1

The Seminal Eighties

Historical Musicology and Ethnomusicology

Adler's Paradigm
This is a narration, and perhaps more, an interpretation, of what may be
considered the beginnings of musicology as a coherent discipline and
of its subdivision ethnomusicology. In 1885, Guido Adler ( r885, 3),
the man often credited with giving musicology its start, began
his most influential article by asserting, "Die Musikwissenschaft entstand gleichzeitig mit der Tonkunst"
(Musicology began simultaneously -with music).
Did he define Tonkunstas "music," or did he mean
"art music"? Either way, this origin occurred very,
very long ago.
Since Adler's time, music historians have declared several moments of creation: 1703, the publication date of Sebastien de Brossard's Dictionnaire

de musique; 1732, when Johann Walther's famous first dictionary of music

appeared; 1768, the publication year ofJean:Jacques Rousseau's Dictionnaire de musique; 1776, the year in which Burney's and Hawkins's histories
of music were published; and 1863, when Friedrich Chrysander published
the first volume of the Jahrbucher for musikalische Wissenschaft, ( Chrysander
1863-69), maybe the first periodical that looks remotely like the journal
of llmerican lo/Iusicology, or lvlusikforschung, or Music and Letters. But most
typically, the beginning of musicology is assigned to the 1885 publication
of the Vierteljahrschrift fur Musikwissenschajt and especially to Adler's article
because it lays out, in ways that have never been totally abandoned by music scholars in the Western world (and those elsewhere influenced by this
tradition), the structure and fundamental function of this field.
My father, Paul Nettl, considered himself a disciple of Adler, having
served for a time as his assistant, and thus frequently mentioned his name.
He would allude to Adler's great accomplishments-and sometimes also
to his stiff-necked irascibility, which was probably responsible for many of
his administrative successes: founding and supervising the Denkmiiler der
Tonkunst in Osterreich; publishing a major compendium of music history,
the Handbuch der Musikgeschichte ( 1930); and developing a Ph.D. program
that produced a generation of the most influential music historians. When
my father assisted him in the 1920s, Adler was already over seventy years
old but still going strong, and in 1927 he asserted Vienna's hegemony as
a musicological center by hosting an international centennial congress
commemorating Beethoven. Paul Nettl was proud of his association with
Adler, who like himself had been born to a Jewish fa..mily in a Germanspeakk~*~unity in the Czech lands (the little town ofEibenschiitz,
in southern Moravia, in 1855) and had held the celebrated musicology
chair in Prague when my father was still a little kid.
Some sixty years later it was time for another centennial, this one in
a small town well into the countryside of Lower Austria outside Vienna,
a region dotted with churches and monasteries. There I attended-in a
funny-looking hotel in a reconstructed medieval granary and thus comically named "Alter Schuttkasten," (Old Granary)-a conference about
Adler and the consequences of his article of 1885. Taken for granted in
the 1930s, when Adler worked as a historian uncovering great music (and
also some of the minor music) of that grand music historv of Austria tile
a..rtide began to stand out increasingly as Adler's~ost si~ificant ac~om
plishment because it stated, in unprecedentedly broad perspective, that
musicology should encompass all kinds of research on music. I believe it
.vas this holistic approach to the field that set musicology apart from other

CENTRAL ISSUES IN A GRAND HISTORY

disciplines among the humanities, and although most living musicologists

have perhaps never read that article, it has always been the cornerstone of
the field. To many, it qualifies as the moment at which musicology began.
In Adler's world, there was no doubt that the true music was the music
of Western culture and that the truest music was the art music of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Austria and Germany and maybe Italy and
France. Eventually Adler came to be considered the leader of paradigmatic
conservatives among music historians, despite his interest in Wagner and
his book on the (then) recently deceased Mahler (Adler 1916). What he
says here and there about non-,1\Testern music shows that he saw it in a
somewhat Darwinian style, as music representing an earlier stage of development far outstripped by European accomplishments. But in 1885,
barely iliirty years old, Adler was a kind of firebrand, bringing to the world
of scholarship a vision of a new field-musicology-and approaching his
task with a wide scope that was not soon if ever shared by scholarship in
the other arts.
The importance of the 1885 article rests in the way it lays out the field
of musicology. Let me remind you of the structure it imposes. There are
two major divisions, historical and systematic, each with subdivisions. Historical musicology includes paleography, taxonomy, the study of chronology (in music, theory, and practice), and, as a kind of annex, the history
of musical instruments. Systematic musicology includes theory-the bases
(}f harmony, rhythm, and melody; aesthetics; music pedagogy; and, again
as a kind of curious annex, something called "Musikologie," defined as
''comparative study for ethnographic purposes." There are several auxil'
iary sciences whose inclusion persuades us that Adler regarded musicology as closely related to other fields. It's important, by the way, to point
out that the kinds of considerations appropriate to ethnomusicology are
not found exclusively under "Musikologie." Adler's discussion of his chart
places non-Western and comparative study, and music's relationship to
the rest of culture, also within other aspects of the systematic branch of
musicology (particularly aesthetics) and in the historical branch as well.
The classes given in Adler's article stayed around for a long time, for example, in his methodological handbook ( 1930) and in the textbook Introduction to Musicology, by one of his North American students, Glen Haydon
(1941). Other outlines have been proposed (see especially C. Seeger 1977,
125-27). Despite some internecine strife and a lot of attitudes, however,
musicology has remained for over a century a single field in which most
individuals recognize that the rest, however far-flung ilieir musical interests,
are colleagues. It continues to be thus defined in dictionaries of music.

