Introduction to the Social and Cultural Study of Music

Martin Stokes

The Social and Cultural Study of Music

• “Music historians drew on three patently incongruous axioms as though they were self-evident truths: (1) that outstanding composers ‘made’ music history (histories of eighteenth- and ninteenth-century music in particular turned into stylised heroiades); (2) that musical genres evolve in the same way as natural organisms (as though music history were part of natural history); and (3) that this evolution in the musical culture of a nation expresses and embodies its ‘national spirit’ (as though north and south Germany shared a common ‘national music history).”

• Carl Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1983: 131) (Grundlagen der Musikgeschichte, Cologne: Gerig, 1967)

The Social and Cultural Study of Music: Responses to Music

History’s ‘crisis’.

• Music history (critical theory, ‘post-modernism’, post-structuralism)

• Music theory/analysis (structuralism, formalism)• Ethnomusicology (anthropology)• Popular music studies (sociology, ‘cultural studies’)

The Social and Cultural Study of Music: Ethnomusicology

‘Montaigne, 1580, ‘Des Cannibales’, Jean de Lery in Rio de Janeiro; sameness.

Orientalism; the Napoleonic expedition to Egypt (1798); difference.“Umfang, Methode und Ziel der Musikwissenschaft” (Adler 1885);

Vergleichende Musikwissenschaft - ‘Comparative Musicology’Music psychology; sound recording archives; Edison’s phonograph;

‘Kulturkreise ethnology (1920-30s).‘Ethno-musicology’; the anthropology of music; Jaap Kunst (1950); the

North American turn; ‘ethnography’, ‘field work’.

The Social and Cultural Study of Music: Southeast Asia, Australasia and

Melanesia 1

KarawitanCentral

Javanese Gamelan

Ben Brinner, Marc Perlman

The Social and Cultural Study of Music: Southeast Asia, Australasia and

Melanesia 2

• Wangga• Daly Region, North

Australia• Allan Marret

The Social and Cultural Study of Music: Southeast Asia, Australasia and

Melanesia 3

• Gisalo• Papua New Guinea• Steven Feld

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