SEM History Post

Perhaps what is more astonishing than how much Ethnomusicology (and Ethnomusicology) has changed in the past year is simply how young the journal is. 50 years is merely an infancy for any discipline--that is if we take Ethnomusicology as a formal substantiation of the discipline being codified and called "ethnomusicology". Even today, the field is still enduring intense growing pains, hence the focus on definition, theory, and method. What surprised me about the 1950s issues was how small they were (initially), and how few case studies there were. Most of the writing in the early articles (once the subscriptions creeped past 500 or so) is littered with titles like "A Dialectical Approach to Music History", "On the Subject of Ethnomusicology", and other field, historical, and research method type articles. 1958 seems to be the year when the journal shifted to include a consistent number of case studies and special topics.

Nevertheless, this writing is far less anthropological than one would expect them to be, even by today's standards. Most of the articles that weren't theoretical concerned African, Asian, or South American subjects, but instead of revealing an expose of music in these specific cultures, the articles took a much more technical and historical tact. I was expecting an old-fashioned, over-exoticised, anthropological attempt that centered on music, but instead the "musical culture" seems to take a backseat to the proper analysis of the notes, rhythms, and instruments. Many of these articles amounted to aural archaeology than it did any sort of cultural study.

"The Shak-Shak in the Lesser Antilles" (Sep., 1958) is a prime example: it describes the historical and religious significance of this instrument (the Shak Shak), describes how they are made and what their function is in music. The framework here is the instrument, and the author doesn't include any personalized accounts.

In "The African Hemiola Style" (Sep., 1959), the author presents this comparative discourse on this particular African rhythm in relation to a similar Western/European rhythm. The article is full of very specific transcriptions of the different styles of hemiolas, and is representative of this acute deconstruction of music (not just the African but the Western art music as well). This focus merely describes a particular sound--the musical and cultural implications or significance has not yet emerged, and the performers and composers are not wholly accounted for or explained.

All in all, it seems as if the journal in its earliest stages was still more focused on the music rather than the music and the culture around the music. In a way, I didn't find most of what I read too unsettling (much in the way early anthropology can seem callous and Western-centric) because these early studies were most focused on the musical content for what it was and what it sounded like. This diligent analysis can clearly be valuable to a study that would later become a much more deeply involved cultural dialogue.