HISTORICAL MUSICOLOGY AND ETHNOMUSICOLOGY

Well, the division of a holistic musicology into such categories has perhaps become old hat, but a hundred years ago it must surely have been a
new thing. There were parallel stirrings elsewhere also: in Russia, in France,
even of a sort in the United States. Adler had predecessors, too, most obvious among them Friedrich Chrysander, who for a few years beginning in
1 86 3 published his Jahrbucher for musikalische Wissenschaft, in whose preface
he asserts that this "Wissenschaft"has several branches: history, aesthetics,
theory, folk music scholarship (including intercultural comparison), and
the presentation-for practical musicianship-of newly discovered works.
This periodical soon disappeared for lack of support, but Chrysander tells
the reader that however many concerns are represented among scholars
involved with music, they have much in common and ought at least to
share a periodical.
In I 884, however, Chrysander, by then about fifty-nine and the distinguished biographer and editor of Handel's works, and Philip Spitta, by
then about forty-five and the great biographer of Bach, joined with the
youthful Adler (who was living in Vienna but getting ready to go to Prague
to assume the chair of musicology) in founding the new Vierteljahrschrift
fur 1'w.usikwissenschaft. There was no fly on the wall, but I like to imagine
the older, established scholars permitting Adler, with his youthful energy
and enthusiasm, to be the principal architect of this venture while also
leaving him most of the work. Anyway, Adler's view of the field as encompassing all imaginable kinds of musical studv seems to have dominated
this journal throughout the ten years of its life. His own article leads the
others and is presented as a kind of position paper for what follows. In
/

s~m~"'~~:t;eads like the _work of a seasone~ scholar, stating its points

Wlth:a'Ufuonty and even maJesty. At the same arne, to lay out a field V~tith
courage and conviction, from scratch, may have been the characteristic
approach of a young man.
So far I've presented the founding of musicology as a function of the
"great man" theory of history-acts of courage and conviction. But as an
ethnomusicologist I'm much more inclined to look for cultural forces. v\'hv
should this periodical and its seminal article come about, and its impa~t
stick, particularly in 188 5 and in the German-speaking lands? Actually,
L"'le kind of grand en try that musicology experienced in the I 88os didn't
occur in a vacuum. This was a time when much was being done \Vith a lot
of courage and conviction, if not always >vith ethical conscience and good
judgment. The notion of a grand vision for a new discipline and the publication of a periodical exhibiting this broad scope seem to fit beautifully
into the 188os, a period when thinking big, innovation, looking at the

CENTRAL ISSUES IN A GRAND HISTORY

vvhole world, and looking at the whole nation were all very prominent in
the minds of European intellectuals, and maybe most so in those of GermanY and Austria. To illustrate the context in which Adle: v.~s working,
Ietme list at random a few of the things that were happenmg m I 88 5, as
)vell as just before and after that year.
Mavbe most significant for the development of the concept of ethnomusi~ology was the beginning, in 1884, of a series of conferences whe~e
European powers carved up the continent of Africa for themselv~s m
thoroughly cavalier fashion. In the United States, where ethnomusiCology would take root most vigorously, this era saw unrest on the lab~r
front and large-scale emigration from Eastern and Southern Europe; It
was also the last period in which a group of Native i\mericans, in this case
the so-called Plains Indians, used violence to oppose white domination,
and it included the Ghost Dance movement, which culminated in the
infai!lous massacre at Wounded Knee in 18go. The 188os were a period
()fgreat technological innovation, too. The short period of 1884-86 saw
the development of a practical phonograph, elect1ical devices in general,
agricultural machinery, the single-cylinder engine, coated photographic
paper, the rabies vaccine, cameras, the fountain pen, and fingerprinting.
The notion of comfort for all was presaged in 188 5 or thereabouts by the
discovery of gold in the Transvaal, the introduction of golf to America, the
opening of the first subway in London, and-in quite another way-the
initial publication of the Oxford English Dictionary. I've mentioned only a
few events, but enough perhaps to give something of the flavor of European thought and social relations of the time. More specifically, I suggest
that the history of musicology in the 188os can be understood through
three related themes of the period.
First, European society was at this time ready to take on the world and
devour it in various ways-politically and culturally, but also intellectually
and aesthetically. People tended to think big during this period. Huge
scholarlv endeavors incredibly ambitious schemes of invention, and vast
projects, in the arts ~re typical, paralleling the insupportably grand and,
in retrospect, intolerable political, social, and military schemes. Second,
there was an increasing interest in the concept of nationalism--something,
to be sure, going back over a hundred years-a nationalism that involved
understanding the cultural heterogeneity as well as unity of one's own nation. Taking on the world was to some extent a function of the groV~ting
nationalism of the time-particularly, at that late date, the nationalism
of Germany and the United States, both new participants in the colonial
activities in which Britain, France, Spain, and the Netherlands were sea-

