topic of discussion for the Society for Ethnomusicology. In humanities and education studies, the term decolonization is used to describe "an array of processes involving social justice, resistance, sustainability, and preservation.

However, in ethnomusicology, decolonization is considered to be a metaphor by some scholars. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, a professor of indigenous studies in New Zealand, offered a look into the shift decolonization has taken: "decolonization, once viewed as the formal process of handing over the instruments of government, is now recognized as a long-term process involving the bureaucratic, cultural, linguistic and psychological divesting of colonial power." For ethnomusicology, this shift means that fundamental changes in power structures, worldviews, academia, and the university system need to be analyzed as a confrontation of colonialism. A proposed decolonized approach to ethnomusicology involves reflecting on the philosophies and methodologies that constitute the discipline.

In order to understand the importance of decolonizing ethnomusicology it's important to recognize the implications of having western methods and beliefs dominate this diverse field. In Mugglestone & Alder's writings from 1981, we see a clear illustration of Eurocentric thinking dominating the discourse on non-Western music. The application of Eurocentric concepts, and the comparative methodology rooted in Western traditions reveal a limited perspective that fails to appreciate the unique and diverse musical traditions of non-Western cultures. This Eurocentric approach essentially viewed non-Western music through a Eurocentric lens, which hindered a deeper understanding of these musical expressions on their own terms.

Gilman's work from 1909 reinforces this Eurocentric perspective, particularly in the context of studying non-Western music through musical scores. The exclusive reliance on European knowledge and musical notation systems can indeed obscure the richness and complexities of non-Western musical traditions. Gilman's observations highlight the limitations of such an approach, emphasizing the need for a more inclusive and culturally sensitive perspective.

In this discussion, it is equally important to highlight the merits of a unified standard system for evaluating music. The framework of Western music, embodied in notation and musical systems, serves as a crucial foundation for the comprehensive analysis and assessment of musical compositions. This standardized system provides a common language that enables musicians, scholars, and enthusiasts from diverse backgrounds to communicate effectively about musical elements such as melody, harmony, rhythm, and structure.

The use of notation, with its established symbols and conventions, allows for the precise documentation of musical ideas and facilitates the reproduction of compositions with a high degree of accuracy. This not only aids in the preservation of musical works but also enables musicians across different regions and time periods to interpret and perform them authentically. The standardized nature of Western music notation fosters a level of consistency that promotes a shared understanding of musical concepts, fostering a global dialogue among musicians and scholars.

As recently as June 2020, there emerged a noteworthy discourse advocating for the continuation of this pursuit towards decolonization within the academic domain of ethnomusicology. This intellectual movement gained momentum through the contributions of individuals such as Danielle Brown, a former professor of Music History and Cultures at Syracuse University. In her analysis, Brown asserts that the discipline at its very core bears the indelible mark of colonialism and imperialism.

Brown's argument revolves around the contention that ethnomusicology, as historically conceived and practiced, has been inherently built upon colonialist and imperialist ideologies, which have had a profound influence on the discipline's methodologies, research agendas, and power dynamics. She claims that this embedded colonialism and imperialism within ethnomusicology have perpetuated harmful structures and narratives that marginalize, exoticize, and misrepresent non-Western cultures. These dynamics, according to Brown, not only perpetuate historical injustices but also perpetuate modern forms of inequity and oppression.

Furthermore, Brown, recognizing the gravity of the issue, posits that the only viable course of action to address the colonialist and imperialist aspects of ethnomusicology is the "dismantling or significant restructuring" of the field. The reason behind this comprehensive solution for change lies in the firm belief that minor tweaks or surface-level alterations would prove inadequate in addressing the deep-seated historical biases and entrenched systemic inequities that are inherent to ethnomusicology.

Brown ends her letter by expressing important calls to action for decolonization and moving towards a more just and inclusive future of ethnomusicology and academia in general: she states that "diversity, equity, and inclusion are a package deal" must be intentionally taught without the exclusion of the others, she explains the importance of having more BIPOC (black, indigenous, people of color) representation in music classrooms (ex. more BIPOC music teachers), she calls for people to recognize the resistance, not reluctance, of trying to provide a more equitable space for BIPOC people, and finally she calls people to admit first the colonialist and imperialist roots of ethnomusicology before moving forward to address the next steps.

