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Music
Music
I. ETHNOMUSICOLOGYAlan P. MerriamBIBLIOGRAPHY
II. MUSIC AND SOCIETYHans Engel
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I. ETHNOMUSICOLOGY
The beginnings of ethnomusicology are usually traced back to the 1880s and 1890s, when studies were initiated primarily in Germany and in the United States. Early in this development there appeared a dual division of emphasis that has remained throughout the history of the field.Definitions
Two polar positions on a definition of “ethnomusicology” are most frequently enunciated: the first is embodied in such statements as “ethnomusicology is the total study of non-Western music,” and the second in “ethnomusicology is the study of music in culture.” The first derives from a supposition that ethnomusicology should concern itself with certain geographical areas of the world; those who hold this point of view tend to treat the music structurally. The second stresses music in its cultural context, no matter in what geographical area of the world and is concerned with music as human behavior and the functions of music in human society and culture. Consequently, its emphasis on musical structure is not as great, although it does use objective techniques of detailing a musical style to effectuate comparison between song bodies and to attack problems of diffusion, acculturation, and culture history.Thus one emphasis in ethnomusicology concerns the description and analysis of technical aspects of musical structure. In early writings this aim tended to be coupled with attempts to use the concept of social evolution to establish basic laws of the development of music structure through time. Particular attention was also directed toward the problem of the ultimate origin of music; and later, with the rise of Kulturkreis theories and particularly in connection with the study of musical instruments, detailed reconstructions of music diffusion from supposed basic geographical centers were attempted.
The second emphasis in ethnomusicology was directed toward the study of music in its ethnologic context, and research in this area was influenced by American anthropology. As a result, extreme theories of evolution and diffusion were strongly discounted.
Ethnomusicology has thus developed in two directions. On the one hand, music is treated as a structure that operates, it is presumed, according to certain principles inherent in its own construction. On the other hand, since music is produced by and for people, it must also be regarded as a product of human behavior operating within a cultural context and in conjunction with all the other facets of human behavior. The duality of music as a human phenomenon is thus emphasized in ethnomusicological studies; while musical sound has structure, that structure is produced by human behavior and operates in a total cultural context.
Ethnomusicology has also been shaped by various historical processes. Arising at a time when virtually nothing was known outside Western and, to a certain extent, Oriental cultures, ethnomusicology placed heavy emphasis on the unknown areas of the world—Africa, aboriginal North and South America, Oceania, inner Asia, Indonesia. Thus the development of ethnomusicology to a considerable extent paralleled that of anthropology: both disciplines were forced to deal with all these areas at once—the anthropologist with the total cultures of the so-called “primitive” peoples and the ethnomusicologist with the total study of their music. Thus there arose in ethnomusicology a body of techniques and a system of analysis, which, while drawing upon studies of Western music, have taken some unique turns.
Music structure
Ethnomusicologists are engaged in a search for the proper balance between the basic parts of their discipline, and this search tends to be made within the framework of three major responsibilities felt by scholars in the field.The first of these areas is the technical study of music structure itself and of how it can best be learned, described, generalized, and compared in specific instances. Even here there is divergence of opinion, as one group of ethnomusicologists argues that the best way to learn a music system is by learning to perform in its style. Performance, most notably in Indonesian and Far Eastern orchestras and styles, is stressed by some scholars, and in many cases with notable results. On the other hand, this approach is criticized by those who hold that performance cannot be the ultimate goal of ethnomusicology and that the value of performance tends to be overstressed.
Ethnomusicologists are agreed, however, that musical sound must ultimately be reduced to notation. Notation by ear in the field is considered unreliable because of the many nuances that are lost, and the usual procedure is to work by ear from tape or disc recordings. In recent years the possibilities of constructing electronic equipment that will give a far more accurately detailed transcription have been explored, and preliminary results indicate that such equipment may, indeed, be both feasible and useful.