HISTORICAL MUSICOLOGY AND ETHNOMUSICOLOGY

sonedveterans. And third, a result perhaps of the first two, there appeared
an interest in the relationships among cultures as Europe, devouring the
world and trying to digest it in ;vays compatible with the notions of nationalism, also had to absorb and reinterpret its variety. Taking on the world
and doing the impossible; collecting and utilizing one's own national heritage; and seeing what the world was made of, how one could make use
of it, and how it came to be-these are three mcyor themes of the 188os.
Arousing admiration as well as dread, they are ultimately the wellsprings
of musicology as it ;vas fashioned by Adler. Let me comment on each, illustrating briefly from the musicological literature of L~is seminal age.

Thinking Big
It is easy to see how someone like Edison (who thought he was up to solving all mechanical and electrical problems), Ranke (who was confident
of being able to present the whole history of the world), or Wagner (who
presented central questions of human history in a confluence of all performative arts at unprecedented length) could be seen as a paradigm of
an era in which people seemed to say, "Let's grab the whole world"-or
maybe, less politically and militarily, an era that said, "Let's learn everything about the world," "Let's not be afraid to think big," and also, with
supreme self-confidence, "We can find out everything." In the world of
politics and economics and even the arts, musicology was (and is) a humble byway, but here too the concept of thinking big asserts itself. The
establishment of musicology as a holistic field taking on all intellectual
prob!.~~~~~erning music, as outlined by Adler, dearly fits L"!J.e pattern,
and":ff~as'iit this time that the tradition of publishing complete collections such as the Gesmntausgaben of Bach, Handel, and Mozart, as well as
comprehensive editions such as Denkmiilerand collections of national folk
songs, really took off. Other publications, too, contributed to this notion
of comprehensiveness.
Take, for example, Victor Mahillon 's ( 1880-1922) celebrated five-volume catalog begun in 1880, of the instrument collection of the Royal
Conservatory of Brussels. The collection had some 3,500 specimens, and
Mahillon developed a taxonomy (derived from an old Indian system) that
eventually led to the now-standard classification of Hornbostel and Sachs
published in 1914. Mahillon divides the instrument groups into European
and non-European and gives a great deal of detail about many items, including scales, details of structure, and cultural context and interest. It's
a marvel of care and love, but the point I want to make here is that Mahi-

CENTRAl ISSUES IN A GRAND HISTORY

llon conceived of this as a work in which all imaginable instruments might

have a place-a work that encompassed the whole world of instruments.
Jnthe area of instruments, Mahillon was taking on the whole world.
The idea of establishing a kind of framework into which one might
lace all phenomena of a particular class within musical culture, from all
rocieties, for the purpose of comparative analysis was to become a hallillark of later ethnomusicology. Chronologically the first example of this
kind of framework was the practice devised by Stumpf, Hornbostel, and
Abraham (in many of t.'leir joint publications-see, e.g., val. 1 of Sammelbande, 1922-24) for describing, in similar terms, a great variety of the
world's music. More to the point, as this tradition was continued-and
more analogous to Mahillon's plan-was the approach of Mieczyslaw Kolinski (e.g., in 1965a and b), who in the 1950s and 196os promulgated
outlines for the comparative analysis of melodic contour, scale and mode,
rhythm, and tempo; these outlines gave space to all extant and imaginable
musics. Clearlv related, too, is the analytical component of Alan Lomax's
"cantometrics;' (first articulated in 1968), which tries to enable the analyst
tocreate a profile of any imaginable musical style. There are also the first
attempts at defining a universal, not culture-specific way of classifYing the
songs (folk songs and perhaps hymns) in a large collection, first in a rather
simple-minded plan by Oswald Koller ( 1 902-3), followed by a more sophisticated approach by the Finnish sch alar Ilmari Krohn ( I 902-3), whose
system was later adopted and thoroughly modified, with much success, by
Bela Bartok (1931) in his fundamental book on Hungarian folk songs.
If the idea of taking on the world is reflected in musical scholarship,
one would expect to find something like a world ethnography of music.
Mter all, if Leopold von Ranke could claim to present a true history of
the world (even though it turned out to be that of Europe to 1500), one
might expect that someone would have attempted a history of world music.
There isn't really enough data to accomplish that even today, and there
certainlv wasn't in 1885, and anyhow, the concept of music would have
been q~ite narrow back then. Still, the first large attempt at a comprehensive history of Western music, by August Wilhelm Ambros ( 1862), merits
consideration.
Ambros is worthy of a digression in any event, for he belongs to the
"thinking big" movement. A musical polymat.'!-composer, scholar, aesthetician earlv Czech-German-Bohemian musical nationalist-who spent
'
'
his life in Prague, he was born in 1816 and thus belongs to the generation
of Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Wagner; he was near the end of his life
(in 1876) by the time the great Czech nationalists Smetana and Dvo ak

