A Look at the Origins of Ethnomusicology and the Nature of Ethnic Musicology in the World
The origin of the term “ethnomusicology” is attributed to the Dutch researcher Jaap Kunst (1950 AD), who used it in the subtitle of the book “Musicology: A Study of the Nature of Ethnic Musicology, Issues, Methods, and Representative Figures” (Amsterdam, 1950). In European languages, it is equivalent to French ethnomusicologie, Italian ethnomusicologia, German Ethnomusikologie or Musikethnologie, and Polish etnografia muzyczna. The term “ethnomusicology” has also been adopted by specialists in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and the Netherlands. In Germany and Austria, some researchers still use the term Vergleichende Musikwissenschaft (“comparative musicology”) to emphasize the dependence on the works of Stumpf, Hornbostel (Berlin), and Lach (Vienna) (see Wiora, 1975, Graf, 1974). Russian, Bulgarian, and Ukrainian researchers distinguish etnomuzïkal’naya (music study) from etnografiya muzïkal’naya (“music ethnography”), which in turn is equivalent to muzikal’naya fol’kloristika music. Since the early 1980s, the term minze yinyuexue has been adopted in China to denote “ethnomusicology.” There are regional interpretations of the term. For example, in Indonesia, both Western scholars and native scholars trained in the West equate ethnomusicology with the study of Indonesian art music, while for researchers at the Central Javanese Academy it is used to indicate the study of the music of other Indonesian islands.
Historically, ethnomusicology has been a scientific discipline mainly in the universities of the United States of America, Canada, and Europe. Its specialists have been trained in music or anthropology, sometimes in both. Research is conducted in academic departments of music or anthropology, in ethnographic museums, and in research institutes of national academies of sciences, especially in Eastern Europe. As the review of musical activities below shows, much musical research was carried out by a range of individuals from many Western countries before World War II, including ethnographers, anthropologists, sociologists, comparative musicologists, folklorists, psychologists, physicists, missionaries, clergymen, crewmen, explorers, and sundry explorers within, and including trespassers and civilian explorers. Academy that influenced contemporary thought. This melting pot includes distinguished figures who have simultaneously participated in the lineage of various disciplines. For example, ethnomusicologists and researchers in folklore studies, or folkloristics, claim equal descent from the collector of English folk songs, Cecil J. Sharp (also to folk music, England, American Charles Seeger or Hungarian Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, despite these individuals’ perceptions of their affiliations.
Similarly, it is difficult to create a single genealogical line for each country, as these lines will differ individually based on a combination of personal interests and professional and cultural orientations. For example, the myth of the origin of the American discipline can be traced back to the “founding fathers” such as Erich Moritz von Hornbostel (1877-1935), who taught an exciting interdisciplinary combination of music psychology, comparative musicology and music ethnology (Musikalische Völkerkundemped his, Musiketh). Franz Boas (1858-1942), who, after moving to North America from Berlin in the 1880s, established fieldwork as a prerequisite for American anthropology and influenced the discipline of ethnomusicology anthropology through his students. To George Herzog (1901-1984), a student of Hornbostel, who moved to Columbia University to study anthropology with Boas and established a solid method for the study of comparative musicology and archival work. Charles Seeger (1886-1979) with his interest in native music and linguistics. And finally, to Mantle Hood’s musicological methods and Alan P. Merriam’s anthropological methods, which exacerbated the theoretical and methodological “great divide.” Alternative lineages may refer to the work of “founding mothers,” such as Alice Cunningham Fletcher (1836-1923), who collaborated throughout her life with Francis La Flesche, an Omaha Indian (1857-1932), and Frances Densmore (1867-1957), author of over a dozen monograph groups. Or they may use figures from various disciplines related to multiple approaches that have traditionally contributed to our understanding of music, such as musicology, sociology, social and cultural anthropology, linguistics, psychology, folklore, political science, and economics.
