Society For Ethnomusicology Research Articles

Oxford Scholarship Online

Reviewed by: Oxford Scholarship Online Stephen Henry Oxford Scholarship Online. [New York, New York]: Oxford University Press, (2008–). http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/ (Accessed 10 October 2017). [Requires a Web browser and an Internet connection. Subscription and perpetual access purchases are available] Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO) provides full-text access to "over 13,000 outstanding academic books from Oxford University Press" (http://oxfordscholarship.com/page/about-oso/about, accessed 4 October 2017). The books are organized into twenty categories, including music. Oxford updates the collection three times a year. Institutions may subscribe to all of OSO or to individual subject areas or they may make outright purchases of individual titles, complete subject modules, or updates within subject modules. Content Oxford Scholarship Online presents scholarly monographs only. Specifically excluded are Oxford publications meant for general audiences, books in the Handbooks series (which are included in a separate resource, Oxford Handbooks Online), tertiary reference sources (some of which are included in Oxford Music Online), and Richard Taruskin's The Oxford History of Western Music (an entity onto itself, available separately from Oxford at http://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com). In addition, OSO is not to be confused with Oxford Bibliographies Online, which features online bibliographies on various topics. Oxford Scholarship Online exists as a subset of Oxford's umbrella interface University Press Scholarship Online. Through University Press Scholarship Online, subscribers may add titles published by a growing number of "partner presses." Publishers with notable offerings in music include University of California Press (102 titles), University of Chicago Press (41 titles), University Press of Mississippi (38 titles), and Yale University Press (31 titles). University Press Scholarship Online and Oxford Scholarship Online users may elect to search within OSO, within any single partner press, or across all partner presses simultaneously. This review will focus on the content available through Oxford Scholarship Online, but comments on the interface and usability apply equally to University Press Scholar ship Online. There are currently 509 titles in OSO's music subject category. The OSO music component was released in 2008; most titles date from that time or later, although Oxford has added several pre-2008 titles over time with the earliest being Martin Williams's Jazz Changes (1993). While not every scholarly monograph on music released since 2008 is represented in the resource, I found few conspicuous absences. As a way of assessing whether Oxford had included the most important music titles, I looked for the presence of books that had won major awards from the American Musico logical Society (AMS), the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), and the Society for Music Theory (SMT) since 2008. All four of the Oxford publications that have won AMS's Otto Kinkeldey Award since 2008 are available in OSO. [End Page 480] In addition, Oxford has included Jane A. Bernstein's, 1998 work Music Printing in Renaissance Venice: The Scotto Press (1539–1572). Furthermore, two Oxford titles currently nominated for the 2017 Otto Kinkeldey Award—Kofi V. Agawu's The African Imagination in Music and Michael Marissen's Bach & God (both 2016)—are also included. Award winning Oxford books in the field of ethnomusicology are similarly well represented, albeit not comprehensively. Four of the five Oxford titles published since 2008 that have won the SEM's Alan Merriam Prize are in OSO, the exception being Carol Silverman's Romani Routes: Cultural Politics and Balkan Music in Diaspora (2012). I was unable to determine why Silverman's book had been excluded, but it is an obvious candidate for inclusion. Unfortunately, the field of music theory does not fare as well. The Society for Music Theory has awarded its Wallace Berry Award to four Oxford books since 2008 and only one of them is in OSO: Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis's On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind (2013). Absent from the collection are Giorgio Sanguinetti's The Art of Partimento: History, Theory, and Practice (2012); Janet Schmalfeldt's In the Process of Becoming: Analytic and Philosophical Perspectives on Form in Early Nineteenth-Century Music (2011); and Danuta Mirka's Metric Manipulations in Haydn and Mozart: Chamber Music for Strings, 1787–1791 (2009). It is not clear whether these titles have been excluded for content or for licensing...

Some Notes on Popular Music in my (Professional) Life

This article sketches the author’s experience with popular music as a student of music and ethnomusicology in the United States, and as a professional in this field. Principally it is a personal meditation on the role of popular music in the history of ethnomusicology, particularly in the Society for Ethnomusicology, in the history of American musical academia, and the reasons for its initial neglect. It recalls some incidents witnessed by the author that were turning points in the eventual acceptance of popular music by both ethnomusicologists and historical musicologists.

The Formation of Ruboī Meters in Terms of Musical Rhythmic Rotations. By Abduvalī Abdurashidov. Translated by Evan Rapport, edited by Richard K. Wolf.

