Crossing Boundaries: An Introductory Essay

Ethnomusicology Forum, 2011

Ethnomusicology, 2001

I. Ethnomusicology, Ethnographic Method, and "Non-Western" Music In an introduction to a special issue of the Journal of the American Musicological Society (JAMS) published in 1995, Regula Qureshi discussed the relationship between anthropology, history, and a broader musicology that includes ethnomusicology. Qureshi characterizes the "anthropologizing of music history," the primary and most productive relationship to date of anthropology and historical musicology, as beginning with "a recasting of the musical product into the realm of experience" (Qureshi 1995:335). The four essays that follow Qureshi's introduction interrogate music in culture through highlighting the notions of "dialogue, de-essentializing, and difference" (Qureshi 1995:339). Indeed, the specialJAMS issue builds on historical musicology's growing engagement with a range of anthropological theories that have served to enliven and enrich the musicological palette, forecast earlier in writings by Tomlinson (1984) and Treitler (1989). Ethnomusicologists, of course, have drawn freely on anthropology; indeed, they have spent much of the second half of the twentieth century trying to remake their own discipline in its image. To note just a few milestones, one might cite Merriam's Anthropology of Music (1964), Alan Lomax's Cantometrics (1976), Timothy Rice's remodeling of ethnomusicological theory (1987) based on readings of Clifford Geertz, and Mark Slobin's schema for transnational musics (1993) which draws upon Arjun Appardurai's notion of "ethnoscapes" (Appadurai 1990). Ethnomusicological research and writing have further interacted closely with a number of different streams of anthropological thought, ranging from structuralism, to symbolic, linguistic, and reflexive anthropology. While none of these efforts has resulted in a new theory that moves beyond its anthropological model, there have been, particularly recently, a number of increasingly nuanced case studies. Yet there is one area allied to anthropology in which ethnomusicologists alone have innovated. I have earlier suggested (Shelemay 1996b) that the domain of ethnographic method is where ethnomusicologists have most successfully and creatively occupied a disciplinary space midway between anthropology and musical scholarship. One is tempted to dub this a true "anthromusicology." But since terminology is already so problematic, I will draw instead on a distinction made over a decade ago by Anthony Seeger (1987). While historical musicologists are now beginning to participate actively in an "anthropology of music," bringing the "concepts, methods, and concerns of anthropology" to studies of music history, ethnomusicologists have in the meantime moved much more aggressively toward what Seeger has termed a "musical anthropology," exploring the way[s] "musi

2009

Entrainment theory describes the process of interaction between independent rhythmical processes. This paper defines entrainment in this general sense, then briefly explores its significance for human behaviour, and for musicmaking in particular. The final section outlines a research method suitable for studies of entrainment in inter-personal coordination, and with reference to published studies suggests that the study of musical entrainment can be a source of rich insight also for the study of human social interactions and their meanings.

Current Musicology, 1997

Anthropology is the field of academic study of human societies and culture. The term is derived from the ancient Greek words anthropos (human being) and logia (lore, study). Anthropology comprises both general and specific concerns about humanity and can best be understood as a metadiscipline of academic inquiry. Its interests largely overlap with the disciplines of biology, human anatomy, and physiology; paleontology, archaeology, and evolution studies; [p. 48 ↓ ] history, sociology, psychology, cultural studies, literature, and art studies; and linguistics and the cognitive sciences. Therefore, its broad scope can best be described by its subdisciplines of biological anthropology, archaeology, cultural and social anthropology, and linguistic or cognitive anthropology.

Music, individuals and contexts: dialectical interaction, 2019, ISBN 978-88-32932-64-5, págs. 1-8, 2019

Volume realizzato con il patrocinio dell'Associazione "Ricerca Continua. Alumni Lettere e Filosofi a Tor Vergata"

2 0 1 0 3 10 9 8 7 6 5 I S B N 0 -8 1 0 1 -0 6 0 7 -8 T h e paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence o f P a p e r for Printed L i b r a r y Materials, A N S I Z . 3 9 . 4 8 -1 9 9 2 . Benin bronze statue on cover and title page courtesy of the M u s e u m of Natural History, Chicago. Photograph by Justine Cordwell and Edward D a m s . Material from the following has been quoted with the permission of the publisher: Louis Harap, Social Roots