the gestation of cross-cultural music...

THE GESTATION OF CROSS-CULTURALMUSIC RESEARCH AND THE BIRTH OF

ETHNOMUSICOLOGY

P. G. TONER

INTRODUCTION

This article examines the development ofcross-cultural music research, from itsearliest days in the collection, notation andanalysis of "primitive music" and "folksongs" to the first annual meeting of theSociety for Ethnomusicology in 1956. Thegestation period was long, and the birth,like all births, was largely unheralded andwas most significant to the immediatefamily. Now that ethnomusicology is en-tering middle age, its true significance canperhaps be better appreciated.

The history of cross-cultural music re-search parallels the history of cross-cultur-al research more generally, with some in-teresting and significant differences. Asin anthropology, the evolutionist perspect-ive of early ethnomusicology gave way tofunctionalism and then to more interpret-ive approaches, but it has been suggestedthat the discipline has dragged its feettheoretically and theoretical change hasbeen slow.1 Ethnomusicology has beeninfluenced throughout its history by itstwo parent disciplines, anthropology andmusicology,2 a process that has at timesbeen harmonious and, at other times, likea custody battle. And, more than many

other disciplines, the development of eth-nomusicology has been closely tied totechnological changes such as the inven-tion of the phonograph. There are, then,unique and distinctive lessons to belearned by historicizing cross-culturalmusic research. In this article, I will at-tempt to take stock of these lessons, andto consider the impact this field of researchhas had on cross-cultural research morebroadly. I will also consider in some detailhow the development of ethnomusicologyhas influenced Australian Aboriginal eth-nography, specifically in northeastArnhem Land, and the early developmentof Australian Aboriginal studies.

This article will also consider the placeof two pioneering ethnomusicologists whowere concerned with the study of Australi-an Aboriginal music, and whose researchrepresents the end-point of the trajectoryto be described below. The American eth-nomusicologist Richard Waterman was notthe first to make field recordings of Abori-ginal music in Arnhem Land, nor was hethe first to analyze recordings of Aborigin-al music. He was, however, the first eth-nomusicologist to conduct long-term,primary research in the region, and tomake a substantial number of field record-ings. Waterman was a student of MelvilleHerskovits, who was himself a student of

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Franz Boas, and so Waterman is firmlyplaced within the anthropological branchof ethnomusicology. The Australian eth-nomusicologist Alice Moyle probably didmore in her distinguished career for thediscipline’s development in Australia thanany other scholar. She was a prolific re-cordist, although her periods in the fieldwere relatively brief. Moyle began herstudies of Aboriginal music under DonaldPeart, the first professor of music at theUniversity of Sydney, and her researchreveals a firm grounding in the musicolo-gical branch of ethnomusicology.

These two scholars began their researchon Australian Aboriginal music in theearly- to-mid 1950s, roughly coincidingwith the formation in the U.S. of the Soci-ety for Ethnomusicology. In late 1952 themusic scholars David McAllester, AlanMerriam, Willard Rhodes and CharlesSeeger met to discuss how to facilitatecommunication between scholars withcommon interests; in 1953 they sent out aletter to 66 people to solicit interest, which10 people signed (including Waterman).The first Ethno-Musicology Newsletter ap-peared later that year. The first annualmeeting of the Society occurred inSeptember 1956.3 For the purposes of thisarticle, I take the foundation of this societyas formally marking the birth of the discip-line known as “ethnomusicology”, eventhough the academic study of non-West-ern musics is much older.4

So what do we have? We have theformation of a scholarly society from anumber of diverse origins, whose member-ship is roughly split between anthropolo-gists and musicologists with a commoninterest in non-Western and/or folk mu-sics. And we have two scholars of Australi-

an music who began their research on thattopic during the same formative period,each representing fairly clearly one of thetwo orientations which are still with ustoday — although I will demonstrate thattheir complex research paths cannot becharacterized in a simplistic way. In thisarticle I want to examine the intellectualtrajectory that led to that formative period,to examine an unusual and lengthy periodof gestation which led to this peculiar andhybrid birth.

EXPLORERS ANDPHILOSOPHERS

Attention to music in situations of cross-cultural contact occurred very early in therecord of European exploration. TheCalvinist missionary Jean de Léry visitedBrazil for 10 months in 1557-58, and hisbook History of a journey made into the landof Brazil, otherwise called America, firstpublished in 1578, includes numerous de-scriptions of musical performance, as wellas music notations in the third edition of15855 — surely among the first studies ofnon-Western music. Léry describes nativeBrazilian instruments, dancing that accom-panied musical performances, and thesinging style of the "savages",6 and hisaccount was incorporated into Montaigne’s1580 essay "Des cannibales".7

Another early work to consider non-Western music was Charles de Rochefort’sThe history of the Caribby-Islands. Trans-lated in 1666 by the Englishman JohnDavies of Kidwelly, de Rochefort’s bookincludes a number of passages relating tothe music of the Caribbean, including thefollowing:

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Humanities Research Vol XIV. No. 1. 2007

To divert themselves they alsomake several Musical Instruments,if they may be so called, on whichthey make a kind of harmony:Among others they have certainTabours or Drums made of hollowTrees, over which they put a skinonly at one end…To this may beadded a kind of Organ which theymake of Gourds, upon which theyplace a cord made of the string ofa reed which they call Pite; andthis chord being touch’d makes asound which they think delight-ful. The concerts of divers otherSavages are no better than theirs,and no less immusical to their earswho understand Musick. In themorning, as soon as they are up,they commonly play on the Fluteor Pipe; of which Instrument theyhave several sorts, as well polish’dand as handsom as ours, and someof those made of the bones of theirEnemies: And many among themcan play with as much grace as canwell be imagin’d for Savages.8

John Barrow’s 1806 tome An account oftravels into the interior of Southern Africain 1797 and 1798 includes the followingpassage:

It has frequently been observedthat a savage who dances and singsmust be happy. With him theseoperations can only be the effectsof pleasurable sensations floatingin his mind: in a civilized state,they are arts acquired by study,followed by fashion, and practisedat appointed times, without havingany reference to the passions. Ifdancing and singing were the tests

by which the happiness of a Hot-tentot was to be tried, he wouldbe found among the most miser-able of all human beings.9

Although amusing when examined retro-spectively, passing references to music donot make an important contribution to thedevelopment of ethnomusicology as a fieldof study, any more than old maps with"there be monsters here" attributed tounknown regions made an importantcontribution to the development of geo-graphy. These passages merely give us ataste of the European mindset which waspresent as the colonizing powers expandedtheir grasp around the world.

One early thinker, however, does standout as having delineated at a very earlystage some of the key orientations thatwould come to define the field of eth-nomusicology, and that was Rousseau inhis A Complete Dictionary of Music of 1779.The ethnomusicologist Anthony Seegerhas interpreted Rousseau’s work as ad-dressing some of the same questions thathave occupied those working in the fieldever since. One of these issues is that thetranscription of musical sounds is a meansto understand the physical laws of music;as Seeger writes, "musical transcriptionsreveal certain similar sound processesgoverned by laws of acoustics",10 and hepoints out that careful transcription hasbeen a characteristic feature of most eth-nomusicological studies. Rousseau’s studyitself included transcriptions of Chinese,Persian, Native Canadian and Swisssongs.11

A second pervasive ethnomusicologicalissue identified by Seeger in Rousseau’swork is his emphasis on the cultural inter-pretation of music, exemplified by a cer-

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The Gestation of Cross-Cultural Music Research

tain Swiss air which provoked such astrong reaction among Swiss troops thatit was banned, although Rousseau statesthat the transcription itself reveals nomusical structures which could be respons-ible.12

In other words, Rousseau identified inhis eighteenth-century writing the twodominant orientations of ethnomusicology,a discipline that did not begin to take formfor another century: the first gearedaround careful transcription and musicalanalysis as the basis for understanding themusic of the Other; and the second gearedaround an interpretation of music basedon its cultural context. These sometimes-opposed, but never entirely exclusive,approaches have been a feature of eth-nomusicology down to the present day,and are well exemplified by the work ofWaterman and Moyle, of which more later.

