The Seminal Eighties: A North American Perspective of

the Beginnings of Musicology and Ethnomusicology

Bruno Nettl

In 1935, Guido Adler, then professor of musicology at the University of Vienna,

published his autobiography.[2]He had had a long, illustrious career in which he had
done much to further the study of musicology. His autobiography says little, however,
about an article that he had published when he was quite a young man, in 1885 [3], but
possibly this article, on the scope, method, and goals of musicology is, among Adler's
achievements, the one we are most inclined to celebrate today -- more perhaps even
than his founding of the Denkmaeler der Tonkunst in Oesterreich, or his famous
methodology of music history [4] in which he laid down much of the generally accepted
methodology of music historical research, or his edition of the first major compendium
of music history.[5] The reason for our celebration of Adler's article of 1885 rests in
large measure on the fact that in it he stated, in unprecedentedly broad perspective, what
musicology should be. If Adler seemed later in his career to depart from his ideal, some
of us now feel that we should return to it.
In his autobiography, Adler himself already made it clear why his article was so
important, saying that music is an organism [6], implying a complex of interactions and
relationships, and going on to point out that in his "Habilitationsschrift," the study that
gave him the license to lecture at a university, he had used the approaches of
psychology, history, folkloristics and other fields to focus on the history of harmony [7].
Later, Adler became known as a kind of paradigmatic historian of European music
famed particularly for showing the world the grand history of art music in Austria. But
in 1885, he was a kind of firebrand, bringing to the world of scholarship a vision of a
new field, musicology, approaching his task with wide scope that was not soon if ever
shared by scholarship in the other arts.
The importance of the 1885 article lies in the way it lays out the field of
musicology. Let me remind you of the structure.[8] There are two major divisions,
historical and systematic, each with subdivisions. Historical musicology includes
paleography, taxonomy, the study of chronology (in music, theory, and practice), and,
as a kind of annex, the history of musical instruments. Systematic musicology includes
theory--the bases of harmony, rhythm, and melody; aesthetics; music pedagogy; and,
again as a kind of curious annex, something called "Musikologie," defined as
"comparative study for ethnographic purposes." There are several auxiliary sciences
whose inclusion persuades us that Adler regarded musicology to be closely related to
other fields. It's important, by the way, to point out that the kinds of considerations of
concern to ethnomusicology are not found exclusively in the annex of "Musikologie."
Adler's discussion of his chart places non-Western and comparative study, and the
relationship of music to the rest of culture, also within other aspects of the systematic
branch of musicology, particularly aesthetics; and in the historical branch as well.[9]
The classes of Adler's article stayed around for a long time; for example, in his
methodological handbook and in the textbook, Introduction to Musicology, by one of
his North American students, Glen Haydon.[10] By the fifties, it had split into three
classes, historical, ethnomusicological, and systematic, as indicated in the work of
Jacques Handschin.[11] But it is significant that in all this time, musicology, despite
some internecine strife and a lot of variety of opinion, has remained a single field in
which most individuals recognise that the rest, however far-flung their musical interests,
are colleagues. It continues to be thus defined in the dictionaries of music.
Well, if the division of a holistic musicology into such categories has become
old hat, a hundred years ago it was surely a new thing. Historiography of music goes
back a long way and includes such illustrious events as the histories, begun in 1776, by
Charles Burney [12] and William Hawkins,[13] and the first music dictionary in 1732 by
Johann Gottfried Walther. [14] I single out Adler's article as a starting point precisely
because it provides an outline for a discipline that includes all types of scholarly
concern with music. To be sure, Adler had predecessors, most obvious among them,
Friedrich Chrysander, who for a few years, beginning in 1863, published a periodical,
Jahrbücher für musikalische Wissenschaft. [15] In its preface, he asserts that this
"Wissenschaft" has several branches, history, aesthetics, theory, folk music scholarship
(including intercultural comparison), and the presentation, for practical musicianship, of
newly discovered works. This periodical soon disappeared for lack of support, but
Chrysander tells the reader that however many concerns are represented among scholars
involved with music, they have much in common and ought at least to share a
periodical.
In 1884, Chrysander, then about 59, the distinguished biographer and editor of
Handel's works, and Philip Spitta, then about 45, the great biographer of Bach, joined
with the youthful Adler, then living in Vienna but about to go to Prague to teach, in
founding the new Vierteljahrschrift für Musikwissenschaft.[16] I have little data, but it is
easy to imagine the older, established scholars permitting Adler, with his youthful
energy and enthusiasm, to be the principal architect of this venture, while also leaving
him most of the work. Anyway, Adler's view of the field as encompassing all
imaginable kinds of musical study, seems to have dominated this journal throughout the
ten years of its life. Adler's article leads the others and is presented as a kind of position
paper for what follows. In some ways, it reads like the work of a seasoned scholar,
stating its points with authority and even majesty. But on the other hand, to lay out a
field with courage and conviction, from scratch, may have been the characteristic
approach of a young man.
