Ethnomusicology: Studying Culture Through Music

Musicology, the scholastic study of music focuses primarily on the music of Western culture including all relevant humanities and ranges of musical forms, styles, genres, and traditions. Ethnomusicology reaches beyond the history of Western music, including variety of cultures, studying music as a social and cultural phenomenon. Ethnomusicologists focus on the anthropology and ethnography of different cultures and nations in music. By examining a culture's music they can derive and apply theories and methods of sociology and cultural studies to compare cultures.

For example in the Ethnomusicology Journal Vol. 43, No. 3 published in the fall of 1999 by The Society for Ethnomusicology, Nancy Guy observes the presence of political authority in the Peking Opera.

"This study shows that state control of politically symbolic institutions, such as Peking opera, can clearly reflect the policies and ideology basic to a regime's strategies for governing. The recent democratization of Taiwan and the subsequent shift in its dominant ideology offers an opportunity to examine the fate of a politicized art form in the wake of such a change."

Guy compares the Peking Opera that is dominated by political figureheads with the free expression of creative outlets in American and other western cultures.

One of the most notable examples of this study of cultural music to make theories about the history and components of a specific culture, is the research of Colin Macmillan Turnbull, the famous British-American anthropologists, whose popular work about the Mbuti Pygmies of Zaire spotlights ethnomusicology. Turnbull's books The Forest People about the Mbuti Pygmies and The Mountain People about the Ik people of northern Uganda inspired future studies in the field of ethnomusicology.

The Society for Ethnomusicology is one of the three major international associations, founded in 1955 it is an academic society that not only helps bring together musicologists and ethnomusicologists and creating a catalogue of research projects and bibliographies in its quarterly journal, Ethnomusicology. Thirty-two universities in the United States of America have an ethnomusicology, including University of California in Los Angeles, who has the oldest ethnomusicology program.

Studying music can tell a lot about a culture. Helen Myers found that instrumental folk music was held in high regard in the northern European countries of Finland, Sweden, and Norway, where the natives' motive of playing instruments is to pass on traditions to younger generations.

Ethnomusicologists research music and then use the data found to apply to sociological and cultural studies, which can not only compare cultures, but also emphasizes the unique structures of non-Western culture.

Guy, Nancy. "Governing the Arts, Governing the State: Peking Opera and Political Authority in Taiwan." Ethnomusicology (1999).

Myers, Helen. Ethnomusicology. 1992.