We’ve devoted five chapters now to defining and laying the groundwork—defined ethnomusicology and music, examined the concepts of creating music, and looked at the world of music in terms of its unity and its diversity—and are now ready to look at some of the things that ethnomusicologists—as ethnomusicologists—actually do.
Inchapter 1, the first clause of the definition of ethnomusicology stated that it is the study of any music from a comparative perspective, which sees each music as part of a world of musics.
Attitudes about the usefulness, efficacy, and even ethics of comparative study have changed. In 1953 I tried to present a panorama of Native American musical styles with a few examples for a class of students. There was a dearth of readily available records, but I tried to compare those that I had and surprised the students with the interesting variety of styles, showing that sharply descending contours characterized the songs of the Plains peoples, the use of the “rise” (an ascending phrase in the middle) was typical of some Yuman-speaking people’s songs of the Southwest, and antiphonal songs of peoples of the Southeast. Although they had at most heard some songs of the Plains peoples, they took this exercise at face value, as it was clear to them that its purpose was simply to exhibit the variety, which struck them as important, and which could only be illustrated through comparison.
Twenty-five years later I tried the same thing, for another class of more knowledgeable and sophisticated students who had heard much more Native American music. With a different attitude, they questioned the purposes of the comparison, wanted to know what valid conclusions one would draw from it, whether we were looking for differences or for similarities, had adequate samplings, were
talking about the same historical period. They criticized the parameters upon which comparison was made and wondered whether a comparative examination of thirty examples was at all a good way to provide an introduction to this music. They were suspicious of making comparisons of what they claimed were “apples and oranges.” Then, twenty-five years further on, a half-century after my first attempt, the students had become more accepting of comparison again, and they were interested, too, in how the various Native American musics related to those of Central Asia, South America, Native Australia.
My experience suggests agreement with Alan Merriam’s (1977a) article outlining the history of definitions of the field, which argues that there has been a gradual trend from the concept of ethnomusicology as an essentially comparative field to an attitude in which comparative study is criticized, avoided, postponed. Beginning with Guido Adler (1885:14), who in the first outline of the subdivisions of musicology stated that the purpose of this branch was to compare in order to provide groupings and classifications of the world’s music, Merriam goes on to cite Hood (1963: 233, and in Apel 1969: 299) to the effect that comparisons are premature until satisfactorily accurate descriptions of musical systems are available, also quoting Meyer (1960:49–50) and Blacking (1966:218), who believed that comparison may result in the improper interpretation of similarities and differences. Most recently, there’s a bifurcation between scholars who show a greater interest in comparative work and others who find it useless. Thus, we’re frequently faced (on Internet discussion groups, for example) with students asking whether this or that kind of music, or behavior, found in one culture, is also known elsewhere, and at the same time, we have to note that the vast majority of recent ethnomusicological publications are in no way interculturally comparative studies. Whether ethnomusicology is in principle a comparative field or not, there is no doubt that the nature and the role of comparison have all along been central issues. They will arise many times in these essays, in specific contexts, and I wish here only to address the question in general.
Of course the concept of comparison is problematic. To note that two things are in one way alike does not mean that they are otherwise similar, spring from the same source, or have the same meaning.
There are some respects in which no two creations of humankind can really be compared. On the other hand, I would maintain that even apples and oranges can very well be compared; they turn out to be
alike in being fruit, round, and about the same size but different in color, taste, and texture. The fact that, to itself, an apple may not feel the least bit like an orange and doesn’t know how it is to feel like an orange may be irrelevant for certain considerations, though crucial for others. The question is whether we can find systematic, elegant, and reliable ways to carry out the comparison, and whether, having done so, we find that it has been worth the effort. Actually, there is little discussion in the literature of ethnomusicology about comparative method. Many of the studies that use comparison do so by implication rather than explicitly, and the conclusions based on comparative work have their great limitations.