In this article, the Tajik maqom master and pedagogue Abduvalī Abdurashidov approaches the problem of ruboī (a type of quatrain) versification from the standpoint of music. He takes us step-by-step through the process by which he arrives at the ruboī meters, with fascinating results that remind us of the interdependent nature of poetry and music.
 Citation: Abdurashidov, Abduvalī.The Formation of RuboīMeters in Terms of Musical Rhythmic Rotations.Translated by Evan Rapport, edited by Richard K. Wolf. Ethnomusicology Translations, no. 6. Bloomington, IN: Society for Ethnomusicology, 2017.
 Originally published in Tajik as “Tashakkul-i avzoni ruboī dar matn-i advor-i zarbi-i musiqī.” In Falak va mas’alahoi ta’rixī-nazariyavi-i musiqi-i tojik. Third International Symposium of Falak. Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Tajikistan: Dushanbe, Tajikistan, 2009.

Musical Mourning Rituals in Sicily. By Sergio Bonanzinga. Translated by Giacomo Valentini.

This article surveys various vocal and instrumental performances (chants, laments, calls, sounds of church bells and drums, band music) connected to the ritual celebration and commemoration of the dead that are still characterized in Sicily by a manifest syncretism between Christian Church rules and folk customs and beliefs. These “sounds of mourning” are examined in terms of both their musical aspects and their social and symbolic functions, with special attention given to the changing dynamics between the present day and the recent past. The focus also extends to include celebrations in which “fictitious funerals” are performed, such as those for Christ during the Easter procession and for Nannu (“Grandpa”) in Carnival ceremonies.
 Citation: Bonanzinga, Sergio.Musical Mourning Rituals in Sicily. Translated by Giacomo Valentini. Ethnomusicology Translations, no. 5. Bloomington, IN: Society for Ethnomusicology, 2017.
 Originally published in Italian as “Riti musicali del cordoglio in Sicilia,” Archivio Antropologico Mediterraneo 17, no. 16, 1 (2014): 113-156. Online at https://www.academia.edu/7954331/Riti_musicali_del_cordoglio.
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Current Directions in Ecomusicology: Music, Culture, Nature eds. by Aaron S. Allen and Kevin Dawe

Current Directions in Music, Culture, Nature. Edited by Aaron S. Allen and Kevin Dawe. (Routledge Research in Music, no. 13.) New York: Routledge, 2016. [vii, 314 p. ISBN 9781138804586 (hardback), $148; ISBN 9781138062498 (paperback), $49.95; ISBN 9781315752938 (e-book), varies.] Music examples, photographs, glossary, index, supplementary website. What is ecomusicology? In a colloquy dedicated to the subject in the Journal of the American MusicoLogical Society, Aaron S. Allen began to answer this question, admitting he was reluctant to define an emerging subfield as yet lacking in consensus, but we must start somewhere (Aaron S. Allen, Ecomusicology: Ecocriticism and Musicology, Journal of the American Musicologicat Society 64, no. 2 [Summer 2011]: 392). In the years since, scholarly and public interest in intersections between music, place, and the environment has blossomed, with vibrant ecomusicology groups in both the American Musicological Society and the Society for Ethnomusicology and a series of successful interdisciplinary Ecomusicologies conferences. From the fruits of these labors, Allen and Kevin Dawe have collected nineteen essays in the volume Current Directions in providing a much clearer answer to the question. In their introductory essay, Ecomusicologies, Allen and Dawe maintain that there is no one ecomusicology but many ecomusicologies constituting a dynamic field (p. 1), and the essays that follow certainly support this assertion. book is divided into four directions: ecological, fieldwork, critical, and textual. Allen and Dawe provide an additional introduction to each of these major sections, summarizing but also connecting the essays to each other and to a wider literature. These divisions are relatively arbitrary; all of the essays involve theoretical criticism in some way, and all are concerned with interpreting specific musics or sounds as texts, for example. Yet the four directions impose additional framing mechanisms that give the volume cohesion, moving from a focus on ecological sciences, to ethnography, to social theory, and finally to exegesis. terms in the book's subtitle--music, culture, and nature--unite all of the chapters, yet they also engage in various degrees with binaries of music/sound, culture/ society, and nature/environment. Often, authors advocate a blurring or complete breakdown of these binaries. Jeff Todd Titon, in his chapter Why Thoreau?, argues for an ecomusicological re-framing of the Walden author in part because of how Thoreau described natural sounds in explicitly musical language. For Thoreau, place is experienced as an embodied encounter with sound. musicalization of natural sounds is the subject of multiple essays, including but not limited to W. Alice Boyle and Ellen Waterman's The Ecology of Musical Performance: Towards a Robust Methodology, and Helena Simonett's Of Human and Non-Human Birds: Indigenous Music Making in Sentient Ecology in Northwestern Simonett's essay also contests the nature/ environment binary as she applies the concept of sentient ecology, which extends the concept of personhood to animals, and ultimately, to all life in an ecosystem (p. 99), to her analysis of indigenous Yoreme musicians in Mexico. This false binary is explored even further in the essay by Margaret Q. Guyette and Jennifer C. Post, Ecomusicology, Ethnomusicology, and Soundscape Ecology: Scientific and Musical Responses to Sound Study. Here the authors argue that traditional notions of nature as a space untouched by humanity, and the environment as merely built or constructed, are problematic for anthropocentric scholarship because they limit or blind researchers from seeing how humans and the natural world are inextricable from one another. In studying the acoustic properties of landscape, Guyette and Post encourage ecologists to be aware of human noise as integral, rather than detrimental, to the soundscape, and implore ethnomusicologists to focus on non-human sound as integral to the performance practices of musical cultures. …