The decolonization of ethnomusicology takes multiple paths. These proposed approaches are: i) ethnomusicologists addressing their roles as scholars, ii) the university system being analyzed and revised, iii) the philosophies, and thus practices, as a discipline being changed. The Fall/Winter 2016 issue of the Society for Ethnomusicology's Student News contains a survey about decolonizing ethnomusicology to see their readers' views on what decolonizing ethnomusicology entailed. The different themes were: i) decentering ethnomusicology from the United States and Europe, ii) expanding/transforming the discipline, iii) recognizing privilege and power, and iv) constructing spaces to actually talk about decolonizing ethnomusicology among peers and colleagues.

One of the issues proposed by Brendan Kibbee for "decolonizing" ethnomusicology is how scholars might reorganize the disciplinary practices to broaden the base of ideas and thinkers. One idea posed is that the preference and privilege of the written word more than other forms of media scholarship hinders a great deal of potential contributors from finding a space in the disciplinary sphere.

The possible influence of the Western bias against listening as an intellectual practice could be a reason for a lack of diversity of opinion and background within the field. The colonial aspect comes from the European prejudices regarding subjects' intellectual abilities derived from the Kantian belief that the act of listening being seen as a "danger to the autonomy of the enlightened liberal subject." As colonists reorganized the economic global order, they also created a system that tied social mobility to the ability to assimilate European schooling, forming a meritocracy of sorts. Many barriers keep "postcolonial" voices out of the academic sphere such as the inability to recognize intellectual depth in local practices of knowledge production and transmission. If ethnomusicologists start to rethink the ways in which they communicate with one another, the sphere of academia could be opened to include more than just the written word, allowing new voices to participate.

Another topic of discussion for decolonizing ethnomusicology is the existence of archives as a legacy of colonial ethnomusicology or a model for digital democracy. Comparative musicologists used archives such as the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv to compare the types of music of the world. The current functions of such public archives within institutions and on the internet has been analyzed by ethnomusicologists. Activists and ethnomusicologists working with archives of recorded sound, like Aaron Fox, associate professor at Columbia University, have undertaken recovery and repatriation projects as an attempt at decolonizing the field. Another ethnomusicologist who has developed major music repatriation projects is Diane Thram, who works with the International Library of African Music. Similar work has been dedicated towards film and field video.

Ethnicity

Giving a strict definition to ethnicity is considered difficult by many scholars, but it can be best understood in terms of the creation and preservation of boundaries, in contrast to the social "essences" in the gaps between these boundaries. In fact, ethnic boundaries can both define and maintain social identities, and music can be used in local social situations by members of society to create such boundaries. The idea of authenticity becomes relevant here, where authenticity is not a property of the music or performance itself, but is a way of telling both insiders and outsiders that this is the music that makes one's society unique. Authenticity can also be seen as the idea that a certain music is inextricably bound to a certain group or physical place. It can give insight into the question of the "origin" of music, in that it by definition bears connection to the geographical, historical, and cultural aspects of music. For instance, holding that particular aspects of African-American music are actually fundamentally African is critical to claims of authenticity in the global African diaspora. In terms of how authenticity can be connected to the concept of place, consider the concept of authenticity in Jewish music throughout the Jewish diaspora. "Jewish" music is bound to both the Land of Israel and the ancient Temple of Jerusalem.

Although groups are self-defining in how they express the differences between self and other, colonization, domination, and violence within developing societies cannot be ignored. In a society, often dominant groups brutally oppress minority ethnicities from their classification systems. Music can be used as a tool to propagate dominant classifications in such societies, and has been used as such by new and developing states especially through control of media systems. Indeed, though music can help define a national identity, authoritarian states can control this musical identity through technology, in that they end up dictating what citizens can listen to. Governments often value music as a symbol, which can be used to promote supra-national entities. They often use this to argue the right to participate in or control a significant cultural or political event, such as Turkey's involvement in the Eurovision Song Contest.

Historically, anthropologists have believed that ethnomusicologists deal with something that by definition cannot be synonymous with the social realities of the present world. In response, ethnomusicologists sometimes present a concept of society that purely exists within an all-encompassing definition of music. Ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger agrees with this, giving an example of how Suya society (in Brazil) can be understood in terms of its music. Seeger notes how "Suya society was an orchestra, its village was a concert hall, and its year a song."

Music helps one understand oneself in relation to people, places, and times. It informs one's sense of physical place—a musical event (such as a collective dance) uniquely evokes collective memories and experiences of place. Both ethnomusicologists and anthropologists believe that music provides the means by which political and moral hierarchies are developed. Music allows people to comprehend both identities and physical places, as well as the boundaries that divide them.