The usefulness and social and intellectual acceptability of comparative study hinges on several questions. Is the purpose of comparison to provide a convenient way of systematically setting forth a mass of diverse data, or to reconstruct history, to make possible interpretations about the nature of society and music, to show broad correlations of one sort or another, to illuminate social inequalities, or to make aesthetic judgments? Let’s first look at the rather convoluted history of comparison in ethnomusicology. Described in Wiora’s small but definitive book (1975) and more recently by A. Seeger (in Nettl and Bohlman 1991 and in Myers 1992), this history includes distinguished studies carefully executed, with criteria, method, and purpose clearly laid out. At the same time, there are unsupportable random comparisons made for capricious reasons or with an ideological agenda, such as relating Tibet to Portugal, but these make even the most devoted comparative musicologists cringe. While the concept of comparison appears basic to the early development of the field, it is also true that ethnomusicologists have not often set out systematically to make comparisons. Adler, in his classic article (1885), presumably felt that the immediate need was to classify the musics of the world in an ethnographic, that is, descriptive manner, in order to see what the universe of music contained, something best done through a series of comparisons.
To a certain extent the early period of ethnomusicology, through the early twentieth century, is marked by a general if not systematically controlled comparative approach, let’s call it a comparative flavor, in contrast to earlier publications on non-Western music, such as those of Amiot (1779), Kiesewetter (1842), and Villoteau (1809), which approach their subjects with particularist zeal. Beginning at the turn of the twentieth century, E. M. von Hornbostel did not engage very much
in comparison as such, but nevertheless provided a series of studies covering many parts of the world all based on a single analytical model, suggesting that comparative study was the ultimate purpose to which these descriptions would be put. His career, encompassing studies of the music of five continents, is itself an exercise in comparative method. Later scholars coming out of Hornbostel’s circle also sustained an interest in comparative study (see also Bingham 1914). There are, for example, the comparison of Pima and Pueblo musics in George Herzog’s dissertation (1936a), that of Yurok and Papago music in Schinhan’s thesis (1937), and Helen Roberts’s comparison of the styles and instruments in North American Indian culture areas (1936). And comparison saturates the many works of Curt Sachs (e.g., 1953, 1962).
The comparative approach of the early ethnomusicologists goes hand in hand with that of anthropologists of the same period. Around 1900 the purpose of anthropologists’ comparisons appears to have been primarily that of historical reconstruction, and the notion of a comparative method, though hardly ever defined, runs deep in the literature. In an important statement of the history of comparative anthropological study, Oscar Lewis (1956:260) very simply said:
“Most anthropological writings contain comparisons,” something one could equally maintain for ethnomusicological writings. But the broad comparisons and generalizations of early ethnomusicology, based inevitably on a small sample of evidence, may have made later scholars hesitant to pursue comparative method. A period of specialization followed. Spurred by greater opportunities for extended and efficient field research, the typical ethnomusicologist became more involved in one culture. Lengthier exposure instilled a respect for the intrinsic value of non-Western musics, particularly those of the Asian civilizations, which would only be satisfied by lifetime devotion to one culture, and this kind of study showed that the musics of the world are indeed in certain respects not comparable. While one can compare those elements of a music that are basically alike, each music also has elements so distinct as to make comparison a matter of methodological and conceptual difficulty. The comparative techniques that had been established by Hornbostel and his school—counting tones and intervals in scales, providing typologies of rhythmic units, and so forth—went only so far. It became clear that we must also study each music in terms of the theoretical system that its own culture provides for it, whether an explicitly articulated, written
system or one that must be derived from interview and analysis; and that one must study musical behavior in terms of the underlying value structure of the culture from which it comes. Thus the period after 1940 showed a marked decline in concern for comparative work in ethnomusicology. But some forty years later it began again to rear its head, and about 2000, it is clearly here again, though without an explicit methodology, and usually without being named.
Anthropology, which had in many cases served as a model for ethnomusicology and preceded it in approach and method by a decade or two, experienced a similar fate. A discipline that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries thrived on comparison, particularly for the purpose of theoretically determining historical processes, it began to move in the direction of specialized ethnography early in the 1900s.
But by the middle 1950s, and later even more, it again began to stress a comparative approach, as shown by the renewed emphasis on comparative study in some of the recent summaries of the field (e.g., Andre Beteille in Ingold 1994:1010–39;Keesing 1976;Naroll and Cohen 1973) and the development of a specialized literature on (Sarana 1975) and criticism of comparative method. On the other hand, some the major theoretical works of the period after 1980, taking it for granted that one looks at the world broadly by comparing the various phenomena one observes (see, e.g., Geertz 2000: 251), don’t go further to suggest a general methodology.