Writing against Europe: On the Necessary Decline of Ethnomusicology. By Martin Greve. Translated by Férdia J. Stone-Davis.

In this appraisal of then-current German-speaking ethnomusicology, Martin Greve calls for much more critical acknowledgment and consideration of recent key debates in cultural studies and cultural anthropology. The essay and its provocative title, certainly written in a constructive spirit, hit a trouble spot, fueling the fear of losing ethnomusicology’s disciplinary raison d’être. A short but telling discussion among German-speaking ethnomusicologists ensued.
 Citation: Greve, Martin. Writing against Europe:On the Necessary Decline of Ethnomusicology. Translated by Férdia J. Stone-Davis. Ethnomusicology Translations, no. 3. Bloomington, IN: Society for Ethnomusicology, 2016.
 Originally published in German as “‘Writing against Europe’: Vom notwendigen Verschwinden der Musikethnologie,” Musikforschung 55 (2002): 239-250.

Musical Semiotics as a Tool for the Social Study of Music. By Óscar Hernández Salgar. Translated by Brenda M. Romero.

Recent studies on musical signification have been characterized by an apparently insurmountable gap between disciplines that focus on the musical text as sound (music theory, musicology), those that focus on the hearing subject (cognitive sciences, psychology of music), and those that focus on social discourses about music (ethnomusicology, anthropology, sociology). This article argues that the most recent theoretical advances in music semiotics provide means to overcome this gap. After a brief examination of some key concepts in music semiotics, the author identifies three approaches to this problem: the semiotic-hermeneutic approach, the cognitive-embodied approach, and the social-political approach. This classification allows him to introduce a brief methodological proposal for the study of musical signification from different academic perspectives.
 Citation: Hernández Salgar, Óscar. Musical Semiotics as a Tool for theSocial Study of Music. Translated by Brenda M. Romero. Ethnomusicology Translations, no. 2. Bloomington, IN: Society for Ethnomusicology, 2016.
 Originally published in Spanish in Cuadernos de Música, Artes Visuales, y Artes Escénicas 7, no. 1 (January 2011):39-77.

The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-Three Discussions by Bruno Nettl

