Ethnomusicology is the study of music from the cultural and social aspects of the people who make it. It asks not only how music works, but why humans make it at all.
DEFINING THE FIELD
Ethnomusicology is the study of music as human behavior — as something that people do, not merely something that exists as an abstract system of sounds. The word itself was coined in 1950 by the Dutch scholar Jaap Kunst, who combined the Greek ethnos (people, nation) with musicology to distinguish this approach from the study of Western art music in isolation. Where historical musicology asked "what is this music and when was it written?", ethnomusicology asks "what does this music mean, and what does it do for the people who make and hear it?"
That distinction shapes everything. Ethnomusicologists have traditionally worked not in archives but in communities — living alongside musicians, attending ceremonies, learning to play local instruments, and conducting interviews. The field borrows methods from cultural anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, history, and more recently from digital humanities and sound studies.
A BRIEF INTELLECTUAL HISTORY
The discipline has roots in the late nineteenth century, when European scholars began systematically collecting folk songs and "exotic" music from colonial territories. These early comparativists — Guido Adler, Carl Stumpf, Erich von Hornbostel — called the field "comparative musicology" and were preoccupied with origins: where did scales come from? Did all music derive from a single source? Their methods were often tainted by the racial hierarchies of the colonial era, and their conclusions frequently said more about European assumptions than about the musics they studied.
The paradigm shifted decisively in the 1950s and 1960s. Alan Merriam's landmark 1964 book "The Anthropology of Music" (Northwestern University Press) argued that music could only be understood within its cultural context. Merriam proposed a three-part model: sound (the acoustical phenomenon), behavior (the actions of musicians and listeners), and concept (the ideas people hold about music). This tripartite framework moved the field away from pure acoustical analysis toward social and cultural interpretation.
Mantle Hood, at UCLA in the 1950s and 1960s, introduced the concept of "bi-musicality" — the idea that ethnomusicologists should develop genuine performance competence in the music they study, not just observe from a distance. Hood's gamelan ensemble at UCLA became a model for university world music programs worldwide. His foundational text "The Ethnomusicologist" (McGraw-Hill, 1971) remains essential reading.
Bruno Nettl at the University of Illinois extended both lines of inquiry across a career spanning five decades. His "The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-one Issues and Concepts" (University of Illinois Press, 2nd ed. 2005) is the field's most comprehensive methodological handbook. Nettl insisted on taking seriously the musical values of all cultures — on the idea that every musical system has its own internal logic, its own standards of excellence, its own history.
THE CORE COMMITMENTS
Three principles define contemporary ethnomusicology. First: cultural relativity. No musical system is inherently superior to another. The Western diatonic scale is not the "natural" endpoint of musical evolution; it is one solution among thousands to the problem of organizing pitch. Second: fieldwork. Knowledge comes from sustained engagement with living musical communities, not from studying recordings in a library. Third: reflexivity. Ethnomusicologists must constantly examine their own cultural assumptions and the power relations embedded in research — who is studying whom, and why.
Philip Bohlman's "World Music: A Very Short Introduction" (Oxford University Press, 2002) adds a fourth concern: the politics of world music as a global category. The very term "world music" — coined as a marketing label in 1987 by a consortium of independent UK record labels — carries ideological freight. It typically means "non-Western music that Western audiences might buy," which is a commercial, not a musical, category. Ethnomusicologists are necessarily critics of such categories even as they sometimes work within them.
WHAT ETHNOMUSICOLOGY TEACHES MUSICIANS
For a practicing musician, ethnomusicology is not an abstract academic exercise. It is the difference between playing "in the style of" and actually understanding why a style works the way it does. It reveals that the assumptions you bring to music — about what constitutes a scale, a rhythm, a correct performance, a beautiful sound — are not universal laws but cultural inheritances. That recognition is, simultaneously, humbling and liberating.
Kay Kaufman Shelemay's "Soundscapes: Exploring Music in a Changing World" (W. W. Norton, 3rd ed. 2015) frames each world music tradition as a soundscape: a sonic environment shaped by geography, history, religion, economy, and social structure. You cannot fully understand any musical soundscape from the outside. But you can learn to listen more carefully, more humbly, and more richly — and that changes how you make music yourself.
FOUNDATIONAL CONCEPTS: EMIC AND ETIC
Ethnomusicologists distinguish between emic and etic perspectives, terms borrowed from linguist Kenneth Pike. An emic description reports a musical phenomenon as understood and described from within the culture itself: a Carnatic musician would describe their music in terms of raga, tala, gamaka, and rasa. An etic description analyzes the same phenomenon using categories developed outside the culture: a Western analyst might describe the same Carnatic performance in terms of pitch classes, time signatures, and ornament types. Both perspectives are legitimate and complementary, but conflating them, or assuming the etic categories are neutral while the emic categories are merely "local," is the central methodological error the field continually warns against.
Equally important is the concept of musical universals. Bruno Nettl identified a short list of features that appear in virtually all known human musical cultures: the use of song, the association of music with ritual, the existence of music for dance, the use of pitch organization (whether scalar or modal), and the use of rhythmic organization. What is striking is how brief this list is. Once we move beyond these structural near-universals, almost everything else about music varies across cultures: scales, instruments, tuning systems, performance contexts, aesthetic values, and the very definition of what counts as "music" in the first place.
KEY INSTITUTIONS AND JOURNALS
The Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), founded in 1955 at a meeting in Boston organized by Alan Merriam, David McAllester, Charles Seeger, and Willard Rhodes, is the discipline's principal professional organization in North America. Its journal Ethnomusicology, published by University of Illinois Press, is the field's flagship publication. The European Seminar in Ethnomusicology (ESEM), the International Council for Traditional Music (ICTM), and the British Forum for Ethnomusicology serve parallel functions internationally. Graduate training programs at UCLA, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Indiana University, Wesleyan, Harvard, SOAS University of London, and many others offer the doctoral preparation needed for full participation in the field.
EXERCISE: LISTENING WITH NEW EARS
Before the next lesson, choose one recording of a musical tradition you know nothing about. Listen three times: first for pure sound impression; second, try to identify what organizing principles you can hear (pulse, pitch relationships, texture, timbre); third, research one thing about the cultural context of that tradition from an institutional source. Notice how the third listening changes what you hear.