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- Partnering with the music communities that they study, ethnomusicologists may document and promote music traditions or participate in projects that involve cultural policy, education, conflict resolution, health, environmental sustainability, arts programming, or advocacy on behalf of musicians.
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Ethnomusicologists study music as a reflection of culture and investigate the act of musicking through various immersive, observational, and analytical approaches drawn from other disciplines such as anthropology to understand a culture’s music.
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.
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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.Nov 17, 2020 · Ethnomusicology is an area of study that encompasses distinct theoretical and methodical approaches to the study of music that emphasizes the cultural, social, material, cognitive, biological, and other dimensions or contexts of musical behavior instead of or in addition to its isolated sound component.
Mar 1, 2023 · In order to study music across cultures, ethnomusicologists employ a variety of methods including fieldwork, interviews with musicians and audiences, analysis of musical recordings, and observation of live performances. They also draw upon interdisciplinary approaches from fields such as anthropology, linguistics, psychology, and sociology.
In study after study, ethnomusicologists have shown how centrally important music can be to the construction, self-representation, and contestation of individual and social identities.
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.