HISTORICAL MUSICOLOGY AND ETHNOMUSICOLOGY

were transforming musical life in Prague. Ambros was arguably the first
person to hold a designated full professorship in musicology at a European
university, having in 186g been appointed professor of history of music
and art at the German-speaking branch of the University of Prague (and
thus forever justifying my native city's claim to a place in the early history
of musicology), and so he gets a few lines on these pages even though he
doesn't quite fit my theory, given that publication of his comprehensive
Geschichte der Musik began in 1862. His appointment no doubt resulted in
part from this great project.
Ambros, like Ranke, didn't get far in the chronology-he left ofhvith
Palestrina, in volume 3 ( 1868). But his history is an astonishing work considering the modest amount of data then available, and it bids fair to be an
ancestor of ethnomusicology. Ambros V\'TOte not only music history in the
narrow sense but also cultural and contextual history. It's amazing, also, to
find the first volume devoted entirely to non-Western music and ancient
Europe: n,yenty pages on China, forty on India, thirty on the Islamic Middle East, and some four hundred on Egyptians, Hebrews, Mesopotamians,
and Greeks. It was not an easy read, even for the reader of Am bros's time,
as he clearly knew when he famously said in his preface (xix), "Die Wissenschaft hat zu Zeiten das Recht, langweilig zu sein" (scholarship has the
right, occasionally, to be boring). But he was determined to put together
everything as he saw it and as it could be made available to him.
Since limited data ruled out any meaningful attempt at a comprehensive world music history in the 188os, as well as any proper description of
the contemporary musics of the world, we may look for the thinking-big
rks that say everything about a given subject, and so we're
eodore Baker's published dissertation Uber die Musik der nordamerikanischen Wilden (On the music of North American savages [ 1882]), the
first comprehensive book on Native American music. Born in New York
in 1851, Baker went to study music in Leipzig, where he earned a Ph.D.,
and eventually returned to the United States to become an editor and
lexicographer, finally retiring in Germany. The dissertation was wTitten
in German and is usually mentioned as being of only historical interest,
but it antedated the earliest tribal monographs on American Indian music
and the first general works on ethnomusicology and is impressive in its
inclusiveness. There are chapters about the various elements or structures
of music, such as poetry, tonality, melodic form, rhythm, recitative, and
instruments-an organization one might find in work from the 1950s.
Especially interesting is Baker's introduction to music in Indian culture,
because it gives a viewpoint not really very different from one we might

10

CENTRAl ISSUES IN A GRAND HISTORY

express today, albeit vvith different terminology. In contrast to some later

students, Baker does not denigrate Native A.mericans and takes their music
.seriously, pointing out that it has a long history, is closely related to social
life, and shares in certain cultural universals.
I also find myself impressed by Baker's sophistication in his description
of performance practice-done, I remind you, before the advent of field
Dividing this section into components rather in the manner
cantometrics, but with fewer categories, Baker discusses consonants and vowels and their treatment, range, general quality of voice,
aspects of singing style-slide, growl, portamento-and ornamentation.
Hewas sensitive to issues of performance practice almost fifty years before
the subject became au courant in musicology.
This sympathetic approach to the music of Native Americans occurred,
it's important to note, at a time when Indians were at the forefront of
,\rhite American consciousness. On t._l-j_e one hand, they were subject to
a.ri early, brutal form of systematic "ethnic cleansing," receiving, both officially and unofficially, harsh treatment from white Americans. But the
American body politic also began to view Native American concerns as a
challenging issue and the cultures as worthy of serious study. In the 188os,
the reservation system was finally being imposed on the Plains Indians,
and tribes were being forcibly moved, decimated by disease and starvation,
and murdered by military and civilians. They saw their lands taken and
redistributed. Nevertheless, in 1881, while Baker was writing in Leipzig,
Helen HuntJackson (1881) published an influential book, A Century of
J)ishonor; that aroused concern over the problems of Native Americans and
stimulated the founding of the Indian Rights Association, which lobbied
for liberalized legislation. And Franz Boas (1888) published
first large monograph, The CentmlEskimo. Baker's dissertation, possibly
acuriosity to his fellow students at the University of Leipzig, fits well into
the beginnings of white Americans' serious concern for Native Americans
and their cultures.
But if we are looking for the truly quintessential practitioner of "thinkbig" in this incunabular period of musicology, it has to be Hugo Ri- .....u.u, a towering figure who in literally dozens of volumes during his
career managed to write about virtually everything musicaL Born in
1849, he reached his peak in the 188os. His massive output is downright
frightening, though not totally uncharacteristic of German scholars of the
time, who were industrious (and didn't have to wash their cars or take out
the garbage), had excellent training in background and memory, and were
supremely self-confident. Today, in the era of peer review and computer-

