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The name change signaled another shift in the field: ethnomusicology moved away from studying the origins, evolution, and comparison of musical practices, and toward thinking of music as one of many human activities, like religion, language, and food. In short, the field became more anthropological.
Ethnomusicology (from Greek ἔθνος ethnos ‘nation’ and μουσική mousike ‘music’) is the multidisciplinary study of music in its cultural context, investigating social, cognitive, biological, comparative, and other dimensions involved other than sound.
In 1956 the hyphen was removed with ideological intent to signify the discipline's validity and independence from the fields of musicology and anthropology. These changes to the field's name paralleled its internal shifts in ideological and intellectual emphasis.
It was known as comparative musicology until about 1950, when the term ethnomusicology was introduced simultaneously by the Dutch scholar of Indonesian music Jaap Kunst and by several American scholars, including Richard Waterman and Alan Merriam. In the period after 1950, ethnomusicology burgeoned at academic institutions.
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Abstract. ‘A bit of history’ charts the history of the study of ethnomusicology. The literate cultures of China and Greece generated philosophical treatises on music because they believed that music is an important cultural expression with significant cosmological, metaphysical, religious, social, and political implications.
Feb 12, 2019 · Overall, since changing its name from comparative musicology to ethnomusicology during the middle of the 20th century, the field has largely avoided discussion of musical evolution, and recent ...
Nov 17, 2020 · The term ethnomusicology, said to have been first coined by Jaap Kunst from the Greek words ἔθνος ( ethnos, “nation”) and μουσική ( mousike, “music”), is often defined as the anthropology or ethnography of music, or as musical anthropology. [1] .