But then, 1885 was a time when much was being done with a lot of courage and
conviction, if not always with ethical conscience and good judgement. What was the
context in which Adler was working? Let me at random list just a few of the things that
were happening in 1885, and just before and after that year: Beginning in 1884, there
was series of conferences of European powers in which the continent of Africa was, as
it were, divided among them, in thoroughly cavalier fashion. In the United States, it was
a period of unrest on the labor front, and of large-scale immigration from Eastern and
Southern Europe; and the time of the infamous Haymarket riots in Chicago. But also, it
was the period in which the last group of American Indians, of the Plains, attempted to
oppose physically the domination by the whites, and it included the Ghost Dance
movement that culminated in the infamous massacre of Wounded Knee in 1890. The
1880s were a period of great technological innovation. Phonograph, electrical devices in
general, agricultural machinery, the single-cylinder engine, cameras. In 1885, the
fountain pen was invented, gold discovered in Transvaal, golf introduced to America,
and the first subway opened in London. 1885 saw the composition of Brahms' Fourth
and The Mikado; and the Oxford English Dictionary began publication, while the
decade also included publication -- never completed -- of Leopold von Ranke's grand
history of the world. These are a few events, but enough perhaps to give something of
the flavour of the time. Let me suggest that the history of musicology in the 1880s can
be interpreted as part of three related themes in the cultural and political history of the
period.
First, the 1880s were a time in which European society was ready to take on the
world, to devour it, in various ways, politically and culturally, but also in its learning
and art. It was a time when people tended very much to think big. Huge scholarly
projects, incredibly ambitious schemes of invention, vast projects in the arts were
typical, paralleling the insupportably grand political, social, and military schemes.
Second, there was an increasing interest in nationalism and in understanding the culture
of one's own nation. Taking on the world was to some extent a function of the growing
nationalism of the time, particularly, at that late date, of Germany and the U.S. And
third, a result perhaps of the first two, there appeared an interest in the relationship
among cultures, as Europe, devouring the world, had to digest its variety. Taking on the
world, doing the impossible; collecting and utilising one's own national heritage; and
seeing what the world was made of, and how it came to be; these are three major themes
of the 1880s. Let me move through them illustrating from the musicological literature of
the seminal 1880s.
1) It is easy to see how an Edison, a Ranke, a Wagner, a Cecil Rhodes could be
considered typical of an era in which people seemed to say; "let's grab the whole
world;" or, less politically and militarily; "let's learn everything about the world," and
also, "let's not be afraid to think big;" or perhaps, more to the point of scholarship. "we
can find out everything." For musicology, the conception of a holistic science seems to
me to fit this same pattern. Also, some of the large, comprehensive works of the field
date from this period, and it was then that the tradition of publishing complete
collections and comprehensive editions really took off, a movement also affected by
other motivations. Or, take Victor Mahillon's celebrated catalogue of instruments.
It's the catalogue of the instrument collection of the Royal Conservatory of
Brussels, begun in 1880, in five volumes.[17] The collection had some 3500 specimens,
and Mahillon developed a taxonomy (related to an old Indian system) that eventually
led to the now standard classification of Hornbostel and Sachs. Mahillon divides the
instrument groups into European and non-European, and gives a great deal of detail
about many items, including scales, details of structure and cultural interest. It's a
marvel of care and love. But the point is that Mahillon conceived of a work in which all
imaginable instruments might have a place, in which the whole world of instruments, as
it were, was encompassed. In the area of instruments, Mahillon was taking on the whole
world.
The idea of establishing a kind of framework into which one might place all
phenomena, from all cultures, in a particular class was to become a hallmark of later
ethnomusicology. For example, the kinds of frameworks for the description of all
possible kinds of scales and melodic contours, produced by Mieczyslaw Kolinski [18] in
the 1950s, harks back to Mahillon's approach. So of course does the cantometrics type
of analysis of Alan Lomax,[19] and in a different way, the analytical procedures of
Hornbostel and Abraham.[20].
