I

DE INVESTIGACIONES
OCIALES
LIOTECA

For Wanda

2 5 1983, 2005 by the Board of Trustees

of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.
First edition published 1983
Manufactured in the United States of America

C) This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Nettl, Bruno, 1930—

The study of ethnomusicology : thirty-one issues and concepts /
Bruno Nettl.— 2nd ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-252-03033-8 (doth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-252-03033-8 (ClOth : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-252-07278-9 (paper : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-252-07278-2 (paper : alk. paper)
1. Ethnomusicology. I. Title.
ML3798.N47 2005
780'.89--dc22 2005011181

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IN
 13. I Am the Greatest: Ordinary and Exceptional 29. Diversity and Difference: Some Minorities 419
Musicians 172 30. A New Era: The 199os and Beyond 431
14. You Call That Fieldwork? Redefining the "Field" 184 31. The Shape of the Story: Remarks on History 443
15. What Do You Think You're Doing? The Host's
Perspective 197 References 455
Index 495
PART 3: In Human Culture

16. Music and "That Complex Whole": Music in

Culture 215
17. The Meat-and-Potatoes Book: Musical
Ethnography 232
18. Music Hath Charms: Uses and Functions 244
19. In the Beginning: On the Origins of Music 259
20. The Continuity of Change: On People Changing
Their Music 272
21. Recorded, Printed, Written, Oral: Traditions 291
22. The Basic Unit of Afi Culture and Civilization: Signs
and Symbols 302
23. Location, Location, Location! Interpreting Geographic
Distribution 320
24. The Whys of Musical Style: Determinants 339

