And so to return to my titular metaphor: the gestation of the discipline of ethnomusicology lasted for roughly seven decades, from Alexander Ellis’ treatise on the musical scales of various nations in 1885 to the first annual meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology in 1956. There was a courting period of at least 300 years, beginning with some of the earliest accounts of non-Western music by travellers and missionaries. The period of labour seems to have started between the late 1940s, with the formation of the International Folk Music Council, and late 1952, when the "founding fathers" of the Society for Ethnomusicology first met at the American Anthropological Association conference to discuss forming a new society.

Using very broad strokes (and cognizant of the dangers of doing so), it is possible to characterize some of the predominant concerns of comparative musicology as a focus on the transcription and analysis of musical structures, especially melodic, scalar and intervallic structures, as the key to an understanding of non-Western music that allows for cross-cultural comparison, generalization and speculation about the origins and development of music. Although there is considerable internal diversity, most of the main figures in comparative musicology, such as Stumpf, Hornbostel and Sachs, dealt with these issues in some detail. This intellectual trajectory provided the theoretical and methodological foundation upon which Alice Moyle built her early work on Australian Aboriginal music.

It is also possible to characterize the anthropological study of music in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries as primarily concerned with the cultural context of musical performance, revealed through the process of salvage ethnography. Scholars like Boas, Sapir and Herskovits lacked any grand theory of music, although they did undertake limited transcription and analysis to complement transcriptions of song texts and detailed accounts of rituals. When they did focus on musical detail, they often singled out rhythmic structures for special consideration. This approach to the study of music paved the way for Richard Waterman’s work on both African-American and Australian Aboriginal musics.

This article has many weaknesses. In order to cover much ground, I have had to gloss over each of the scholars mentioned with undue haste, very likely ignoring many of the subtleties of their work. I have left out a great many significant early scholars of non-Western musics, such as Helen Roberts, Frances Densmore, Jaap Kunst, Robert Lachmann and Hugh Tracey. I have had to ignore the entire movement of scholars who studied the folk musics of Europe, including Percy Grainger, Béla Bartók, Cecil Sharp, Marius Barbeau, Maude Karpeles and many others. Perhaps most grievously, I have left unexamined, except in a passing way, the impact of two major developments on ethnomusicology: the invention of the phonograph^[141] and the development of music archives based on phonographic recordings. Both changed the course of ethnomusicology forever, and must wait for another article.

This article has at least pointed back in time to some of the important factors which led to the intellectual situation of both the founding of ethnomusicology as a discipline and of the earliest significant research on Australian Aboriginal music. The intellectual situation then, with a smaller number of musically inclined anthropologists and a larger number of ethnically inclined musicologists, continues to characterize the discipline today. However, as the cases of Richard Waterman and Alice Moyle demonstrate, the intellectual history of ethnomusicology is quite complex and no individual scholar’s development can be analyzed in a simplistic way. Waterman and Moyle each began their work on Australian Aboriginal music just as the scholarly study of non-Western music was in the process of becoming formalized as a discipline, and they were subject to a wide range of theoretical and methodological influences. Each went on to become extremely influential on the development of ethnomusicology in their respective countries as they trained future generations of researchers. As a pair, then, they shed some considerable light on the origins of ethnomusicology and the ways in which it has grown during the subsequent half-century. Now that the discipline is into late middle age, with grown-up children of its own, its intellectual trajectory will no doubt continue on a robust interdisciplinary path for generations to come.