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Well, the literature is full of measurements by approximation and implication, that this music is like that, and that piece unlike this one, but not many have bitten the bullet of trying to come up with some kind of precise measurement. A few scholars, usually as byproducts of other quests, have presented something approximating inches and feet.

Let’s look at a few of examples, all the while wondering why they haven’t often been emulated.

An early landmark is Melville Herskovits’s (1945) rating of Africanisms in the music and other cultural domains of various Negro populations in the New World. There are five degrees of similarity, described only as “very, quite, somewhat, a little,” and “absent” or with a trace. One notes from Herskovits’s table (14) that music is generally more African than other domains. Indeed, Herskovits assigns the “very African” rating to the musics of Guiana, Haiti, most

of African-derived Brazilian cultures, and parts of Trinidad and Jamaica; the rest, including even the northern United States, is “quite African.” The musical distinctions are thus limited to two categories, and one wonders about Herskovits’s unwillingness to separate, say, Cuba from the United States. But it is interesting to see that in all of these cultures music is the most African domain, that folklore and magic follow, that religion is less African, and technology and economic life least. Herskovits may have missed an opportunity afforded by the fact that the music lends itself readily to being divided into elements and is capable of being quantified, but he was surely a pioneer in making comparative statements among musical repertories of an area, and among domains of culture, using a generalized African model as a base. He went well beyond the completely general and often sentimentalized way of putting it that dominated earlier writing.

Unsurprisingly, some other pioneering attempts came, so to speak, out of Herskovits’s shop. One of the most formidable, in its later effect on studies of music under cultural change (though I think the author had no thought of being formidable), was Richard Waterman’s comparison of African, African American, and European musics (1952;critiqued by C. Waterman in Nettl and Bohlman 1991), made for the purpose of showing why an African-derived music would flourish in a Western cultural context. Waterman simply said that African and Western musics have a number of common features, leaving to implication their mutually greater difference from other large bodies of music. Merriam (1956), student of both Herskovits and Waterman, took the matter a step further, bringing in Native American music, which, he asserts, is more distant from and less similar to either African or European than they are to each other. The large number of recent studies of syncretic musics in the Caribbean (e.g., Averill 1997;

Guilbault 1993; Moore 1997) considered these kinds of stylistic measurements to be helpful to their interpretations.

A major landmark in the enterprise of measuring similarities among such large bodies of music was continued by Alan Lomax in his often-mentioned cantometrics project (1968: 80–105). His measurements may be questioned and criticized, though they frequently confirmed what was widely assumed anyway, despite his weighting of the criteria in favor of those involving performance practice and singing style. Some of his conclusions surprised: For instance, Oceania is internally less homogeneous than Africa, which turns out to be highly unified but lacks the perfect homogeneity of Europe—a bit curious,

since Lomax elsewhere (1959) made sharp distinctions among some European areas. Some conclusions resulting from his musical analysis are difficult to accept, as are, even more emphatically, many of the conclusions about the relationships of musical style and culture type.

Some earlier, less sophisticated and comprehensive statistical studies can again be traced to Herskovits’s influence. Although studies by Densmore (1929b) and Kolinski (1936) are worthy precursors, Freeman’s and Merriam’s (1956) work stands out as a rigorously controlled early evaluation of the interval frequencies of two African American repertories, songs of the Ketu cult of Brazil and the Rada cult of Trinidad. The “discriminant function” technique was used to state differences and to determine the degree to which a newly analyzed song has a chance of being in one or the other repertory. The authors went to great lengths to show how different or similar these song groups are to each other, grasping firmly the nettle of this particular issue. Formal statistics was also used by Keil (1966), a sometime student of Merriam, in dealing with a completely different problem, the degree to which a number of musics are perceived as being different from each other by a group of American students.

Using the semantic differential technique of psychology, this study compared four Indian ragas and selections of jazz and Bach. The results reflected not an interpretation of broad stylistic differences but perception along several specified continua, for example, flexible to rigid, warm to cool. I mention this study here because it, too, is an early attempt to measure comparatively the difference among musics, at least as perceived by a specific group of listeners.

One would expect that studies of tune families such as those of Bayard would go in for statements of degrees of similarity, but these are at best present by implication. Moreover, the question of simple similarity and difference is sometimes obscured by the question of genetic relationship. Further, the analyst’s assessment of similarity may well differ from that of the informant. In a study that tries to take into account similarity, relationship, and the folk evaluation, Goertzen (1979) attempted to measure similarity among versions and variants of the North American fiddle tune “Billy in the Low Ground,” according to criteria that are revealed and weighted within the performance of fiddle tunes. The nature of repetitions of each strain makes clear what sorts of difference are considered significant by the performers. For instance, rhythms are varied at will while overall contour is varied only slightly, and diagnostic tones not at all. Replicating Bayard’s

findings, Goertzen showed that if two tunes differ drastically in the rhythms employed but are otherwise much alike, they are regarded by

“insiders” to be more similar than two tunes identical only in rhythm.

The question of measuring degrees of musical similarity and difference and associating this to genetic relationship has always been one of the most vexing in musicology and ethnomusicology. Although often not made explicit, it seems always to be with us, but those who have bitten the bullet and gone on record with some kind of even very rudimentary technique have not been widely followed. In the real world of music, however, in the age of globalization and of domination of technology, the measuring of works by degrees of similarity, determining whether there is chance similarity or a “note-for-note steal,” has become a major issue in the negotiation of intellectual property, and some ethnomusicologists have been expert witnesses and have been called upon to establish method and theory.

Making such measurements might also play a role in ethnomusicologists’ interest in protecting the musics and musicians whose work they study (see Frith 1993 and the bibliography in McCann 2001).

But within the immediate concerns of ethnomusicology, formal attempts at determining kinds and degrees of relationships in both style and content have not fared well in the period since 1985, a period in which personal interpretation, informed by consciousness of reflexivity and the belief that the position of the observer plays a major role in the quality of observations. In the first edition of this chapter, I wrote that “if we could increase the sophistication and precision of measuring similarity, and if we could also distinguish simple similarity from genetic relationship, many of the outstanding problems of analysis, description, and comparison would no doubt fade away.” Twenty years later, while the social analogues of true

“tune family” and mere “type”—nature and nurture—continue to be the subjects of raging debates, the interests of students of music seem to have moved in other directions.

PART 2