Ethnology and Nationalism

These forages of folk-song into ethnomusicology make it desirable to demarcate their spheres. Historically folk-lore is a product of the nineteenth century, ethnomusicology of the twentieth. But as a matter of logic the latter (and later) includes the former, as the whole includes the part. On the other hand as a matter of semantics ethnomusicology has been by use generally confined to that music which we, with European arrogance, call primitive or exotic. (It is a solecism to speak of a product of the ancient civilization of China as primitive, so we call it exotic.) Early anthropologists and explorers in the nineteenth century wrote ‘uncivilized’ of such and knew what they meant and moreover were right in so far as the word ‘civilization’ implies an urban, civil or citizen culture. But in so far as anthropological consciences have grown more tender even the lowliest peoples are recognized as possessing a culture and it is becoming difficult to find a single word that will embrace Pygmies, Amerindians and Melanesians, unless one allows ‘primitive’ for it, meaning with simple culture and no reading or writing. Dr Bruno Nettl ¹ tries to sort things out by defining ethnomusicology as the science that deals with the music of peoples outside Western civilization and then adds ‘The ethnomusicologist ordinarily distinguishes in his work between three kinds of music: Oriental, folk and primitive.’ This use of Oriental with a capital O certainly avoids the solecism just mentioned and allows the art to have professional practitioners, but his attempt to bring folk music into line with primitive is less satisfactory. Folk music, he says, is the music of social groups within a higher culture but which are not musically literate or professionally competent, which is true enough, but European folk music is not outside Western civilization nor even outside Western musical culture. Primitive music has no contact with any high culture as folk music certainly has. It is really better to go back to the original idea of ethnology from the Greek word ε̄θνος which is usually translated ‘race’ but has a fundamental meaning of a community, people living together who recognize that they form some sort of a unity: Ethnos therefore as a prefix can apply to nations as well as pigmentation of the skin and lowly culture, and ethnomusicology will be the comparative study of the music of any homogeneous group of people.