Gender is another area where boundaries are "performed" in music. Instruments and instrumental performance can contribute to a society's definition of gender, in that behaviour of performers conforms to the gender expectations of society (e.g. men should not display effort, or women should feign reluctance to perform). Issues of ethnicity and music intersect with gender studies in fields like historical musicology, the study of popular music, and ethnomusicology. Indeed, gender can be seen as a symbol of social and political order, and controlling gender boundaries is thus a means of controlling such order. Gender boundaries reveal the most deeply intrinsic forms of domination in a society, that subsequently provide a template for other forms of domination. However, music can also provide a means of pushing back against these boundaries by blurring the boundary between what is traditionally considered male and female.

When one listens to foreign music, one tries to make sense of it in terms of one's own (familiar) music and musical worldviews, and this internal struggle can be seen as a power struggle between one's musical views and the other, foreign ones. Sometimes, musicians celebrate ethnic plurality in problematic ways, in that they collect genres, and subsequently alter and reinterpret them in their own terms. Societies often publicize so-called multi-cultural music performances simply for the promotion of their own self-image. Such staged folklore begins to greatly diverge from the celebration of ethnic plurality it purportedly represents, and the music and dance being performed become meaningless when presented so entirely out of context. In such a scenario, which is seen very commonly, the meaning of the performance is both created and controlled by the performers, the audience, and even the media of the society the performance takes place in.

Music rarely remains stable in contexts of social change—"culture contact" causes music to be altered to whatever new culture it has come in contact with. In this way, minority communities can internalize the outside world through music—a kind of sense-making. They become able to deal with and control a foreign world on their own (musical) terms. Indeed, such integration of musical difference is an integral aspect of the creation of a musical identity, which can be seen in Seeger's description of the Brazilian Suya, who took music from an outside culture and made it their own as an "assertion of identity in a multi-ethnic social situation." In addition, consider the development of East Indian culture. Many of the trademarks of East Indian society, such as the caste system and the Bhojpuri form of the Hindi language, are becoming obsolete, which erodes their concept of ethnic identity. In light of these conditions, music has begun to play an unprecedented role in the concept of East Indian ethnic identity. Music can also play a transformative part in the formation of the identities of urban and migrant communities, which can be seen in the diverse and distinct musical cultures in the melting pot of communities in the US. In the case of colonialism, the colonizer and the colonized end up repeatedly exchanging musical ideas. For instance, in the Spanish colonization of the indigenous Native Americans, the resulting mestizo music reflects the intersection of these two culture spheres, and even gave way to new modes of musical expression bearing aspects of both cultures.

Ethnicities and class identities have a complicated relationship. Class can be seen as the relative control a group has over economic (relating to means of production), cultural, political, and social assets in various social areas. In the case of migrant communities, the divide between the concepts of ethnicity and class blur (for instance, one ethnic group/class level provides cheap labor for the other, such as in the case of Latinx Mexican immigrants performing cheap farming labor for White Americans). This blurring can also be seen in Zimbabwe, where White settlers determined a hierarchical social order divided by ethnicity: Blacks, others "coloureds," Asians, and Whites (who were at the top of the hierarchy). The concept of "geographical heritage" (where one cannot change where one's ancestors come from) contributed to this concept of immutability of this constructed hierarchy; White settlers enforced the ranks of this hierarchy through their definition of how "civilized" each ethnic group was (Whites being the most civilized).

However, one cannot simply match a class with a single musical style, as musical styles reflect the complex and often contradictory aspects of the society as a whole. Marxist subcultural theory proposes that subcultures borrow and alter traits from the dominant culture to create a newly diverse range of available traits where the signs of the dominant culture remain, but are now part of a new and simultaneously subversive whole. In fact, ethnicities are similar to classes in many ways. They are often either defined or excluded based on the rules of the dominant classificatory system of the society. Thus, ethnic minorities are forced to figure out how to create their own identities within the control of the dominant classifications. Ethnic minorities can also use music in order to resist and protest the dominant group. This can be seen in European Jews, African Americans, Malaysian-Chinese, and even in the Indonesian-Chinese, who expressed resistance through Chinese theater performances.

Medical ethnomusicology

Main article: Medical ethnomusicology

Scholars have characterized medical ethnomusicology as "a new field of integrative research and applied practice that explores holistically the roles of music and sound phenomena and related praxes in any cultural and clinical context of health and healing". Medical ethnomusicology often focuses specifically on music and its effect on the biological, psychological, social, emotional, and spiritual realms of health. In this regard, medical ethnomusicologists have found applications of music to deal with a broad range of health issues. Music has been helpful in the treatment of autism, dementia, AIDS and HIV, as well as in social and spiritual contexts through the restoration of community and the role of music in prayer and meditation. Recent studies have also shown how music can help to alter mood and serve as cognitive therapy.