Study of Ethnomusicology: ThirtyThree Discussions. By Bruno Nettl. 3d ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015. [xiii, 560 p. ISBN 9780252039287 (hardcover), $95; ISBN 9780252080821 (paperback), $30; ISBN 9780252097331 (e-book), various.] Bibliography, index.Bruno Nettl's Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-Three Discussions (2015) is a revised edition of Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-One Issues and Concepts (2005), which was an updated version of his 1983 Study of Ethnomusicology: Twenty-Nine Issues and Concepts. Popularly known as The Red Book, the text has thirty-three essays that Nettl no longer refers to as concepts and issues, but rather as discussions. This edition is substantively revised, presenting closelyand well-edited versions of previously presented chapters with updates to reflect recent developments and concerns in the field. Most chapters are refashioned from the previous edition; a few have entirely new information. Study, regardless of the edition, is a standard introductory text in many ethnomusicology courses on the history and development of the discipline. It is an amazing repository of information recounted from texts and other sources, as well as from Nettl's own work and personal interpretations of events, relationships, ideas, directions, and experiences over the course of the history of the discipline.Nettl's third excursion in Study of Ethnomusicology divides the manuscript into six parts. first five parts are revised, reworked, updated, and reorganized from the previous edition's four parts. sixth part has new materials. While the number of chapters in each section is unevenly distributed, they hold together well in their units: Part I has three chapters, Parts II, III, and V have six chapters each, Part IV has seven, and Part VI has five chapters. As in previous editions and in line with the book's title, each chapter has a subtitle that more explicitly conveys the topic under consideration. In each chapter, Nettl includes a historical trajectory of the subject matter with expanded literature that reflects continuing discussions from newer literature or previously-unknown older texts. This, of course, has resulted in a more extensive bibliography. Further, in each chapter Nettl introduces concepts and terms that have defined the field, whether they were borrowed from other disciplines or invented by ethnomusicologists. In this way, one can imbibe the discipline's linguistic protocol almost seamlessly.Part I, titled Contemplating the Musics of the World, revisits and collates perennial discussions about how to delineate the field and the definition of itself, as well as debates and understanding of universals and specificities of and its study. His provocative opening line states that ethnomusicology may have arrived into polite society in 2013 due to its inclusion in a New York Times crossword puzzle (p. 3). This sets up an account of scholars who have offered definitions of the term ethnomusicology and the discipline, and credits the first use of the word etnomusikologia to a Ukrainian folklorist and scholar Kliment Kvitka in 1928, according to Bohdan Lukaniak (p. 7). Nettl rehashes some of his previous opinions on these definitions and how they determine who ethnomusicologists are and what they do, and also revisits and revises his take on the discipline's Credo and how it has shaped or been shaped by the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM). Chapter 2 is an update of the previous editions' discussions of what music is, leading into Nettl's exploration, in chapter 3, of concepts about the universality of, or commonalities within, music, with expanded ideas on origins (which seems to have been an obsession for scholars through much of the twentieth century).As Sounds and Structures, Part II, examines how is created (chapter 4), what makes distinctive and/or distinguishes one culture from another (chapter 5), and rehashes debates on notation and transcription (chapter 6) in order to discuss how data is collated so as to distill its particular characteristics: issues that generate dialogues about universals versus culturally-specific features of repertory (chapter 7). …

Popular Music and Jazz, 1950–Present

The coverage of post-1950 popular music and jazz in the second edition of The Grove Dictionary of American Music (hereafter referred to as the AmeriGrove II) is truly impressive in its range and scope. AmeriGrove II gives substantial space to a variety of styles ranging from rhythm and blues and rock to country and hip hop, a nod not only to the tremendous impact they have had on the making and consumption of U.S. music in recent decades, but also to the explosion in popular music scholarship witnessed in organizations like the International Association for the Study of Popular Music and the popular music study groups of the American Musicological Society, Society for Music Theory, and Society for Ethnomusicology. Throughout its many entries, AmeriGrove II showcases just how much the study of recent American popular music has grown since AmeriGrove I appeared nearly thirty years ago.

Homeland as Sound and Sound as Homeland: Cultural and Personal Soundscapes in Christos Christovasilis's Short Stories. By Panayotis Panopoulos. Translated by Vasiliki Chatzopoulou.

This essay is an original contribution to the ethnomusicology of literature in Greece. Concepts and perspectives from the anthropology of music, soundscape studies, and the ethnography of sound and the senses are used to approach and analyze the sound world of Christos Christovasilis’s literary work. Christovasilis (1860-1937) is an important figure in the so-called “ethographic” literary movement in Greece of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; his work is of exceptional interest concerning the presentation of sound and hearing in Greek mountain communities. Panayotis Panopoulos’s sharp ear identifies the strong presence of sound in the short stories of Christovasilis, which he interprets in terms of the ethnography of the senses and the role of sound and hearing in the cultural construction of community and personhood among Greek pastoralists. In this text Panopoulos places special emphasis on the sound of animal bells in everyday and ritual contexts, developing further his earlier ethnographic work on animal bells (see “Animal Bells as Symbols: Sound and Hearing in a Greek Island Village,”Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 9 (2003): 639-56; and Skyros Carnival, photographs by Dick Blau, essay by Agapi Amanatidis and Panayotis Panopoulos, CD + DVD by Steven Feld, Santa Fe, NM: VOXLOX, 2011). More importantly, Panopoulos challenges received ideas in which text is understood as a predominantly visual, linguistic construct and he eloquently depicts how experiences of sonic imagination are culturally reproduced in text. In this way, he makes an important contribution to the ethnomusicological reading of literary text by showing how text is mediated through acoustic environment and how sound produces, surrounds, and immerses itself in text.
 Citation: Panopoulos, Panayotis. Homeland as Sound and Sound as Homeland: Cultural and Personal Soundscapes in Christos Christovasilis’s Short Stories. Translated by VasilikiChatzopoulou. Ethnomusicology Translations, no. 1. Bloomington, IN: Society for Ethnomusicology, 2015.
 Originally published in Greek in Dokimes: Journal of Social Studies 13-14 (2005): 277-307.

Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and the Environment by Mark Pedelty (review)

ETHNOMUSICOLOGY Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and Environment. By Mark Pedelty. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012. [xi, 229 p. ISBN 9781439907122. $29.95.] Illustrations, bibliography, index.Over past decade, musicologists and ethnomusicologists have become increas- ingly interested in ecomusicology, a mode of inquiry that Aaron S. Allen has described as the study of music, culture, and nature in all complexities of those terms (Ecomusicology, in The New Grove Dictio- nary of American Music, 2d ed., [New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming]; http://www.ecomusicology .info, accessed 20 September 2013). Interest groups devoted to development and re- finement of ecomusicological methods are currently recognized by American Musicological Society and Society for Ethnomusicology, and, in 2011, Journal of American Musicological Society pub- lished a series of essays by several noted ecomusicologists that outlined need for musicological methods that engage with ecological crises, articulated ecomusicol- ogy's relationship to existing musicological preoccupations regarding connections between music and natural world, and reflected upon ethical implications of ecocritical research in music (Colloquy: Ecomusicology, Journal of American Mu- sicological Society 64, no. 2 [Summer 2011]: 391-424). Using a rich combination of tex- tual analysis and ethnographic participant- observation, anthropologist Mark Pedelty's recent book, Ecomusicology: Rock, Folk, and Environment, extends current ecomusico- logical discourse through a careful consid- eration of ecological impacts of rock and folk production and consumption and challenges readers to engage in what Alexander Rehding has described as awareness-raising, praxis (in Marxian sense), and activism (Ecomusicology be- tween Apocalypse and Nostalgia, Journal of American Musicological Society 64, no. 2 [Summer 2011]: 410). Whereas much eco- musicological scholarship has, to date, fo- cused primarily on specific musical texts, Pedelty works to broaden term ecomu- sicology from its current use-describing specific modes of critical inquiry-and to transform it into a way of life, arguing that we should add sustainability to long list of musical values and expectations (p. 202). Through a series of case studies, he interrogates ways in which music making-and rock and folk music in particular-have been mobilized for greater ecological good or contributed to environmental degradation. Furthermore, he offers some general advice to assist com- munities in creating more sustainable modes of music making and to build local communities. Although book occasion- ally mobilizes utopian rhetoric, Pedelty is quick to observe that music's [ability] to play some role in fostering environmental sustainability, biodiversity, and human well- being (p. 202) is complicated by inevitable negative environmental impacts, vary- ing levels of engagement of audience mem- bers, and skill level and professional ambitions of musicians themselves.Pedelty opens book with a detailed exploration of environmental impacts of contemporary rock touring practices and organizations that are working to miti- gate negative consequences of global touring. Using U2's 2009-11 360° Tour (which required hundreds of trucks, as well as ships and airplanes, to transport equip- ment and personnel) and Al Gore's anti- climate-change Live Earth concerts as ex- amples, he demonstrates that, regardless of socially-oriented rhetoric of concert organizers and musicians, touring con- tributes to climate change, unsustainable land use practices, and localized pollution. Criticizing carbon offset programs used to counteract emissions of tour buses and trucks and drawing attention to contradic- tions between pro-environmental rhetoric of many national and international rock and pop stars and their lifestyles, he notes that 'eco-friendly' rock is still about celebrity and spectacle, massive apparatuses and media designed to project individual personas onto giant stages for large audi- ences to enjoy (p. …

(Left Out in ) Left (the Field ): The Effects of Post-Postmodern Scholarship on Feminist and Gender Studies in Musicology and Ethnomusicology, 1990-2000

