What is “Nettl’s Elephant?” As Nettl himself explains his title, he has come to identify his vast collection of 150 or so elephants (the pictures of which are sprinkled throughout this book) with the nature of ethnomusicology. After all, they “have old and modern and hybridized designs and shapes, they include works of ‘folk’ art and ‘high’ art, and they show the subjects in different moods, positions, and attitudes. In parallel to the ethnomusicological studies I’ll be discussing in these pages, they provide a variety of interpretations of what it means to be an elephant (or, for ethnomusicology, to study musical culture)” (xiv). And so we have here Nettl’s elephant(s), a book-length study, as its subtitle further suggests, of the history of ethnomusicology, written from the particular vantage point of one of the discipline’s “elder statesmen.” Indeed, Nettl’s particular perspective precedes even widespread adoption of the term “ethnomusicology,” and he has been a consistently nourishing contributor to the field’s intellectual life for what is arguably, depending upon when exactly one locates its point of origin, its entire duration.

But this book is far from “the” history or even “a” history. Rather, I would suggest, it quite intentionally presents a set of multiple histories in service of a kind of meta-history, in which commonly accepted historical narratives of ethnomusicology are presented alongside one another, demythologized, and critiqued from the unabashedly personal perspective of its author. As laid out in the introduction, these common narratives include the division of ethnomusicological history into two broad periods: 1) the one usually labeled “comparative musicology” (beginning sometime in the 1880s and “dominated by European, mainly Germanophone scholars who engaged, principally, in analytical and historical studies of recordings and artifacts with emphasis on comparison of various kinds” (xvi-xvii)); and 2) the adoption of the term “ethnomusicology” around the 1950s (“dominated by American scholars who were first concerned with the study of non-Western contemporary musical cultures from a number of perspectives” (xvii)). As Nettl describes, the ethnomusicology period is then often divided into two contrasting orientations, the “anthropological” (emphasizing the “study of music in culture” often associated with Alan Merriam) and the “musicological” (focusing on the study of “non-Western” musical performance and the concept of bimusicality as promulgated by Mantle Hood). Nettl’s contention is that such narratives of the discipline produce dichotomies that are too neatly separated and orderly, and he presents compelling bibliographic and anecdotal evidence to justify the claim.

It is this kind of demythologizing thread that draws together all four parts of Nettl’s Elephant, refracted through varying lenses. Part I, Central Issues in a Grand History, includes five essays exploring the seminal scholarly output of the 1880s, possible viable alternative renditions of ethnomusicological history, the use and development of a concept of “world music,” the often-noted preoccupation of ethnomusicology with self-critique and self-definition, and the stereotypes and misconceptions involving the concept of comparison and comparative study. Part II, In the Academy, includes three essays examining ethnomusicology’s emplacement in its institutional context of academic departments, varying takes on the concept of evolution, and a contrastive view of the treatment of music within anthropology. Part III, Celebrating Our Principal Organizations, includes three essays exploring the founding of the IFMC/ICTM (International Folk Music Council; later changed to the International Council of Traditional Music), the Society for Ethnomusicology, and intersections between the two. Part IV is aptly titled, A Collage of Commentary, and includes a kind of miscellany of reflection on topics of personal interest to Nettl: musical geography, the concept of “minorities,” the ethnomusicology of canons, and the nature of ethnomusicological work for understanding essential questions about music and its role in social life.

Taken together, the sum total picture of Nettl’s Elephant, even more than a demythologizing metahistory, is an exemplary case study in disciplinarity. Here the principal narratives of a field of study are dissected, the boundaries of the “objects” it studies scrutinized, its location in social, cultural, intellectual life and positioning in institutional contexts accounted for, its principal organizations fostering communication and coherence outlined and investigated. And on a personal level, it is full of a historical vantage point one cannot imagine getting access to any other way. From whom else can one read about the 1950 IFMC conference in Bloomington, Indiana, when Nettl, a newly-graduated college student, witnessed a scene in which Marius Barbeau, singing examples of Native American music during his presentation, moved Gertrude Kurath to get up at the back of the room and dance, all in front of such prominent scholars as Saygun, Bayard, Lord, Herzog, Jackson, Karpeles, Seeger, and Waterman (139)? From whom else could we recall the way in which the founding of SEM in the years between 1952 and 1955 felt at the time to its participants; as Nettl describes, rather than something brand new, “I think that I--and maybe others, too--saw these events more as revival than innovation, as one of a sequence of landmarks in our field’s organizational and intellectual history” (160).

It should be noted that the essays in Nettl’s Elephant are substantially taken in their original form (with only light editing) from previous publications, invitational lectures, and papers presented at conferences between 1988 and 2008. There is thus, as Nettl notes, some significant overlap in the arguments and examples from one essay to the next. Far from repetitious or redundant, however, this kind of cross-reference is enormously helpful, assisting in further binding together the diverse subject matter of the book and nuancing each example as it is presented in support of various shades of argument.

I will say that some of the more idiosyncratic essays I find traffic in subjects too specific or vague (in that they are seemingly defined as broadly as possible) to be useful, certainly when related to ethnomusicology writ large--the essay on evolution in Part II, for example, seems out of place, and I would put nearly all of Part IV in this category. Even so, I consider these minor quibbles. Nettl’s academic writing, here as elsewhere, is some of the most clear and precise, ordered, directed, and attention-getting I have ever encountered. It is light and entertaining, moving, and head-noddingly simple without sacrificing the complexity of its implications. In other words, Nettl’s Elephant is classic Bruno Nettl, and well worth the time. Mythologies of ethnomusciology beware!

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[Review length: 1050 words • Review posted on May 6, 2012]