Attention to music in situations of cross-cultural contact occurred very early in the record of European exploration. The Calvinist missionary Jean de Léry visited Brazil for 10 months in 1557-58, and his book History of a journey made into the land of Brazil, otherwise called America, first published in 1578, includes numerous descriptions of musical performance, as well as music notations in the third edition of 1585[5] — surely among the first studies of non-Western music. Léry describes native Brazilian instruments, dancing that accompanied musical performances, and the singing style of the "savages",[6] and his account was incorporated into Montaigne’s 1580 essay "Des cannibales".[7]
Another early work to consider non-Western music was Charles de Rochefort’s The history of the Caribby-Islands. Translated in 1666 by the Englishman John Davies of Kidwelly, de Rochefort’s book includes a number of passages relating to the music of the Caribbean, including the following:
To divert themselves they also make several Musical Instruments, if they may be so called, on which they make a kind of harmony: Among others they have certain Tabours or Drums made of hollow Trees, over which they put a skin only at one end…To this may be added a kind of Organ which they make of Gourds, upon which they place a cord made of the string of a reed which they call Pite; and this chord being touch’d makes a sound which they think delightful. The concerts of divers other Savages are no better than theirs, and no less immusical to their ears who understand Musick. In the morning, as soon as they are up, they commonly play on the Flute or Pipe; of which Instrument they have several sorts, as well polish’d and as handsom as ours, and some of those made of the bones of their Enemies: And many among them can play with as much grace as can well be imagin’d for Savages.[8]
John Barrow’s 1806 tome An account of travels into the interior of Southern Africa in 1797 and 1798 includes the following passage:
It has frequently been observed that a savage who dances and sings must be happy. With him these operations can only be the effects of pleasurable sensations floating in his mind: in a civilized state, they are arts acquired by study, followed by fashion, and practised at appointed times, without having any reference to the passions. If dancing and singing were the tests by which the happiness of a Hottentot was to be tried, he would be found among the most miserable of all human beings.[9]
Although amusing when examined retrospectively, passing references to music do not make an important contribution to the development of ethnomusicology as a field of study, any more than old maps with "there be monsters here" attributed to unknown regions made an important contribution to the development of geography. These passages merely give us a taste of the European mindset which was present as the colonizing powers expanded their grasp around the world.
One early thinker, however, does stand out as having delineated at a very early stage some of the key orientations that would come to define the field of ethnomusicology, and that was Rousseau in his A Complete Dictionary of Music of 1779. The ethnomusicologist Anthony Seeger has interpreted Rousseau’s work as addressing some of the same questions that have occupied those working in the field ever since. One of these issues is that the transcription of musical sounds is a means to understand the physical laws of music; as Seeger writes, "musical transcriptions reveal certain similar sound processes governed by laws of acoustics",[10] and he points out that careful transcription has been a characteristic feature of most ethnomusicological studies. Rousseau’s study itself included transcriptions of Chinese, Persian, Native Canadian and Swiss songs.[11]
A second pervasive ethnomusicological issue identified by Seeger in Rousseau’s work is his emphasis on the cultural interpretation of music, exemplified by a certain Swiss air which provoked such a strong reaction among Swiss troops that it was banned, although Rousseau states that the transcription itself reveals no musical structures which could be responsible.[12]
In other words, Rousseau identified in his eighteenth-century writing the two dominant orientations of ethnomusicology, a discipline that did not begin to take form for another century: the first geared around careful transcription and musical analysis as the basis for understanding the music of the Other; and the second geared around an interpretation of music based on its cultural context. These sometimes-opposed, but never entirely exclusive, approaches have been a feature of ethnomusicology down to the present day, and are well exemplified by the work of Waterman and Moyle, of which more later.