Ethnomusicology Journal Archive Musings

Some observations on the newsletter and journal Ethno-musicology.

·      The first issue, from December 1953, doesn’t have any articles and is described not as a journal but as a newsletter aspiring to become a journal.  It is comprised simply of an introduction discussing the aims of the publication, a section of “Notes and Reviews” with short submissions from fieldworkers outlining their current work, and a bibliography compiling a list of recent publications in the field (to be purchased on Amazon, of course).  The divisions of the bibliography are Africa, American Indian, and Other, the last comprised mostly of a list of recordings.  The call for correspondence and information in the introduction is fascinating and it gave me a sense of how scattered academic disciplines were.  Having grown up with the internet, I take it for granted that scholars can communicate easily with one another, access information immediately, and identify each other and the salient writings of their discipline.

·      The publication begins as the newsletter of “Ethno-musicology.” In 1958 it becomes “Ethnomusicology.”  I think people used to be more into dividing these types of words with a hyphen.  Archaeo-musicology is another example that came up in one of the early newsletters.

·      Without easy means of disseminating and collecting news, the world seems so much bigger!  One note reads “news of the present situation in Germany.”  Scholars had left Germany during the Nazi regime and they were trying to reconstruct the discipline there.

·      The authors make clear from the start their intention to establish an organization to connect ethnomusicologists internationally.  And they had received money from the “defunct American Society for Comparative Musicology.”  I think this is cool, because as the organization using the old term died out, it passed some of its last funds on to help start the new organization under the new term Ethnomusicology.

·      Newsletter No. 2 begins its “Notes and News” section with an entry from Belgium written in un-translated French (one of two such entries).  Would most of the academic audience have spoken French?  It’s interesting to consider language choices in this international English journal.  They don’t address the issue directly, but it seems they assume scholars in other countries to whom they have sent this publication will read English.  

·      The submissions for the second newsletter were much longer than those in the first.  The bibliography that follows includes a comprehensive compilation of works by German scholar Erich Moritz von Hornbostel.  Then the bibliography then continues on from the first newsletter, listing more work on Africa and America (they switched from American Indians to the broader term) and adding sections on Asia and Oceania and Europe.

·      F. A. Kuttner writes about his work on a two volume “history and sociology of Chinese music.”  He also criticizes “the whole system of comparative methods” as “obsolete and inadequate” and discusses his intention to establish the discipline of Far Eastern archaeo-musicology.  I wonder what became of this project.  I tried to find out on Google, but couldn’t find it, although I found an article by Kuttner.

·      Jaap Kunst writes in that he is one of the few people in Holland “working in this field.”  In his position in the ethno-musicological section of the Royal Tropical Institute, he is “all at the same time, founder, leader, assistant, clerical help, and messenger boy.”  It seems that in many countries (in Germany too, as I mentioned), a career as an ethnomusicologist is a lonely one.  Many contributors to this newsletter come across as eager to participate in a dialogue with their peers.  This level of isolation is really quite unimaginable to me, having grown up with Google and Facebook. 

·      The newsletter evolved into a journal with extended pieces by fieldworkers.  And pictures and diagrams. “Music on Ifaluk Atoll in the Caroline Islands”, by Edwin Grant Burrows, offers precise observations, but its conclusions include words and phrases such as “display the rudiments of”, “”an art so meager in total content”, and “extremely primitive.”  This piece really showed the mindset Burrows was approaching this work with: scientific (decidedly etic) analysis of a Primitive Culture.Some observations on the newsletter and journal Ethno-musicology.

·      The first issue, from December 1953, doesn’t have any articles and is described not as a journal but as a newsletter aspiring to become a journal.  It is comprised simply of an introduction discussing the aims of the publication, a section of “Notes and Reviews” with short submissions from fieldworkers outlining their current work, and a bibliography compiling a list of recent publications in the field (to be purchased on Amazon, of course).  The divisions of the bibliography are Africa, American Indian, and Other, the last comprised mostly of a list of recordings.  The call for correspondence and information in the introduction is fascinating and it gave me a sense of how scattered academic disciplines were.  Having grown up with the internet, I take it for granted that scholars can communicate easily with one another, access information immediately, and identify each other and the salient writings of their discipline.

·      The publication begins as the newsletter of “Ethno-musicology.” In 1958 it becomes “Ethnomusicology.”  I think people used to be more into dividing these types of words with a hyphen.  Archaeo-musicology is another example that came up in one of the early newsletters.

·      Without easy means of disseminating and collecting news, the world seems so much bigger!  One note reads “news of the present situation in Germany.”  Scholars had left Germany during the Nazi regime and they were trying to reconstruct the discipline there.

·      The authors make clear from the start their intention to establish an organization to connect ethnomusicologists internationally.  And they had received money from the “defunct American Society for Comparative Musicology.”  I think this is cool, because as the organization using the old term died out, it passed some of its last funds on to help start the new organization under the new term Ethnomusicology.