Another way of "taking on the world" is exhibited in the comprehensive
collections of a variety of materials that were beginning to take shape in the 1880s. The
idea of producing the complete works of a composer was well established by 1880, as
editions of Mozart, Haydn, Bach, Handel, Beethoven had been published. Producing
large sets of significant early works such as the various Denkmaeler editions was
beginning. But more to my theme, putting together comprehensive editions of music
existing essentially in open corpus, a more difficult undertaking, may be illustrated by
two collections of German hymns, one for Catholic songs, by Wilhelm Bäumker, in
four volumes, 1883-1911,[21] a huge undertaking in which comprehensiveness is
attempted, and the Protestant counterpart by Johannes Zahn, six volumes, 1889-
1893.[22] Zahn's work, incidentally, became the basis of one of the earliest attempts to
establish a way of classifying folk songs, the system of Oswald Koller, basically a kind
of alphabetical index that was quickly supplanted by Ilmari Krohn's more musical one,
which in turn led eventually to the work of Bartók and others.
If the idea of taking on the world is reflected in musical scholarship, one would
expect to find something like a world ethnography of music. After all, if Ranke could
try to write a true history of the world (even if it turned out to be Europe to 1500), one
might expect someone to attempt a history of world music. Of course there isn't really
enough data for that today, and there certainly wasn't in 1885. The first large history of
Western music, by Ambros,[23] a kind of musical Ranke, must have been considerably
affected by social Darwinism and ideas of musical evolution, with non-Western people
occupying a role of prehistorical artefact. And yet there began to appear works that
showed that attempts at some kind of world ethnography of music might not be too far
in the offering. There were no works about world music; but there were works which
looked at a music from many sides, and saw it as a complex system.
Take for example Theodore Baker's dissertation, the first general work on
American Indian music, published in 1882.[24] Born in New York in 1851, Baker went
to study music in Leipzig, receiving his Ph.D. with the mentioned dissertation,
eventually returned to the U.S. and became an editor and lexicographer best known for
his excellent Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, whose latest edition appeared in
1985. His dissertation was written in German (was there an original English ms. from
which he translated? I've never found out.), and only a few years ago published in
English translation. It is usually mentioned as being only of historical interest. But it
predated the earliest tribal monographs on Indian music and the first general works on
ethnomusicology, and when I look at it, I continue to be impressed. There are chapters
about the various elements or parameters of music: poetry, tonality, melodic form,
rhythm, recitative, instruments, an organisation you might find in work of the 1950s.
Most interesting to me is Baker's introduction to music in Indian culture, giving a
viewpoint thatˇs not really very different from one we might express today -- if with
different terminology. In contrast to some later students, Baker does not denigrate
Native Americans and their music, taking it seriously and pointing out that it has a long
history, is closely related to social life, and shares in certain cultural universals. Let me
quote a paragraph from the translation:.
It would be difficult to say with certainty how the songs originated, or how they
maintained their present form and particular design. The Indian simplifies (to his own
way of thinking) the answer to this question by ascribing a supernatural origin to those
songs which are used at particular religious festivals, and he believes the newer songs to
be based on these models. Some writers are of the opinion that Indian songs were
originally a simple imitation of certain birds; they nevertheless show no intellectual
relationship between such trite attempts and the true and higher expression of feeling
that every music ought to be, and that the music of the Indians certainly is. A much
more obvious and legitimate hypothesis seems to be that these melodies are the result of
a long evolution in which, at its simplest, are rooted expressions of joy or grief common
to all people. This hypothesis is strengthened by the fact that according to it music rises
directly out of the human heart. It is further supported by the actual situation of the
music, which, as voiced by the Indians, is observed at its most basic stage of
development. In such cases, however, singing seldom appears to be an independent art,
but is almost always accompanied by various dances. In their general features, the
performances of the different Indian peoples show striking similarities.[25].
I also find myself impressed by Baker's sophistication in his description of
performance practice, done, I remind you, before the advent of recording. Dividing this
section into components rather in the manner of Lomax's cantometrics, but of course
with fewer parameters, Baker deals with consonants and vowels and their treatment,
with range, general quality of voice, aspects of singing style -- slide, growl, portamento
-- and ornamentation. He was sensitive to issues of performance practice almost fifty
years before Robert Haas's pioneering work on the subject. [26] Baker wanted to take on
all of the variety of Indian music, and also all aspects of the music and its cultural
context, and did what one could to do the field justice. Only lack of better and more data
and of developed technique prevented a more comprehensive result.
