ABSTRACT
The creation of music requires a process—composition. It also involves an issue usually relating to social function or contextual use, such as shamanistic curing, ballroom dancing, lullaby singing, concert listening, and many others. What is often termed art music includes processes and issues and is therefore as much the domain of ethnomusicological study as it is the domain of historical musicology, music theory, and criticism. How ethnomusicologists study art music, however, is what makes their approach unique: ethnomusicologists emphasize processes and issues as aspects of human behavior.