Since the publication of womenand Music in Cross-Cultural Perspective in 1987 I have watched the steady growth of feminist and, more recently, genderist studies in musicology and ethnomusicology.1 Heavily influenced by postmodern theories derived from history, literary criticism, anthropology, cultural studies, queer theory, and the many "posts" (e.g., postcolonialism, poststructuralism, postfeminism), it is clear that recent postmodern studies have contributed much to our understandings of how both music sound and sociomusical activities are gendered. What has been less clear, however, are the reasons behind a growing separation between the two fields of musicology and ethnomusicology with respect to this research: after a brief spurt in the late 1980s and into the 1990s, work in feminist and genderist ethnomusicology seemed to slow in relation to that of musicology. Yes, certain recent works stand out, Beverly Diamond and Pirkko Moisala's Music and Gender and Tulia Magrini's Music and Gender: Perspectives from the Mediterranean, among others.2 Yet, compared to studies in musicology and especially in popular music studies, there seemed to be comparatively few. I began to question, first, if this were actually the case and, second, what could explain this disparity, if it did indeed exist. To find some answers [End Page 90] I conducted a quick, informal search, scanning the titles of over fifteen hundred books and articles written since 1990 on the subject of women and music, feminist theory and music, gender and music, and, most recently, men and music to see if my perceptions were correct. The book titles were culled from the Voyager Catalog on the University of Rochester's library system, and articles were taken from three prominent journals: the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Ethnomusicology, and Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture. Click for larger view Table 1 DISTRIBUTION OF ARTICLES ON WOMEN, GENDER, AND MUSIC TAKEN FROM WOMEN AND MUSIC: A JOURNAL OF GENDER AND CULTURE I KNEW FROM PREVIOUS SEARCHES THAT AT LEAST HALF OF THE WORKS WOULD NOT BE SCHOLARLY BUT, RATHER, TRADE BOOKS (MORE OR LESS) CHRONICLING THE LIVES OF FAMOUS FEMALE JAZZ SINGERS OR ROCK GROUPS. THE REMAINING 750 OR SO, THAT IS, THOSE ATTEMPTING TO THEORIZE WOMEN, MEN, GENDER, AND MUSIC IN SOME WAY, COULD BE ROUGHLY DIVIDED AS FOLLOWS: MUSICOLOGY, INCLUDING WESTERN CLASSICAL AND POPULAR MUSIC, ABOUT 90 PERCENT; ETHNOMUSICOLOGY, MEANING EVERYTHING ELSE, INCLUDING NON-WESTERN POPULAR AND CLASSICAL MUSIC, ABOUT 10 PERCENT. I DECIDED TO SEPARATE MUSICOLOGICAL FROM ETHNOMUSICOLOGICAL WORK ON THE BASIS OF METHOD: WAS THE WORK UNDER QUESTION DERIVED FROM TEXTWORK OR FROM FIELDWORK? WOMEN AND MUSIC: A JOURNAL OF GENDER AND CULTURE, THE ONLY MUSIC JOURNAL TOTALLY DEDICATED TO PUBLICATIONS ON WOMEN, GENDER, AND MUSIC, HAD A SLIGHTLY HIGHER PERCENTAGE FOR ETHNOMUSICOLOGICAL PUBLICATIONS (CA. 17 PERCENT). TABLE 1 SHOWS THE DISTRIBUTION OF ARTICLES FROM THE INITIAL ISSUE IN 1997 TO 2004. WE COULD PARTIALLY EXPLAIN THESE STATISTICS AS EVIDENCE FOR THE RELATIVE NUMBERS OF MUSICOLOGISTS AND ETHNOMUSICOLOGISTS IN THE FIELD TODAY. ACCORDING TO THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGY SOCIETY AND THE SOCIETY FOR ETHNOMUSICOLOGY WEBSITES, ABOUT 3,300 PEOPLE ARE MEMBERS OF THE AMS, and about 1,200 belong to the SEM. Of course, some of these are the same people, but if we accept these numbers at face value, then indeed there are almost three times the number of musicologists than ethnomusicologists out there. It is easy to see why there are comparatively fewer published works in feminist and genderist ethnomusicology. However, this is not the complete story. I linked Western popular music studies with musicology, not ethnomusicology, although, until recently, all music outside the Western art canon was considered the province of ethnomusicology. Western popular music studies, influenced by the newly burgeoning theories of cultural studies, brought the...