COMPARATIVE MUSICOLOGY

Ethnomusicology, as it is now known, wasfirst manifested as an organized academicfield of study under the rubric "comparat-ive musicology" in the late-nineteenthcentury. A common view is that one of itsfounders was the tone-deaf13 Britishphysicist A. J. Ellis, whose best-knownwork was his 1885 article "On the musicalscales of various nations". As a physicistand musical enthusiast, Ellis’ interest wasin using the methods of acoustics tomeasure the characteristic pitches and in-tervals of musical scales of different music-al cultures with the aim of comparingthem. Ellis’ starting point, however, washis understanding (as a physicist) that theinterval between any two notes:

…is measured properly by the ra-tio of the smaller pitch number tothe larger, or by the fractionformed by dividing the larger bythe smaller. When these ratios areknown for each successive pair ofnotes, the scale itself is known, formeans then exist for tuning thewhole scale when one of its notesis given.14

As Jaap Kunst explains in a discussion ofEllis’ paper, an octave is represented by a2:1 ratio, a perfect fifth by a 3:2 ratio, anda perfect fourth by a 4:3 ratio. When thetwo pitches have no lowest common de-nominator, the ratios become very un-wieldy and a logarithmic table is used.15

His long paper was originally a talkgiven to the Society of Arts with manyaccompanying illustrations on various in-struments, including a dichord, a numberof English concertinas specially tuned todifferent scales, a sitar, a koto and a set ofChinese bells. The research on which thetalk was based was done with instrumentsobtained privately or through museumcollections, some of which had fixed tun-ing (and therefore which could be invest-igated independently), and others whichhad to be played by native musicians;these included the Arabic oud, the Scotshighland bagpipe, the Indian sitar andvina, Chinese flutes, mouth organs, gongsand stringed instruments, the Japanesekoto, and both slendro and pelog gamelanorchestras. His treatise is full of tables andcharts showing the exact frequency meas-urements and intervals of all of these in-struments, as well as scales derived fromthem. Ellis reveals an ethnomusicologicalsensibility that is somewhat ahead of histime when he writes that it is necessary to

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be a native musician is to hear the realpitch of a musical scale, that there mightbe considerable variation of such a scalefrom musician to musician, and that, atany rate, there is a significant differencebetween knowing the notes used in a pieceof music and the musical theory whichunderpins it.16

In Ellis’ conclusions, he compares theprincipal intervals used in these differentscales from all over the world, proposinghow particular intervals were altered toproduce distinctive scales, and even sug-gesting how particular musical featuresfrom one region of the world influencedanother. For his final conclusion, however,Ellis writes: "the Musical Scale is not one,not 'natural,' nor even founded necessarilyon the laws of the constitution of musicalsound, so beautifully worked out byHelmholtz, but very diverse, very artifi-cial, and very capricious."17

So, even though Ellis’ starting pointand methodology were based on theWestern conception of the physics ofsound, there is also an explicit recognitionthat the musical practices of different cul-tures might be based on quite differentprinciples. Most importantly, it has beenobserved that his work provided the em-pirical foundations for comparative musi-cology.18

Perhaps the most important aspect ofEllis’ work was his development of a sys-tem of "cents" for the study of intervalsbetween pitches. To measure non-tempered intervals in terms of ratios of thetwo pitches in question is cumbersome inthe extreme, and to use a logarithmic scaleis only somewhat less so. Ellis’ most endur-ing contribution to ethnomusicology wasto propose the division of each semitone

in the equal-tempered scale into one hun-dred equal increments which he called"cents"; although a difference of one centis impossible to discriminate, Ellis felt thatmost sensitive ears could register a differ-ence of five cents.19 By freeing comparat-ive musicology from the need to negotiatecomplex logarithms, Ellis provided amethodological tool that not only facilit-ated the comparison of different tonalsystems, but also maintained a strong ori-entation around tonality as a primaryconcern of the discipline.

A prominent influence on early schol-ars of non-Western music like Ellis waspsychological theory — the idea that thestudy of various aspects of music, likerhythm or tonality, could reveal principlesof the functioning of the human mind. In-deed, comparative musicology and psycho-logy were very closely integrated in thelate-nineteenth and early-twentieth centur-ies,20 and many early research problemswere oriented around the investigation ofthe origins and development of music anduniversal musical principles.21 CarlStumpf’s Tonpsychologie (1883 and 1890)was particularly influential, developing atheory of tone sensation based on individu-al cognition: for instance, examining theperception of similarity and difference intonal stimuli, which led to a major focuson tonal distance and scale formation ad-vanced by Ellis and many others.22

As Dieter Christensen has pointed out,Stumpf "believed in the unity of the hu-man mind",23 and required musical datafrom all cultures to substantiate his theor-ies. Toward this end, and under his direc-tion, a large collection of phonograph re-cordings — which eventually became thefamous Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv —

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were amassed that would be analyzed forthe purpose of psychological research.24

The Phonogramm-Archiv also became thebasis for the development of a unique formof evolutionary theory focusing on musicand, in particular, on pitch and intervallicorganization.25 As Eric Ames notes,Stumpf and his colleagues used recordingsof non-Western music to emphasize music-al evolution. However, evolutionarythought at the turn of the twentieth cen-tury took a variety of forms beyond astrict linear model, and Stumpf was ableto construct an evolutionary discourse thataccommodated notions of both develop-ment and geographical diffusion.26

Stumpf’s colleagues, notably Erich vonHornbostel and Otto Abraham, continuedto investigate psychological aspects ofmusic, based primarily upon the examina-tion of tonal systems, scales, intervals, andthe like. Regardless of their commitmentto the intricacies of psychological theory,other comparative musicologists certainlymaintained a dominant interest in scalesand melodies well into the twentieth cen-tury. As Stephen Blum notes, for manycomparative musicologists "'musical sys-tem' was in effect synonymous with 'tonesystem'".27 Blum quotes Robert Lach asan example:

How does a scale originate? Howdid the human spirit — in variouslands, various times, among vari-ous peoples and races — succeedin constructing its musical system,i.e., the sequence of individualscale degrees, according to variousspecific schemata, or “systems oftonal crystallization”, so to speak,which differ so fundamentallyfrom one another — as is evident

from the various scales and tonesystems?28

This emphasis on scales, melody, pitch,heterophony and polyphony — all aspectsof music associated with pitch or tone —was prominent in much comparative musi-cology, particularly in the work of Horn-bostel.

A well-known example is his theory ofthe cycle of blown fifths, discussed in de-tail by Jaap Kunst. Hornbostel’s theoryhas it that an ancient Chinese tone-se-quence or scale was developed as follows:a tone of 366 Hz (the so-called huang chong,or "yellow bell") was produced on a lengthof stopped bamboo 230 mm in length and8.12 mm in diameter. When this tube isoverblown, it produces a tone a twelfthabove the fundamental, which is thentransposed down an octave to give thesecond tone of the sequence, a fifth abovethe fundamental; an overblown twelfthabove this second tone, transposed anoctave down, produces the third tone, afifth above the second tone; and so on. Acycle produced in this way using purefifths (702 Hz, a "Pythagorean" intervalbased on string-measurement) would ar-rive back at the same note from which itstarted after 12 jumps. However, Horn-bostel noted, since the blown fifth isroughly one-tenth of a tone flat, the cycleis not completed until 23 jumps. Horn-bostel postulated that before the Chinesebegan to construct scales based on Py-thagorean principles, they must have de-veloped their scale based on this cycle ofblown fifths. Hornbostel and others dis-covered scales from around the worldwhich could be derived from this prin-ciple.29 Hornbostel’s complex theory hasbeen criticized since its inception, but it

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reveals two key concerns of the comparat-ive musicology of his day: first, a concernwith the origins of musical features; andsecond, a belief that such origins may berevealed through the study of tones, scalesand intervals.

Another example is Hornbostel’s ideasabout the concept of pure melody. UnlikeEuropean music, which since roughly 1600has been based on harmony, all other mu-sic is based on pure melody. Hornbostelbelieved that harmony was superimposedon "natural" traits rooted in the "psycho-physical constitution of man": a naturalmelodic movement downward ("likebreathing or striking, from tension torest"); small melodic steps of at most amajor third; a "melodic unity" with a dis-regard for fixed scale steps; and a concernwith the "distance" between notes — "thesize of steps" —rather than their conson-ance.30

As with Stumpf, there is an undercur-rent of evolutionism in Hornbostel’s spec-ulation on melody.31 He states that short,repetitive melodies of a few notes less thana fourth apart are indicative of "an earlystage of development" and are due to "anarrow range of consciousness",32 andthat the natural evolution of melody isfrom this level to a larger number of notes,a greater range, and longer phrasing.33

Furthermore, in his study of African mu-sic, Hornbostel believed that polyphonywas a natural development from antiphony(the alternation of solo and chorussinging), probably by accident when thetwo parts unintentionally overlapped.However, he is clear that this polyphonyis the result of a melodic, rather than har-monic, principle.34

Hornbostel’s theoretical orientation iswell-revealed in a 1933 article called "TheEthnology of African Sound-Instruments".Hornbostel was an advocate of a form ofevolutionism, but one which was com-bined with the geographical diffusion ofcultural traits.35 In fact, at certain pointshe seems to deny the validity of evolution-ary theory for the purpose of understand-ing cultural phenomena. Of the idea thatwe might reconstruct the history of cultur-al phenomena, such as musical instru-ments, by arranging them according todifferential features which would revealtheir relative ages, Hornbostel writes:"Plausible as this reasoning sounds, itsutility as a guide to method is doubtful,and theories of evolution, however ingeni-ous, can contribute little to the classifica-tion of cultural phenomena in chronologic-al order, which has always been acceptedas one of the most important problems ofethnology."36

In support of this critique of evolution-ism, Hornbostel cites two instruments fa-miliar to the Australian ethnographic liter-ature: "the bull-roarer and the boomerangimpress us by the subtlety of their tech-nique, yet they belong to the Australianaborigines"37 - which certainly qualifiesas a case of damning with faint praise.

