[ANPPOM-L] FW: New edition of The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-One Issues and Concepts (Nettl, Bruno)

Sáb Mar 24 12:10:06 BRT 2007

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The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-One Issues and Concepts. By
Bruno Nettl. 2005. Champaign: University of Illinois Press. 440
pages. ISBN: 0-252-03033-8 (hard cover), 0-252-07278-2 (soft cover).

Reviewed by Daniel Reed, Indiana University

[Word count: 1157 words]

Bruno Nettl's The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-One Issues and
Concepts, published in 2005, is a second edition and substantial
revision of this same book originally published in 1983 as The Study
of Ethnomusicology: Twenty-Nine Issues and Concepts. The new edition
adds four completely new chapters along with new material seamlessly
interwoven with the old, significantly updating sections in nearly
every chapter.

This genre of book--the overarching, meta-level portrayal of a
discipline--is notoriously difficult to write. Generalizing without
glossing over, and presenting a complete picture of a field in a
single volume that prohibits comprehensive inclusion, are just two of
the challenges that vex authors of such texts. The Study of
Ethnomusicology, however, proves that Nettl is up to the task. This
volume offers a deft synthesis of ethnomusicological history and a
relatively thorough overview of many facets of the field, all based
upon Nettl's exhaustive knowledge of ethnomusicological literature.
But it is not just Nettl's great knowledge--based on half a century
working in the discipline--and nimble handling of sources that make
The Study of Ethnomusicology such an effective book; it is also his
rhetorical style. Nettl, using an authorial voice that is at once
authoritative and humble, has created one of those rare books that is
simultaneously densely packed with information and a fun read.
Peppered throughout the text are colorful, often humorous anecdotes
that render the text engaging and less dry than many books of a
similar scope and reach. These anecdotes manage to keep a potentially
unwieldy amount of information anchored in what is ultimately the
book's greatest strength--Nettl's wealth of personal experience
teaching, conducting research, and simply relating to the world
around him from the perspective of an ethnomusicologist. Just as
ethnomusicology attempts to understand music as a window into a
broader understanding of human culture and society, Nettl's anecdotes
serve as an experiential window into the culture of our field.

This book's thirty-one chapters are subdivided into four parts. "Part
1: The Musics of the World" lays out some of the basic elements of
ethnomusicology, including definitions of the field, concepts of
music, transcription, and description and analysis of music. "Part 2:
In the Field" covers areas such as the history and challenges of
fieldwork, relationships between researchers and people being
studied, archives and preservation, and changing notions of what
constitutes "the field." In "Part 3: In Human Culture," Nettl tackles
analytical models for studying music and culture, as well as
theoretical paradigms of the field. "Part 4: In All Varieties" probes
various foci of ethnomusicological scholarship, including musical
taxonomies, organology, gender, and teaching and learning, while the
final chapter constructs a high-level characterization of the history
of the field and new trends in relation to that history.

Several of the book's chapters deserve special mention. Three of the
four chapters new to this edition address issues that have become
major concerns in the field of ethnomusicology since the original
publication of this book. Chapter 14 explores changes in
ethnomusicological purview, or subjects of study, including the
increasingly common trend toward scholars conducting fieldwork in
their own "backyards," and the growing recognition that a model of
the field based upon easily distinguished societies with distinct
cultures has had to be abandoned. Chapter 17 purports to approach the
writing of ethnography. While in recent years ethnomusicologists have
developed an increased reflexive awareness of issues of
representation and the art and craft of ethnographic writing, this
chapter does not really address these issues, but rather offers a
historical overview of the range of different topics covered in
ethnomusicological ethnographies. Chapter 28 succinctly but
effectively summarizes the heightened sensitivity in the field of
ethnomusicology to women's musics and to gender inequities in the
discipline at large and its professional societies. The fourth new
chapter, in contrast to the other three, introduces to this volume a
mode of research that was already in decline in 1983 and is a rare
focus for today's ethnomusicologists: organology. Still, given the
importance of organological research in the history of the field,
this chapter is a welcome addition. Of particular interest to today's
students of ethnomusicology will be Chapter 30, which considers
social changes since 1990 that impact ethnomusicology, and resultant
recent changes in the field. In a world characterized by global
cultural flows and increasing intercultural interaction, concepts
such as globalization, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism have
gained currency in all social sciences, including ethnomusicology. As
Nettl writes, "If, after 1950 we moved from looking at the world as a
group of discrete musics to studying the musical results of their
interactions, beginning in the 1980s we proceeded further, to greater
emphasis on the ways in which the interactions of the world's
societies themselves determined musical life" (441).

Nettl's use of sources, generally agile and effective, is marred
occasionally by an over-reliance on some scholars and certain of
their works. This unevenness is likely revealing of Nettl's personal
judgement of what is, and what is not, the most valuable work in the
field (one might wish for Nettl to weigh in with a more direct
critique of the scholarship throughout the book). The Study of
Ethnomusicology's emphasis upon Alan P. Merriam's work, and
especially The Anthropology of Music, echoes a pattern found
throughout Nettl's work, which often builds upon Merriam's insights.
The prominence of Merriam in these pages, however, also attests to
the enduring value of his work. One has to wonder, though, more than
forty years after the publication of The Anthropology of Music,
whether the best analytical model in our field remains Merriam's
tri-partite conceptualization of music as sound, ideas, and behavior.
These frequent references to Merriam's innovations are but one
example of the rearview mirror emphasis of this book, which is better
in its treatment of the history of the field than in its grasping of
recent trends in ethnomusicological scholarship (Chapter 30 cited
above notwithstanding).

That said, The Study of Ethnomusicology is a gift to the field,
authored by one of the few scholars--a true giant in the
field--capable of such a monumental, broadly focused treatise. This
book's first edition has already spent over twenty years alongside
Merriam's The Anthropology of Music and Blacking's How Musical is
Man, and more than a decade in the company of critically important
overviews such as Helen Myers' Ethnomusicology: An Introduction, in
graduate and undergraduate courses on the history and theory of the
discipline. With this new edition, Nettl has revived this text's
relevance. Particularly if used in concert with recent books such as
Jennifer Post's Ethnomusicology: A Contemporary Reader which offer
more forward-looking overviews of the field, The Study of
Ethnomusicology should continue to prove useful to students and
scholars for years to come.

Works Cited:

Blacking, John. How Musical is Man? Seattle: University of Washington
Press. 1973.

Merriam, Alan P. The Anthropology of Music. Evanston: Northwestern
University Press. 1964.

Myers, Helen, ed. Ethnomusicology: An Introduction. London:
Macmillon. 1992.

Post, Jennifer, ed. Ethnomusicology: A Contemporary Reader. New York:
Routledge. 2006.
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