In the introduction to his latest book, Bruno Nettl states that he wishes to pay “homage to eleven people who were very important on my road to becoming an ethnomusicologist” and adds that, though he refers to his own experiences, the study focuses on the personalities and accomplishments of this group of individuals (xvii). In the free-flowing and highly engaging narrative that follows, he offers vivid portraits of his mother and father, five professors at Indiana University in Bloomington, and four musician-consultants with whom he conducted research. The resulting blend of personal reminiscence, discussion of historical contexts, and analysis of ideas complements two of his other recent books: Encounters in Ethnomusicology: A Memoir (2002), which recounts various aspects of his early life and multifaceted career in ethnomusicology since 1950; and Nettl’s Elephant: On the History of Ethnomusicology (2010), which offers his assessment of the development of this interdisciplinary field since the late-nineteenth century. Among the highlights of Becoming an Ethnomusicologist are its evocative accounts of pre-World War II Prague, postwar Bloomington, and the international network of comparative musicologists, anthropologists, and folklorists engaged in research on forms of traditional music during the first half of the twentieth century. This network provided a foundation for the institutionalization and growth of North American ethnomusicology after 1950 and was the milieu for the development of Nettl’s own distinguished career.
Bruno Nettl’s parents, Paul Nettl (1889-1972) and Gertrud Nettl (1905-1952), were born in Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and eventually settled in multicultural Prague, where Bruno was born in 1930. Their primary language was German, though they also spoke Czech, and they were of Jewish background, though they also attended Christian churches. Bruno states that his parents perceived themselves as citizens of the world and notes that his father had “an essentially noncommittal notion of ethnicity, religion, nationality” (145). His mother was an accomplished pianist, with an eclectic repertoire ranging from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Though she never achieved the success that she desired as a performer, she taught for many years, including a period as an instructor at the Indiana University School of Music. His father was a musicologist who published prolifically; though well respected among German-speaking scholars, he was disappointed by the more limited recognition that he received from the musicological establishment in the United States. Paul Nettl studied at the German University in Prague, where he obtained doctorates in both law and musicology and, following military service during World War I, engaged in post-doctoral work with the seminal musicologist Guido Adler in Vienna. In the course of his career, he pursued a vast range of research interests, including Bohemian and Austrian Baroque composers (particularly their use of dance music genres), Mozart (especially his time in Prague and involvement in Freemasonry), Luther and music (with much attention to Bach), Beethoven, national anthems, the origins of music, and much more. He also wrote on various non-musical topics, such as the history of Prague. Paul Nettl taught at the German University in Prague until 1939, when he was dismissed from his post with the arrival of the Nazi regime. In September of that year, the family fled via the Netherlands to the U.S., settling first in Princeton and moving in 1946 to Bloomington. There Paul became a professor of musicology at Indiana University and continued to publish many works, including books and articles aimed at a general audience.
Bruno Nettl clearly inherited from his parents a deep commitment to music studies and an openness to cultural diversity. In addition, his father’s work contributed to his interests in folk music, the cultural contexts of music-making, and the lives of musicians. While he enrolled in Indiana University as a conventional music major in 1947, he shifted to a different kind of music study after the arrival in 1948 of George Herzog (1901-1983) in the recently established anthropology department. Though not well known today, Herzog was the leading figure in comparative music research in the U.S. during the 1930s and 1940s. By the late 1940s, however, he was contending with a mental illness that led to his move in 1958 to an Indianapolis sanatorium, where he remained for the rest of his life. Born in Budapest, Herzog studied in Berlin during the 1920s with the great comparative musicologist Erich M. von Hornbostel and assisted Hornbostel in his Phonogrammarchiv. Around 1925 he began work on a Ph.D. in anthropology at Columbia with Franz Boas, who apparently wished to groom an anthropologist with solid musicological training. With this educational background, Herzog combined the two disciplines that would become the cornerstone of American ethnomusicology during the second half of the twentieth century, while also incorporating the perspectives of fellow Hungarian composer and folk music researcher Béla Bartók. Following Hornbostel, Boas, and Bartók, Herzog emphasized meticulous documentation, transcription, and stylistic analysis of what were assumed to be distinct bodies of music across the world. His extensive fieldwork (including sound recording) with Native peoples in the American Southwest resulted in numerous publications, such as a comparison of Pueblo and Pima musical styles that comprised an entire issue of the Journal of American Folklore in 1936. In 1936 he also published a book on Jabo proverbs, based on a year of field research in Liberia. A few other examples of his wide range of publications are a comparative analysis of how cultures with tone languages handle song melodies (1934), an article on folksong for Funk and Wagnalls Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend (1950), and a foreword to Bartók and Albert Lord’s Serbo-Croatian Folk Songs (1951). At IU Herzog taught a year-long course titled “Folk and Primitive Music.” Nettl entered this course midway in the spring of 1949, became Herzog’s research assistant in 1950, and continued to learn from him primarily through independent study.
