Journal Article

Second Thoughts: A Short Personal Anthology

Nettl, Bruno

2014

Overview

The history of ethnomusicology since ca. 1950 is explored from a personal perspective by contemplating ways in which the author (seeing himself as an exemplar of the profession as a whole) has changed directions and attitudes on several major issues: (a) The system of ideas, often very complex, about music in indigenous societies provides important insights into a culture. (b) Recent research in the history of Native American cultures suggests that the music discovered and recorded in the twentieth century may be a remnant of much more complex music that disappeared when the population of Native Americans was greatly reduced after the coming of Europeans. (c) Rather than looking for the origins of music in human society fundamentally as one event, the author suggests that a number of different kinds of sound communication, originally unrelated, only later came to be seen as comprising a single unified concept. (d) The concept of authenticity used to explain the relationship between a society and its own unique music has been abandoned in favor of an understanding that the function of music is more typically to establish and maintain relationships among societies. (e) The usefulness of learning performance as part of fieldwork has been broadly accepted and the risks it presented to authentic transmission and preservation turn out to have been exaggerated. In a related development, the capacity of ethnomusicological research to provide practical benefits has become a major focus of the field. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

• Publisher: The College Music Society, Inc
• Subject: Authenticity / Ethnomusicology / Native American Music / Transitions