In Britain, the “father of ethnomusicology” is generally regarded as the British physicist and phonetician, Alexander John Ellis (1814-1890), who suggested that “acoustic phenomena” should be studied by scientists rather than musicians, as those trained in particular musical systems tended to regard “8” natural sounds as “8.” That the conceptualization of music – the way we listen to and evaluate musical sounds – is not without value was later developed by John Blacking in his theories of music as “humanly organized sound” in the British context. An anthropologist and ethnomusicologist from Cambridge is required to point out that the term “fieldwork” was adopted from the natural sciences to anthropology by ethnographer Alfred Cort Haddon, who led the “Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait” in 1898. With today’s technology: two gramophones with recording and playback capabilities, a movie camera, a still camera, and a magic lantern projector. Musical recordings on wax cylinders, some of which have been transcribed using Ellis’s “cent” system (dividing the semitone equally into 100 equal parts), are now housed in the British Library’s National Sound Archive in the UK (Clayton, 1996) and Australia. The film – the first piece of ethnographic film made in the field – which depicts dance sequences performed in a re-enactment of the Malu-Bomai ceremony – is now in the National Film Archive in the UK and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in Canberra. Hundreds of field photographs, including some of the masked dances of the Malu-Bomai sect, are available in the collections of the Cambridge Museum of Archeology and Anthropology. The emphasis on direct field research in this journey provided the basis for the development of intensive fieldwork as the fundamental methodology of British anthropology: “the ethnographic method.” Haddon’s exciting description of dance emphasizes “performance” and “experience,” both of which are prominent in contemporary ethnomusicological writings. Thus, from these origins, the anthropological lineage progresses through Bronisław Malinowski, the performer-strategist of the Trobriand, who constantly changes tradition, through Radcliffe-Brown’s elucidation of the power of Andaman Island music and dance to act as a moral force on the individual (1922). Comparative musicology (e.g., Fox Strangways, 1914) and folk music research (Cecil Sharp and his descendants) before continuing through Hamish Henderson at the School of Scottish Studies and John Blacking, who moved from Cambridge to Paris and then to Belfast.
In addition to being present in various disciplinary lineages, specific figures appear in the national lineage of the same discipline. For example, Constantin Brăiloiu, who, following the Romanian school of sociology formed by Dimitrie Gusti, argued that music is inextricably linked to social phenomena, is important for French, Romanian, and Swiss ethnomusicology.
It is not the first time that ethnomusicology is faced with the need to re-evaluate its perceptions of history, the subject of ethnomusicology has always been debated since its inception. Initially, it was considered all music outside the Western European art tradition and intended to exclude Western art and popular music. He was paying attention to the music of illiterate people. Oral transmission music of cultures that were then considered “high,” such as the traditional court and urban music of China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, India, Iran, and other Arabic-speaking countries; and “folk music,” which Nettl (1964) tentatively defined as music in the oral tradition found in areas dominated by high cultures. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, ethnomusicology encompasses the study of all music in local and global contexts. Recent studies, mainly related to live music (including music, singing, dance, and instruments), have also examined the history of music. A discipline that initially examined music “in culture” (Merriam, 1964) and then “as culture” and had “fieldwork” as an integral part of its methodology, now raises both “culture” and “fieldwork” as a problem.
Since its inception, ethnomusicology has always witnessed links between itself and other disciplines, as mentioned above. It was never happily placed in the modernist dichotomy between “us” and “them.” Therefore, the heated contemporary debate about whether musicology is part of ethnomusicology or vice versa becomes irrelevant.
Musicology is one of the many intertwined theoretical and methodological disciplines in a field that has recently shifted its focus in the West from the traditional musics of the “other” to popular music, both local and global (e.g., Manuel, 1988; Waterman, 1990; Berliner, 1994; Mitchell, 1996, World Music, 1996, Mitchell, 1996, World Music, 1996, Mitchell, 1999, World Music, 1996, 1996, World Music, Mitchell, 1996, 1999, World Music, 1996, Mitchell, 1996, World Music, 1996, 1996, Popular Music, Musicology, Musicology, Musicology. (e.g., Keil and Feld, 1994) and Western “art” music, from traditional interdisciplinary relations to contemporary interactions with disciplines such as cultural studies (e.g., Lloyd, 1993; Straw, 1994) and performance studies (e.g., Schechner and Appel, 1990; Schieffelin, 1994; Pegg 2001). And from homogeneous, structural, and interpretative perspectives to perspectives of experience (e.g., Rice, 1994; Blacking, 1995). Ethnomusicology is not a homogeneous discipline and it is clear that it is no longer limited to the West or Europe. It is now well-positioned to embrace the diverse national ethnographies shown in this dictionary, including those that have recently emerged from the former Soviet Union, non-European scholars, and musicians not trained in the Western system.