PART 4: In All Varieties

25. I've Never Heard a Horse Sing: Musical Taxonomies 357

26. The Creatures of Jubal: Instruments 376

27. How Do You Get to Carnegie Hall? Teaching

and Learning 388
28. I'm a Stranger Here Myself: Women's Music, Women
in Music 404
 160 • IN THE FIELD
to being an outsider, providing a limited if unique view. In the end, this is
our proper role, whether it is as a European or American working in Turkey,
a university-educated Nigerian or Indian working in a village, a woman from
the countryside who has been trained to look at her culture in special ways
not shared by her fellows, or an American trying to find rhyme and reason
in the musical life of his or her own urban community.
Once more: What is it that our consultante and teachers want from us?
Most significantly, they demand recognition of their art and their culture.
Helen Myers (1992: 16) characterized ethnomusicologists as the "great egali-
tarians of musicology," though admitting that each quickly springs to the de-
fense of "his" or "her" music. But to our teachers abroad, for us simply to be
egalitarians may not go far enough. It may be a cultural universal, the belief
that one's own music is special—not only to one's own society, but maybe
globally. The German music historian Eggebrecht (Dahlhaus and Eggebrecht
1985: 191-92) tells us that the essence of Western music resides in its "pri-
macy among the arts; it is incomparable in its nature and its ambivalence,
reflection of the cosmos, creator and destroyer of the good and the evil." It's
a strong statement of the uniqueness of Western culture, bu t as a lover of Mo-
zart, Beethoven, and Schubert, in my heart I can't contradict. Elsewhere too,
however, one hears of the uniqueness of cultures. A musician in Madras in-
sisted to me that the world needed only two things to exist in peace: English
literature—principally Shakespeare—and Carnatic music, which can express
everything that humans wish musically to express. Carnatic music, he said,
was the most essential music of humanity. And then, my Blackfoot teacher:
"The right way to do something is to sing the right song with it." He corrected
himself: "The right Blackfoot way to do something is to sing the right song
with it." Wasn't this true in other societies, I asked? Could he imagine this?
He didn't know, but he believed not, because this was a way in which the
Blackfoot were distinct from other nations. And finally there was my teacher ,
in Iran, who often spoke with me about various musics he had heard or heard
about. Persian music, with its twelve modes, dastgahs, is the richest, as it has
a universal expressiveness; it could reflect everything about Persian life and
culture. European music has only two modes compared to the twelve. Music
as a "reflection of the cosmos, creator and destroyer of good and evil," as
Eggebrecht gave it; this was how my three cited consultants—and maybe
many other musicians throughout the world—would have gladly character-
ized their own musical system. It's possible that my teacher in Iran, telling me
that I would "never understand this music," meant that I would never ap-
preciate its unique grandeur in a world context.
12
Hanging on for Dear Life:
Archives and Preservation
Archives of the World, Unite!
Of the many defmitions of ethnomusicology, none explicitly or implicitly in-
dudes the cóncept of preservation as a major purpose or component. Yet the
preservation of music in various forms has all along been one of major
activities. This urge, characteristic especially of the early history of our field,
continues with us in the present. At the 1950 meetings of folklorists and ethno-
musicologists in Bloomington, Indiana (reproduced in Thompson 195o and
also described in Thompson 1996: 259-71), major sessions were devoted to
the subject, and in 1963, at the sixteenth annual conference of the Interna-
tional Folk Music Council in Jerusalem, a full session was held on "preser-
vation and renewal of folk and traditional music." Alan Lomax devoted much
of his life trying to defend against the "cultural grey-out" that would result
from the disappearance of separable traditions, and indeed, among his many
activities, the recording, preservation, and archiving of American and Euro-
pean folk musics were a major component of his career. As a matter of fact,
many musicologists of all stripes have been motivated throughout their his-
tory by the belief that the interesting music of the world is disappearing, and
that our field as a whole must hang on for dear life, recording and notating
and "storing as against some kind of musical famine. It's a warning that has
been promulgated for almost 150 years, and while it must be admitted that
music—songl, pieces, performance practices—is as interesting as ever, it is a
warning well taken. Through the twentieth century, ethnomusicologists have
sometimes worked hand in hand with, but sometimes also in opposition to,
162 • IN THE FIELD
a lot of educational, commercial, artistic, and governmental (as well as
antigovernmental) institutions that have devoted themselves to preservation
of local and national traditions, often selectively and with ulterior motives,
sometimes reviving (see Rosenberg 1993), occasionally just inventing.
Obviously, one must collect and preserve materials in order to study them.
But collecting and preserving have sometimes become ends in themselves. In
the nineteenth century particularly, but also later, many scholars were devoted
