er like what many contemporary folk music researchers do. Distinctions between what I see as a typical ethnomusicological stance and that of a British folk music enthusiast and collector might be listed as follows (though I'm not qualified to represent the latter): 1. Ethnomusicologists are mostly embedded in an academic system that encourages certain kinds of research (for instance, the writing of weighty tomes and research papers replete with footnotes), above others, particularly practical performance. This doesn't mean we only like or only undertake the former, but it may mean that there is pressure on us to devote much of our energies to fulfilling job requirements in that respect. My impression is that folk music enthusiasts might argue that the ethnomusicologist's priorities need to be reversed. 2. In our research and writing, ethnomusicologists draw on a literature that refers to many different kinds of music and musical cultures from all around the world. As such, and when we write, we sometimes use a vocabulary that will be distinct from that habitually employed among British folk music researchers talking one to another. Terms like 'informants,' and 'participant-observation' trip from the tongue of the ethnomusicologist, and although they make sense to others, they may not feel entirely comfortable at first. Also,knowing that we are writing for an international crowd of ethnomusicological readers, we tend to be a bit self-conscious in terms of explaining our assumptions, rather than just getting stuck straight into 'the music itself'. My feeling is that the folk music expert finds some of this vocabulary and theoretical positioning alienating, and may find references to the musics of other peoples colourful but beside the point. 3. In fact, ethnomusicologists have a bit of a problem with the idea of 'the music itself', in that we know 'music' is not the same thing everywhere around the world. In practice, ethnomusicologists a...