If this sympathetic approach to the music of the Indians is noteworthy, it's
interesting to see that it occurred at a time when Indians were very much in the forefront
of white American consciousness. On the one hand, the Indians were getting the worst
of treatment by white Americans, but they also began to be viewed as an issue in the
American body politic, and their culture as worthy of serious study. The 1880s was the
time in which the reservation system was finally being imposed on the Plains Indians. It
was the period in which vast quantities of Western lands opened to settlement, granted
to railroads, and fenced off. But also, in 1881, while Baker was writing in Leipzig,
Helen Hunt Jackson published an influential book, A Century of Dishonour, [27]arousing
concern over Indian problems and stimulating the founding of the Indian Rights
Association that lobbied successfully for liberalised legislation. And in 1888, Franz
Boas published his first large monograph, The Central Eskimo.[28] Baker's dissertation,
perhaps a curiosum, at the University of Leipzig, fits well into the beginnings of
American Indian study.
But if we speak of taking on the world, we can hardly do so without mentioning
Hugo Riemann, a towering figure who in literally dozens of volumes in his long career
tried to write about virtually everything musical. Born in 1849, he seemed to be almost
at his peak in the '80s. The total output of Riemann is downright frightening, but is not
totally uncharacteristic of scholars of his time. Today, such productivity is virtually
inconceivable, and one may marvel -- perhaps gratefully -- that times have changed so.
In the decade of the 1880s Riemann's publications largely concern music theory (though
his landmark history of music theory[29]was not to appear until 1898). There were about
ten books of a theoretical or theory-text nature, a couple on notation, and most
important, two major encyclopaedic efforts. One was the Musik-Lexikon[30] published
in 1882, which is still being edited and reedited although by now the contents have
turned over completely. Except for MGG and Grove, each with many authors, it is the
largest encyclopaedia of music, and it was first written entirely by one man. The second
major work of Riemann's in the 1880s was the Opernhandbuch, a comprehensive
dictionary of opera. [31] You can imagine that this didn't include a lot of the operas now
in our standard repertoire, Puccini, Strauss, Berg. But it seems to have an entry for
every opera known or discovered by then, and one on every subject on which an opera
was written, to say nothing of composers. Even now there is nothing like it in
comprehensiveness, given its time of publication. But in Riemann's oeuvre these two
works are almost drops in the bucket.
Riemann was one of those people who evidently thought that nothing worth
doing was too difficult to try. There were many scholars like that in his time, German
and others. Think of all the folk songs Bela Bartok collected in several cultures,
between 1900 and 1914, just in his spare time! Or think of Thomas Edison, if you will.
Or, for that matter, Boas. It was a time people in Western culture thought they could do
everything, conquer all worlds. Was it courage, or an incredible immodesty and greed?
I'm telling you about the grand accomplishments of the early musicologists, but I can't
quite avoid drawing a tenuous connection between Adler's dividing up the world of
musicology and the European powers dividing up Africa in the same year; and between
Riemann's incredible concentration and indefatigable work habits, his wish to contribute
something to every branch of music, and the 20th century Germans as would-be
conquerors of the world. But this is analysis long after the fact. Riemann surely
wouldn't have recognised himself in this parallel; and if his theories were sometimes a
bit zany, he seems in the vast majority of instances to have had his facts straight.
2) The development of national consciousness is an old story to students of 19th
century history, of course. But indeed, if one was taking on the world, one was doing it
in a sense on behalf of nationhood. And so, of course, there was much in the early
literature of musicology one of whose principal values was love and admiration of
nation. The Denkmaeler movement, emphasis on folk music collecting, national
orientation to the writing of music history books, all this is an obvious corollary. Since I
am approaching my task here largely through the examination of some major
publications of the 1880s, let me mention two which seem noteworthy in illustrating an
interest in moving through the various social strata that sometimes accompanied
nineteenth century cultural nationalism. Both make their readership aware of the music
of their whole society; all of the music. Along with the folk song collecting going on at
that time, there also developed a formidable literature about the concept of folk song.
Julian von Pulikowski,[32] in his large compendium of folk-song definitions, gives five
German publications of 1885 which discuss the concept of folk song or define it. (His
book certainly supports the contention that we have not progressed very far in the
delineation of categories or strata of music such as folk music.) The most interesting of
his five citations of 1885 is by Gustav Weber, a Swiss composer (1845-87) who, near
the end of his life, for some years edited the influential Zurich weekly Schweizerische
Musikzeitung. There is an article curiously entitled "Die Musik der Sinhalesen and
einige Bemerkungen ueber das Volkslied." Let me quote a passage, in my own
translation:[33].
"There are so many forms, and transitions between them, that it is often hard to
distinguish where folk song ends and art song or folk-like song begins. That the
composer may be unknown is a matter of coincidence, and cannot be a factor in the
decision. The fashioning of a simple melody, on the other hand, as the folk might wish
it, is so easy that any reasonably musical person could manage it. If someone, with more
or less good luck, has invented such a song, then it depends on the text, or on
coincidence, or extraneous circumstances, whether it becomes a true folk song. A true
folksong can be understood by anyone without artistic education, and it can be
composed, written, understood and sung by such a person. But it is maintained
specifically by oral tradition.