more or less exclusively to preservation. They made recordings, sometimes in
enormous quantity, and proceeded to store them in archives, perhaps tran-
scribing them into notation, eventually preserving them in print as well; and
often went no further. Scholars of Western folk music in particular built vast
collections, and they were followed by students of Native American music and
to a smaller extent by those of African and Asian musics. In the period before
1950 a few major archives, storehouses of recorded collections, were founded,
beginning with the Phonogrammarchiv in Berlin, started by Stumpf and
Hornbostel in 190o (see Reinhard 1961, Katz 2003, and two publications sur-
veying and documenting with recordings the first ioo years of its history:
Simon 2000; Simon and Wegner 2000)—which was actually preceded slightly
by the less prominent Vienna effort (1899). Also among the most eminent were
the German Folk Song Archives in Freiburg (founded in 1914, at first consist-
ing only of manuscripts), the Archive of Folk Song in the Library of Congress
(in 1928), and the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University (in 1948).
Major figures in the history of ethnomusicology lave been in manageriál po-
sitions in these archives—including, for example, Marius Schneider and Robert
Lachmann in Berlin, John and Alan Lomax, Joseph Hickerson, and Alan Jab-
bour at the Library of Congress, and George List, Frank Gillis, and Anthony
Seeger at Indiana (see Porterfield 1996; Spear 1978,1991). Since 195o, many uni-
versities as well as libraries, state historical institutions, formally constituted
tribal organizations, and other kinds of units have built their own archives of
(or including) traditional music. National archives in old and new nations have
been developed throughout the world, among the most prominent recent ones
being the Archives and Research Center for Ethnomusicology in New Delhi.
Ethnomusicologists at universities wished in the first instance to house ma-
terials collected by themselves and their students, eventually in order to pro-
vide large collections for teaching, study, and research. National archives, in-
cluding some in new nations established since the 1950s, attempt to make
comprehensive collections of national heritage. Some archives are incredibly
large; the number of songs and pieces at Indiana University amounts to hun-
dreds of thousands. Even the archive at the University of Illinois, known to
ARCHIVES AND PRESERVATION • 163
be very modest in scope, includes over 400 collections comprising some io,000
songs and pieces. A few archives, such as those at Indiana University and at
UCLA, attempt to be comprehensive, providing research materials for all. Some
are simply working collections for local products and needs. Others again try
to be comprehensive for a special ama; the Phonoteque in the Jewish Music
Research Center in Jerusalem collects what may by some criterion be consid-
ered Jewish music and materials of all types found in Israel. The Archive of
Folk Song of the Library of Congress, now associated with the American Folk-
life Center but also the Smithsonian Follcways project (whose job is not just
preservation of musics but preserving a particular facet of the history of preser-
vation itself), has concentrated on the musics found in the United States.
Clearly, one of the initial purposes of our field, stated early on by Horn-
bostel (1905), was simple preservation, using the then difficult techniques of
recording on cylinders. Gradually, as recording became more convenient and
efficient, and as the world's peoples began to produce their own recordings,
the attitudes toward preservation became more sophisticated and critical. The
history of music preservation includes a lot beyond archiving—publishing„
performance, and more—but the development and use of archives has been
a major preoccupation of ethnomusicologists and is thus the principal sub-
ject of this chapter.
Why archive, why try to save everything? For academice, the question might
be considered a "no-brainer." Preservation, obviously, is necessary for his-
torical research, for restudy, for comparison. But archives also play an im-
portant role in what has come to be called applied ethnomusicology—the use
of ethnomusicological ideas and data to help outside the academy. This in-
dudes the production of text and instructional materials for schools, the sup-
port of ethnic festivals, the rebuilding of cultures, all of them dependent on
sound and visual records of activities and performances no longer practiced.
One of the major problems of an archive is organization and cataloguing,
given the many different ways in which the world's cultures classify and iden-
tify their musical works, and the problem is exacerbated by the tendency of
many recordists to provide insufficient information to place a recording in
its proper cultural context. The idiosyncratic tendencies of fieldworkers in
organizing_and identifying materials certainly didn't help. Library cataloguing
systems provide imperfect models. Beyond this, the archives of the world, de-
spite energetic efforts (e.g., the International Association of Sound Archives)
have not found a way to cooperate fully in exchanging and combining infor-
mation. It is, for example, extremely difficult to locate all of the field record-
ings that have been made in one culture or of one repertory, however small
164 IN THE FIELD
and locali7ed, or all archival versions of one song. An early attempt to list all