Academic programs

Many universities around the world offer ethnomusicology classes, offering both graduate and undergraduate degree-granting options, and act as centers for ethnomusicological research. The Society of Ethnomusicology maintains a list of such programs. At the undergraduate level, students pursuing degrees in ethnomusicology often enroll in programs housed within Departments of Music. These programs provide a solid foundation in music theory, history, and performance, with an emphasis on world music traditions. Introductory classes have helped expand the popularity of the discipline to a diverse set of students.

For graduate students seeking more advanced training, master's and Ph.D. programs specifically in ethnomusicology are commonly available. These advanced programs delve into a wide range of subjects, including in-depth research design, music transcription and analysis, the exploration of cultural interactions, and the utilization of specialized ethnomusicological tools. Students also engage with music studies theory, and they can choose from a variety of electives and area studies to tailor their education to their specific interests. Proficiency in at least two languages is often required to conduct research in diverse cultural contexts, and students are encouraged to pursue independent research projects. The culmination of their academic journey typically involves the completion of a dissertation that contributes to the field's body of knowledge.

In popular culture

Global music festivals pertaining to ethnomusicology sometimes occur, most notably, WOMAD (World of Music, Arts and Dance). This yearly festival, first held in 1982, showcases a diverse range of artists and genres from around the world. This contributes to the rising popularity of ethnomusicological perspectives on a global scale.

A notable musical work heavily influenced by ethnomusicology is Paul Simon's album, Graceland (1986). Incorporating elements of South African music, Simon displays the significance of ethnomusicology in popularizing and amalgamating diverse musical traditions.

The string quartet called the Kronos Quartet has exhibited many connections to the practice of ethnomusicology. Throughout their years, many collaborations have occurred between the members of the quartet and traditional musicians from around the world. This exemplifies the cross-cultural nature of ethnomusicological research; Pieces of Africa (1992) is an album by the Kronos Quartet that clearly exhibits these qualities.

Ethnomusicology has also had its fair share of representation in literature. For example, in Karen Hesse's novel, The Music of Dolphins (1996), one character (Doctor Elizabeth Beck) is an ethnomusicologist researching the musical communication of dolphins, exemplifying ethnomusicology in fictional literature. Another work of literature with ethnomusicological components is The Summer Prince by Alaya Dawn Johnson. This science fiction novel, published in 2013, presents an ethnomusicologist as its main protagonist. June Costa, the said protagonist, lives in a future society where art and creativity are tightly monitored. This novel revolves around the storyline of June Costa finding the hidden power of music as well as its potential to spur up change in a dystopian world.

In film, The Buena Vista Social Club (1999), directed by Wim Wenders, delves into traditional Cuban music and notably illustrates ethnomusicological elements in its portrayal of musicians and their cultural backbones. As well, the movie Songcatcher (2000) is loosely based on the ethnomusicology work of Olive Dame Campbell. In Inside Out 2 (2024), ethnomusicologist is briefly mentioned as a possible future career for the character Riley, but her personified emotion of joy does not know what it is. Her personified anxiety later sees being one as part of a possible bad future for Riley, but it is unclear if Anxiety knows what it is either.

Ethnochoreology

Main article: Ethnochoreology

Definition

The definition of ethnochoreology stands to have many similarities with the current way of studying of ethnomusicology. With ethnochoreology's roots in anthropology taken into account, and by the way that it is studied in the field, dance is most accurately defined and studied within this academic circle as two parts: as "an integral part of a network of social events" and "as a part of a system of knowledge and belief, social behavior and aesthetic norms and values". That is, the study of dance in its performance aspects—the physical movements, costumes, stages, performers, and accompanied sound—along with the social context and uses within the society where it takes place.

Beginnings

Because of its growth alongside ethnomusicology, the beginning of ethnochoreology also had a focus on the comparative side of things, where the focus was on classifying different styles based on the movements used and the geographical location in a way not dissimilar to Lomax. This is best shown in "Benesh Notation and Ethnochoreology" in 1967 which was published in the ethnomusicology journal, where Hall advocates using the Benesh notation as a way of documenting dance styles so that it is "possible to compare styles and techniques in detail — even 'schools' within one style — and individual variations in execution from dancer to dancer."