HISTORICAl MUSICOlOGY AND ETHNOMUSICOLOGY

11

generated editorial fussiness, such producti-vity is virtually inconceivable,

and we readers may marvel-perhaps gratefully-that times have changed
so. Riemann's work includes histories, compilations, reference works, editions, theory texts, and monographs and articles in musicology. His publications from the 188os include about ten books on theory or theory texts
(though his landmark history of music theory was not to appear until the
next decade), a couple of books on notation, and two major encyclopedic
efforts. His music encyclopedia was published in two massive volumes in
1882 and has been repeatedly re-edited (although by now t.~e contents
have turned over completely). It was first written entirely by one man, yet
in length it rivals the later team-produced efforts such as the early editions
of the Grove dictionary. He also published an encyclopedia of the opera
(Riemann 1887), which, though it of course omitted many later operas
now in our standard repertoire-Puccini, Strauss, Berg-seems to have an
entry for every opera kno-wn or discovered by then and an entry on every
operatic subject, to say nothing of composers. Hardly useful any more, it
must have been a gold mine for the opera buff of a century ago. But in
Riemann's oeuvre these two works are almost drops in the bucket.
Spending his career in Leipzig and not personally associated with Adler,
Riemann lived an Adlerian life, devoting himself to studies in both the
theory and history of music and often dealing -with perception and theoretical universals. He also dipped into ethnomusicology-in a theoretical
fashion-extending to all music an eighteenth-century concept of rhythmic symmetry (called Vierhebigkeit) based on physiology that explained
everything in a fundamentally quadruple metric structure and examining
tonali
music. He was one of those people who evidently think
that"rt
ing worth doing is too difficult or too much work. During t.~e
188os and the few decades that followed, he wasn't unique in his efforts.
Think of all the folk songs Bela Bartok collected from Hungarians, Slovaks, Romanians, Bulgarians, Serbs, and Turks between 1900 and 1914,
just in his spare time. Or think of Thomas Edison, a man who rarely slept,
and his hundreds of inventions. Or think, for that matter, of Franz Boas,
the founder of i\merican-style anthropology, with his dozens of publications in all branches of anthropology, who ultimately made possible the
importation of European comparative musicology.
It really was a time when people in Western culture thought they could
do everything, conquering all worlds, physical, social, and intellectual.
Was this a sign of their courage, or should we see it more as an indication
of incredible immodesty, bravado, and greed? Were these great men heroes or the intellectual by-products of a society of bullies? I'm telling you

12

CENTRAL ISSUES IN A GRAND HISTORY

about the grand accomplishments of these early musicologists, but I see

an uncomfortable analogy between Adler's dividing up the world of music for a unitary musicology and the European powers dividing up Africa
into a unitary colonial system in the same year; or between Riemann's incredible concentration, indefatigable work habits, and wish to contribute
something to every branch of music and the twentieth-century Germans'
self-confidence as would-be military conquerors of the world. But no, Riemann-zany theories and all-surely wouldn't have recognized himself
in this parallel, and Adler, dictatorial to his assistants a..'ld students, would
have been horrified to find himself seen as a general or field marshal. He
himself, dying peacefully (I believe) in 1941 in Vienna, barely, perhaps
because he was then eighty-five, escaped perishing in the Holocaust.

Celebrating the Nation

The development of national consciousness is a major theme for students
of nineteenth-century history, but it plays a special role in the ideology
that led to the development of musicology. If one took on the world, it
was in a sense on behalf of one's nation, and one of the palpable values of
early musicological literature was love and admiration of nation-usually
one's own, but the concept of "nation" could also be celebrated by looking outward. The move toward publishing series of scores of major or even
minor works that in some sense represented the nation (series typically
titled Denkmiiler or 1\-Ionu-ments or Monumenta) is typical, as is the publication of comprehensive collections of folk songs with a national focus, as
well as the development of a national orientation to the writing of musichistory books. Musical land-grabbing sometimes accompanied political
and military action. Thus, the Austrian Denkmalerincludes works by composers usu~lly associated >vith Bohemia (Biber, Hammerschmidt), Italian
composers brought to Vienna or Prague mainly as a result of opera commissions (Cesti, Monteverdi), and composers whose works happened to
be included in manuscripts found on Austrian territory or even territory
arguably not properly Austrian, such as the works of Renaissance Dutch
composers discovered in manuscripts at Trent. So, certainly, issues of nation played an important role in the early development of musicology.
The conception of folk song as a defining element of nation was already
set forth in works by August Wilhelm Herder in the early nineteenth century; by then, the "nationhood" of ethnic groups such as Czechs, chafing
under the hegemony of empires, began to be recognized in the collecting of folk songs, as was the negotiation betv.,reen nation and region in

