The term ‘ethnomusicology’ was coined in 1959 by Dutch academic, Jaap Kunst.  Put simply, it is the social and cultural study of music – whether that is gamelan, hip hop, British folk or any other kind.

A Spanish translation of this podcast is set out below the English transcript.  We are very grateful to Héctor Pittman Villarreal for producing it for us.

Jo Barratt and Sarah Winkler Reid went to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford to interview Dr Noel Lobley, the museum’s ethnomusicologist to find out more about ethnomusicology and hear about his personal experiences working particularly in the Eastern Cape of South Africa.

Jo and Sarah have produced 2 other podcasts from the Pitt Rivers collection:

Pitt Rivers Collection: Louis Sarno and the BayAka
Pitt Rivers Collection: Reel to Real

Noel Lobley:  What is ethnomusicology?  That’s a good question and it has been debated and argued about for at least the last 60 years. Ethnomusicology was coined as an academic term in 1959 by Jaap Kunst, a Dutch scholar working mainly in Indonesia.  Before that ethnomusicology was known as comparative musicology.

Simplistically, it is the social and cultural study of music.  It’s very interdisciplinary, it was originally a divergence from more traditional musicology, which was very much about wertern art music, about the cannon, German composers,  this is the only music that matters. Ethnomusicologists were those who started to be interested in Indian music, folk music - just the variety of musics that are out there in the world- and realised that the musicological approach (transcription, score based analysis) doesn’t necessarily apply or doesn’t work anything like what we understand as harmony.

Musicologists realised they needed different methods of dealing with different musics, so they started to say it is the study of music in culture, music as culture, the study of all the human processes that are important in the making of music eg psychology, biology, what happens in the cells.  But the most important threads are still the anthropological approaches to music.  This means participant observation, fieldwork, long term immersion with a culture.  Ethnomusicology used to be defined by what it studied, but it isn’t any more because Ethnomusicologists study techno, hip hop, noiseart.  I don’t think there is a genre of music or sound that Ethnomusicologists don't look at now.  It's not just traditional music from Africa or India.  It's the social and cultural study of music, trying to find interdisciplinary ways of understanding what enable us to make music.

Sometimes that involves non-human processes.  There is research into the relationship between insect sounds, bird sounds and whale sounds, and our music. The natural environment and our music.

So it is a very vibrant and exciting area of musical study.

Jo Barratt: Does this mean recorded sound is your primary source?

NL: In the development of ethnomusicology recording has been hugely influential. , - the making of ethnographic recordings, where scholars/researchers/travellers/ anthropologists went somewhere and made their recordings. As soon as the invention of the phonograph in 1877, it has probably been the central method, alongside participant observation.

Ethnomusicologists used to do analysis just through recordings, which might not have bee made by them, so they could listen to the recorded objects and they might get it worng, through not understanding the context - not knowing what went into making the recording.  If the recording is too fast and there is no picture reference you can make mistakes.

But the recorded object has been hugely influential. We've made millions of hours of these ethnomusicology recordings, piled them up in sound archives or private collections.  But the next stage, what to do with those documents is not always so obvious.  Traditionally once they'd been transcribed the recording would be discarded,

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