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1990s
- During the 1990s, cultural relativism was reconfigured from an absolute value to something more contingent; at the same time, more and more graduate students in ethnomusicology turned to ward American topics, often focused on popular music, which further shifted the preoccupation with relativism toward critique.
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In North America, state folklore societies were founded in the early 20th century and were dedicated to the collection and preservation of Old World folksong, i.e. music that came from Europe, Africa, or places outside of the U.S. during the settlement of the U.S. by colonizers; Native American music was also included in these societies.
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.
History. 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.
Comparative musicology, the primary precursor to ethnomusicology, emerged in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Eventually, this term fell out of use in the 1950s as critics for the practices associated with the field became more vocal about ethnomusicology's distinction from musicology. [14]
From the early 1980s to 2000 ethnomusicologists turned their attention to gender and music; the effect of media and technology on music; music, politics, and power; individual agency in culture; social and individual identity; and the effect on music of migrations, diaspora, and globalization.
(The earliest recordings of “world music” are usually attributed to Walter Fewkes [1850–1930], an American anthropologist who, in 1890, made the first recordings of Native American music.) Their comparisons focused on five principal issues: (1) the origins of music; (2) musical evolution; (3) understanding the distribution of musical ...
Initially in the early 20th century the focus of ethnomusicologists was the study of contemporary non-Western music. In contrast to music historians, ethno-musicologists – at that time still addressed as comparative musicologists – re-corded and studied living music.