The precise transcription of scale systems tuned in intervals different from the Western scale remains somewhat difficult, although such measuring devices as the monochord, electronic equipment, and the cents system can, and do, bring a high degree of precision. Most ethnomusicologists, however, use the Western staff system for notation, employing various special signs to indicate pitch differences and discussing the precise tunings in the body of their report. Analysis is almost always couched in objective, arithmetical, and sometimes statistical terms, with frequencies of appearance of specific characteristics related to the total possibility of the sample. Those characteristics of the music usually considered include melodic range, level, direction, and contour; melodic intervals and interval patterns; ornamentation and melodic de-vices; melodic meter and rhythm; durational values; formal structure; scale, mode, duration tone, and (subjective) tonic; meter and rhythm; tempo; and vocal style. Other characteristics may be added by the individual student, and almost every body of song demands unique attention in some respects.
There remain, however, a number of difficulties in the technical analysis of music. The first of these concerns transcription itself and the accuracy that can be achieved through the use of the human ear. Closely connected with this is the unresolved question of how accurate a transcription must be; that is, can one generalize, or must the accuracy be as high as that presaged by the advent of electronic equipment? A third problem concerns sampling. Theoretically, at least, the musical universe of any given people is infinite, and the questions are thus how large a sample yields reliable results and whether a larger sample will yield significantly different results from a smaller one. It must also be decided whether one type of song in a given culture is significantly different from another and, if so, whether these types must be treated separately or lumped together into a general set of results for the entire body of music. Finally, there is the major problem of which elements of a musical style are significant, and whether those that are significant are also characteristic. Despite these questions, the technical analysis of musical style has reached a point at which a high degree of precision is possible, and the directions in which analysis has thus far moved seem clearly to be those that will be refined and more fully exploited in the future.
Musical instruments. Associated with the study of musical structure is the study of musical instruments, taken from both the technical and the distributional points of view. Ethnomusicology has supplied detailed studies of the construction and tuning of instruments, as well as a precise classification of instruments according to the mechanism of sound production (aerophones, chordophones, idiophones, and membranophones). Distributional and diffusion studies of instruments are found for many parts of the world.
Music as human behavior
Musical sound does not and cannot constitute a system that operates outside the control of human beings. It is thus a product of the behavior that produces it. Behavior includes a wide variety of phenomena, but within the rubric four particularly important facets can be segregated. The first of these refers to the physical behavior of the musician and his audience. In order to produce vocal sounds, the musician must control the vocal organs and the muscles of throat and diaphragm in certain ways; likewise, in producing instrumental music his breath control and manipulation of fingers or lips upon the instrument can only be achieved through training, whether the musician trains himself or is trained by others. It has further been noted that in performing, musicians take on characteristic bodily postures, tensions, and attitudes, and attempts are being made to correlate these with types of music styles. Similarly, the audience responds to music in physical and physiological ways, but little is known of this phenomenon cross-culturally.A second form of behavior in this context is the social behavior that accompanies music. In response to his social role, the individual musician behaves in specific ways according to his own concept of what that role entails, as well as in response to the pressures placed upon him by society at large. Being a musician means behaving according to culturally defined values; for him, the attitudes and expectations of society, as well as his own attitudes toward himself, define what is considered to be “musicianly.” But society is shaped also by the musician and his music, for it is often the latter that gives the cues for proper behavior in a given social situation.
The third important aspect of music behavior concerns learning both on the part of the specialist and the layman. The musician needs training, whether it is achieved through imitation, apprenticeship, formal schooling, or some other device. Similarly, the nonspecialist learns his music system sufficiently to participate to some extent and certainly well enough to differentiate it from other systems.
Finally, verbal behavior is involved in music to the extent to which analytic comment is made by members of a culture on their music system.
Theory of music. Beneath the level of behavior as such, however, lies a deeper level, that of the conceptualization of music. The ethnomusicologist deals with why music sounds the way it does, as well as with the “musts” and “shoulds” of music. Although little material of this kind is available as yet, the problems lie in the nature of the distinctions made between music and nonmusic, the sources from which music is drawn, techniques of composition, the inheritance of musical ability, and other questions of a similar nature. In other words, before music behavior can be acted out, there must be underlying concepts in terms of which the behavior is shaped.
There exists, then, a continuum of levels of analysis in the study of musical behavior: music must begin with basic concepts and values, which in turn are translated into actual behavior; this in turn is directed toward the achievement of a specific musical product, or structural sound.
