Ethnomusicology Study Essay Example For Students

Ethnomusicology Study Essay Ethnomusicology has an image problem. Insofar as anyone has heard of ethnomusicologists at all, there is a fairly common feeling (and not unjustified, bearing in mind what ethnomusicologists collectively seem to do) that ethnomusicology is, exclusively, the study of non-Western musics. Actually, this isnt so. Ethnomusicologists study Western traditions also, albeit not in huge numbers in Britain but even here, our sparseness in the study of local traditions is probably no more marked than our sparseness in the study of overseas traditions. There are just two British ethnomusicologists who work on Chinese music, for instance, which means that we have something like 1/8 of the worlds population each; Im happy to let the other chap take on most of these. ) As we shall see below, and although the international connections are important, where ethnomusicology differs from the other fields of music studies and where it may offer ideas of potential utility to those studying British folk traditions is not really a function of geographical scope at all. Sometimes, the term ethnomusicology itself is perceived as pretentious. On a practical level, there seem too many syllables, an apt reminder of the word-spinning so enjoyed by us impractical academics, perhaps. Then there are those who sense in this term the essence of something unsavourily colonialist (that E-word prefix). In fact, and as far as I know, the original intention underlying the coining of this word was neither overly academic (quite the contrary, as we shall see in a moment) nor pejorative this was not supposed to be the science of the sounds of ethnics. Instead, those who proposed and adopted this term (in preference to comparative musicology, which seemed to over-emphasize external comparison) in the early 1950s came from a background where several composite ethno-words were already in use: ethnopoetics,ethnomedicine, ethnohistory, etc The point of all these terms was that the investigator sought to understand the topic from the perspective of the native informant. The ethnomusicologist was as interested in, say, an Egyptians musicology i. e. , his explanations and understandings of music as in his music itself. Adoption of the term signalled a departure from previous research, where it had often been assumed that there was no native theory. The comparative musicologist (or at least his caricature) had simply (or not so simply,when we think of old recording technology) remained in his laboratory where he amassed an archive of wax cylinders and the like. Sitting down (in an armchair, according to most stereotypes) he (less often, she) then wrote out the music and studied the resulting notation in order to produce theories about what was going on. The ethnomusicologist, on the other hand, is himself (and more and more, herself) a collector as well as an analyst. The model of collection, however, was not that of earlier scholars like Cecil Sharp, Percy Grainger or Bela Bartok. Rather than ranging widely, but quickly, across a broad region, the ethnomusicologist was supposed to gather materials through participant-observation. Instead of gathering recordings alone, the ethnomusicological researcher gathered experience, both in the form of contextual explanation (based on observation and on informants own readings of what was going on) and in the form of personal know-how, gained from actually learning to perform the music s/he was studying. In other words, the researcher has the responsibility of living among the researched; living as far as possible as one of the researched; taking full part in their musical lives; and gradually coming to understand, typically through personal engagement in performance, what music really means in that particular society. Future Of Fiber Optics EssayThe influence of anthropology (recently of gender studies), and of our disciplinary desire to explain music according to local perspectives, can clearly be felt here. My feeling is that folk music experts have been less interested in writing about musical people than ethnomusicologists. Of course, folk researchers have documented the lives of notable performers, but, I think there is a difference in kind in the ways in which ethnomusicologists and folk music scholars discuss the communities within which they have carried out research. Given these areas of distinction, I would see nonetheless a rich potential for cross-fertilisation between these two fields. We ethnomusicologists might pay more attention in our teaching and writing (and perhaps also organising of concerts and workshops) to the musical traditions of the British Isles. This would, at the very least, help ensure that all graduate musicians (many of whom go into classroom teaching and arts administration) actually know that such music exists. Furthermore, through arming students with an awareness that aims in this music are not necessarily identical to those in classical music, and encouraging them to discover for themselves how this music continues to play a meaningful part in contemporary peoples lives, we can perhaps begin to break down some of the common prejudices that characterise knee-jerk reactions to the mention of folk music. Given that few universities employ folk music specialists, then this responsibility would seem to fall to the (still few but slightly more numerous) ethnomusicologists. Moreover, some ethnomusicologists may perhaps wish to begin researching British folk music themselves even those of us who have invested in foreign language training. Not only will we find rich musical materials and social contexts, but also we can get on with this work while waiting for the next foreign trip to fall into place. England is one of the few countries to sustain a more-or-less habitual demarcation between ethnomusicologists and folk music scholars, and we could act to remove this. Folk music experts might find, once they have become familiar enough with the ethnomusicological literature to not feel alienated by our strange use of words like culture, that there are ideas in this writing that can be usefully applied in their own research. Ethnomusicology is essentially about people making music or humanly-organized sound (e-mail me if youd like the references) which is what folk music studies focuses on too, so it should be possible to add useful aspects of ethnomusicological enquiry to folk music research without giving up existing perspectives. The reading list set to MMus trainees in ethnomusicology at Sheffield, for instance, (and presumably elsewhere too) refers to musical traditions from all around the world, yet, thinking about it, all these writings would have pertinence to someone intending primarily to research musical life in Britain, or planning on gaining an academic qualification for research work already ongoing in that field. These are not so much different fields as overlapping sets with much common ground but somewhat differentemphases. In the end, it is up to the individual researcher to decide which questions to ask and what to do with the answers.