HISTORICAL MUSICOLOGY AND ETHNOMUSICOLOGY

13

the coalescing "second empire" of Germany. But in the last decades of

the century, the movement intensified. To illustrate, let me mention two
important figures, Ludwig Erk and Franz Magnus Boehme, who produced
(together and individually) collections of Volkslieder (folk songs) and volksthumliche Lieder (songs in a folklike vein) of Germany. These collections
use a debatable concept of folk music; land-grabbing of a sort is evident
in the inclusion of Low German, Dutch, and Scandinavian examples;
and the presentation of songs in chronological order by source is also
noteworthy not only because it provides something of scholarly value but
also because it suggests the significance of the German nation as a longenduring unit (for which one can make a better case ;vith folk songs than
with political history).
The collections by Erk and Boehme ( 1893-94) play a major role in the
history of folk-music scholarship, but as a group Lhey show that the German concept of folk music was one of emotional wealth, historical depth,
geographical breadth, and cultural relevance. Interestingly, as part of this
"program" of presentation, at the moment of ethnomusicology's most
seminal publications, Boehme (1886) published Geschicht.e des Tanzes in
Deutschland. Like many scholars of the time, Boehme was not a member
of the academic profession. He was involved in many aspects of musicas composer, editor, choral conductor, and collector and editor of folk
songs-at times making his living teaching elementary school in Weimar,
Dresden, and smaller towns of central Germany. He is best known for the
folk-song collections, but the subtitle of his book on dance, translated as
"a contribution to German history of customs, literature and music," has
to wa~~eart of the historian of ethnomusicology, as must its basic
tenet~ti'iat'scholarship on dance has a special relationship to musicology
(more special than, say, its relation to the history of theater or athletics).
I say this because in its publications since the 1 950s, the field of ethnomusicology has alw-ays reserved a special place for dance.
Boehme's history of dance in Germany is rather comprehensive, 1\<ith
chapters on various early periods. Some chapters also deal with problems
the art of dance has had in establishing itself as respectable. The subjects
ranged broadly: evaluation and preaching about dance from the Middle
Ages to the modem era, official prohibitions of dance, foreign dances in
Germany in the sixteenth century, old German ritual dances that have been
maintained into the nineteenth century, types of folk dances still in use today, social dance in Germany, dance music and dance musicians, and the
preservation of old folk dances in modem children's games. It's a true if
early contribution to tile anthropology of dance in that it thoroughly exam-

14

. . ciety's attitudes toward dance; it treats on an equal footing the genres

mes so
t lk d .
. I t
of dance that might be called artis_tic: popu1ar, and o ;.an
pays ~ o
to intercultural issues m 1ts study of the relatiOnship berneen
and non-German dances. It has its light moments, too. Boehme
o"'nn.se1> the attitude of his time (but only his?) when, defending the art of
he nevertileless criticizes the til en-current state of affairs:

I:

Our social dancing is too fast, unattractive, and even dangero~~ to the health.
The good old slow dances of earlier times, perhaps old-fasnroned and ped~ntic but at least not unhealthy, are everywhere scorned and.indeed har.dly
known; or the rapidity of our lifestyle has transformed them mto gallopmg
tempo in order to satisfy humanity, that living steam engine. (Boehme 1886,
1:31 ; my translation)

I don't know how widespread this kind of attitude may have been i~ .the
1 gg 05 . V\'hen I noticed it a hundred years later, it sounded very familiar.
Boehme's book leads me to explore two ideas. First is the develop~ent
()[folk-music collecting and scholarship in Europe-related, as I sa1~, to
the growth of nationalism-through the nineteenth century ~nd on, _m a
strand of intellectual history quite sepa...rate from the "comparative musicology" tilat was looking at non-Western music. \Veil, why shou~d Europe~
scholars interested in East Asian and Mrican music also be mterested m
the folk music of their own nations (or vice versa) or feel they have a lot
in common? I don't have an answer, but there were occasions when tile
two groups got together, as in 1 932, when Bartok, folk-song collector par
excellence, and Hornbostel, Lachmann, and Sachs, leaders of Germanstyle comparative musicology, all (as interestingly describe~ in ~cy 1991)
attended the Cairo Congress on Arabic Music and met With Middle Eas.tern musicians and scholars and with interested composers such as A.l01s
Haba of quarter-tone fame.
.
.
Nonetheless, the conception of ethnomusicology as a field m wh1ch students of both non--Western and folk musics had a stake, with books and
courses that included both, didn't come about until the work of George
Herzog, who put them together in his survey of research (19~6~).and in
his courses, such as the one I took with him titled "Folk and Pnmitive Music." In the nineteenth century, folk-music research was largely a matter
of national orientation and interest, and each nation eventually came to
have its most prominent folk-music collector or collectors-for example,
Bartok ( 1931 ) for the Hungarians, but much earlier, K J. Erben ( 1862)
for the Czechs, 0. Kolberg (1991) for the Poles, and Erk and Boehme

