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This article examines the development of cross-cultural music research, from its earliest days in the collection, notation and analysis of "primitive music" and "folk songs" to the first annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology in 1956. The gestation period was long, and the birth, like all births, was largely unheralded and was most significant to the immediate family. Now that ethnomusicology is entering middle age, its true significance can perhaps be better appreciated.
The history of cross-cultural music research parallels the history of cross-cultural research more generally, with some interesting and significant differences. As in anthropology, the evolutionist perspective of early ethnomusicology gave way to functionalism and then to more interpretive approaches, but it has been suggested that the discipline has dragged its feet theoretically and theoretical change has been slow.[1] Ethnomusicology has been influenced throughout its history by its two parent disciplines, anthropology and musicology,[2] a process that has at times been harmonious and, at other times, like a custody battle. And, more than many other disciplines, the development of ethnomusicology has been closely tied to technological changes such as the invention of the phonograph. There are, then, unique and distinctive lessons to be learned by historicizing cross-cultural music research. In this article, I will attempt to take stock of these lessons, and to consider the impact this field of research has had on cross-cultural research more broadly. I will also consider in some detail how the development of ethnomusicology has influenced Australian Aboriginal ethnography, specifically in northeast Arnhem Land, and the early development of Australian Aboriginal studies.
This article will also consider the place of two pioneering ethnomusicologists who were concerned with the study of Australian Aboriginal music, and whose research represents the end-point of the trajectory to be described below. The American ethnomusicologist Richard Waterman was not the first to make field recordings of Aboriginal music in Arnhem Land, nor was he the first to analyze recordings of Aboriginal music. He was, however, the first ethnomusicologist to conduct long-term, primary research in the region, and to make a substantial number of field recordings. Waterman was a student of Melville Herskovits, who was himself a student of Franz Boas, and so Waterman is firmly placed within the anthropological branch of ethnomusicology. The Australian ethnomusicologist Alice Moyle probably did more in her distinguished career for the discipline’s development in Australia than any other scholar. She was a prolific recordist, although her periods in the field were relatively brief. Moyle began her studies of Aboriginal music under Donald Peart, the first professor of music at the University of Sydney, and her research reveals a firm grounding in the musicological branch of ethnomusicology.
These two scholars began their research on Australian Aboriginal music in the early- to-mid 1950s, roughly coinciding with the formation in the U.S. of the Society for Ethnomusicology. In late 1952 the music scholars David McAllester, Alan Merriam, Willard Rhodes and Charles Seeger met to discuss how to facilitate communication between scholars with common interests; in 1953 they sent out a letter to 66 people to solicit interest, which 10 people signed (including Waterman). The first Ethno-Musicology Newsletter appeared later that year. The first annual meeting of the Society occurred in September 1956.[3] For the purposes of this article, I take the foundation of this society as formally marking the birth of the discipline known as “ethnomusicology”, even though the academic study of non-Western musics is much older.[4]
So what do we have? We have the formation of a scholarly society from a number of diverse origins, whose membership is roughly split between anthropologists and musicologists with a common interest in non-Western and/or folk musics. And we have two scholars of Australian music who began their research on that topic during the same formative period, each representing fairly clearly one of the two orientations which are still with us today — although I will demonstrate that their complex research paths cannot be characterized in a simplistic way. In this article I want to examine the intellectual trajectory that led to that formative period, to examine an unusual and lengthy period of gestation which led to this peculiar and hybrid birth.