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Ethnomusicology is the study of music in its social and cultural contexts. Ethnomusicologists examine music as a social process in order to understand what music is and what it means to its practitioners and audiences. Ethnomusicology is highly interdisciplinary. Individuals working in the field may have training in music, sound studies ...
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If all ethnomusicological knowledge is put to use in one way or another, then the term applied ethnomusicology is redundant. All of this may be so, but for strategic reasons the editors of this volume find the term useful, in order to highlight a certain kind of activity and distinguish an ethnomusicology based in social responsibility where ...
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Ethnomusicologists study a wide range of topics and musical practices throughout the world. It is sometimes described as the study of non-Western music or “world music,” as opposed to musicology, which studies Western European classical music. However, the field is defined more by its research methods (i.e., ethnography, or immersive fieldwork with...
The field, as it is currently named, emerged in the 1950s, but ethnomusicology originated as “comparative musicology” in the late 19th century. Linked to the 19th-century European focus on nationalism, comparative musicology emerged as a project of documenting the different musical features of diverse regions of the world. The field of musicology w...
Ethnomusicology takes as given the notion that music can provide meaningful insight into a larger culture or group of people. Another foundational concept is cultural relativismand the idea that no culture/music is inherently more valuable or better than another. Ethnomusicologists avoid assigning value judgments like “good” or “bad” to musical pra...
Ethnography is the method that most distinguishes ethnomusicology from historical musicology, which largely entails doing archival research (examining texts). Ethnography involves conducting research with people, namely musicians, to understand their role within their larger culture, how they make music, and what meanings they assign to music, amon...
There are a number of ethical issues ethnomusicologists consider in the course of their research, and most relate to the representation of musical practices that are not “their own.” Ethnomusicologists are tasked with representing and disseminating, in their publications and public presentations, the music of a group of people who may not have the ...
Barz, Gregory F., and Timothy J. Cooley, editors. Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology. Oxford University Press, 1997.Myers, Helen. Ethnomusicology: An Introduction. W.W. Norton & Company, 1992.Nettl, Bruno. The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-three Discussions. 3rded., University of Illinois Press, 2015.Nettl, Bruno, and Philip V. Bohlman, editors. Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology. University of Chicago Press, 1991.Jun 30, 2021 · Musical performances are at the heart of many significant cultural events and often represent and affirm distinct cultural identities. Ethnographic research on music thus provides an important lens through which to understand distinct cultural worlds. In this introductory article we consider the value of research on music—for the communities ...
- Georgia Curran, Mahesh Radhakrishnan
- 2021
ethnomusicology, field of scholarship that encompasses the study of all world musics from various perspectives. It is defined either as the comparative study of musical systems and cultures or as the anthropological study of music. Although the field had antecedents in the 18th and early 19th centuries, it began to gather energy with the ...
Students begin learning about the methods and materials of music studies with core seminars in ethnomusicology and historiography, while creating individually tailored programs of further study that suit their scholarly and professional needs. This might mean developing fluency in textual analysis, ethnography, historiography, critical theory ...
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Jul 16, 2023 · Ethnomusicology is the study of music from the cultural and social aspects of the people who make it. It encompasses distinct theoretical and methodical approaches that emphasize cultural, social, material, cognitive, biological, and other dimensions or contexts of musical behavior, in addition to the sound component.
