ABSTRACT
Observations on the peculiarities that distinguish the music of various populations always raised the interest of philosophers and musicians. Ancient Greeks used to assign ethnic names such as Doric, Phrygian, Lydian, etc., to their different scales, but curiosity as to the variety of the exotic musical systems remarkably increased in the modern age. Geographic discoveries face the Europeans with puzzling forms of musical otherness, and some attention begins to be paid to the repertory of the domestic barbarians living in the countryside of cultivated Europe. 1 Yet, it is only by the beginning of the twentieth century that a systematic discipline with genuine scientific ambitions eventually begins its process of institutional recognition under the name of comparative musicology. 2