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( 1893-94) for the Germans. Attitudes differed. Bartok looked for what
he judged truly authentic and eliminated what seemed foreign, urban, or
precomposed. Erk and Boehme looked for early written sources of son!!S
that seemed folkish, included non-German tunes and texts if a relatio~
ship could be found, and were generally inclusive (or maybe expansive).
But surely in the 188os, the stream of folk-music scholarship was becoming a tributary leading to a larger ethnomusicology.
Further, the fact that Boehme undertook to write a history of dance of
all sorts in Germany is also significant to the early history of ethnomusicology. The world of dance in twentieth-century America strove for recognition as an independent art, and dance remains separate in performance
and teaching. It cooperates with music, of course, but also with theater,
visual art, and disciplines concerned with physiology. My daughter Rebecca, dancer, choreographer, and a professor of dance in my university,
wouldn't be inclined to consider attaching her department to the School
of Music. But in historical and ethnographic research it has been different. Ethnomusicologists since the 1950s have considered dance to fall
within their field's boundaries. The International Folk Music Council,
~ounded in 1947, included dance scholars and teachers among its governmg board from the beginning and has always had representatives of dance
on its program committees, to say nothing of paper sessions on dance
or of folk dancing in the evenings. In 1958, the first year its journal appeared, the Society ofEthnomusicology began having an associate editor
responsible for dance; this practice continued until197 2 . Since then, the
field of dance research and ethnochoreology has established itself in curricu~~~~ .. nizations. But the literature of ethnomusicology, of which
Boffin.! book may be considered an early exemplar, continues to have
much about dance and dancing.

Comprehending the /JOt her"

If twu of the themes of 188os Europe that informed musicology were the
discovery and conquest of the world and the understanding of one's national culture, it follows almost logically and inevitably that a third theme,
combining the first two, would lead to a concern with understanding the
~vorld tJ_tat has been politically or intellectually conquered, contemplatI~g the mt:rrelationship of its cultures and their components. Juxtaposition of nation and world led inevitably to a need to confront and relate to
the cultural "other," and this need was the most direct inspiration for the
development of ethnomusicology. Thus, if one wishes to argue about a
16

elate for the beginnings of musicology as a whole, claiming 1732 or 1776

as a worthv rival to 1885 as the field's proper commencement, I
it most persu~ive to assign the beginnings of ethnomusicology to n~
cte:ca~u::: other than the 188os. It was in this decade that landmark pubhand other events heralding the principal issues and paradigms of
ethnomusicology first appeared: intercultural studies in music, fieldthe studv of music in culture, comparative organology, attention to
problems-all of these surfaced almost simultaneously.
.
Still, these landmarks could arrive only in an atmosphere sympathetic
to a holistic view of musicology, and a holistic musicology could exist only
ifit.included pursuit of the cultural "other." Never mind that this pursuit
moved, at first, in peculiar and probably wrong-headed directions. I'm inclined to suggest that the various kinds of historical study that had been
carried out before the 188os required the appearance of something leading
to ethnomusicology in order to develop into a discipline that could incleed nroperly be called musicology rather than simply the history of music.
Inter;stingly, the same kind of development did not take place in other
humanistic fields such as art history, whose practitioners-perhaps for the
better, in their view-relegate the anthropological study of art to departments of anthropology, the psychology of art to psychology, the physical
C:omponents of ~rt to the sciences, and the contemplation of vernacular
genres such as commercial art to departinents of advertising.
.
The comprehensive approach to musicology promulgated by Adler 1s
superbly illustrated by the amazing variety of subjects in the first volume
( 1885) of the Vierteijahrschrift fur Musikwissenschajt. Immediately following
Adler's seminal article is one by Friedrich Chrysander on an unexpected
subject: "Uber die altindische Opfermusik" (On ancient Indian sacrificial
music), an analysis, on the basis of Sanskritic and other Indologicalliterature, of the Vedic chants. It takes issue with Sir William Jones, the great
Sanskritist who in 1 792 had vvritten the first Western study oflndian music. Chrysander's essay is followed by Philip Spitta's comprehensive study
about Sperontes's Singende lviuse an der Pleisse, a 1736 collection of popular
or vernacular music of Leipzig; an article by George Ellinger on Handel's
"Admetus" and its sources; and a piece by Paul GrafWaldersee about Vivaldi's violin concertos as arranged by Bach. Mathis Lussy's article on the
relationship between meter and rhythm sets out problems in analysis of
the use of time that are still with us and, as is particularly significant, criticizes theorists for emphasizing harmony and neglecting rhythm. There
is a large critical review essay by Carl Stumpf, the leading psychologist
whom we'll shortly meet as the "grandfather" of ethnomusicology, about

