Historically ethnomusicology has been a scholarly discipline primarily within
     universities in the USA, Canada and Europe (see §II). Its specialists are
     trained in music or in anthropology, sometimes in both. Research is
     undertaken in university departments of music or anthropology, in
     ethnographic museums and in research institutes of national academies of
     science, found particularly in Eastern Europe. As the following survey of
     musical activities illustrates (§II below), a multitude of musical research was
     being undertaken by a range of people from many Western countries prior to
     World War II including ethnologists, anthropologists, sociologists,
     comparative musicologists, folklorists, psychologists, physicists,
     missionaries, clerics, explorers, civil servants and enthusiasts, forming
     multiple influences both inside and outside the academy that affected
     contemporary thinking. This melting pot includes distinctive figures who have
     been simultaneously co-opted into the lineages of different disciplines.
     Ethnomusicologists and scholars in Folk Life Studies or Folkloristics, for
     instance, lay equal claim in their disciplinary ancestry to the English folksong
     collector CECIL J. SHARP (see also FOLK MUSIC, ENGLAND, §II), the American
     CHARLES SEEGER or the Hungarians BéLA BARTóK and ZOLTAN KODáLY,
     despite these individuals' own perceptions of their affiliations.

     Similarly, a single geneological line is difficult to create for any single country,
     since these will vary individually according to a combination of personal
     interest and professional and cultural orientations. For instance, the myth of
     origin of the American discipline may be projected back to ‘founding fathers’
     such as ERICH MORITZ VON HORNBOSTEL (1877–1935), who taught a heady
     interdisciplinary mix of music psychology, comparative musicology and music
     ethnology (Musikalische Völkerkunde, Musikethnologie) in Berlin supported
     by his mentor CARL STUMPF; FRANZ BOAS (1858–1942) who, after moving to
     North America from Berlin in the 1880s, established fieldwork as a
     prerequisite of American anthropology and through his students influenced
     the anthropological strand of ethnomusicology; to GEORGE HERZOG
     (1901–84), Hornbostel's student, who moved to Columbia University to study
     anthropology with Boas and established a consistent methodology for
     comparative musicological study and archival work; Charles Seeger
     (1886–1979) with his interest in vernacular musics and linguistics; and
     eventually to the musicological methods of MANTLE HOOD and the
     anthropological methods of ALAN P. MERRIAM which exacerbated the
     theoretical and methodological ‘great divide’. Alternative lineages might point
     to the work of ‘founding mothers’, such as Alice Cunningham Fletcher
     (1838–1923), who collaborated with the Omaha Indian Francis La Flesche
     (1857–1932) throughout her life, and Frances Densmore (1867–1957),
     author of over a dozen monographs on different Amerindian groups. Or they
     might draw upon figures from different disicplines relevant to the multiple
     approaches that have traditionally contributed to our understanding of music,
     such as MUSICOLOGY, sociology, social and cultural anthropology, linguistics,
     psychology, folklore, political science and economics.

     In Britain, the ‘father of Ethnomusicology’ is perceived generally as the British
     physicist and phonetician, ALEXANDER JOHN ELLIS (1814–90) who suggested
     that ‘acoustical phenomena’ should be studied by scientists rather than
     musicians, since those who had been trained in particular musical systems
     tended to consider ‘familiar’ sounds as ‘natural’ (1885). That the
     conceptualization of music – the way we listen to and evaluate musical
     sounds – is not value free was later to be developed in the British context by
     JOHN BLACKING in his theories on music as ‘humanly organized sound’. An
     anthropologist and ethnomusicologist from Cambridge is bound to point out
     the term ‘fieldwork’ was appropriated from natural science for anthropology
     by the ethnologist Alfred Cort Haddon, who led the ‘Cambridge
     Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait’ in 1898. This multidisciplinary
     project, which included the physician and musician Charles Myers and
     photographer Anthony Wilkin, was equipped with the high technology of the
     day: two phonographs with recording and playback facility, a cine camera,
     still cameras and a magic lantern projector. Recordings of music on wax
     cylinders, some of which were transcribed using Ellis's system of ‘cents’
     (division of the equal-tempered semitone into 100 equal parts), are now
     housed in the British Library National Sound Archives in the UK (Clayton,
     1996) and Australia. The film – the first piece of ethnographic film made in
     the field – which depicts dance sequences performed at re-enactments of the
     Malu-Bomai ceremonies – is now in the National Film Archives in the UK and
     the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in
     Canberra. Several hundred field photographs including some of the masked
     dances of the Malu-Bomai cult are in the collections of the Cambridge
     Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The emphasis on direct field
     research on this expedition provided the basis for the development of
     intensive fieldwork as the essential methodology of British anthropology: ‘the
     ethnographic method’. Haddon's evocative description of the dance
     emphasizes ‘performance’ and ‘experience’ both of which are very much to
     the fore in contemporary ethnomusicological writings. From these origins,
     then, the anthropological lineage proceeds through the theoretical
     developments of Bronislaw Malinowski's strategizing Trobriand performer
     constantly reshaping tradition, through Radcliffe-Brown's elucidation of the
     power of the Andaman Islanders' music and dance to act as a moral force on
     the indivual (1922) and the parallel developments in; comparative musicology
     (e.g. Fox Strangways, 1914) and folk music research (Cecil Sharp and his
     descendants) before proceeding through Hamish Henderson at the School of
     Scottish Studies and John Blacking who moved from Cambridge to Paris
     then Belfast.

