Is Ethnomusicology Relevant To Essay Research Paper

Is Ethnomusicology Relevant To Essay, Research Paper

Is Ethnomusicology Relevant to

the Study of British Folk Music.

Some thoughts and key references

Ethnomusicology has an image problem. Insofar as anyone has heard of ethnomusicologists at all, there is a fairly common feeling (and not unjustified, bearing in mind what ethnomusicologists collectively seem to do) that ethnomusicology is, exclusively, the study of non-Western musics. Actually, this isn’t so. Ethnomusicologists study Western traditions also, albeit not in huge numbers in Britain . but even here, our sparseness in the study of local traditions is probably no more marked than our sparseness in the study of overseas traditions. (There are just two British ethnomusicologists who work on Chinese music, for instance, which means that we have something like 1/8 of the world’s population each; I’m happy to let the other chap take on most of these.) As we shall see below, and although the international connections are important, where ethnomusicology differs from the other fields of music studies . and where it may offer ideas of potential utility to those studying British folk traditions . is not really a function of geographical scope at all.

Sometimes, the term ethnomusicology itself is perceived as pretentious. On a practical level, there seem too many syllables, an apt reminder of the word-spinning so enjoyed by us impractical academics, perhaps. Then there are those who sense in this term the essence of something unsavourily colonialist (that E-word prefix). In fact, and as far as I know, the original intention underlying the coining of this word was neither overly academic (quite the contrary, as we shall see in a moment) nor pejorative . this was not supposed to be the science of the sounds of ‘ethnics’.

Instead, those who proposed and adopted this term (in preference to comparative musicology, which seemed to over-emphasize external comparison) in the early 1950s came from a background where several composite ethno-words were already in use: ethnopoetics,ethnomedicine, ethnohistory, etc … The point of all these terms was that the investigator sought to understand the topic from the perspective of the native ‘informant’. The ethnomusicologist was as interested in, say, an Egyptian’s ‘musicology’ – i.e., his explanations and understandings of music – as in his music itself. Adoption of the term signalled a departure from previous research, where it had often been assumed that there was no native theory. The comparative musicologist (or at least his caricature) had simply (or not so simply,when we think of old recording technology) remained in his laboratory where he amassed an archive of wax cylinders and the like. Sitting down (in an armchair, according to most stereotypes) he (less often, she) then wrote out the music and studied the resulting notation in order to produce theories about what was going on.

The ethnomusicologist, on the other hand, is himself (and more and more, herself) a collector as well as an analyst. The model of collection, however, was not that of earlier scholars like Cecil Sharp, Percy Grainger or Bela Bartok. Rather than ranging widely, but quickly, across a broad region, the ethnomusicologist was supposed to gather materials through ‘participant-observation’. Instead of gathering recordings alone, the ethnomusicological researcher gathered experience, both in the form of contextual explanation (based on observation and on informants’ own readings of what was going on) and in the form of personal know-how, gained from actually learning to perform the music s/he was studying. In other words, the researcher has the responsibility of living among the researched; living as far as possible as one of the researched; taking full part in their musical lives; and gradually coming to understand, typically through personal engagement in performance, what music really means in that particular society.

So far, I would suggest, this sounds rather like what many contemporary folk music researchers do. Distinctions between what I see as a typical ethnomusicological stance and that of a British folk music enthusiast and collector might be listed as follows (though I’m not qualified to represent the latter):

1. Ethnomusicologists are mostly embedded in an academic system that encourages certain kinds of research (for instance, the writing of weighty tomes and research papers replete with footnotes), above others, particularly practical performance. This doesn’t mean we only like or only undertake the former, but it may mean that there is pressure on us to devote much of our energies to fulfilling job requirements in that respect. My impression is that folk music enthusiasts might argue that the ethnomusicologist’s priorities need to be reversed.

2. In our research and writing, ethnomusicologists draw on a literature that refers to many different kinds of music and musical cultures from all around the world. As such, and when we write, we sometimes use a vocabulary that will be distinct from that habitually employed among British folk music researchers talking one to another. Terms like ‘informants,’ and ‘participant-observation’ trip from the tongue of the ethnomusicologist, and although they make sense to others, they may not feel entirely comfortable at first. Also,knowing that we are writing for an international crowd of