And yet, a chronological or develop-mental approach, whether or not we callit evolutionism, is present throughoutHornbostel’s work. He states explicitlythat if one phenomenon belongs exclus-ively to a "primitive" culture and a secondbelongs exclusively to a "higher" culture,then the first phenomenon is chronologic-ally earlier38 — which seems like a caseof circular reasoning. Hornbostel also givescautious approval to Tylor’s concept of

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"survivals", but does not agree with thefull extent of Tylor’s reasoning. Horn-bostel writes that Tylor felt that "inorganicand uncomprehended phenomena belongto an earlier stage of development",39 buthe is more cautious: "[I]norganic and un-comprehended phenomena are thereforemerely an indication that we have to dowith older cultural phenomena, but inwhat connexion, and to what culture theymust be assigned, can only be decided onits merits in each individual case."40

On the subject of monogenesis vs.polygenesis, Hornbostel is unambiguouslyclear: it is highly unlikely that any special-ized cultural phenomenon could developindependently in two different locations:41

"[T]here has never, so far as I know, beenan historically verified instance of polygen-esis in different cultures."42 Instead,Hornbostel advocates what he calls "thedespised 'diffusion theory'",43 arguingthat some cultural phenomena may survivefor a long time and may travel great dis-tances. Any specialized cultural phenomen-on, according to Hornbostel, must onlyhave developed in one place at one time— as he famously tried to demonstratethrough his theory of the "cycle of fifths".Subsequent distance of the phenomenonfrom the central point of origin indicatesrelative age.44

This leads us fairly directly to Kul-turkreise theory, of which Hornbostel wasan advocate. The idea is that cultures maybe defined by a collection of individualcharacteristics (architectural, ritual, music-al, social, etc.); complexes of characteristicsshared by several cultures, called "culture-circles" (Kulturkreise), must have a com-mon origin. These culture-circles havemoved outwards from their points of ori-

gin, have mixed, overlapped and de-veloped, resulting in the current situationof cultural diversity.45

Another prominent figure in comparat-ive musicology, Curt Sachs, betrayed amore obvious evolutionist stance thanHornbostel. In his The Rise of Music in theAncient World: East and West, Sachswrites from the outset of "the plain truththat the singsong of Pygmies and Pyg-moids stands infinitely closer to the begin-nings of music than Beethoven’s symphon-ies and Schubert’s lieder".46 He continuesby stating that "the only working hypo-thesis admissible is that the earliest musicmust be found among the most primitivepeoples".47 Later, Sachs writes that:

The songs of Patagonians, Pyg-mies, and Bushmen bring home thesinging of our own prehistoric an-cestors, and primitive tribes allover the world still use types ofinstruments that the digger’s spadehas excavated from the tombs ofour Neolithic forefathers. The Ori-ent has kept alive melodic stylesthat medieval Europe choked todeath under the hold of harmony,and the Middle East still plays theinstruments that it gave to theWest a thousand years ago…Theprimitive and Oriental branch ofmusicology has become the open-ing section in the history of ourown music.48

Some of Sachs’ writing seems almost com-ical in its evolutionism by today’s stand-ards, but he was by no means alone in histhinking among some scholars of his day.What is somewhat more remarkable is thatthis evolutionist line persisted into the1940s, long after it had met a timely de-

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mise in mainstream anthropology. How isit that comparative musicology laggedtheoretically behind cultural anthropologyby at least two decades, when the twodisciplines dealt with such similar subjectmatter?

Sachs’ interpretive framework revealsnot only an underlying evolutionist con-ceptualisation of music and its develop-ment, but also how the evolution of musicis revealed through particular musicalstructures. As with Hornbostel, melodyfeatures prominently as one key to under-standing the contemporary music of so-called "primitive" people as representingthe precursors to European music. Al-though, "[t]o the evolutionist, one-tonemelodies as a first step before the rise oftwo- and three-tone melodies would almostbe too good to be true",49 Sachs acknow-ledges that the best available informationsuggested that two-note melodies are theearliest that can be traced.50

Sachs refers to these basic melodieswhich alternate between two notes a shortdistance apart as logogenic, or word-born.He considers them to be "a mere vehiclefor words",51 and they evolved in an ad-ditive way; that is, certain other notes be-came added to the central core.52 Opposedto logogenic melodies were pathogenicmelodies, which are due to "an irresistiblestimulus that releases the singer’s utmostpossibilities";53 these are characterizedby great force and passion at the begin-ning of a phrase, only to diminish andweaken toward the end. "Descendingmelodies", Sachs writes, "recall savageshouts of joy or rage, and may have comefrom such unbridled outbursts".54 Inpathogenic melodies, evolution proceedsin a divisive way; that is, the larger vocal

range resulting from savage outburstsleads to the octave and larger intervals likefourths and fifths creating a skeleton formelodic development.55

Between these two extremes is melogen-ic music, which represents a kind ofmiddle ground characterized by elementsof both logogenic and pathogenic. At thismore developed melogenic level, wheremelodies tend to have a range greater thana third, particular intervals tend to crystal-lize, "determined by simple proportionsof vibration numbers":56 the 2:1 ratio ofthe octave, the 3:2 ratio of the fifth, andthe 4:3 ratio of the fourth. Sachs’ reasoningis sometimes far from convincing, as whenhe writes: "The strongest magnetic poweremanates from the fourth — for physiolo-gical reasons it is here best to acceptwithout attempting discretionary explan-ations."57

This "magnetic attraction" results inthe development of tetrachords andpentachords, and ultimately the complexmelodic structures of "highly civilizedpeoples".58

In a further extension of evolutionistprinciples, Sachs asserts that the earlieststages of music, represented by contempor-ary "primitive" people, also appears in thebabbling songs of European toddlers.Sachs concludes: "Thus we cannot but ac-cept their babbling as an ontogenetic reit-eration of man’s earliest music and, in-versely, conclude that the music of today’smost primitive peoples is indeed the firstmusic that ever existed."59

This was in 1943. It would be easier todismiss such speculative thinking if Sachswas not so influential on others in compar-ative musicology — including, as will be

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discussed below, the early thought ofAlice Moyle.

Ellis, Hornbostel and Sachs are onlythree, albeit quite influential, figures incomparative musicology, and it would beseriously misleading to suggest that theirviews are completely representative of anentire emerging discipline. Like any discip-line, there was a great deal of internal di-versity, which is suggested by the diversebackgrounds of the early practitioners:musicology, composition, physics, chem-istry, phonetics. And yet, in their thoughtwe can see some of the broad outlineswhich would come to characterize the"musicological" half of ethnomusicology.I have already commented on an underly-ing evolutionist stance, although this wasnot equally prominent among all scholars.Another feature was a unitary approach,viewing "the world’s musics as a group ofseparate units, stylistically distinct andinternally homogenous",60 and thereforeable to be characterized as wholes on thebasis of very small samples which reflecta single set of principles.61

The focus on melody, polyphony,scalar structures and other similar musicalfeatures has been interpreted by BrunoNettl as reflecting some of the dominantvalues of Western music in the late-nine-teenth century. In Germany and CentralEurope, where many of the early compar-ative musicologists were based, standardmusical training tended to stress intellec-tually difficult musical structures, such asmelodic development and the simultaneousinteraction of various parts. When theearly scholars of non-Western music begantheir study, we see particular attentionpaid to these same features.62 Nettl contin-ues:

And if normal music, to us, ispolyphonic, in the broad sense,the concept of polyphony wasused to show on the one hand thatthe non-Western music wasworthy of attention because it didhave, one said rather defensively,polyphony, with people perform-ing together in incomprehensiblefashion, nevertheless knowingwhat they were doing; but on theother hand, most of this exoticmusic was worthy of study pre-cisely because it was so different,had no polyphony…The idea of asystematic polyphonic practice —and of systematic music making ingeneral — was high on the list ofvalues among our forebears…earlyethnomusicologists wanted toshow that non-Western musicswere systematically organized ingood part because they hadlearned their own music with thisvalue in mind.63

Another feature of early comparative mu-sicology, also related to the "musicologic-al" half of ethnomusicology, was an em-phasis on the transcription of non-Westernmusic as an end in itself. Transcribingmusic onto the Western staff, even afterthe invention of recording technology,was and still is an important aspect ofethnomusicological training and prac-tice,64 although the necessity and accur-acy of transcription has always been sub-ject to questioning and debate. Exactnotation was not even a feature of Westerncompositional practice until the late-eighteenth century,65 and of course thecompression of an entire musical systemonto five lines and four spaces represent-ing 12 semitones per octave tends to mould

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non-Western music to our own image.Any understanding of a non-Westernmusic which is based on a transcription inWestern notation will necessarily encodeour own musical values.66 Nevertheless,if we think of the transcription of musicas itself an interpretive orientation, it mustbe one of the most pervasive in comparat-ive musicology through its first 50 years.

So, if early comparative musicologycame substantially to inform the "musico-logical" half of ethnomusicology, what wasthe intellectual trajectory that led to thesometimes-opposed, but always inter-twined, "anthropological" half?