collections in American archives was published by Herzog (1936b), but this
surprisingly large account was made at a time when the making of record-
ings was difficult and still fairly rare. After the introduction of magnetic tape,
archives increased in size and number. In 1958, Indiana University began the
publication of a smáll periodical whose job it was to exchange information,
The Folklore and Folk Music Archivist, eventually replaced by a periodical titled
Resound, and there have been other, larger initiatives to establish communi-
cation. They have gradually, increased the degree to which they have begun if
not to unite and standardize their methods then to cooperate. Briegleb (197o)
listed and briefly described 124 archives in the United States and Canada.
Chaudhuri (1992) provides a succinct summary of the history and problems
of archiving. Increasingly, archivists have found ways to pool their informa-
tion and resources, but the amount of material going to archives grows expó-
nentially, and so do private collections. Finding a way to fight entropy of disks
and tapes and providing efficient compact permanent storage and retrieval is
one of the great challenges of the early twenty-first century.
Most of these archives are of greatest use to individuals who are more or
less permanently at their institutions, bu't they are gradually living up to
greater potentials. Many of the recordings they contain are restricted by the
collectors and may thus be heard but not fully utilized for research. It may
amaze the reader that few recordings (with significant exceptions) are fully
used by anyone other than the collectors. While the archives continue to
grow, most scholars in their research rely upon their own recordings. But it
is my distinct impression that the period since 198o has seen a revival of in-
terest in archives and increasing use. Some of this may be due to the tendency
of small communities—for example, Native American nations, or provinces,
states, and towns—to develop individual archives of their musical traditions.
While this development is encouraging—and is itself a subject for ethno-
musicological research—it doesn't necessarily improve the prospects for cen-
tralized discographic or bibliographic control.
Oldies Are Goodies
We talk about sound recordings as the norm of the preservation side of eth-
nomusicology, but of course films and videos and DVDs now accompany and
may begin to replace them; and recordings are also accompanied—and were
preceded by—still photographs. But preservation was first accomplished by
ARCHIVES AND PRESERVATION • 165
the production of transcriptions published in large numbers in grand collec-
tions. There are hundreds of relevant publications, but as almost random ex-
amples, let me mention only the monuments of German folk music (Erk
1893-94, Deutsches Volksliedarchiv 1935-74); the many volumes of Hungarian
and other eastern European folk song produced as a result of the collecting ac-
tivities of Bela Bartók and Zoltan Kodály (e.g., Bartók 1959; Corpus 1953; Hun-
garian Academy of Sciences 1992); the collections of English folk songs found
in the various states of the United States and in part stimulated in the 193os
by the Works Progress Administration (see, e.g., Cox 1939; for discussion,
Canon 1963; Library of Congress 1942: 2-3; Wilgus 1959: 186 87), and the mul-
-
tivolume collection of Norwegian violin and Hardanger fiddle music (Gurvin
1958-67). The two forms of preservation, recording and notation, differ fun-
damentally in various ways. For one thing, collections of transcriptions un-
dergo far more filtering; they are in effect collections of recordings processed,
organized, and actually preserved selectively in the way transcription is selec-
tive in what is chosen for representation. Also, record archives might include
materials recorded by amateurs who had no scholarly intent, and by anthro-
pologists whose interests were not specifically musical, while the printed col-
lections required musicianship for transcribing and making decisions on das-
sification and order. The students of folk music were certainly interested in
preserving a heritage they felt was slipping away, and this feeling of imminent
loss was a powerful stimulus for more specifically ethnomusicological inquiry.
The point is that these collectors often sought what was specifically old, partly
because it was disappearing but partly, one feels, also because what was old was
in a sense good. If today's disc jockeys defensively announce "oldies but good-
ies," many folk music collectors insisted that the oldies were ipso facto the
goodies. Certain scholars who made truly enormous contributions with their
insight into musical and cultural processes, such as Bartók and Sharp, were in-
tent upon extracting from modernizing and urbanizing villages and small
towns that which was ancient. To be sure, this attitude was not limited to
printed collections but includes initiatives such as the resurrections of older
recordings in catalog form (e.g., the listing of old field recordings at Indiana
University by A. Seeger and Spear 1987), reissues of older recordings (Horn-
bostel's Demonstration Collection of the 192os) and energetic recording proj-
ects (as in Feld 2001). Some collectors even went out of their way to prove that
what they collected was indeed old.
Preservation characterized the early history of our field, but it continued
as an important facet even while the value of contemplating the present carne