Notes: A Sixtieth Birthday Retrospective

Forty years ago, the late Frank Campbell, editor of Notes, needed an essay celebrating the journal's first twenty years. These were dark days for both the association and its journal: funds were short, and the vision was strong but not confident. Implicit in my assignment was the case for the journal to continue. (1) My sequel twenty years later reflected a happier time: (2) the journal was still highly respected, but the crisis that lay behind the 1962 essay had passed. For the present third essay, the news is still good: if there is a crisis at all, it is partly caused by success. (3) The editorial practices have been worked out, and special features have been added, removed, revised, or deleted in orderly and convincing fashion. The turnover in editorial staff has been continuous and inconspicuous (editorial staff are recognized in table 1 (4)). The page count put on weight, then went on a diet. Advertisers, knowing that Notes readers come to remember their names and look for their new titles, have remained steady in their support. While other timely features (as listed in table 2) have served the special needs of many readers, it is the articles and reviews that have characterized the journal. Back in 1962 I proposed that the setting in the music world, which makes up the community of readers in the music library, was solid; but that the setting in the library world, which provides the administrative context for the music library, needed attention. In 1982 I thought the reverse was true. For this third retrospective, are there problems? Reviewing the contents of the last twenty years, and in the light of changes in the music world of today, there probably are, although they are hard to define, let alone address. Music librarians are well aware of them, and Notes is part of the answer, at least to the extent that the problem has a solution. Few of us expect things twenty years from now to be propitious in quite the same way as they are now. Both the music world and the library world continue to spin out of control. (So what is new?) The one has seen a proliferation of writings, kinds of interests, and communities of knowledgeable readers. The other has seen a proliferation of practices for addressing technical library practices. (The music library was such a safe and happy place in the 1950s: say this to the old-timers and watch them laugh!) Other professional organizations have also proliferated, and caught the eyes of music librarians. In music, the American Musicological Society (AMS) is still the next-door neighbor, partly because its members are our most numerous and supportive readers and contributors. But the Society for American Music (SAM), formerly the Sonneck Society, reflects a long-standing special interest of music libraries. Other music groups--the College Music Society (CMS), the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), and International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) most notably, and many other delimited groups--are in the wings. In the library world, the American Library Association (ALA, as well as its components like ACRL and PLA) has been the obvious counterpart to AMS, but its primacy is being shared with the American Society for Information Science (ASIS). Music librarians today, furthermore, often find their kindred spirits in the International Association of Music Libraries, Archives, and Documentation Centres (IAML), or the Music OCLC Users Group (MOUG), the Association of Recorded Sound Collections (ARSC), or even the Art Library Association of North America (ARLIS-NA). The litany of acronyms makes it clear: while Notes has many good neighbors, it lives in its own home. The articles in Notes--in the beginning usually two per issue, averaging about ten pages each--have been the most conspicuous section of the journal. (5) A survey of the essays, arranged by broad topics to provide a scanning list of sorts, will suggest the content of the journal: MLA Activities. …

Understanding Charles Seeger, pioneer in American musicology

A giant in the development of American musicology, Charles Seeger was a scholar- musician active in practically all areas of musical endeavor. This wide-ranging collection investigates Seeger's writings on music, musical research, and the responsibility of the musician and musicologist to society. A social activist who played a leadership role in the Composers Collective in 1930s New York and in the founding of scholarly organizations including the American Musicological Society and the Society for Ethnomusicology, Seeger was a philosopher as well as a builder. His ideas about music and musicology, incorporating perspectives as wide-ranging as physics, philosophy, and anthropology, set the stage for the rise of modern ethnomusicology. Key to the establishment of formal musical scholarship in the United States, Seeger was also vitally interested in nurturing uniquely American musical forms and in bridging the gap between academia and the world outside the ivory tower. By presenting new views of Seeger's thought, incorporating in particular often neglected early writings, Understanding Charles Seeger, Pioneer in American Musicology provides a unique perspective on intellectual history in twentieth- century America.