Background
Primary sources
Western interest in non-Western music dates back to exploratory voyages, and the philosophical rationale for the study of foreign cultures stems from the Age of Enlightenment. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1712) argued that cultural music is not natural and that different peoples respond differently to “varied musical accents.” His Dictionnaire de Musique (1768) includes examples of Swiss, Iranian, Chinese, and Canadian American music.
In the early seventeenth century, Europeans, including missionaries, explorers, and government officials, contributed to music research in the colonies through references to diaries and monographs. Captain James Cook (1728-1728) recorded detailed descriptions of the music and dance of the inhabitants of the Pacific island (1784). Swiss theologian Jean de Léry (1534-1611) wrote about Brazil in his History of a Voyage to Brazil (1578), which includes musical notation and describes antiphonal songs between men and women and dancers in elaborate feather costumes. Jacques Cartier (1491-1557) observed the singing and dancing of Canadian Americans on his voyages to the New World (1534, 1535-6), and his crew entertained the Americans with “trumpets and musical alters” (Biggar, 1924).
Early literature is particularly rich in writings on Chinese music. The French Jesuit Jean-Baptiste du Halde (1674-1743) based his monograph, entitled Geographical, Historical, Chronological, Political, and Physical Description of the Empire of China and of Chinese Tartary (1735), on reports from Jesuit missionaries from the 16th century onwards. The French clergyman Joseph Amiot (1718-1718) served as a missionary in Beijing for about 60 years, where he wrote the pioneering study, Mémoire sur la musique des Chinois tant anciens que moderns (1779). The Irish-born Earl Macartney led an embassy from the King of England to China in 1793-1794, where he met Father Amiot (1793–4; published, 1962). The party included 95 people, including a German six-piece band that played for the Chinese with a set of string and wind instruments (supplied by English musicologist Dr. Charles Burney). Gottfried Wilhelm Fink (1782-1846), a German theologian and music critic, published a monograph on Chinese and Hindustani music entitled Einiges über die Begründungsweise (1831). He also presented an early diffusionist theory of European music (1831, Erste Wanderung der ältesten Tonkunst).
Francis Taylor Piggott, author of The Music and Musical Instruments of Japan (1893), spent years with Japanese musicians. His valuable treatise describes many aspects of Japanese musical life, some of which are now obsolete. For the Arab world, the French Guillaume André Villoteau (1759-1839) worked at the request of General Bonaparte during the Egyptian campaign. In his three main works, Villoteau discussed Arabic folk and art music, the music of minority groups in Egypt from Asia, Europe, and sub-Saharan Africa, and Ethiopian, Armenian, and Greek music (1812, 1813, 1816). The French composer Francesco Salvador-Daniel lived in Algeria from 1853 to 1865.
He combined Eastern and Western systems in his compositions and compared them in his essay La musique arabe, se rapports avec la musique grecque et le chant grégorien (1863), in which he argued that Arab and Greek modes were similar and contrasted with Villoteau’s theory.
In modern times, some ethnomusicologists have made good use of these sources, for example, in the analysis of musical changes. In her research on Tongan dance, Adrienne Kaeppler used Captain James Cook’s third travelogue (1784) to confirm that the formal ceremonial dance structures of me’etu’upaki remained relatively unchanged after the conversion of Chief T’ui Tonga to Christianity in the late 19th century, and that the dance called Dana Cookoola has. Describes graceful hand and arm movements, renamed Lacalaca after becoming Methodist (Kaeppler, 1970).
The writings of Park Mungo (1771-1806) provide evidence of stylistic continuity in African music. Imprisoned during his travels, he recorded observations in his diary about indigenous singing and dancing, for example this passage about the songs of the Bambara women, Niger (July 20, 1796). They lightened their work with songs, one of which was made in an exceptional way. For I myself was the subject of it. One of the young women sang it, and the rest participated in a choir. The air was sweet and plaintive, and the words, literally translated, were these. – “The winds roared, and the rain fell. – Poor white man, faint and weary, came and sat under our tree.
– He has no mother to bring him milk. He has no wife to grind his corn. Chorus. Let us have mercy on the white man. He has no mother, and j, and j” (Park, 1799).
This episode describes some of the important features of African music. Its integration with work and play, the dominance of the leader-choir form, and the use of improvisation.
A useful selection of primary sources is provided in Harrison (1972).
● Scientific advances
The scientific study of non-Western music was made possible by the invention of the gramophone in 1877 by Thomas Edison. The gramophone facilitated fieldwork and provided pioneer comparative musicologists with playback for transcription and analysis.