more to the fore, and in the late twentieth century, it came back to claim a
166 • IN THE FIELD
greater role again. The publication of comprehensive collections of national
folk music carne to be characteristic of musical scholarship in eastern Eu-
rope after 1950. In the study of non-Western music, the idea of comprehen-
sive collecting never attained the same importance—with notable excep-
tions, such as the hundreds of North American Indian songs published by
Frances Densmore—and to some, at least, the idea of holding fast to early
materials was not so much a consideration as was the very discovery of what
was then a new phenomenon. Students of Western folk music, on the other
hand, were no doubt affected by the movement in historical musicology to
publish series of "monuments" of national music history. Beginning with
the German Denkmaler deutscher Tonkunst (1892) and the more prestigious
Austrian Denkmüler der Tonkunst in Osterreich (1894), various national se-
ries were begun—the most recent, Music of the U.S.A. (MUSA), being pub-
lished under the aegis of the American Musicological Society—and much of
the energy of music historians in the first half of the twentieth century was
directed to the publication, in authentic form, of hundreds of often obscure
but "historically" important works. In the end, one would in a sense "have"
the materials of art music of a given country. Suiely the tendency to pub-
lish large folk music collections with attention to their authenticity and to
the inclusion of good and perhaps especially old versions and variants was
similarly motivated. Folk music scholars and folklorists were interested in
the preservation of the most important stories, songs, melodies of the rural
societies of Europe and eventually the Americas. I am not sure whether much
thought was given to the eventual use of such collections. As in the case of
the classical monumenta, performance was at least sometimes considered.
It was assumed, one suspects, that large-scale, artifact-oriented, multipur-
pose collections would satisfy a number of future needs, historical, ethno-
graphic, and practical. It doesn't always seem to have worked out so.
While the collections grew, the scholars who after about 196o were con-
cerned with increasingly specialized problems in ethnomusicology tended
to decrease concern with comprehensive collecting, and there seemed to de-
velop something of a split between them and those we might label profes-
sional collectors. Having recognized that music in oral tradition is subject to
constant change, that songs, styles, repertories are in a state of flux, we may
wonder why so many individuals devoted themselves to collecting largely for
the purpose of preserving what was in a sense a piece of ephemera.
Early in the twentieth century there developed an approach to preserving
that one might include among the activities of "applied" ethnomusicology.
Practical publications to be used for teaching, the development of records for
ARCHIVES AND PRESERVATION • 167
promulgating what could be of interest to the amateur, the idea of urging peo-
ple in various communities to continue the older practices of music and
dance, finding government support for encouraging them and indeed in some
ways improving their practice, all these seem to involve preservation in a dif-
ferent sense, holding materials for practical use by peoples thought to be in
danger of losing their heritage. This kind of preservation is not a practice al-
ways resulting in unmitigated benefit. Much of it, especially in the 193os, was
to take on political and in some cases stridently nationalistic overtones: It also
meant that the collector would intrude, trying to persuade people not to
change their ways, insisting that it was incumbent on them to retain prein-
dustrial practices. One senses resentment on the part of societies wanting so-
cial change and believing that it must be accompanied by musical change.
As seen in my discussion of the roles of insider and outsider, the ethnomusi-
cologist's lesson about the place of music in culture is one that indigenous so-
cieties have learned very well. There are interesting examples of conflict. Aus-
tralian aborigines living in the countryside who did not wish their material
to be preserved because the tape recorder would invalidate rituals were op-
posed by other aboriginals living in cities who felt that they had been deprived
of their tribal heritage by their removal to a different setting, and wanted to
have these recordings.
In the 195os there developed a movement within the field of anthropol-
ogy appropriately labeled "urgent anthropology," involving the recognition
of the imminent destruction of societies, cultures, and artifacts by modern-
ization. It emphasized the need for concentrating anthropological resources
upon their preservation. In the case of archeology, this might involve the ex-
ploration of areas shortly to become inaccessible by the building of dams
or roads; in social anthropology, it might be addressed to the forced move-
ment of peoples and the dispersal of once homogeneous populations. For
the historian, such preservation was obviously of paramount importance.
For the social anthropologist, who studies change as it occurs, it did not out-
weigh the study of kinds of change constantly occurring; extinction of cul-
tures was, so to speak, an everyday event. So it turned out that the thrust of
"urgent anthropology" was mainly the study of the out-of-the-way, with the
