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Is Ethnomusicology Relevant to

already in use: ethnopoetics,ethnomedicine, ethnohistory, etc ... The point of all these terms was that the investigator sought to understand the topic from the perspective of the native 'informant'. The ethnomusicologist was as interested in, say, an Egyptian's 'musicology' - i.e., his explanations and understandings of music - as in his music itself. Adoption of the term signalled a departure from previous research, where it had often been assumed that there was no native theory. The comparative musicologist (or at least his caricature) had simply (or not so simply,when we think of old recording technology) remained in his laboratory where he amassed an archive of wax cylinders and the like. Sitting down (in an armchair, according to most stereotypes) he (less often, she) then wrote out the music and studied the resulting notation in order to produce theories about what was going on. The ethnomusicologist, on the other hand, is himself (and more and more, herself) a collector as well as an analyst. The model of collection, however, was not that of earlier scholars like Cecil Sharp, Percy Grainger or Bela Bartok. Rather than ranging widely, but quickly, across a broad region, the ethnomusicologist was supposed to gather materials through 'participant-observation'. Instead of gathering recordings alone, the ethnomusicological researcher gathered experience, both in the form of contextual explanation (based on observation and on informants' own readings of what was going on) and in the form of personal know-how, gained from actually learning to perform the music s/he was studying. In other words, the researcher has the responsibility of living among the researched; living as far as possible as one of the researched; taking full part in their musical lives; and gradually coming to understand, typically through personal engagement in performance, what music really means in that particular society. So far, I would suggest, this sounds rath...

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