Two prominent features of comparativemusicology as it developed in late-nine-teenth-century Europe are an overall lackof contextualization and a universalizingcomparative perspective.67 This was im-plicit in Ellis’ large-scale comparison ofscales, in Hornbostel’s meticulous analysisof recordings from around the world, andcertainly in Sachs’ assumption of a singledevelopmental framework for all theworld’s musics. These two features alsoproved to be a key rift within the schol-arly study of non-Western music, and ledto the development of a distinctive per-spective within American cultural anthro-pology.

THE ANTHROPOLOGY OFMUSIC

What must be one of the earliest substan-tial references to music within anthropo-logy appears in Franz Boas’ 1888 mono-graph The Central Eskimo,68 which con-tained transcriptions and some analysis oftwo-dozen Eskimo songs, within the con-text of a comprehensive ethnography. Not

only did this set the stage for an anthropo-logical approach to the study of non-Western music, but it represents a schol-arly effort almost as early as Ellis andStumpf in comparative musicology. In-deed, Boas and Stumpf worked togetherin collecting and analyzing NorthwestCoast indigenous music, subsequentlypublished by Stumpf in 1886 in Vier-teljahrsschrift für Musikwissenschaft, oneof the earliest journals in comparativemusicology.69 So it would be a mistake toassume that comparative musicologists andanthropologists operated in isolation fromone another. Nevertheless, their overallapproaches to the study of non-Westernmusic were very different in many ways.The comparative musicologists were mo-tivated by theories about the origins andstructure of music, and analyzed theirmaterials accordingly. Boas’ work on mu-sic lacked a theory of this type,70 and in-stead fitted into a framework of meticulousdetail and ethnographic salvage work.

In addition to the music contained inThe Central Eskimo, Boas published articleson Kwakiutl, Chinook, Eskimo and Siouxmusic between 1888 and 1925. Each ofthem, while focusing on music, containsthe elements that have come to be associ-ated with Boasian cultural anthropology.The article "On Certain Songs and Dancesof the Kwakiutl of British Columbia"71

contextualizes several musical transcrip-tions of songs (presumably done by Boashimself) by including accounts of ritual,song texts, and a very lengthy version ofmythology relevant to the songs. His art-icle "Chinook Songs"72 contains threebrief notations along with 38 song textsand a glossary of several dozen words.Two articles, both entitled "Eskimo Talesand Songs",73 present song texts along

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with explanations of dozens of words usedin them. His article "Teton Sioux Music"74

addresses issues of musical form, includingrhythm, phrasing, and structure, and in-cludes 11 quite detailed musical transcrip-tions. Although he does not approach thetechnical and analytical detail of the workof some comparative musicologists, Boaswas on par with many, and his work onmusic is under-recognized, probably dueto the enormous volume of work on othersubjects.

Boas’ impact on the cross-culturalstudy of music is felt most strongly not inhis own research and publications, but inthose of his students and their students, alegacy which has led to a number of themost significant ethnomusicologistsworking today. Edward Sapir, the ethno-grapher, linguist and poet, was also a mu-sician and grew up in a musical family (hisfather was a professional cantor).75 Hisfirst in-depth work on songs was in 1910,when he transcribed over 200 Paiute(northern Arizona/southern Utah) songtexts76 and recorded 120 songs on waxcylinders.77 Along with this material,much of it unpublished, was copious con-textual information on the performances,people and places associated with thesongs.78 Sapir’s recordings were tran-scribed by his father, Jacob Sapir.79 Thisresearch led to Sapir’s article "Song Recit-ative in Paiute Mythology",80 which in-cluded his own musical transcriptions andmusical analysis focusing primarily onrhythm. This represents a notable differ-ence, given the strong emphasis in compar-ative musicology on matters of melody,scales and intervals.

Some of the fundamental differencesbetween comparative musicological and

cultural anthropological approaches to thestudy of non-Western music can be foundin a 1912 review Sapir wrote of a publica-tion by Carl Stumpf (Die Anfänge der Mu-sik). Sapir offers a précis of Stumpf’s beliefthat, in primitive music, notice was takenof "the unified effect of tones sung atconsonant intervals", while other intervals"dissonant or relatively so, would in timearise by giving the voice free play withinthe fourth, fifth, and octave".81 Sapir cri-ticizes this approach as being difficult toprove or disprove, and as not being basedon historical data.82 As Sapir writes:

In the nature of things any suchtheory must be purely speculative,as the use of musical tones is fartoo ancient a heritage of humanityto yield its genesis to historical re-construction. Failing historicalevidence, a theory of origin can befully convincing only when sowell grounded in psychology asnecessarily to exclude all otherpossible theories. This is hardlythe case here.83

Sapir is also critical of Stumpf’s over-em-phasis (which could be extended muchmore broadly in the comparative musico-logy of the day) on "the purely intervalic[sic] side of music":

Music is neither purely tone norpurely rhythm. Would it not bemore suggestive to think of it interms of an association of toneproduction, however it mightarise, with the rhythmic impulsemanifested in all of man’s artisticactivities? Granted this impulseand the possession of vocal chords,adjustable for changes of pitch,various forms of musical expres-

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sion might be expected to arise.Several paths seem possible, theactual course or courses traversedlie beyond our ken.84

And in a similar vein, critiquing Stumpf’shandling of melodic structure and musicalform, Sapir writes:

I am inclined to doubt whether apurely musical study of this prob-lem would be as fruitful as whentaken in connection with song-texts, dance forms, and other fea-tures as musical execution is wontto be associated with in practice.The peculiarities of melodic formsare often due to factors that haveno direct relation to musical prob-lems as such, as witness ourmasses, lullabies, and bugle calls.These remarks are meant to indic-ate the necessity of studying themore complicated problemspresented by primitive music inconnection with associated cultur-al features. Stumpf’s relative neg-lect throughout the book of allfeatures that are not strictly music-al in character is naturally to alarge extent unavoidable, but wemust not fail to realize that suchone-sidedness may lead us astrayin our interpretations.85

Overall, Sapir’s review is quite favourable;these comments, however, indicate certainmatters of interpretation and emphasis thatdifferentiated comparative musicologistsfrom anthropologists, matters that still, tosome extent, characterize ethnomusico-logy.

Another of Boas’ students who wasvery influential in the development of

ethnomusicology was George Herzog.Herzog is an interesting character in thisnarrative, as he really stands with one footin each of the two camps that I am discuss-ing. He first studied at the Royal Conser-vatory in Budapest, and was heavily influ-enced by the folk music research of BélaBartók and Zoltán Kodály.86 From 1923until 1925, Herzog worked under Horn-bostel at the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv,the most important archival institution forcomparative musicology until the SecondWorld War, and thus was part of the so-called Berlin School of Comparative Musi-cology.87 In 1925 he emigrated to theUnited States and studied anthropologyunder Boas.88 Thus, in one individual wehave the intellectual descendant of a vari-ety of important approaches to the cross-cultural study of music. Bruno Nettl,Herzog’s most prominent student, wrotethe following about Herzog’s letters,which give an interesting insight into hisplace in the development of ethnomusico-logy:

Throughout the correspondenceone sees the hand of Hornbostel,the comparativist and the archive-builder, of Bartók the careful pro-cessor and analyst concerned withauthenticity, of Boas the methodic-al fieldworker, of the confluenceof folkloristics, linguistics, andethnography…The multidisciplin-ary nature of American eth-nomusicology is in part due to hismany-sided reach.89

Another prominent student of Boas’ whowas greatly influential in the developmentof the anthropological approach to non-Western music was Melville Herskovits,whose interest in the relationship between

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African and African-American culture wasstimulated by the role of music.90 Al-though Herskovits did not publish extens-ively on musical topics, he supervised thedoctoral dissertations of both RichardWaterman and Alan Merriam (who wouldboth be very prominent in the new fieldof ethnomusicology), and he made fieldrecordings of music in Dutch Guiana,Haiti, Trinidad, Brazil, Dahomey, the GoldCoast and Nigeria.91

WATERMAN AND MOYLE:CONTRASTING SCHOLARSCOMPARED

In this section, I would like to examine theparticular theoretical and methodologicalapproaches of two of the earliest scholarsof Australian Aboriginal music, RichardWaterman and Alice Moyle. As well asany two ethnomusicologists, their workclearly represents the mixed parentage ofthe discipline, one anthropological andone musicological — although it is diffi-cult to characterize their work in asimplistic way. Their distinctive ap-proaches to the study of music revealmuch of the discipline’s past, and also thedirections it came to take in the sub-sequent five decades.