·      Newsletter No. 2 begins its “Notes and News” section with an entry from Belgium written in un-translated French (one of two such entries).  Would most of the academic audience have spoken French?  It’s interesting to consider language choices in this international English journal.  They don’t address the issue directly, but it seems they assume scholars in other countries to whom they have sent this publication will read English.  

·      The submissions for the second newsletter were much longer than those in the first.  The bibliography that follows includes a comprehensive compilation of works by German scholar Erich Moritz von Hornbostel.  Then the bibliography then continues on from the first newsletter, listing more work on Africa and America (they switched from American Indians to the broader term) and adding sections on Asia and Oceania and Europe.

·      F. A. Kuttner writes about his work on a two volume “history and sociology of Chinese music.”  He also criticizes “the whole system of comparative methods” as “obsolete and inadequate” and discusses his intention to establish the discipline of Far Eastern archaeo-musicology.  I wonder what became of this project.  I tried to find out on Google, but couldn’t find it, although I found an article by Kuttner.

·      Jaap Kunst writes in that he is one of the few people in Holland “working in this field.”  In his position in the ethno-musicological section of the Royal Tropical Institute, he is “all at the same time, founder, leader, assistant, clerical help, and messenger boy.”  It seems that in many countries (in Germany too, as I mentioned), a career as an ethnomusicologist is a lonely one.  Many contributors to this newsletter come across as eager to participate in a dialogue with their peers.  This level of isolation is really quite unimaginable to me, having grown up with Google and Facebook. 

·      The newsletter evolved into a journal with extended pieces by fieldworkers.  And pictures and diagrams. “Music on Ifaluk Atoll in the Caroline Islands”, by Edwin Grant Burrows, offers precise observations, but its conclusions include words and phrases such as “display the rudiments of”, “”an art so meager in total content”, and “extremely primitive.”  This piece really showed the mindset Burrows was approaching this work with: scientific (decidedly etic) analysis of a Primitive Culture.

Topic Post for Ethnographic Fieldwork

For my ethnographic fieldwork project, I will be attending the Brown/RISD Hillel’s weekly Havurah service.  This service is uniquely oriented around group singing and is located in a high ceilinged room that fits 30-40 people.  I am told everyone sits in a circle and participates in the music making, which includes a lot of harmonizing and a broad repertoire of songs from many periods of Jewish history.

Many questions and issues will come up in this study.  Where and when did the songs come from?  How did they come to be sung here at Brown in 2012?  Who comes to these services?  What kinds of backgrounds do people have, what other communities are they a part of?  Do people focus on songs’ texts?  What nigunim (wordless songs) are sung and what role do they play in the service?  How does music mediate the experience and liturgical content of the service? Looking at the technical construction of the music, what melodic and harmonic modes are used? Are there recurring motives and progressions?

I am Jewish but have not practiced in college nor been a part of the Jewish community at Brown.  I am coming to this project, then, with a conflicted notion of my own connection to this community.  On the one hand, I will likely be familiar with many of the customs and songs of a Shabbat service.  On the other, I have stood apart from the broader Jewish community for several years, have not engaged with this local community, and will be approaching the service with an academic lens.  It is from this liminal position that I will attempt to flesh out an ethnography of the Havurah group and the music it produces.

Critical Review 2

Seeger outlines an approach toward understanding music in its full context.  He advocates the use of general probing questions about the music, its audience, and the location and time it is performed.  Ultimately he suggests that we need to approach music—people’s experience of music, the sociology of music—from as many angles as possible.  We must attempt to relate to the significance people attribute to musical events by investigating our differing mental representations of the music in its full context.   Our experience of music is shaped by our past experiences, communal memory, the location and timing of the performance, our company, and other factors.  These elements together generate our mental representation, categorization, and the meaning we attribute to a musical event. 

Does a music-culture develop when these factors overlap and personal significance gives way to a shared sense of meaning, a shared societal representation and understanding of the music?

Critical Review 1

In their essay “Tradition, Genuine or Spurious”, Handler and Linnekin elaborate on the notion of tradition as a continual reinvention/reinterpretation of the past.  They see tradition as a symbolic entity formed in the present in a specific cultural context, rather than as a static set of beliefs and practices that are passed down as unchanging cultural objects from one generation to the next.  They use examples from societies in Hawaii and Quebec where traditions take on new meanings as they are reinterpreted consciously in the present in an attempt to reclaim continuity with the past.  Ultimately, the authors contend, our feeling that a tradition can be labeled objectively genuine or spurious underscores our misunderstanding of the meaning of tradition, something defined in the present in terms of its relation to an interpreted past.

Discussion question: Can we make any objective claims about a culture’s traditions?  Aren’t there still traditions that continue to be passed down as A. L. Kroeber suggests? Can’t we make some judgments regarding the continuity of those practices?  What about a Rosh Hashanah or Shabbat meal with an orthodox Jewish family?