Reference Tools for Ethnomusicology

Abstract

thnomusicology today claims to be an independent discipline, independent though closely allied to musicology at large, anthropology, folklore, and possibly also linguistics, psychology, sociology, and even further: literature, history, physics, physiology, and others. In the last twenty years, there has appeared a stream of publications -journals, texts, histories-which underscore this claim to independence, and though some representatives of this field deplore what appears to be a splintering and a tenency to overspecialization, there is no doubt that the amount of material in ethnomusicology-here I am thinking of raw material for research, published material, as well as human personnel--is now so large that it must be handled in a fashion separate from other disciplines. Furthermore, while ethnomusicology has often been treated as a subdivision of musicology, anthropology, or folklore, this association has not always supplied the methodological integrity required, nor has it made possible the kind of relationship between raw material and methodology which is desirable. The need for reference tools in ethnomusicology is one of today's important problems. I should like to survey some of these needs, not necessarily with the idea of stimulating immediate action, for some of the tools I contemplate can certainly not be manufactured for decades to come. But I want to focus attention on the fact that the amount of published material and of knowledge in ethnomusicology is today so large that reference works of various sorts are badly needed and should be planned. It is at this point that the bibliographic and classificatory skills of the librarian could be of great value to the ethnomusicologist. I should like to discuss briefly bibliographic tools, source catalogs, dictionaries, and encyclopedic works. Bibliographic control of ethnomusicological publications has always been difficult. Articles and essays appear in the media of many different disciplines, and materials useful for research are sometimes in the disguise of casual travel reporting and general entertainment. The lack of definite boundaries for ethnomusicology is also problematic; are we to include the music of primitive cultures only, or also the music of Oriental high cultures? And how about folk music? In this paper I should like to make the definition as broad as possible. But this problem stood in the way of Jaap Kunst, the third edition of whose Ethnomusicology (The Hague, 1959), is certainly the best attempt at bibliographic control of the field. Kunst comes close to being exhaustive in material on primitive music, except for what may have appeared in the Soviet Union and in other Eastern European countries. On Oriental music he is also very inclusive, but in the field of European and New World folk music he admittedly covers only some of the more important works. Kunst's third edition also constitutes a beginning of a Western European union list of ethnomusicological publications. Most ethnomusicologists will probably be satisfied with Kunst's listing as a standard bibliography, except for folk music. The problem now is to establish control of currently appearing materials, for especially in Eastern Europe and Asia the amount of publication is increasing. Our journal Ethnomusicology, makes a brave attempt to present current bibliography, but it is dependent on random contributions by subscribers. Music Index now indexes regularly some of the periodicals devoted primarily to ethnomusicology. But a large number of publications is still omitted, since ethnomusicology is not the primary aim of Music Index. What is needed, evidently,