Richard Waterman is best known as ascholar of African and African-Americanmusic, and had a distinguished anthropo-logical pedigree through Herskovits toBoas. His doctoral research, completed in1943, looked at African patterns in themusic of Trinidad, which he pursuedthrough a clearly anthropological frame-work.92 He later worked with Herskovitsat Northwestern University in Chicago,becoming the founding director of theNorthwestern University Laboratory of

Comparative Musicology and supervisingthe doctoral research of Alan Merriam,who was to become one of the leadingfigures in ethnomusicology.93 Merriamlater wrote of Waterman’s work: "overrid-ing all else is a basic orientation towardanthropology; [Waterman] was an anthro-pologist first and foremost, and his eth-nomusicological specialization was almostalways handled within the anthropologicalframe of reference."94

This orientation is most clear in Water-man’s consistent theoretical interest incultural dynamics, examining how culturalpatterns, especially musical ones, are re-tained, reinterpreted, or fused over time.95

His best-known work in this regard ex-amined the degree to which African-American musics maintained African mu-sical elements.

Waterman was most interested inrhythmic styles and their cultural context;this in itself differentiates him from a greatdeal of comparative musicology which hada primary focus on tonality, melody andharmony, and the analysis of music in itsown terms. His 1948 paper entitled "'Hot'Rhythm in Negro Music" examined thevarying tenacity of West African rhythmicpatterns in a variety of African-Americanmusics in the New World. Waterman de-scribes "hot" as "one of those subliminalconstellations of feelings, values, attitudes,and motor-behaviour patterns"96 whichmanifests itself in mixed metres, percus-sion polyrhythms, off-beat melodicphrasing, and an overall prominence ofpercussion instruments.97 The degree towhich these West African musical charac-teristics were syncretised with musics inthe New World, and the particular natureof the syncretism, depended on the music-

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al styles to which they were exposed and,crucially, on the cultural context. In NorthAmerica, where whites discouraged anddisparaged African music and culture,African-American music is largelyEuropean in nature, with significant butsubmerged African features. In contrast,in Central and South America, in whichthere was a more accommodating culturalcontext, African musical elements weremore evenly blended, or even dominantlyWest African.98 A place like Trinidadexhibits the full range of possibilities, withdominantly British and Protestant areasfeaturing European-derived religious andfolk music with a more subtle African fla-vour in some areas, and music of Africanreligious cults in others.99 From the out-set, then, Waterman’s work on musicpertained directly to understanding thebroader cultural patterns of which musicwas a part.

Waterman’s work on African andAfrican-American music was also criticalof some of the prevailing attitudes in theacademic study of non-Western music. Hetook issue, for instance, with the notionthat Africans were not developed enoughculturally to have harmony, and that anyinstances of harmony in recorded sampleswere purely the accidental result of over-lapping polyphony of different vocalparts. He also lamented the methodologythat facilitated such an interpretation,where analysts relied on poor-quality re-cordings made by others, where true har-monic features may have been masked,rather than on recordings they madethemselves.100 Waterman writes: "That ahypothesis concerning the absence ofharmony in African music could have beenframed on the basis of early data presen-ted, then, is completely understandable;

how the hypothesis came to be acceptedas fact and how it managed to persist tothis day are less readily understood."101

In his work on Australian Aboriginalmusic, Waterman retained his overridingtheoretical interest in cultural dynamicsand social context, even to the extent thatany focus on particular musical featuresis limited. He made around 15 hours ofrecordings of Yolngu music during a year’sfield research in Yirrkala in 1952/53. Forthe most part, they were elicited record-ings of short sequences of songs, perhapsa half-dozen to a dozen, by single patrifili-al groups. There are several recordings oforal narrative, and at least two sequencesof songs recorded in their ritual context.

Waterman’s only published workdealing specifically with Yolngu musicwas an article in 1955 entitled "Music inAustralian Aboriginal Culture — SomeSociological and Psychological Implica-tions". Waterman’s primary focus was inexamining Yolngu music as an enculturat-ive mechanism, and he drew upon func-tionalist theory in his interpretations.102

Much of the article examines how musicis learned in childhood, adolescence, earlyadulthood, and late adulthood, and thefunctions of music are described asproviding recreation, improving morale,increasing and relieving emotional ten-sion,103 strengthening kin-group solidar-ity, acting as textbooks of natural history,history and cosmology, and affirming tiesbetween social groups and totemic spe-cies.104

In terms of musical features, it is curi-ous that Waterman’s interest in rhythm,as detailed in his African-American re-search, does not replicate itself in hisYolngu research (despite considerable

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rhythmic complexity). Instead, Watermanturns his attention to subject matter closerto the heart of comparative musicology:melody, scales and intervals. Even here,though, his primary interest is to demon-strate the relationship between melodyand sociality, by demonstrating the patri-filial identity of various melodic intervals.Thus, he can assert that: "[a] karma cycleof the ridajigo-speaking lineage uses thefirst, the flatted second, and the flattedthird of scale; a cycle of the komaitt-speak-ing lineage uses the natural second andflatted third of scale, and one of themagkalili-speaking lineage the flatted thirdand the fourth."105

If the shift to a focus on melody overrhythm is somewhat surprising, the focuson social context is not. At any rate, thearticle as a whole does not deal with anymusical feature in great detail, concentrat-ing on matters of social function and encul-turation.

Waterman’s interest in cultural dynam-ics is more obvious in a paper, co-writtenwith his wife, called "Directions of CultureChange in Aboriginal Arnhem Land",106

a chapter of a book co-edited by him onthe subject of cultural change in Aborigin-al Australia. The paper is a critique of theview, widespread at the time, that Abori-ginal culture is essentially conservativeand unchanging under conditions of cul-tural contact, leading to cultural break-down instead of accommodation. TheWatermans advance the position that, al-though certain areas of Yolngu culture,such as their experience of missionaryeducation and religion, demonstratedconsiderable resistance to change, in otherareas of culture Yolngu people were re-markably innovative and willing to accept

new things.107 In support of this position,the Watermans point to Macassan-derivedmaterial culture and cosmology, and thediscovery of "new" songs in the Yolngumusical repertoire.108 The authors con-clude:

…that Australian Aboriginals, asexemplified by the people ofYirkalla [sic], have earned theirreputation for resisting changeonly in connection with changeswhose motivations they do notunderstand, changes detrimentalto their well-being, and changesthat would involve behaviour inopposition to their values and tothe principles of their world-view.

Actually, in their own terms,the Aboriginals of Yirkalla arepeople with open and questioningminds, continually making use ofevery source of good and valuablesuggestions for the modificationof their behaviour and willing toconsider any innovation on itsown merits.109

In his only other publication on the sub-ject of Aboriginal music, Waterman againadopts a stance reminiscent of comparativemusicology in two senses: first, througha focus on melodic structures (although hedoes pay attention to melodic rhythm);and second, by analyzing a collection ofmusic made by Mountford on GrooteEylandt. In both senses, Waterman wouldseem to contradict the interpretive stancewhich he took vis-à-vis African andAfrican-American music in the 1940s and1950s.

Waterman’s focus is to draw sometentative conclusions about Groote Eylandtmusic based on his melodic analyses of a

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small sample of songs. The language whichhe uses and the style of analysis arestrongly reminiscent of early-twentieth-century comparative musicology, andmark something of a departure from hisother ethnomusicological work. There isa general interpretive assumption that theanalysis of melodic structure, in the senseof counting notes and measuring the inter-vals between them in terms of Westernmusical theory, can provide material forgeneral conclusions about the music andits place amongst the musics of the world.Thus, to give but one example, Watermanwrites about one particular song in thesample:

Its basic materials are two tonelevels, scored G and A. In the firstmeasure the initial notes of thehalf-measure figures rise to B, butI suspect that this is either a spe-cies of beginning formula or thesinger using a few notes to find hisbest pitch. A peculiar featureabout this song is the “rise” inmeasure 12, which is echoed by ahigh note at the beginning ofmeasures 13 and 14. This intrusivehigh note — intrusive because itis unique in this particular collec-tion, and because it breaks theconsistent pattern of alternatingand balancing figurations using Gand A, of which the present songis almost entirely composed —reaches to a major seventh abovethe low note, then slides down ahalf-tone for its other two appear-ances.110

What is surprising here is not the natureof the analysis itself, which was commonenough in the mid-1960s when the paper

was written, nor the value of such ananalysis. What is surprising is that itcomes from the pen of Waterman, whoseother published work is based so stronglyupon an anthropological method, copiouscultural context, and a much broader ap-proach to the analysis of musical features.

Waterman himself comments on this inthe paper, noting that, although he isgenerally in the "anthropological" campof ethnomusicology, one may follow thelead of Kolinski — amongst the most"musicological" of ethnomusicologists —in using other people’s recordings, analyz-ing musical structure, and ignoring thecultural context111 — an approach whichhe had previously characterized as "unfor-tunate for the development of ethnomusico-logy as a branch of cultural anthropo-logy".112

Waterman’s conclusions in this paperalso situate it within a well-establisheddiscourse of comparative musicology.Given that Groote Eylandt music (at leasthis small sample) uses a small number ofnotes, he suggests that melody is betterunderstood in terms of pitch levels ratherthan scales. He writes:

…this is a way of making musicsomewhat different from the cre-ation of melodies using an array ofnotes drawn from a series that canbe arranged in a scale either by thesinger himself or at least by somemusically trained investigator…Ishould like to suggest that, withregard to tonal materials, thereexists a hitherto unrecognisedmusical culture area to go with thescale-type areas generally recog-nized. To the South Asian-NorthAfrican microtonal area, the

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European-African diatonic area,and the Far Eastern-American Indi-an pentatonic area (which, incid-entally, should be divided and re-characterized), I should like to addan area of Oceania characterizednot by scales, but rather by thetechnique of forming songs out ofa very few established levels ofpitch.113

Thus, here we have one of the mostprominent "anthropological" ethnomusico-logists, a student of Boas and Herskovits,shunning the investigation of culturalcontext and addressing himself to thekinds of questions which had dominatedcomparative musicology since the mid-1880s. It is obvious that, despite being ableto characterize different approaches to thestudy of non-Western music, some schol-ars cannot be completely tarred with onebrush.

