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Why did ethnomusicology change its name?
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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.
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.
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.
Thus, ethnomusicology contrasted the field of conventional musicology where the primary focus was on Western art music. Early in its existence, ethnomusicology was known as "comparative musicology," which established Western musical traditions as the standard to which all other kinds of music were compared.
Although the field of study can be traced to the late 19th century, the term ethnomusicology entered common usage only in the 1950s. Some of the important questions in ethnomusicology can be traced to ancient Greek philosophers, Muslim scholars, and Enlightenment philosophers, but the invention of the wax cylinder recorder by Thomas Edison in ...
Feb 7, 2006 · The word "ethnomusicology" was adopted by a group of music scholars in the 1950s to replace "comparative musicology". In the early and mid-20th century, the field was often defined to encompass musical traditions other than European art music (the study of which is sometimes labelled "historical musicology").
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]
