The Ethnomusicology reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Ethnomusicology

Ethnomusicology is the study of music in its cultural context, cultural musicology. It can be considered the anthropology of music. Jeff Todd Titon has called it the study of "people making music". It is often thought of as a study of non-Western musics, but often includes the study of Western music from an anthropological perspective.

While musicology contends to be purely about music itself (almost always western classical music), ethnomusicologists are often interested in putting the music they study into a wider cultural context. Ethnomusicology as it emerged in the late 19th century and early 20th century, practiced by people such as Carl Stumpf, Erich von Hornbostel, Curt Sachs and Alexander J. Ellis, tended to focus on non-European music of an oral tradition, but in more recent years the field has expanded to embrace all musical styles from all parts of the world.

Ethnomusicologists often use techniques borrowed from anthropology, and people who have done well known ethnomusicological work have sometimes been anthropologists studying many other aspects of a society as well as their music. A well known example of such a study is Colin Turnbull's study of the Mbuti pygmies. Another example is Jaime de Angulo, a linguist who ended up learning much about the music of the Indians of Northern California (see [1]).

Three important centers for ethnomusicological study are the Universities of California at Los Angeles, Santa Barbara and Indiana University, Bloomington.

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