Bruno Nettl’s The Study of Ethnomusicology: Thirty-One Issues and Concepts , published in 2005, is a second edition and substantial revision of this same book originally published in 1983 as The Study of Ethnomusicology: Twenty-Nine Issues and Concepts . The new edition adds four completely new chapters along with new material seamlessly interwoven with the old, significantly updating sections in nearly every chapter.
This genre of book--the overarching, meta-level portrayal of a discipline--is notoriously difficult to write. Generalizing without glossing over, and presenting a complete picture of a field in a single volume that prohibits comprehensive inclusion, are just two of the challenges that vex authors of such texts. The Study of Ethnomusicology , however, proves that Nettl is up to the task. This volume offers a deft synthesis of ethnomusicological history and a relatively thorough overview of many facets of the field, all based upon Nettl’s exhaustive knowledge of ethnomusicological literature. But it is not just Nettl’s great knowledge--based on half a century working in the discipline--and nimble handling of sources that make The Study of Ethnomusicology such an effective book; it is also his rhetorical style. Nettl, using an authorial voice that is at once authoritative and humble, has created one of those rare books that is simultaneously densely packed with information and a fun read. Peppered throughout the text are colorful, often humorous anecdotes that render the text engaging and less dry than many books of a similar scope and reach. These anecdotes manage to keep a potentially unwieldy amount of information anchored in what is ultimately the book’s greatest strength--Nettl’s wealth of personal experience teaching, conducting research, and simply relating to the world around him from the perspective of an ethnomusicologist. Just as ethnomusicology attempts to understand music as a window into a broader understanding of human culture and society, Nettl’s anecdotes serve as an experiential window into the culture of our field.
This book’s thirty-one chapters are subdivided into four parts. “Part 1: The Musics of the World” lays out some of the basic elements of ethnomusicology, including definitions of the field, concepts of music, transcription, and description and analysis of music. “Part 2: In the Field” covers areas such as the history and challenges of fieldwork, relationships between researchers and people being studied, archives and preservation, and changing notions of what constitutes “the field.” In “Part 3: In Human Culture,” Nettl tackles analytical models for studying music and culture, as well as theoretical paradigms of the field. “Part 4: In All Varieties” probes various foci of ethnomusicological scholarship, including musical taxonomies, organology, gender, and teaching and learning, while the final chapter constructs a high-level characterization of the history of the field and new trends in relation to that history.
Several of the book’s chapters deserve special mention. Three of the four chapters new to this edition address issues that have become major concerns in the field of ethnomusicology since the original publication of this book. Chapter 14 explores changes in ethnomusicological purview, or subjects of study, including the increasingly common trend toward scholars conducting fieldwork in their own “backyards,” and the growing recognition that a model of the field based upon easily distinguished societies with distinct cultures has had to be abandoned. Chapter 17 purports to approach the writing of ethnography. While in recent years ethnomusicologists have developed an increased reflexive awareness of issues of representation and the art and craft of ethnographic writing, this chapter does not really address these issues, but rather offers a historical overview of the range of different topics covered in ethnomusicological ethnographies. Chapter 28 succinctly but effectively summarizes the heightened sensitivity in the field of ethnomusicology to women’s musics and to gender inequities in the discipline at large and its professional societies. The fourth new chapter, in contrast to the other three, introduces to this volume a mode of research that was already in decline in 1983 and is a rare focus for today’s ethnomusicologists: organology. Still, given the importance of organological research in the history of the field, this chapter is a welcome addition. Of particular interest to today’s students of ethnomusicology will be Chapter 30, which considers social changes since 1990 that impact ethnomusicology, and resultant recent changes in the field. In a world characterized by global cultural flows and increasing intercultural interaction, concepts such as globalization, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism have gained currency in all social sciences, including ethnomusicology. As Nettl writes, “If, after 1950 we moved from looking at the world as a group of discrete musics to studying the musical results of their interactions, beginning in the 1980s we proceeded further, to greater emphasis on the ways in which the interactions of the world’s societies themselves determined musical life” (441).
Nettl’s use of sources, generally agile and effective, is marred occasionally by an over-reliance on some scholars and certain of their works. This unevenness is likely revealing of Nettl’s personal judgement of what is, and what is not, the most valuable work in the field (one might wish for Nettl to weigh in with a more direct critique of the scholarship throughout the book). The Study of Ethnomusicology ’s emphasis upon Alan P. Merriam’s work, and especially The Anthropology of Music , echoes a pattern found throughout Nettl’s work, which often builds upon Merriam’s insights. The prominence of Merriam in these pages, however, also attests to the enduring value of his work. One has to wonder, though, more than forty years after the publication of The Anthropology of Music , whether the best analytical model in our field remains Merriam’s tri-partite conceptualization of music as sound, ideas, and behavior. These frequent references to Merriam’s innovations are but one example of the rearview mirror emphasis of this book, which is better in its treatment of the history of the field than in its grasping of recent trends in ethnomusicological scholarship (Chapter 30 cited above notwithstanding).
That said, The Study of Ethnomusicology is a gift to the field, authored by one of the few scholars--a true giant in the field--capable of such a monumental, broadly focused treatise. This book’s first edition has already spent over twenty years alongside Merriam’s The Anthropology of Music and Blacking’s How Musical is Man , and more than a decade in the company of critically important overviews such as Helen Myers’ Ethnomusicology: An Introduction , in graduate and undergraduate courses on the history and theory of the discipline. With this new edition, Nettl has revived this text’s relevance. Particularly if used in concert with recent books such as Jennifer Post’s Ethnomusicology: A Contemporary Reader which offer more forward-looking overviews of the field, The Study of Ethnomusicology should continue to prove useful to students and scholars for years to come.
Works Cited:
Blacking, John. How Musical is Man? Seattle: University of Washington Press. 1973.
Merriam, Alan P. The Anthropology of Music. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. 1964.
Myers, Helen, ed. Ethnomusicology: An Introduction . London: Macmillon. 1992.
Post, Jennifer, ed. Ethnomusicology: A Contemporary Reader . New York: Routledge. 2006
--------
[Review length: 1157 words • Review posted on March 22, 2007]