Modeling Ethnomusicology

Abstract

Abstract This book collects eight essays, plus a new introduction, about the field of ethnomusicology. The book proposes a variety of models that illuminate the nature of ethnomusicology. Some of these models pull together disparate strands of the field, such as the nature of field research, what ethnomusicologists have claimed about the nature of music, the way they have included the study of individuals within their studies of musical cultures, and the way their work coalesces around certain themes such as identity, musical meaning, and musical experience. Others propose heuristic models for researchers to generate use as they plan and conduct their research: models for the formative processes in music, for how to understand subject-centered musical experience, and for the nature of ethnomusicological theory and theorizing. After reviewing the history of the author's writing about ethnomusicology, the introduction concludes with a new fifteen-item list of the ways ethnomusicologists theorize. Rather than focus on the theories that ethnomusicologists have used to guide their work, the list illustrates the way ethnomusicologists do theory, that is, theorize. The list is grouped into four large categories that move from low-level description and classification to high-level thinking and theorizing: (1) organizing the data, (2) structuring the data, (3) explaining the data, and (4) synthesizing the data. Thus, the book summarizes the author's thirty-year-long engagement with theory and theorizing in ethnomusicology and proposes yet one more new model for theorizing in ethnomusicology and theorizing by ethnomusicologists.

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