purpose of gaining insight into human exceptions.
Ethnomusicologists, coming out of a long tradition of looking for the ex-
ceptional while often virtually ignoring the readily available, might sympa-
thize with this approach. Some, such as Wolfgang Laade (1969, 1971a), par-
ticipated in the "urgent anthropology" movement in publications and letters
noting cultures and musics in danger of extinction. But while we may be be-
168 • IN THE FIELD
mused by those who wish to exclude all but the exceptional, it is of course
true that during the past few centuries many musical cultures, belonging to
the weak end of power distribution, have in effect gone out of existence. This
is relevant to scholars working in the Americas or Australia, areas of grad-
ual social change, but even more in nations where culture change has been
dramatic, such as Israel or parts of Central Asia and western China, for here,
obviously, once highly heterogeneous populations appear to be on the way
to thorough homogeneity. No doubt, then; much ethnomusicology has been
motivated by a sense of urgency.
Recognizing that the principal owners of any music ought to be the people
who created and performed it—or their descendants and relatives—ethno-
musicologists began, in the 197os, to encourage the development of music (and
other cultural) archives in such institutions as local museums, or on Native
American reservations, and in places relevant to the societies involved. The
198os saw the growth of a process sometimes called "repatriation," which is,
mainly, the development of archives in and for the cultures that produced the
music, and particularly, then, the "return" of early recordings and ar tifacts such
as instruments. It began, according to Frisbie (200n 492) around 196o, and in
the United States it was closely associated with the legal expansion of Native
American rights to grave sites and human remains as well as intellectual prop-
erty. A number of institutional and personal initiatives undertook to distrib-
ute material from large archives to ethnic and tribal repositories. Most notable
is the Federal Cylinder Project (1984; see also Frisbie 2001: 495), which copied
and disseminated the earliest collections of Native American music. The
archives of Native American and First Nations communities, often very com-
prehensive, often contain material that may be used for the reconstruction of
ceremonies and rituals whose content has been lost. The Smithsonian Insti-
tution and the American Folklife Center have deposited collections, sometimes
with considerable ceremony, on Native American reservations.
One of the scholars who most emphasized the central role of ethnomusi-
cologists as helpers in the preservation process was the Australian Catherine
Ellis. The "Aboriginal Music Centre" that she helped to establish in Adelaide
contained a large collection of tapes that aboriginal people living in the city,
who claimed to have lost all traditional knowledge, could consult for a vari-
ety of purposes, including the reconstitution of older ceremonies or their
adaptation to urban life. Meeting with a group of aboriginal users of this
archive who told me that in their quest for some knowledge of their musical
traditions they were having to start from a position of total ignorance, I found
t'hat they considered their visits to it important aspects of their lives, and that
ARCHIVES AND PRESERVATION • 169
they welcomed the help of white ethnomusicologists. But small indigenous
societies are not the only ones benefiting from the use of archival resources
in their quest for reconstitution of their musical cultures. The large archives
of folk music, such as those at Indiana University and the Library of Congress,
were important resources for the musicians who led the twentieth-century
revivals of Anglo-American folk song.
What's Worth Preserving?
What should we preserve? "Everything?" Impossible! There has to be some
kind of a process of sampling. Just as fieldwork involves, in a variety of ways,
the sampling of a culture, so archives try to work in ways that will assure ad-
equate sampling of the world's musics. The point is that we must make clear
our values, decide what we are seeking. We can start by asking whether we
should preserve what we deem to be of high quality, or what is typical, or what
a culture considers ideal. The fieldworker needs to grapple with some funda-
mental issues of ethnomusicological method before simply turning on the
video camera. There is the question of authenticity, the problem of what is in
some way representative of a culture. The point is that before going to work
one must face the theoretical issues of sampling, plan one's collecting activi-
ties, understand what one is doing. This would be greatly preferable to record-
ing everything within earshot and ending up with a collection with which one
can do very little. We should design research carefully and then go after the ma-
terial we need to carry it out, rather than preserving first and studying later.
Preservation and research may conflict. Sometimes the field methods we
impose on the society we wish to study distort what is really going on. Let
me refer to a personal experience, my project in Iran in which I tried to study
certain principles of improvisation. I tried to use a single mode, a dastgah,
as a sample, and to record as many improvisations in that mode as I could,
and I believe I was reasonably successful. However, I am sure I did not ar-
