Grove Ethnomusicology Article Flashcards
Comparative Musicology (in german)
Vergleichende Musikwissenschaft
Berlin School
- -cylinders from German ethnologists in colonial territories
- -psychologists and acousticians
- -theories on distribution of musical styles, instruments, tuning
- -1930s: reconstructions of music history
- -aka “cultural-historical school”
Carl Stumpf - Bella Coola Indians (1886)
- touring group from B.C.
- Germans say birth of ethnomusicology is scholarly discipline
- repertory of single group
- description of musical elements
- transcriptions in Western notation
- discussion in cultural context
- principle assumption: world’s musics can be divided into individual units, each with its own system and rationale
Carl Stumpf – overall
- Berlin School
- founded Berlin Institute of Psychology
- gave birth to Gestalt psychology
- Songs of Bella Coola Indians (1886) – first german ethnomusicology
Erich M. von Hornbostel
- Carl Stumpf’s assistant
- collaborated w Otto Abraham (psychology and absolute pitch)
- many articles appended to German ethnographies
- dealing w scales, tonal systems, and rhythms from cylinder collections
- assistants: Marius Schneider, Mieczyslaw KOLINSKI; CURT SACHS
Viennese scholars
- Robert Lach (Adler’s successor)
- Ricahrd Wallaschek
- Siegfried Nadel
- Walter Graf
- Albet Wellek
Aim of comparative musicology
outline historical and genetic relationships between music systems of the world
- evolutionary models and genetic classification in biology
- many trained in nat. sciences
- In britain, Ellis trained in linguistics
- progression from ‘simple’ to ‘complex’/’sophisticated’
- Eurocentric perspective, e.g. ‘primitive’ v. ‘civilized’ peoples
- drew on limited samples of cylinders
- tonal measurement and psychological testing to develop theories
When did comparative musicology end
1885, Hornbostel’s death
Training of comparative musicologists
- Hornbostel, chemsitry
- Boas, physics and geography
- Abraham, physician (psychology and absolute pitch)
diffusionist theories in comp. musicology
Hornbostel, Kunst, Sachs claimed:
- historical links between music of insular South-east Asia and of Africa
- connection b/w Madagascar and South-east Asia, based on instruments, tunings and linguistic relationships
AM Jones (1964)
correlated other cultural elements (fine arts, agriculture) with diffusionist music thinking.
‘Theory of Culture Circles’
- Fritz Graebner, Father Wilhelm Schmidt, Fatehr Wilhelm Koppers
- culture developed in ONE GEOGRAPHICAL REGION
- CENTRAL ASIA
- spread OUT in waves of migration from this center
- similarities in ‘culture traits’ (objects and forms of social organization) resulted from past migrations
- FARTHEST traits = EARLIEST
- assumed uninventiveness of humankind (monogenesis)
- Curt Sachs organology
Curt Sachs organology
- instruments historically ordered and organized
- 23 areas distribution and technological level
- scattered regions = older
- high importance despite short role in anthropology
Theory of Blown Fifths
- Hornbostel
- most sensational proposal of Berlin School
- found many eg’s of equipentatonic and equiheptatonic scales (measuring tunings of instrument collections)
- equally spaced tunings seemed widespread and thus significant
- from blowing Brazilian panpipes: H proposed
- many non-Western tunings based on intervals of 678 sents (rather than pythagorean 702 cents)
- failed to heed Ellis’s argument
- disproved by Manfred Bukofzer for lack of evidence
- hurt Berlin school’s credibility
Alexander Ellis’s warning
‘there is no practical way of arriving at the real pitch of a musical scale, when it cannot be heard as played by a native musician; and even in the latter case we only obtain that particular musician’s tuning of the scale, not the theory on which it was founded’ (1885)
phonography
- 1877 Thomas Edison
- facilitated fieldwork
- playback allowed transcribe, analyze
first phonograph fieldwork
Jesse Walter Fewkes (1890)
- Passamaquoddy Indians of Maine
Hungary: Bela vikar (1896)
Russia: Evgeniya Linoyova 1897
Alexander Ellis
- to Brits, the father of ethnomusicology
- ‘on the musical scales of various nations’ (1885)
- first scientific appraisal of non-Western tuning systems
- devised ‘cents’ systems (he thought he had faulty hearing)
- semitone = 100 cents
- precision –> objective measurement of non-Western scales
- So, Ellis found scales were the product of CULTURAL INVENTION, NOT based on natural acoustical laws
- All musical scales = equally natural, equally good
- brought into question the superiority of Western tembered tuning
- led to open-minded cross-cultural comparison of musical systems
“contemporary ancestor” theories
- primitive music = early phase in evolution of European art music
- Alexander Ellis dealt blow to these
A. Ellis’s pronouncement to Royal Society (1885)
the Musical Scale is not one, not ‘natural’, nor even founded necessarily on the laws of the constitution of musical sound, so beautifully worked out by Helmholtz, but very diverse, very artificial, and very capricious”
Alexander Ellis’s research subjects
- assistant Alfred James Kipkins (specialist on temperament and pitch)
- visiting Japanese musicians
- Central Javanese music during gamelan appearance at London Aquarium
- Chinese Court Music at International Health Exhibition
Netherlands ethno
- colonial holdings: East Indies (now Indonesia), the Moluccas, Dutch Antilles, Dutch Guiana (Suriname)
- important ethnographies from Java (Indonesian archipelago), includd music (from 1850)
- Jaap Kunst
John Blacking
- everyone’s a musician (AF)
- ‘humanly organized sound’
- pushed scientific turn into BIOLOGY
- Music-making BASED IN THE HUMAN BODY
- in genetic and physical structures
- therefore SPECIES SPECIFIC within nature
- thus CULTURE NOT context for music
- Culture a PRODUCT of musical practices that combine with other elements to form SOCIETY
- Thus provoked ideas about dance, but didn’t complete
- music-making primary context in which a community reproduces itself