     In addition to cropping up in different disciplinary lineages, certain
     personages appear in the national lineages of the same discipline. For
     instance, CONSTANTIN BR?ILOIU who, following the Romanian Sociological
     School shaped by Dimitrie Gusti argued that music was indissolubly attached
     to social phenomena, is important for French, Romanian and Swiss
     ethnomusicology.

     Not for the first time, ethnomusicology is faced with the need to reassess its
     perceptions of history (compare, for instance, the historical methodologies of
     §II and §III below), its subject matter, methods and ethics (see §IV). The
     subject matter of ethnomusicology has been constantly debated since its
     inception. Initially, it was perceived as all music outside the Western
     European art tradition and intended to exclude Western art and popular
     musics. It concerned itself with the musics of non-literate peoples; the orally
     transmitted music of cultures then perceived to be ‘high’ such as the
     traditional court and urban musics of China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, India,
     Iran and other Arabic-speaking countries; and ‘folk music’, which Nettl (1964)
     tentatively defined as the music in oral tradition found in those areas
     dominated by high cultures. At the beginning of the 21st century,
     ethnomusicology embraces the study of all musics in local and global
     contexts. Concerned primarily with living music (including music, song, dance
     and instruments), recent studies have also investigated music history (Blum,
     Bohlman and Neuman, 1991). A discipline that first examined music ‘in
     culture’ (Merriam, 1964) and then ‘as culture’, and has had ‘fieldwork’ as
     integral to its methodology now presents both ‘culture’ and ‘fieldwork’ as
     problematics rather than givens (see §IV).

     Since its inception, ethnomusicology has always seen connections between
     itself and other disciplines, as outlined above. It never fitted happily into the
     modernist dichotomization between ‘us’ and ‘them’; the contemporary hot
     debate on whether musicology is part of ethnomusicology or vice versa
     therefore becomes irrelevant. Musicology is one of many theoretical and
     methodological interweaving strands in a discipline that recently moved in the
     West from concentrating on the traditional musics of the exotically removed
      ‘other’ to POPULAR MUSIC, both local and global, (e.g. Manuel, 1988;
     Waterman, 1990; Berliner, 1994; Mitchell, 1996; Schade-Poulsen, 1999),
     World music (e.g. Keil and Feld, 1994) and Western ‘art’ music (e.g. Born,
     1995); from traditional interdisciplinary relationships to contemporary
     interactions with disciplines such as cultural studies (e.g. Lloyd, 1993; Straw,
     1994) and performance studies (e.g. Schechner and Appel, 1990;
     Schieffelin, 1994; Pegg 2001); and from homogeneous, structural and
     interpretive perspectives to those of experience (e.g. Rice, 1994; Blacking,
     1995). Ethnomusicology as a discipline is not homogeneous and, clearly, is
     no longer confined to the West or to Europe. It is now well placed to take on
     board the diverse national ethnomusicologies represented in this dictionary
     which include those who recently emerged from the former Soviet Union,
     non-European scholars and musicians untrained in the Western system.