rive at something that is truly representative. All of the performances I
recorded, I feel, would be acceptable to the Iranian listener and to the in-
formed Iranian musician. Individually, they are part and parcel of the mu-
sical culture. However, since I was there with my tape recorder, requesting
and commissioning performances and available for formal events, I no doubt
failed to record certain kinds of musical phenomena that would appear only
in other less structured and less formal situations. What I recorded was a
group of performances each of which was probably acceptable as proper Per-
170 • IN THE FIELD
sian music, but I wonder whether they as a group constitute a representa-
tive sample, or whether my particular recording procedure caused certain
things to be done more, or less, than in real musical life. I may have found
out important things about the way certain things are done in Iranian per-
formance practice, but probably I did not adequately preserve a slice of Iran-
ian musical culture. This kind of conclusion might have to be made in many
studies, but particularly in those dealing with improvisation of folk music,
where variation from a norm is a major point of observation. In our zeal to
preserve, we should be careful to preserve what actually happens in society,
or if we can't, at least be aware of the ways our work distorts it.
If we view ethnomusicology as a science of music history that emphasizes
patterns and regularities, preservation pure and simple will play a minor role.
But the gathering of data in systematic and controlled forms is important to
scholars who need to deal with it in something approaching a sciéntific way.
The result of such gathering is in the end also a form of preservation for the
future. At the other end of the spectrum, we ask ourselves whether we should
continue encouraging people to keep up their old practices, asking them to
do what they perhaps would not wish to do, just for the sake of the rest of
the world. I have no answer. But there is no doubt that ethnomusicologists,
simply by their interest in certain kinds of musical phenomena, have stimu-
lated the societies they study to keep up, develop, and sometimes isolate and
preserve these phenomena in culturally traditional or in more artificial fash 7
ion.Therlfcts,wihernolgyadpstie,hnvrou
places been enormous; we have heard of Asian and African performers who
won't perform without the presence of "their" ethnomusicologist.
So what is our role, in the preservation game? One alternative is to study
what actually happens, swallowing hard when we find that societies change
all the time and allowing precious gems of creation to fall by the wayside.
People must retain the freedom to do as they wish (something of an article
of faith with me) or are forced by circumstances to do, and then observing
what actually happens, because this makes better scholarship than mixing
observation with the imposition of one's ideas. Or we may instead take it
as a basic assumption the idea that preservation on our part and on the part
of the cultures of the world is itself a supreme good and must be encouraged
at the expense of other factors. An unresolved question for the individual
as well as the profession.
Ethnomusicologists in recent years have concentrated on the study of
change, and they need somehow to record and preserve change. How one goes
about thfs, creating a record of change, a basic phenomenon of culture that
ARCHIVES AND PRESERVATION • 171
isn't compatible with the concept of culture as a group of "things," may be
beyond present-day practicality. But I would suggest that one theoretical di-
rection in which we could move is to add to the musical artifact—the piece,
song, individual situation as the focus of study—ways in which the fact and
process of change itself can somehow be used as the main focus of attention.
There is reason to believe that of the various components of musical culture,
using Merriam's model, the musical sound itself changes least rapidly; be-
havior changes more quickly, and the conception of music most quickly. The
sound of Blackfoot music today is much closer to what it was in the nine-
teenth century than is their system of ideas about music. If we are indeed to
preserve something about music, we must find ways also of preserving and
recording the concept part of the model; this seems to me to be in fact more
urgent ethnomusicology than the continuing preservation of the musical ar-
tifact alone. If I am justified in being generally critical of the role of preser-
vation in the ethnomusicology of the past, it is because it has often failed to
recognize that there is much more to music than the piece. As the archives
of the world continue to grow, those practicing preservation will increasingly
need to expand and refine their approaches to the systematic sampling of
the infinite musical universe.
And finally, the act and practice of recording by the societies that we're
trying to understand has become, itself, a significant area of research, and
one that requires increased attention and sophistication. Christopher Scales
(2004: 346), suggesting that ethnomusicologists have recently been con-
fronted with a division of loyalty between attending to their own recording
and preservation and contemplating preservation itself as a field of research,
sees their field "becoming increasingly intertwined with recording tech-
nologies and mass mediation (as both topics of and tools for study)."