A Harmless Drudge

Reaching for the Dictionary

Definitions

I think it was in September 2013 that the field of ethnomusicology may have finally arrived in polite society; the term appeared in a New York Times crossword puzzle, with the clue "Prefix to musicology." Sixty years earlier, when I was a brand-new college teacher and began using the word to describe what I did, it was met with expressions of wonder. But soon people were able to respond with terms such as "folk music" and "primitive music," and "ancient music and instruments" soon entered the conversation. By 1960 the follow-up question might have often been "Oh, do you play in a gamelan?" or "Have you heard of the didgeridoo?" In the 1970s, the conversation might well include the term "ethnic" music or even the etymologically outrageous "ethnomusic"; and in the eighties and nineties, free association might lead to "diversity" and "world music" and "indigenous music" (no one said "primitive" anymore). In the twenty-first century, one hears about theoretical frameworks, about Orientalism, about ethics, diasporas, international hip-hop. The free associations that "ethnomusicology" calls up have changed, and by and large the word is no longer the puzzler it was in 1950. But if the term is broadly accepted in the academy, elsewhere we're not yet out of the woods. Only recently, when I told my faithful physician that I taught a specialized field called ethnomusicology, he said, a bit condescendingly, "Oh, there must be as many as three or four of you." Yet ethnomusicology has widely affected a number of academic disciplines, it has greatly influenced the world of performers and audiences, and it has had a significant impact on the world's listening habits.

In the 130 years in which what is now called ethnomusicology may be said to have existed, beginning with pioneer works such as those of Alexander J. Ellis (1885), Theodore Baker (1882), and Carl Stumpf (1886), attitudes and orientations have changed greatly. And so also has the name, from something very briefly called Musikologie (in the 1880s; see Adler 1885), to "comparative musicology" (through about 1950, though also first used by Adler 1885), then to "ethno-musicology" (1950–ca. 1956), quickly to "ethnomusicology" (removing the hyphen, by the Society for Ethnomusicology, actually was an ideological move in the campaign for disciplinary independence), with later suggestions such as "cultural musicology" (Kerman 1985), "socio-musicology" (Feld 1984), and a perhaps doubt-inspired "(ethno)musicology" (Stobart 2008) occasionally thrown in. The changes in name accompanied changes in intellectual directions and emphases.

It is difficult to find a single simple definition to which most people in this field would subscribe, and maybe this is the reason ethnomusicologists were for many years excessively concerned with defining themselves. Alan P. Merriam, the scholar in the history of ethnomusicology most concerned with definition and the associated problems of basic orientation, cited repeatedly the need for ethnomusicologists to look carefully at what they had done, and wished to do, in order to move in concerted fashion toward their goals (Merriam 1960; 1964, 3–36; 1969b; 1975). In a major essay discussing the history of definitions, Merriam (1977a) brought together a large number of disparate statements defining the limits, the major thrust, the practicality, and the ideology of ethnomusicology; his list was later supplemented by Simon (1978), Myers (1992, 3, 7–9), and others. Interestingly, definitions are harder to come by in recent publications. Major theoretical statements such as those of Rice (2003, 2010), Stobart (2008), or Solis (2012) don't come right out with any. In one of the most recent discussions of the field, Rice starts out with one that strikes me as both too general and too specific: "Ethnomusicology is the study of why, and how, human beings are musical" (2014a, 1), but then (9–10) lists more than a dozen others, all of which he seems to accept as useful. Perhaps this definitional uncertainty has been a good thing, contributing to the elasticity of ethnomusicology's interests and the flexibility of its boundaries. Perhaps we need to remember the fable of the blind men and the elephant.

There are various types of definitions: Some tell what each ethnomusicologist must do or be in order to merit the title, and some synthesize what the entire group does. Others focus on what kinds of research have been done, or what should have been done instead, or what must eventually be...