While Nettl discusses Herzog as his principal mentor, he singles out four other IU professors as major influences: C.F. “Carl” Voegelin, Harold E. Driver, Thomas Sebeok, and Stith Thompson. Voegelin was the first chair of the university’s anthropology department, which included four-field representation but was distinctly oriented toward sociocultural and linguistic anthropology and, especially, expressive culture. A student of Boasians Alfred Kroeber, Robert Lowie, and Edward Sapir, Voegelin taught linguistics courses such as “American Indian Languages,” which Nettl took in 1950 with classmate Dell Hymes. In the course of his studies, Nettl also enrolled in an advanced course in sociocultural anthropology with Driver, another student of Kroeber and Lowie, and a linguistics course with the Hungarian-born Sebeok, whose interdisciplinary interests included folktales and songs. Finally, Nettl relates that Thompson, as Dean of the Graduate School, was one of the most influential persons at IU and helped Voegelin recruit a humanistically oriented group of anthropologists, including Herzog. Thompson maintained extensive contacts with European folklorists and brought many to campus as he established IU as a major center of folkloristics. Nettl enrolled in his seminars on the folktale and on folklore theory and method, with the hope that analysis of tale types and motifs might be helpful in the study of musical forms. In assessing his education at IU, he states that Thompson, Voegelin, Driver, and Sebeok taught him to “think big,” since they all were engaged in large-scale synthetic research projects. The interest of the first three in the comprehensive mapping of cultural traits also shaped his dissertation—a geographic survey of North American Indian musical styles, which he published in 1954 both as articles in the Journal of American Folklore and as a volume in the Memoirs of the American Folklore Society.
In addition to his professors at IU, Nettl identifies four “teachers in the field” who were particularly influential in his ethnomusicological education. He actually met the first, an Arapaho man named William Shakespear, at IU in 1951 in what was then called the Archives of Folk and Primitive Music. Shakespear was on campus as a consultant for a summer linguistics institute, and Voegelin suggested that Nettl should record whatever Arapaho songs he knew. In the continuation of his research on Native American musics, Nettl began fieldwork in 1966 with the Blackfoot people in Montana, where he met Calvin Boy—a man whose diverse song repertoire reflected various aspects of Blackfoot experience. During the 1960s and early 1970s, he also conducted fieldwork in the rapidly growing city of Tehran, where he studied with Dr. Nour-Ali Boroumand, who was reviving Persian classical music and teaching at the University of Tehran. In the early 1980s, he carried out research in Chennai (Madras) as part of an effort to develop a comparative perspective on urban classical music cultures. There his guide was Dr. S. Ramanathan, a master musician in the South Indian (Carnatic) classical tradition. Ramanathan had studied and taught at Wesleyan University (where he eventually obtained a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology), and in 1965 Nettl began inviting him to his own school—the University of Illinois in Urbana. In discussing his work with these four remarkable individuals, Nettl recounts specific discoveries that increased his understanding of the diversity and intricacy of conceptual systems that underlie musical practices.
Nettl’s reflections on his parents, professors, and other teachers demonstrate the complexity of intellectual influence and the fact that it often takes a lifetime to fully comprehend the impact of various individuals on one’s thought. Moreover, his narrative reveals much about how networks of institutions and individuals shape fields of research and processes of education. In this wonderful book, we learn not only about the substantial impact of European scholars on ethnomusicology in the U.S. but also how musicians and researchers throughout the world have collectively constructed this field of knowledge. At the same time, we gain many insights on the life and work of Nettl himself, who has done so much to build this field over the past half-century through his many publications, teaching at the University of Illinois, and service to the Society for Ethnomusicology and other organizations. This book is highly recommended to practitioners of ethnomusicology, historical musicology, folkloristics, linguistics, and anthropology—all fields that have been embraced and synthesized by Nettl in his exceptional career.
--------
[Review length: 1676 words • Review posted on December 17, 2013]