Researchers quickly used the gramophone, recording two- to four-minute samples of music on wax cylinders and adding them to a collection of instruments, photographs, and notation. The first field recording was made by Jesse Walter Fewkes in 1890 among the Passamaquoddy Indians of Maine. In Hungary, Béla Vikár (1859-1945) began recording in the field in 1894, and in Russia, Evgeniya Linoyova in 1897. The portable and convenient cylinder device continued to be used in the field until the 1950s, even as more advanced technologies such as wire, and then sound recording, became available.
English phonetician Alexander J. Ellis (1814-1890), an expert in auditory psychology and acoustics, is often said by English researchers to be the father of modern ethnomusicology, and his publication “On the Musical Scales of Various Nations” (1885), the first scientific and unbiased assessment to show the birth of non-self systems. Although he felt his hearing was impaired (or perhaps precisely for this reason), he devised the “cent” system for measuring pitch, whereby the Western semitone is divided into 100 cents and the octave into 1200 cents. The accuracy of his system allowed for objective measurement of non-Western scales. Ellis believed that musical scales were the product of cultural invention and not based on the laws of natural acoustics. All musical scales were equally natural, therefore equally good. The statement he read in 1885 to the Royal Society is a belief for modern ethnomusicology, namely that “the musical scale is not one, is not ‘natural,’ nor even necessarily based on the laws of the statute of musical sound, which is beautifully made by Helmholtz, but very diverse, very artificial, and very beautiful. This finding questioned the superiority of Western tunings and paved the way for the free cross-cultural comparison of musical systems. This dealt a blow to the destructive theory of the “contemporary ancestor” as applied to music, whereby so-called “primitive” music was recognized as representing an early stage in the evolution of European art music.
Ellis was assisted in his research by Alfred James Hipkins (1826-1903), an expert in temperament and tuning, from the piano company Broadwood. The team measured the non-diatonic and non-harmonic tunings of Asian instruments and broke ground by testing in a performance setting rather than in a laboratory. They studied visiting Japanese musicians (1885), Central Javanese music during the gamelan’s appearance at the London Aquarium (1882), and Chinese court music at the International Health Exhibition (1884). In their findings, they rejected the common notion that pentatonic scales arose in Asian cultures due to a lack of sensitivity to the subtleties of the semitone: “It was found that three-quarter and five-quarter tones, and even more, occur. Hence the actual division of the octave in the pentatonic scale is very diverse.
Southern and Eastern Europe
Collection projects of Southern and Eastern Europeans in the second half of the nineteenth century were mainly a contribution to folklore studies. These collectors feared that entire repertoires were on the verge of extinction, repertoires that were perceived as a suitable foundation for nationalist styles of art music. Early collectors were motivated by musical nationalism, theories of autonomy, and hopes of musical logic for Pan-Slavism identity. Thus composers of the late nineteenth century, from Janáček, to Grieg, Sibelius, Bartók, and Rimsky-Korsakov, were indebted to the laborious research of song collectors. While German researchers focused on small samples of music from distant colonies, Eastern European collectors explored their own linguistic environment, collecting large collections, thousands of song texts, and later songs, which they sought to classify and compare. Local music research and comparative musicological approaches were combined after World War I in the studies of Béla Bartók for Hungary and neighboring regions, the Romanian collector Constantin Brăiloiu, Klement Kvitka for Ukraine, Adolf Chybiński for Poland, and Vasil Stoin for Bulgaria. These later writings addressed theory, method, documentation, and analysis with respect to the orientation of the Berlin School.
Hungary
From 1832, the Hungarian Academy of Sciences was responsible for collecting and publishing folk songs both to preserve the “authentic song” and to provide composite versions of folk songs to shape a general national taste and aesthetic. Early Hungarian works include the collector Károly Szini, who published 200 melodies in notation (1865). Áron Kiss compiled an important collection of Hungarian children’s games (1891). And István Bartalus (1821–1899) produced a seven-volume work, Magyar népdalok (1873–1896), which included items obtained through correspondence and pieces by contemporary composers.
Philologist Béla Vikár (1859-1945) was the first to record Hungarian folk songs with an Edison gramophone in 1895. Molnár (1890-1983) worked from the ethnography section of the National Museum (later the Ethnographic Museum).
