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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.
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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.People also ask
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Thus, in the process of developing the study of music and people, the field of ethnomusicology combines perspectives from a wide variety of disciplines such as folklore, psychology, cultural anthropology, linguistics, comparative musicology, music theory, and history.
Willard Rhodes' “Toward a Definition of Ethnomusicology,” (1956) outlines a brief history of the beginnings of Ethnomusicology, in which he argues that three “types of studies” appear, parallel to changing ideas in what was called “comparative musicology”.
Define ethnomusicology. Describe evidence of musical instruments in prehistory. Articulate the importance of sociocultural context to the understanding of music. Describe how music can form the basis of subculture and community. Evaluate the potential of music to impact processes of social change.
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 fie...
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]