Fusion |
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WORLD MUSIC |
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UNDERSTANDING WORLD MUSIC |
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Ethnomusicology,
the study of world music, is a branch of musicology. This discipline developed after World
War II in Western countries with a special emphasis on the inter-disciplinary approach to
music. Like any other academic field, which is being created and recreated through
research, writings and teaching, Ethnomusicology also had many variations in concepts,
interpretations and applications. The discipline Ethnomusicology branched out of musicology because of the ardent desire of many Western musicologists to study non-western music that had passed on from generation to generation through the oral tradition, especially the music of tribal and village communities. |
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Jaap Kunst, a Dutch musicologist,
introduced the term Ethnomusicology in 1950, though the actual discipline was in existence
since late 19th century under the name Comparative Musicology. It may be said that from
the publication of the Viennese scholar Guido Adler, 'Umfang Methodeund Zid Der
Musikwissenschaft' (1885), the term Comparative Musicology was used for the study of
non-Western music as a separate branch of musicology. The first edition of the Harvard
Dictionary defines Comparative Musicology as the study of exotic music and
the musical cultures outside the European tradition. After World War II, many musicologists did not favour the term Comparative
Musicology and one of them was Jaap Kunst, the Dutch Ethnomusicologist who argued that the
term was not entirely satisfactory. However the comparative method is frequently used in
other fields of musicology and studies in this field are often not directly comparative.
Therefore Jaap Kunst introduced the term Ethnomusicology in his little booklet Musicologa
in the title page of the book in 1950. He placed the prefix Ethno in front of
the word Musicology with a hyphen to indicate that the study would be on the music of the
races of man or ethnic groups. Dr. S A K Durga |
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Note: The author is a noted expert on Ethnomusicology. | |