There remains one further aspect of the continuum, however, and this appears in the acceptance or rejection of the final product both by the musician and by the members of the society at large. If the product is acceptable to both, then the concepts out of which it has arisen are reinforced and the behavior perfected insofar as possible; if, on the other hand, the product is not adjudged acceptable, then concepts must be changed and translated into different behavior in order to adjust the structured sound to what is considered proper. The product thus inevitably feeds back upon the concept, which in turn shapes behavior so that the product, again, will be successful. Both here and on the behavioral level, ideas and techniques of musical training are of the utmost importance.
Under the stimulation of anthropological problems, methods, and theory, the behavioral aspects of ethnomusicology have begun to take on added interest; and by 1950 “ethnomusicology” was replacing the older term “comparative musicology” (vergleichende Musikwissenschaft ).
Ethnomusicology and related fields
Growing out of the studies of those interested primarily in music as human behavior has been a third area of responsibility for ethnomusicologists, and this concerns the relationship of the field to other kinds of studies. Two major avenues of research have opened here, the first in the relationship of ethnomusicology to the study of the other arts, and the second in its relationship to the social sciences.Relations with the arts. In respect to the arts as a whole, ethnomusicologists have begun to turn to problems of general aesthetics as these are illuminated by the cross-cultural perspective of comparative music studies. One such problem is the nature of what is called the aesthetic in Western culture, for those few ethnomusicologists who have considered the subject have in general agreed that the term does not translate well to other cultures, particularly those of nonliterate peoples where the underlying assumptions about music tend to run along different lines. There is a strong suggestion that for most peoples outside Western and Eastern civilization music may be a functional rather than an aesthetic complex in which major emphasis is placed upon what music does rather than philosophic speculation on what it is. This in turn has considerable bearing upon the Western assumption of the interrelatedness of the various arts. What empirical evidence is available seems to indicate that most other peoples do not conceive ideationally of the arts as structurally interrelated, and therefore this concept may well be applicable in the Western context alone. Similar problems that tend to bring evidence to these two major questions include synesthesia, intersense modalities, and so forth. The cross-cultural contribution of ethno-musicology in such problems is potentially considerable, and questions of this nature are being more and more widely considered.
Relations with the social sciences. The relationship of ethnomusicology to the social sciences has already been indicated in that an ethnologic component is inherent in the basic organization of the field. As ethnomusicology continues to expand its orientation, it becomes more and more apparent that both ethnomusicologists and social scientists have overlooked a number of possibilities for fruitful cooperation between the two broad areas. The entire study of music as human behavior, of course, lies well within the sphere of social science, as does the application even of technical music analysis to problems such as acculturation, but there are other applications as well.
Among these is the study of music as symbolic behavior, both in itself and as it relates to broader areas of the culture under study. Political, social, legal, economic, and religious concepts can all be symbolized in musical sound and behavior, and it is frequently to be noted that in the arts in general, among them music, symbolic expression tends to cut to the deepest levels of value and belief. The functions of music in any given culture tell much of the organization and processes of the culture at large, and reference is made here not only to “use” but to integrative function as well. Music operates for specific purposes in all cultures, and analysis of these processes reveals much about both specific and general behavior. Song texts are a badly neglected area of study, both in connection with music itself and with the wider culture. Studies have shown that language behavior in song may differ sharply from that in everyday discourse, with the stress in song often being placed upon the expression of otherwise unutterable feelings, thoughts, attitudes, and ideas; texts are thus very often an extremely important index to basic values. Texts, too, reveal psychological processes in the life of any given culture, such as when they indicate mechanisms of repression or compensation. It is well known that songs can serve functions of social control, as well as educational and historiographical functions. The relevance of music studies to social science is indeed great, and both disciplines might derive considerable benefit from recognizing this fact.
Ethnomusicology, then, is currently in a phase of expansion and development wherein it is engaged in sorting out the kinds of studies of greatest importance to its development. By its very nature it is interdisciplinary, using the techniques, methods, and theories of both musicology and ethnology; from the fusion of the two it gains new and unique strengths.
Alan P. Merriam
