I'm an ethnomusicologist. Not everyone knows this word, so if you're introduced to me at a party, or if you strike up a conversation with me on an airplane, I'll probably tell you that I'm a "music professor" or a "music historian."
Pressed further, I will explain that I write books and articles and teach classes about music of the twentieth-century United States, particularly jazz and rock. “That sounds like an interesting job!” you might say, and I’ll wholeheartedly agree.
If, instead, I begin by saying that I’m an ethnomusicologist, you may very well ask, “What’s ethnomusicology?” That’s a harder question for me to answer.
Ethnomusicology has been defined in many different ways, largely because ethnomusicologists seem to study so many different subjects. Mantle Hood, who established the influential ethno-musicology program at UCLA, defined the field in 1963 as “the study of music in terms of itself and within the context of its society.” Alan Merriam, Hood’s contemporary at Indiana University, famously proposed “the study of music in culture” in 1960, modified this definition to “the study of music as culture” around 1973, and then in 1975 described ethnomusicologists as those who “see the focus of their study as human beings and work out from there, saying that ‘music is culture’ and ‘what musicians do is society.’” These very general definitions rely on the shaky assumption that we know what “music” is, which, strange as it may sound, is far from certain.