In the seventies and eighties, like with ethnomusicology, ethnochoreology had a focus on a very specific communicative type of "folklore music" performed by small groups and the context and performance aspects of dance were studied and emphasized to be a part of a whole "folkloric dance" that needed to be preserved. This was influenced by the same human centered "thick description" way of study that had moved into ethnomusicology. However, at this time, the sound and dance aspects of the performances studied were still studied and analyzed a bit separately from the context and social aspects of the culture around the dance.

Current

Beginning in the mid eighties, there has been a reflexively interpretive way of writing about dance in culture that is more conscious of the impact of the scholar within the field and how it affects the culture and its relationship with the dance that the scholar is looking into. For example, because most scholars until this point were searching for the most "authentic" folk, there was a lack of study on individual performers, popular dances, and dances of subgroup groups within a culture such as women, youth, and members of the LGBT community. In contrast, this newer wave of study wanted a more open study of dance within a culture. Additionally, there was a shift for a more mutual give and take between the scholar and the subjects, who in field work, also assist the scholars as teachers and informants.

Differences with ethnomusicology

Although there are many similarities between ethnochoreology and ethnomusicology, there is a large difference between the current geographical scope of released studies. For example, from the beginning of ethnomusicology, there was a large focus on types of music from Africa and Asia, due to them seeming to have the most deviation from their norm while ethnochoreology, also beginning in Europe, has long had extensive studies of the Eastern European "folk dances" with relatively little of African and Asian dances, however American studies have delved into Native American and Southeast Asian dance. However, the very basis of this being a difference could be challenged on the basis that many European ethnomusicological and ethnochoreological studies have been done on the "home" folk music and dance in the name of nationalism.

Organizations

The Society for Ethnomusicology is, with the International Council for Traditional Music and the British Forum for Ethnomusicology, one of three major international associations for ethnomusicology. Its mission is "to promote the research, study, and performance of music in all historical periods and cultural contexts." Officially founded in 1955, its origins extend back to November, 1953 at the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association in Philadelphia with an informal agreement between Willard Rhodes, David McAllester, and Alan P. Merriam.

The International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM) is a scholarly non-governmental organization which focuses on the study, practice, documentation, preservation, and dissemination of traditional music and dance of all countries. Founded in London on September 22, 1947, it publishes the Yearbook for Traditional Music once a year and the Bulletin of the ICTM three times a year. The organization was previously known as the International Folk Music Council (IFMC). In 1949, it helped found the UNESCO International Music Council and remains a non-governmental organization in formal consultative relations with UNESCO.

According to its website, the British Forum for Ethnomusicology began in 1973 as the United Kingdom chapter of the International Folk Music Council; the International Folk Music Council later changed its name to the International Council for Traditional Music, and its United Kingdom chapter became the British Forum for Ethnomusicology in 1995. The mission of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology "is to advance the study, practice, documentation, preservation and dissemination of all and any music."

See also

For articles on significant individuals in this discipline, see the List of ethnomusicologists.

• List of musicologists
• Choreomusicology
• Fumio Koizumi Prize for Ethnomusicology
• List of musicology topics
• Prehistoric music
• Smithsonian Folkways
• Sociomusicology
• World music
• International Council for Traditional Music

Further reading

• Hood, Mantle (1971). The Ethnomusicologist. Mc-Graw Hill.
• Blacking, John (1973). How Musical Is Man?. Seattle: University of Washington Press. ISBN 0-295-95218-0.
• Harrison, Frank (1973). Time, Place and Music. An Anthology of Ethnomusicological Observation, c. 1550 – c. 1800. Amsterdam: Frits Knuf. ISBN 90-6027-241-2. OCLC 164765118..
• Myers, Helen, ed. (1992). Ethnomusicology: An Introduction. New Grove Handbooks in Music. London: Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-57631-4.
• Stone, Ruth (2008). Theory for Ethnomusicology. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Pearson Prentice Hall. ISBN 978-0-13-240840-0.

External links

• Society for Ethnomusicology
• International Council for Traditional Music
• British Forum for Ethnomusicology
• International Library of African Music (ILAM)
• The World and Traditional Music Section at the British Library Archived 2011-01-03 at the Wayback Machine
• The Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University
• Ethnomusicology, Folk Music, and World Music (University of Washington)
• Outreach Ethnomusicology An Online Ethnomusicology Community and Fieldwork Resource
• SIL publications on Ethnomusicology
• Yale Music Library Research Guide for Ethnomusicology
• Oxford Handbook of Applied Ethnomusicology