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British approaches to the psychology of music, dealing in large measure

with origin theories and summarizing contributions by Herbert Spencer,
James Sully, Charles Danvin, and Edmund Gumey. Then there is an early
article by Franz Xaver Haberl on the life and works ofDufay. In sum, the
Vierteljahrschrift published articles on the methodology of Lhe field, theory, psychology of music, sources, processes (the arrangements by Bach),
biography, popular music, and non-Western music. You can see why this
quarterly, >vith a scope broader than that of any periodical today, is often
properly regarded as the centerpiece of a period in which musicology as
a discipline began.
But I return to the third intellectual characteristic of the 188os-the
confrontation of the cultural "other"-and thus to the beginnings of ethnomusicology as a way of studying the relationships among cultures. Three
events of the decade are especially noteworthy. One, Carl Stumpf's article about the music of the Bella Coola Indians, appeared in 1886, in the
second volume of the Vierteljahrschrift. Hardly the first study of a tribal or
non-Westem repertory, it is often seen as a seminal work in ethnomusicology-principally, it seems to me, because it establishes a procedure
for describing "a" music that Stumpf himself used for various cultures (as
eventually Hombostel, Abraham, and others did, too) and that became
for a time a paradigm of description. Actually, though greatly modified
and expanded, it dominated as a method until ethnomusicologists, in tandem vvith the ascendancy of the "new ethnography" of the 1950s, came to
believe in the greater efficacy of follmving a culture's own way of presenting its music and of developing for each music a method of description
ape~~~~ itself.

IllAlnerica, Stumpf ( 1848-1936) is actually better known to historians

of psychology than to musicologists: his many publications are largely about
psychology, perception, and psychoacoustics, follo>ving in t.~e footsteps of
Hermann Helmholtz ( 1821-94). After 1886, however, he continued working with his student Hombostel, publishing transcriptions and analyses of
collections of recordings, w-riting an early synthesis on tribal music ( ~ g 11),
founding and guiding the Berlin PhonograniiDarchiv, and revealing in a
series of articles his conviction that the psychology of music and comparative musicology have a lot to say to each other. Some consider him the
originator of ethnomusicology, but that's a title we've bestowed on several.
It's important to note, however, that the close association of psychoacoustics-that is, what we now (in America) call "systematic musicology"-to
ethnomusicology has always been maintained in Germany and Austria
(and other parts of Europe). This association, largely lacking in the North

18

CENTRAL ISSUES IN A GRAND HISTORY

American tradition, goes back to Stumpf and to his student Hombostel

(see Hombostel1904-5, 1986), whose influence dete~ined its continued maintenance in the work of such scholars as Franz Fodermayr (I 971),
Walter Graf, and Albrecht Schneider ( 1976, 2006).
Stumpfs Danvinian view of the music of nonliterate peoples as a frozen
stage in normal evolution is not dissimilar to Adler's and is reflec_ted. in
much later scholarship, related to the approaches of cultural evolut10msts
()fmany stripes. His article about the Bella Coola (Stumpf 1886) would
hardly be helpful to anyone today but still merits a moment of celebration
as a historical milestone. Four areas of method in this article are worth mentioning: ( 1 ) It is centered on a set of transcriptions that are presented in the
text; (2) it includes an element-by-element discussion of the musical style;
( ) unlike most others writing even a few decades later, Stumpf describes
3
in detail how he gathered his data, interviewed, and transcribed; and (4)
in a harbinger of the interest in reflexivity that came a century later, he
discusses his relationship to Nutsiluska, his principal consultant and singer.
Near the end of his essay, Stumpf contemplates the cross-cultural vievvs held
by himself and Nutsiluska, imagining their contrastive reactions to Bach's
&-minor Mass and thus interestingly-though maybe naively-examining
the specialness of\Vestern culture, which colonizes and holds hegemony
over other cultures but also looks at them -vvi.th a relativistic perspective.
Stumpfs transcriptions were made from live performances, but the second major event leading to the development of ethnomusicology in the
188os is so obviously essential that one need hardly mention it. It is the
first field recording of American Indian music-and of any non--Western
music-made in 18go by Walter Fewkes. A biologist by training, Fewkes
worked t.~roughout his life in several disciplines-ethnology, archeology,
zoology-and his contributions to ethnomusicology were only a small part
of his oeuvre. Interested in Native Americans from several viewpoints, he
undertook to test the usefulness of the phonograph, developed some ten
years earlier, for field research. In 18go, Fewkes recorded songs of the
Passamaquoddy of Maine and the Zuni of Arizona. The technique spread
like wildfire, of course; soon, despite the difficulties of the cylinder technology, anthropologists, missionaries, and tourists were recording music
in many parts of the world. By 1go 1, important archives had already been
established in Vienna and Berlin.
I don't have to talk about the importance of recording in the history
of music and musicology, but adopting field recording as a central datagathering technique is not something that was "natural" or "inevitable."
One might, for example, have concentrated on gathering commercial

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