Ethnomusicology: Towards the holistic study of music

Abstract

Throughout its history, ethnomusicology has been persistently regarded as a field of one or other of the two ‘parent’ disciplines from which it took issue rather than as a discipline in its own right. This, it is argued in the first section of the article, has had a significant impact on the search for definition, theory and method in the subject acting largely as a disincentive to the development of an independent theory and method with a precise set of research objectives. There has nevertheless been a convergence of several models in ethnomusicology over the last 25 years from quite separate traditions of scholarship, all of which advocate a comprehensive integrative approach to the study of music. These are discussed in the middle section of the article. Finally, as what might be seen as the logical culmination of recent developments, there is the presentation of a holistic model for the study of music.