What, then, of Alice Moyle? In manyways, she was as good an exemplar of the"musicological" side of the discipline asWaterman was of the "anthropological"side. But, like Waterman, she cannot beentirely tarred with one brush either.

One of Alice Moyle’s first publicationswas a book called Know Your Orchestra,114

but her first excursion into Aboriginalmusic was her 1957 M.A. thesis at theUniversity of Sydney entitled "The Inter-vallic Structure of Australian AboriginalSinging". The subject matter, overall ap-proach and theoretical inspiration placeher squarely within the European traditionof comparative musicology. Moyle’s object-ive was the comparative study of interval-lic resemblances among different musicaltraditions in Aboriginal Australia, with an

eye toward describing them in terms ofdevelopmental stages.115

Moyle draws upon some of the mostprominent figures in comparative musico-logy, especially Curt Sachs, positing a rela-tionship between the number of notes usedmelodically and different stages of singing;that is, fewer notes equals an earlierstage.116 She further uses Sachs’ frame-work of logogenic, pathogenic and melo-genic singing, stating that Aboriginal songbelongs in the last category due to thepresence of well-marked intervals.117

Moyle also refers to Alain Danielou’s "In-troduction to the Study of Musical Scales",in which he states that intervals can eitherbe divided by numbers (like stringlengths), or "by their psychological corres-pondence such as the feelings and imagesthey necessarily evoke in our minds",118

extending such an idea to Aboriginalsinging.

Like so much comparative musicologyin the first half of the twentieth century,Moyle devotes a significant portion of herstudy to the subject of the pentatonicscale, and refers to both Hornbostel andSachs in her analysis. She notes that thesequence A-G-E-D-C is a "typically Aus-tralian" mode of descent,119 and examinesa number of other possible pentatonicmodes.120 She writes, however: "whilethe intention here is not to suggest regularor systematic pentatonism…— the reverseis nearer the truth in Australian singing— the conglomerations of small 'motives'already described do frequently produceresemblances to the above pentatonic se-quences."121

She continues:

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What remains to be said here onthe subject of pentatonism is thatin songs all over the continentboth pentatonic, diatonic (hep-tatonic), chromatic, even microton-ic progressions are demonstrated.And it would seem that all of theseare purely vocal modes of singingwhich can exist side by side. The-ories of “evolution” or develop-ment are probably no more thantheories of emphasis, certain instru-ments emphasising certain scaleprogressions more than others. TheAustralian situation in this regardwould closely parallel that at thebeginning of Western musical his-tory, long before subsequent exper-iments in harmony gave to thediatonics that "advanced" statusthat they had in Western musicaltheory.122

It is obvious that Moyle has not beenswept away by an inordinate focus on thepentatonic scale in so-called primitivemusic, like some of her predecessors.However, her work is clearly marked bya strong concern for scales and intervalsas holding the key to understanding uni-versal principles of musical development.

Tonality — that is, the number of tonesused and the way they are used in partic-ular intervallic sequences — is at thecentre of Moyle’s theory of stages of devel-opment in Aboriginal singing;123 for, asshe writes, "the rise and fall of melody issurely closer to the core of music thanfeatures derived from song-texts or fromdancing rhythms".124 This is combinedwith a corresponding theory of musicaldiffusion in order to speculate on the ori-gins and spread of Australian Aboriginal

music. Moyle refers to Sachs’ belief thatthere was an Asian cradle of music whichcould be demonstrated by attention tomelody, modes and scales.125 She writes:"Having traced — thanks to Sachs — themajor-third-plus-semitone progressionright to Australia’s back door, we are nowable to follow it further into North EastArnhem Land to the popular Wadamiri[sic] song-series which features this inter-val group in a well-established and strik-ing manner."126

And she continues:

…judging by the basic tones andintervals aboriginal singers select,it might well be that here in Aus-tralia, and for contemporary earsto hear, is music which belongs tothe same deep strata as the sourcesof both Eastern and Western mu-sic. In Australian aboriginal musicwe may be hearing the same ger-minating cells from which havecome every known style of mu-sic.127

She then goes on to outline, based onmelodic structure, a series of stages in thedevelopment of Aboriginal music, from asmall range with monotonous repetitionall the way through to polyphonic rudi-ments,128 and states that diffusion ac-counts for similarities between musicalregions across the country.129 It seems tome that the underlying evolutionist implic-ation of Moyle’s thesis was probably im-ported into her thinking by her theoreticalreliance on Sachs more than any othersingle scholar.

Moyle’s primary interest in the inter-vallic features of Aboriginal music contin-ued in subsequent publications. Her 1959

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analysis of Baldwin Spencer’s wax cylin-der recordings, made in 1901 and 1912,concentrates almost entirely on which in-tervals may be heard and in which order.The universal significance of particularintervals is suggested through numerouscomparisons between the intervals sungon Spencer’s cylinders and the ancientmodes of Western civilization: "the tonesof the “Arunji” corroboree…resemblethose of the ancient Greek Hypophrygian,or mediaeval Mixolydian mode"130 or "astructural interval of a fourth…is linkedconjunctly to one of a fifth…after themanner of the ancient Greek Hypomixoly-dian and mediaeval Phrygian modes".131

In 1960, Moyle turned her analyticalear to the earliest recordings of Aboriginalmusic in existence, made in 1899 and 1903of the Tasmanian singer Fanny CochraneSmith. Once again, melodic structureprovides the material for her interpretiveframework, as it had in her earlier work.Comparing these songs with those of theVedda of what was then Ceylon — thehands-down winner of the early comparat-ive musicological prize for "most primit-ive" music — Moyle contends that theTasmanian songs show a much higher levelof organization, based on melodic struc-ture, with "a compass of an octave andseven or eight appreciably different tones"and melodies which "proceed upwards aswell as downwards".132 And, within thesample itself, the legato-style "Birds andFlowers" song is more musically advancedthan the syllabic "corroboree" song, byvirtue of melodic phrases which are "bal-anced above and below a tonal centre".133

In both cases, conclusions regarding mu-sical development and sophistication aremade solely on the basis of melody andmelodic features, with no consideration of

rhythm or timbre, much less cultural con-text.

Moyle’s grounding in the theory ofEuropean comparative musicology alsoleads her to adopt an explicitly comparat-ive approach to her material, as she detailssimilarities and differences between theTasmanian material and songs from thewest coast of South Australia as well asCentral Australia. These comparisons arebased on scale tables, a method advocatedby Hornbostel, which break down a pieceof music into its constituent notes andtheir relative duration; the most frequentlyoccurring note is taken as the tonic of ascale used in the piece.134 Moyle con-cludes that the Tasmanian songs have aclear tonic and an emphasis given to a tri-ad with the tonic in the middle, whereasthe other Aboriginal songs emphasize thefifth note above the triad. These and othermelodic features lead Moyle to comparethe Tasmanian songs with Melanesianstyles of singing135 — which is obviouslydrawing a very long bow.

So, early in her career Alice Moyle wasstrongly informed by some of the charac-teristic features of comparative musico-logy: an overriding interest in melodic andintervallic structures; a negligible interestin rhythmic features; an interest in com-parison, musical origins and development-al stages; a reliance on a "laboratory"method of analyzing field collections madeby others; an overall lack of focus on cul-tural context; and a general belief innotation and musical analysis as thefoundation of methodology. However, asher career progressed she became muchless easy to characterize in each of theseareas. A single example, an article from1968 which was a follow-up on the Tas-

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manian recordings, reveals some subtlechanges in her approach.