Kodály began his first collecting trip in 1905 and Bartók in 1906. In collaboration, they divided between themselves the areas they hoped to cover. Bartók’s travels took him to neighboring countries and led to comparative studies. Between 1906 and 1918 Bartók collected 3223 Slovak melodies and between 1908 and 1917, 3500 Romanian melodies. In 1913 he collected Arabic music in Biskra in North Africa and in 1936 he traveled to Turkey. His Hungarian collections include 2721 songs (1924). In A magyar népdalok (Hungarian Folk Song) (1924) Bartók summarized his work with Kodály and presented 8000 melodies, attempting to reconstruct the evolution of Hungarian folk song through classification and typology. His work Népzenénk és a szomszéd népek népzenéje (Our Folk Music and the Folk Music of Neighboring Peoples) (1934) provides a comparison of Hungarian, Romanian, and Slovak songs that is remarkable for the 1930s. Kodály’s A magyar népzene (Hungarian Folk Music) (1937) covers the entire Hungarian oral tradition, including instrumental genres, folk customs, and the relationship of music to culture. In 1953, Kodály founded the Folk Music Research Group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (renamed the Folk Music Research Department of the Institute of Musicology in 1974). Its main project has been the publication of Corpus musicae popularis hungaricae (1951-1951). The collection of the Institute of Musicology is expanding (it has about 150,000 melodies) and research is underway reflecting the changing scene.
● Roots of music
Early studies of black music by musicologists attempted to characterize the origins of the African-American style. Richard Wallaschek found little evidence of Africans in transcriptions of black spirituals, claiming that they were imitations of European singing (1893). Hornbostel concluded that African and European music were “constructed on completely different principles” and could not be combined (1928).
The success of the Fisk Jubilee Singers in the 1870s, the first popular “Jubilee” choir from black colleges, stimulated the publication of song arrangements and reviews of their concerts (Marsh, 1875). Collections of spirituals from this period include Johnson and Johnson (1925, 1926), Grissom (1930), and Carr (1940). Spirituals were the first genre of black music to receive all-encompassing scientific attention. In the early twentieth century, controversies arose that continued into the 1990s. Henry Edward Krehbiel (1854-1925) stated in African-American Folk Songs (1914) that African-American music is a purely African substance and originates from its unique historical position without any external influence. George Pullen Jackson (1874-1953) advanced the “white origin theory” in White and Black Spirituals (1943), arguing that black music was influenced by English-American singing and formed an integral part of the British tradition. Jackson discovered many of these white spirituals that were published in early nineteenth-century hymnbooks. For example, the black spiritual “Down by the Riverside” is derived from the white spiritual “We Wait Till Jesus Comes,” which was published in 1868. The black spiritual “I Want to Die with a Shout” uses a tune from the white spiritual “New Harmony,” but takes parts of its lyrics from three other white spirituals: “Jamesing A Soldim a My Grace.” This “white origin theory” was rejected by James Weldon Johnson and J. Rosamond Johnson (1925-1925), John W. Work (1940), Mieczysław Kolinski (1969), and John Lovell (1972).
During the 1940s, anthropological theory strongly influenced the debate over the origins of spirituals. Melville J. Herskovits (1895-1963; The Myth of the Negro Past, 1941) and his student Richard A. Waterman (“African Influence on the Music of the Americas,” 1952) developed important anthropological theories based on assumptions of culture change that included acculturation, Africa, and syncretism and a new cultural focus in Europe. Genres that have characteristics of both mother musics. They argued that European and African music have many characteristics in common, including diatonic scales and polyphony. When the two musics met, during slavery, it was natural for them to combine. The lack of common characteristics explains why European and American music failed to combine.
Herskovits and Waterman believed that the survival of music, the “Africanisms,” was stronger in areas of the New World where blacks were numerically dominant. In the West Indies, particularly in Haiti, Jamaica, and Trinidad, for example, songs from the Shango and Vodou sects (which originate directly from Africa) are still sung (these songs may have changed or even disappeared in their original African environment). In the United States of America, the cotton cultivation system placed blacks in close contact with white music, and less pure African can be identified in the folk songs of the American South. Herskovits proposed a scale of intensity that assessed music as “slightly African” in the urban North, “quite African” in the rural South, and “very African” in the Gullah Islands (Herskovits, 1941; Waterman, 1946, 1951, 1952).
Hamidreza Ghorbani
