Impressions of Finnish Music Research

Abstract

I still regard Alan Merriam as my greatest teacher. Not to go into detail, but it is easy to accept his view by (1) replacing his word conceptualization with brain-functioning or thinking, and (2) accepting that what he called a product is anything between heaven and earth-such as, for example, the underlying culture behind the production of T-shirts with faces of Elvis and Mozart on them, or the advisory board of a city opera, or the system of copyright laws, or the international music business. But this leads us to a fundamental question of ethnomusicology. If a student does a very detailed study of the cultural functions behind a T-shirt business but knows nothing about how to make sense of musical syntax, what is she? If a linguist cannot analyze language, is he a linguist? He is not. If a sociologist does a study on music marketing or on discourse about music, this makes her neither an ethnomusicologist nor a linguist. She is neverthless conducting ethnomusicological research. I possess no skills for studying the syntax of dance but I am deeply interested in dancing as a mode of human communicative behavior. Yet my deepest interest certainly does not make me an ethnochoreologist. Hence, in my view, it is necessary to make a distinction between the history of a discipline (which usually is characterized by an accumulation of knowledge produced by researchers of separate disciplines) and an academic specialization. From my point of departure, an ethnomusicologist is a scholar who specializes in the study of music and areas around it which are related in one way or another to the music: for example, dance, soundscape, the nervous system or musical instruments. An ethnomusicologist does not always need to conduct ethnomusicological or any other kind of research. The main point is this: if a researcher understands that what she is dealing with is a part of human culture telling her facts or clues about the internal and invisible contents of human nature-then I consider her an ethnomusicologist. And then, the object of the actual study can be whatever the researcher considers worth researching.