One notable change, which reflects anextra decade of thought on matters eth-nomusicological, as well as her first-handresearch and recording, is a re-orientationaway from the scalar arrangement ofpitches toward a focus on melodic contour,which may reveal "significant demarca-tions of musical style".136 To this end,Moyle’s standard transcriptions in West-ern notation are accompanied by graphsoutlining melodic contour, with pitchrepresented on the Y-axis and duration onthe X-axis. Of this method Moyle writes:

…the tonal level (or levels) withwhich the progression of vocal tonesmost often coincides is seen to emergein the length and disposition of thehorizontal lines. Western designationssuch as “tonic”, “dominant” etc. arethus avoided. Vertical lines indicate“broad” (as against “narrow”, or accur-ately measured) melodic steps or inter-vals…Pitch/duration graphs have theadvantage here of directing attentionto tonal movement, rather than toprecise pitch.137

Another notable change is Moyle’smuch greater emphasis on the historicalrecord to provide some relevant culturalcontext; in particular, in examining songtexts and historical reports of polyphonicsinging in parallel thirds. Although shepoints out that, on the Australian main-land, polyphonic singing was producedby accidental overlapping of vocal parts(the same interpretation criticized by Wa-terman with regard to African polyphony),she gives some credence to early historicalaccounts of Tasmanian singing in parallelthirds.138

However, despite these changes in herapproach, and new information therebygenerated, her conclusions remain virtu-ally the same. The innovative pitch/dura-tion graphs depicting melodic contour areused to compare Tasmanian singing notonly with mainland Aboriginal singing,but also with singing in the Solomon Is-lands, again taking melodic features as thesole basis for intercultural musical compar-ison. Examining these graphs, along withthe historical accounts, Moyle is able toconclude:

Compared with songs recorded onthe mainland more differencesthan similarities have been foundin the present study of FannySmith’s songs. Fanny Smith’sSpring Song and Hymn Improvisa-tion show some structural resemb-lance to a style of singing hithertoobserved in parts of Melanesia.And if early evidence for singingin “third parallels” be accepted,further support is thus given to atentative theory of musical connec-tion between Tasmania and placesin the South Pacific.139

So, up to this point in her career Moylecontinues to develop a speculative theoryof musical diffusion, reminiscent of Horn-bostel’s support of diffusion theory andthe monogenesis of cultural phenom-ena.140 Although her thought changedover the many years of her work, it canbe concluded that Moyle maintained aconsistent grounding in the theoreticalframework of her early career, and there-fore is a good representative of the "musi-cological" side of ethnomusicology.

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CONCLUSIONS

And so to return to my titular metaphor:the gestation of the discipline of eth-nomusicology lasted for roughly sevendecades, from Alexander Ellis’ treatise onthe musical scales of various nations in1885 to the first annual meeting of the So-ciety for Ethnomusicology in 1956. Therewas a courting period of at least 300 years,beginning with some of the earliest ac-counts of non-Western music by travellersand missionaries. The period of labourseems to have started between the late1940s, with the formation of the Interna-tional Folk Music Council, and late 1952,when the "founding fathers" of the Societyfor Ethnomusicology first met at theAmerican Anthropological Associationconference to discuss forming a new soci-ety.

Using very broad strokes (and cogniz-ant of the dangers of doing so), it is pos-sible to characterize some of the predomin-ant concerns of comparative musicologyas a focus on the transcription and analysisof musical structures, especially melodic,scalar and intervallic structures, as the keyto an understanding of non-Western musicthat allows for cross-cultural comparison,generalization and speculation about theorigins and development of music. Al-though there is considerable internal di-versity, most of the main figures in com-parative musicology, such as Stumpf,Hornbostel and Sachs, dealt with these is-sues in some detail. This intellectual traject-ory provided the theoretical and method-ological foundation upon which AliceMoyle built her early work on AustralianAboriginal music.

It is also possible to characterize theanthropological study of music in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuriesas primarily concerned with the culturalcontext of musical performance, revealedthrough the process of salvage ethno-graphy. Scholars like Boas, Sapir andHerskovits lacked any grand theory ofmusic, although they did undertake lim-ited transcription and analysis to comple-ment transcriptions of song texts and de-tailed accounts of rituals. When they didfocus on musical detail, they often singledout rhythmic structures for special consid-eration. This approach to the study ofmusic paved the way for Richard Water-man’s work on both African-American andAustralian Aboriginal musics.

This article has many weaknesses. Inorder to cover much ground, I have hadto gloss over each of the scholars men-tioned with undue haste, very likely ignor-ing many of the subtleties of their work.I have left out a great many significantearly scholars of non-Western musics,such as Helen Roberts, Frances Densmore,Jaap Kunst, Robert Lachmann and HughTracey. I have had to ignore the entiremovement of scholars who studied the folkmusics of Europe, including PercyGrainger, Béla Bartók, Cecil Sharp, MariusBarbeau, Maude Karpeles and many oth-ers. Perhaps most grievously, I have leftunexamined, except in a passing way, theimpact of two major developments onethnomusicology: the invention of thephonograph141 and the development ofmusic archives based on phonographicrecordings. Both changed the course ofethnomusicology forever, and must waitfor another article.

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This article has at least pointed back intime to some of the important factorswhich led to the intellectual situation ofboth the founding of ethnomusicology asa discipline and of the earliest significantresearch on Australian Aboriginal music.The intellectual situation then, with asmaller number of musically inclined an-thropologists and a larger number of eth-nically inclined musicologists, continuesto characterize the discipline today. How-ever, as the cases of Richard Watermanand Alice Moyle demonstrate, the intellec-tual history of ethnomusicology is quitecomplex and no individual scholar’s devel-opment can be analyzed in a simplisticway. Waterman and Moyle each begantheir work on Australian Aboriginal musicjust as the scholarly study of non-Westernmusic was in the process of becomingformalized as a discipline, and they weresubject to a wide range of theoretical andmethodological influences. Each went onto become extremely influential on thedevelopment of ethnomusicology in theirrespective countries as they trained futuregenerations of researchers. As a pair, then,they shed some considerable light on theorigins of ethnomusicology and the waysin which it has grown during the sub-sequent half-century. Now that the discip-line is into late middle age, with grown-up children of its own, its intellectual tra-jectory will no doubt continue on a robustinterdisciplinary path for generations tocome.

ENDNOTES

1 Timothy Rice, "Toward the Remodeling of Eth-nomusicology", Ethnomusicology, vol.31 no.3, 1987,p. 471.2 The distinction in ethnomusicology between “an-thropological” and “musicological” approaches is

less relevant now than it was in the past, althoughit still persists in a variety of ways. I maintain thedistinction here only as a heuristic device for thepurpose of examining the development of the discip-line from these initially distinct disciplinary bases.3 Charlotte Frisbie, "Women and the Society forEthnomusicology: Roles and Contributions fromFormation through Incorporation (1952/3–1961)" inBruno Nettl and Philip V. Bohlman (eds), ComparativeMusicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on theHistory of Ethnomusicology (Chicago and London: TheUniversity of Chicago Press, 1991), pp.245–6.4 The International Council for Traditional Music(ICTM) is the other major international society dedic-ated to ethnomusicological scholarship. Founded in1947 as the International Folk Music Council (ErichStockmann, "The International Folk Music Council/In-ternational Council for Traditional Music: FortyYears", Yearbook for Traditional Music, vol.20, 1988,p.1), the birth of this organization could also havebeen used in this article to mark the beginning oforganized ethnomusicology. In either case, thefounding of these organizations was merely a symbol-ic milestone marking the coalescence of a number ofscholarly trends that had been developing lessformally for decades.5 Frank Harrison, Time, Place and Music: An Antho-logy of Ethnomusicological Observation c.1550 toc.1800, (Amsterdam: Frits Knuf, 1973), p.6.6 Ibid, pp.16–9.7 Philip Bohlman, "Representation and Cultural Cri-tique in the History of Ethnomusicology", in Nettland Bohlman, Comparative Musicology and Anthropo-logy of Music, p.131.8 Cited in Harrison, Time, Place and Music, p.56.9 Cited in Harrison, Time, Place and Music, p.199.10 Anthony Seeger, "Styles of Musical Ethnography"in Nettl and Bohlman, Comparative Musicology andAnthropology of Music, p.347.11 Ibid.12 Ibid, pp.347–8.13 The claim of tone-deafness is made by Jaap Kunst,Musicologica: A Study of the Nature of Ethno-musico-logy, Its Problems, Methods and Representative Person-alities (Amsterdam: Koninklijke Vereeniging IndischInstituut, 1950), p.9. In the published paper, Ellisstates: "I have been assisted throughout by the delic-ate ear of Mr. Alfred James Hipkins…without hisremarkable power of discriminating small intervalsbetween tones of very different qualities…this papercould not have come into existence…The calcula-tions, the arrangement, the illustrations, as well asthe original conception, form my part. The judgmentof ear, musical suggestions, and assistance in every

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way form his.” (Alexander Ellis, "On the MusicalScales of Various Nations", Journal of the Royal Societyof the Arts, vol.33, pp.486).14 Ellis, ‘On the Musical Scales of Various Nations",pp.486–7.15 Kunst, Musicologica, p.10.16 Ellis, ‘On the Musical Scales of Various Nations",pp.490–1.17 Ibid, p.526.18 Alexander L. Ringer, "One World or None? Un-timely Reflections on a Timely Musicological Ques-tion" in Nettl and Bohlman, Comparative Musicologyand Anthropology of Music, p.187.19 Ellis, "On the Musical Scales of Various Nations",p.487.20 In this sense, early ethnomusicology bears a re-semblance to the early anthropology of Franz Boas,whose doctoral dissertation in physics had a definitepsychological angle, examining the psycho-physicsof colour perception.21 Albrecht Schneider, "Psychological Theory andComparative Musicology" in Nettl and Bohlman,Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music,p.293.22 Schneider, "Psychological Theory and Comparat-ive Musicology", pp.294–5.23 Dieter Christensen, "Erich von Hornbostel, CarlStumpf, and the Institutionalization of ComparativeMusicology" in Nettl and Bohlman, ComparativeMusicology and Anthropology of Music, p.204.24 Christensen, "The Institutionalization of Compar-ative Musicology", p.204.25 Eric Ames, "The Sound of Evolution", MODERN-ISM/modernity, vol.10 no.2, 2003, pp.303, 315 andpassim.26 Ibid, p.316.27 Stephen Blum, "European Musical Terminologyand the Music of Africa" in Nettl and Bohlman,Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music,p.10.28 Cited in Blum, "European Musical Terminologyand the Music of Africa", p.10.29 Jaap Kunst, Around Von Hornbostel's Theory of theCycle of Blown Fifths (Amsterdam: KoninklijkeVereeniging Indisch Instituut, 1948), pp.3–5.30 Erich M. von Hornbostel, African Negro Music(London: International Institute of African Languagesand Cultures, 1930), pp.7–8.31 Also see Ames, "The Sound of Evolution", p.316and passim.