The Wide Field of Finnish Ethnomusicology

It is easy to agree with many of the characteristics of Finnish ethnomusicology described above, even though each of us has our own personal view of the same phenomena. It is interesting to note, however, how different are our views of ethnomusicology as a discipline. Some regard EuroAmerican ethnomusicology and the European tradition of folk music research as separate domains, whereas to others ethnomusicology includes both of these. In addition, there are almost as many understandings of ethnomusicology as there are individual scholars. As current chair of Finland's Society for Ethnomusicology, I see Finnish ethnomusicology as the result of the activities of its members: ethnomusicology in Finland is what people who define themselves as ethnomusicologists do under the name of ethnomusicology. However, as an individual scholar interested in the development of theory and method and for the purposes of my own studies, I find it necessary to arrive at a more exact view of the discipline. It is a characteristic trait of Finnish ethnomusicologists that almost all of us also work actively outside the academy in the areas of public or applied ethnomusicology. Particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, many ethnomusicologists who were active members of the leftist movement attempted to break down the hegemony of art music in Finnish musical culture. These leftist activities influenced the early reception of Euro-American ethnomusicology in Finland and aroused resistance from the more conservative battalions of

"Supremely clubbed, devastatingly dubbed".

(Versions of this paper were presented at the 1990 meetings of the MidAtlantic Chapter of the Society for Ethnomusicology (MACSEM) in Newark, Delaware, and of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) in New Orleans, Louisiana. No quotations please without permission from the author.)

People's music comparatively: Style and stereotype, class and hegemony

In Ethnomusicology whatever revolution? ary potential there was in the "folk music" movement and its scholarly promoters, not? ably the Seeger and Lomax families, seems to have been swamped by the usual liberal per? spectives, professional standards and technical emphases as represented in the founding of the Society for Ethnomusicology in the early 1950s. There is a most enlightening history to be written of the Seeger and Lomax families and their efforts to define and create an Amer? ican "folk music" that could serve revolu? tionary purposes. I can't attempt a chapter of that book here. I can say that the "folk" idea has been bothering me ever since I first gave the con? cept any serious thought [ 1 ] and more recent discussions [2] have clarified the issues only to deepen my frustration. I can agree with Dorson, William Sturtevant and others that certain kinds of folk sub-cultures centered on sports, modes of transportation, hobbies, musical tastes, etc., are variably participated in by everyone; people from all classes and ethnic backgrounds pass along jokes and anec? dotes, narrate personal experiences peculiar to their time, place, vocation. Augmenting the peasants and primitives, we are all part-time folk in the sense of sharing values and consci? ousness with various groupings whose pro? cesses of cultural creation are not usually studied by scholars. Singing the unsung, map? ping the hidden strategies of daily life, may be a worthy enough goal for folklorists, but with? out a dialectical sense of class relations and power differentials, "folk," "folklore," "folk music," always feel like concepts in search of content, a field indiscriminately in search of data. For these reasons and in order to define a space between "folk" (with its strong conno? tations of "rural," "illiterate") and "popular" (with its denotation today of "mass medi? ated") I like to talk about people's music. The following analysis, comparing blues and polka as people's musics evolving in the twentieth century, has been presented in various forms to various forums over the past few years and no major objections to its formulations have been raised. I hope it gives some sense of what a dialectical ethnomusicology might be like. In 1928 both blues and polka appear on record for the first time in clean, modern, authentic form. In 1951 "dirty" blues and "honky style" polkas emerge from Chicago to challenge the established norms. Why this parallel pattern? How do economic trends and modes of production, the dominant cul? ture's stereotypes, working class recreational needs and, most important, the necessities of style combine to shape Afro-American and Polish-American music? Some simple Marxist assumptions ground these questions and my answers, but an older Apollonian/Dionysian dialectic is at work as well. It was in the course of reviewing Robert Palmer's book, Deep Blues [3], that I came upon a page of information that suggested the Charlie Keil is a Professor in the American Studies Depart? ment at the State University of New York, Buffalo.

The Anthropology of Dance: Reflections on the CORD Conference

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Anthropology of Dance: Reflections on the CORD ConferenceJudith Lynne HannaJudith Lynne Hanna Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Current Anthropology Volume 16, Number 3Sep., 1975 Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/201578 Views: 7Total views on this site Copyright 1975 The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological ResearchPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Fourth CORD Conference held with the Society for Ethnomusicology, hosted by the American Society for Eastern Arts, San Francisco, Fall 1974

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ETHNOMUSICOLOGY, Journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Vol. II, No. 1—3 (January, May and September, 1958)

ETHNOMUSICOLOGY, Journal of the Society for Ethnomusicology, Vol. II, No. 1—3 (January, May and September, 1958)