ABSTRACT
Ethnomusicologists are not, of course, the only academics producing knowledge about music. The same can be said of musicologists and of scholars in the discipline of cultural studies. As an ethnomusicologist, however, I write as a representative of my discipline on the ways in which we have come to view the cultural study of music. Whereas traditional musicologists regard “culture” in the Arnoldian sense of “getting to know . . . the best which has been thought and said,” we regard culture in the anthropological sense as the learned inheritance that makes one people’s way of thinking and doing different from another’s. Traditional musicology understands “serious” music as not only good for a person’s intellectual development and emotional maturity, but also as locked in combat with other, lesser musics motivated by the cheap rewards offered by industrial and postindustrial society. For the traditional musicologist, the cultivation of classical music and the other fine arts offers a defense against the commodified popular music carried by mass media; it offers a means of refinement and civilization amidst the hellish modern industrial state. Ethnomusicologists do not make such value judgments; indeed, by focusing on everything but Western art music (and, lately, even that) we invoke a cultural relativism in which all musics have a legitimate claim to be understood: first in the terms that their own culture understands them, and then in terms of their contribution to our understanding of music as a worldwide phenomenon.