32 Hornbostel, African Negro Music, p.11.33 Ibid.34 Ibid, p.13.35 Ames, "The Sound of Evolution", p.316.36 Erich M. von Hornbostel, "The Ethnology ofAfrican Sound-Instruments", Africa: Journal of theInternational African Institute, vol.6 no.2, 1933,p.133.37 Ibid.38 Ibid, pp.138–9.39 Ibid, p.140.40 Ibid, p.141.41 Ibid, p.144.42 Ibid, p.145.43 Ibid, p.146.44 Ibid, p.148.45 Ibid, p.150; also see Ames, "The Sound of Evolu-tion", ff.77.46 Curt Sachs, The Rise of Music in the Ancient World:East and West (New York: W.W. Norton & Co.,1943), p.20.47 Ibid, p.21.48 Ibid, p.29.49 Ibid, p.31.50 Ibid, p.32.51 Ibid, p.41.52 Ibid, p.52.53 Ibid, p.41.54 Ibid, p.41.55 Ibid, p.52.56 Ibid, p.42.57 Ibid, pp.42–3.58 Ibid, p.43.59 Ibid, p. 44.60 Bruno Nettl, "Western Musical Values and theCharacter of Ethnomusicology", The World of Music,vol.24 no.1, 1984, p.31.61 Ibid, p. 31.62 Ibid.63 Ibid, pp.32–3.64 Ibid, p.35.

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65 cf. Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of MusicalWorks: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1992).66 Nettl, "Western Musical Values", p.36.67 Norma McLeod, "Ethnomusicological Researchand Anthropology", Annual Review of Anthropology,vol.3, 1974, p.102.68 Franz Boas, The Central Eskimo (Lincoln: Univer-sity of Nebraska Press, 1964 (1888)).69 Franz Boas, "On Certain Songs and Dances of theKwakiutl of British Columbia", Journal of AmericanFolklore, vol.1 no.1, 1888, p.52.70 McLeod, "Ethnomusicological Research and An-thropology", p.102.71 Franz Boas, "On Certain Songs and Dances of theKwakiutl of British Columbia", p.52.72 Franz Boas, "Chinook Songs", Journal of AmericanFolklore, vol.1 no.3, 1888.73 Franz Boas, "Eskimo Tales and Songs", Journal ofAmerican Folklore, vol.7 no.24, 1894, and "EskimoTales and Songs", Journal of American Folklore, vol.10no.37, 1897.74 Franz Boas, "Teton Sioux Music", Journal ofAmerican Folklore, vol.38 no.148, 1925.75 Robert Franklin and Pamela Bunte, "Edward Sa-pir’s Unpublished Southern Paiute Song Texts", inRegna Darnell and Judith Irvine (eds), CollectedWorks of Edward Sapir, vol.4: Ethnology, (Berlin:Mouton, 1994), p.589.76 Franklin and Bunte, "Edward Sapir’s UnpublishedSouthern Paiute Song Texts", p.589.77 Thomas Vennum, "The Tony Tillohash Wax Cyl-inder Recordings and Jacob Sapir’s Musical Transcrip-tions", in Darnell and Irvine, Collected Works of Ed-ward Sapir, vol.4, p.663.78 Franklin and Bunte, "Edward Sapir’s UnpublishedSouthern Paiute Song Texts", p.594.79 Ibid, p. 589.80 Edward Sapir, "Song Recitative in Paiute Mytho-logy", Journal of American Folklore, vol.23 no.90,1910.81 Edward Sapir, "Review of Carl Stumpf, Die Anf-dnge der Musik", in Darnell and Irvine, CollectedWorks of Edward Sapir, vol.4, p.141.82 Ibid, p.141.83 Ibid, pp.141–2.84 Ibid, p.142.85 Ibid, pp.143–4.

86 Bruno Nettl, "The IFCM/ICTM and the Develop-ment of Ethnomusicology in the United States",Yearbook for Traditional Music, vol.20, p.21.87 Christensen, "The Institutionalization of Compar-ative Musicology", p.206.88 Nettl, "The IFCM/ICTM and the Development ofEthnomusicology in the United States", p.21.89 Bruno Nettl, "The Dual Nature of Ethnomusico-logy in North America: The Contributions of CharlesSeeger and George Herzog", in Nettl and Bohlman,Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music,pp.271–2.90 McLeod, "Ethnomusicological Research and An-thropology", p.102.91 Richard A. Waterman, "“Hot” Rhythm in NegroMusic", Journal of the American Musicological Society,vol.1 no.1, 1948, p.24.92 Alan Merriam, "Richard Alan Waterman,1914–1971", Ethnomusicology, vol.17 no.1, 1973, p.73.93 Ibid, p.74.94 Ibid.95 Ibid.96 Waterman, "'Hot' Rhythm in Negro Music", p.24.97 Ibid, p.25.98 Ibid, pp.26–7.99 Ibid, pp.33–6.100 Richard A. Waterman, "African Influence on theMusic of the Americas", in Sol Tax (ed.), Accultura-tion in the Americas (Chicago: The University ofChicago Press, 1952), p.208.101 Ibid, p.209.102 Richard A. Waterman, "Music in AustralianAboriginal Culture: Some Sociological and Psycholo-gical Implications", Journal of Music Therapy, vol.5,1955, p.41.103 Ibid, p.45.104 Ibid, p.47.105 Ibid, p.46.106 Richard A. Waterman and Patricia Panyity Wa-terman, "Directions of Culture Change in AboriginalArnhem Land", in Arnold R. Pilling and Richard A.Waterman (eds), Diprotodon to Detribalization: Studiesof Change among Australian Aborigines (East Lansing:Michigan State University Press, 1970), pp.101–109.107 Waterman and Waterman, pp.103–7.108 Ibid, pp.107–8.109 Ibid, pp.108–9.

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110 Richard A. Waterman, "Aboriginal Songs fromGroote Eylandt, Australia", in Peter Crossley-Holland(ed.), Proceedings of the Centennial Workshop on Eth-nomusicology (Victoria: Provincial Archives of BritishColumbia, 1975), p.105.111 Waterman, "Aboriginal Songs from GrooteEylandt, Australia", p.111.112 Waterman, "African Influence on the Music ofthe Americas", p.208.113 Waterman, "Aboriginal Songs from GrooteEylandt, Australia", p.112.114 Alice M. Moyle (as Alice Brown), Know YourOrchestra (Melbourne and London: F.W. Cheshire,1948).115 Alice M. Moyle, The Intervallic Structure ofAustralian Aboriginal Singing (M.A. Thesis, Depart-ment of Music, University of Sydney), 1957, p.6.116 Ibid, p.27.117 Ibid, p.29.118 Ibid, p.37.119 Ibid, p.54.120 Ibid, p.55.121 Ibid, p.55.122 Ibid, p.58.123 Ibid, p.60.124 Ibid, pp.67–8.125 Ibid, pp.61–2.126 Ibid, p.62.127 Ibid, p.63.128 Ibid, p.64.129 Ibid, p.81.130 Alice M. Moyle, "Sir Baldwin Spencer’s Record-ings of Australian Aboriginal Singing", Memoirs ofthe National Museum, vol.24, 1959, p.20.131 Ibid, p.21.132 Alice M. Moyle, "Two Native Song-Styles Recor-ded in Tasmania", The Papers and Proceedings of theRoyal Society of Tasmania, vol.94, 1960, p.73.133 Ibid, p.73.134 Ibid, p.74.135 Ibid, p.75.136 Alice M. Moyle, "Tasmanian Music, An Im-passe?", Records of the Queen Victoria Museum,vol.26, 1968, p.2.137 Ibid, p.5.

138 Ibid, p.5.139 Ibid, p.6.140 von Hornbostel, "The Ethnology of AfricanSound-Instruments", p.146.141 cf. Erica Brady, A Spiral Way: How the Phono-graph Changed Ethnography (Jackson: University Pressof Mississippi, 1999).

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the gestation of cross-cultural music...

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