"Popular songs result from occasions or events, or from the desire on
somebody's part to show the folk how to sing; they are tossed into the folk culture and
held fast by it. Such songs are usually first printed, and then diffused by school teachers,
societies, or theaters. In the first category [folk song] we have before us artistic sounds
coming from nature, the capability of the artistic as it slumbers in the totality of human
spirit and breaks out in many little flames. In the second, folk-like or popular song,
these natural sounds are simply imitated.".
Weber mentions a third category, popular art songs and choral songs. I don't
think that this publication had much effect on later scholarship; but the attitudes that
dominated folk song conceptualisation for fifty years are very much in evidence: the
concern with definition; the categorization of music; the interest in transmission; the
relationship of folk, popular, and art song; the view of musical culture comprising
several strata.
My second example: In 1886 there appeared a two-volume work by Franz
Magnus Boehme Geschichte des Tanzes in Deutschland. [34] The author was a man who
was involved in many aspects of music, as composer, editor, choral conducting,
collecting and editing of folk songs, teaching elementary school in Weimar, Dresden,
and smaller towns of central Germany. In particular, he published folk song collections.
This book has the subtitle, translated as "A contribution to German history of customs,
literature and music." It's a rather comprehensive history, the kind of thing we might
call a historical ethnography of dance. It has chapters on various early periods in the
history of dance, but then also chapters on other topics such as these: Judgments and
preachings about dance from the Middle Ages to the modern era; official proscriptions
of dance; foreign dances in Germany in the 16th century; old German ritual dances that
have been maintained into the 19th century; all sorts of folk dances still danced today;
social dance in Germany; dance music and dance musicians; continuation of old folk
dances in modern children's games. The book presents dance as a part of culture in that
the attitudes towards dance are thoroughly examined, in its equal treatment of art,
popular, and folk dance; and in its study of acculturation in the relationship of German
and non-German dances. Boehme reflects the attitude of his time (or does he?) as at one
point, he becomes involved, defending the art of dance but also criticising the current
state of affairs:.
"Our social dancing is too fast, unattractive, and even dangerous to health. The
good old slow dances of earlier time, if old-fashioned and pedantic, though at least not
unhealthy, are everywhere scored and indeed hardly known; or the rapidity of our
lifestyle has transformed them into galloping tempo in order to satisfy humanity, that
living steam engine."[35]
I don't know how widespread this kind of attitude may have been in the 1880s.
To me it sounds very familiar.
3) If two of the themes of European history of the 1880s that informed
musicology were the discovery and conquest of the world, and the understanding of
one's national culture, it follows almost logically and inevitably that a third would in
some way combine these two into a concern with understanding the world that has been
politically or intellectually conquered, and the interrelationship of its cultures, and by
extension, of the components of these cultures. If we can argue about a date for the
beginnings of musicology as a whole, 1885, or 1776, or 1732 as I've already suggested,
it is difficult to relegate the beginnings of ethnomusicology to a decade other than the
1880s. It is in this decade that landmark publications and other events heralding the
principal issues and paradigms of later ethnomusicology first appeared. Intercultural
studies, field work, the study of music in culture, comparative organology, analytical
problems, all of these surfaced in a way almost simultaneously. All of this could
perhaps only have happened in an atmosphere holding a holistic view of musicology,
and so, I would contend, there is an intimate relationship between the three themes that I
have been illustrating, the beginning of musicology as a single, comprehensive
discipline, and the beginning of ethnomusicology. In a way, I'm even inclined to suggest
that the various kinds of historical study that had earlier been carried out required the
appearance of something later to be called ethnomusicology, in order to develop into a
discipline that could indeed properly be called musicology, rather than simply history of
music. The same kind of development somehow did not take place in the fields of visual
and literary art, something that has given those fields a rather different scholarly
ambience. The holistic view of musicology is excellently illustrated in the first volume
of the Vierteljahrschrift für Musikwissenschaft, [36] the publication whose centennial we
are noting. The table of contents shows an amazing variety of subject matter.
Immediately following Adler's seminal article is one by Chrysander, the famous Handel
scholar, on an unexpected subject: "Ueber die altindische Opfermusik." It is an analysis,
on the basis of Sanskritic and other Indological literature, of the Vedic chants. Mainly
of course about cultural context of music, it begins by taking issue with Sir William
Jones, the great Sanskritist who in 1799 had written the first Western study of Indian
music. [37] Almost a century after Jones, Chrysander starts in a style by now familiar: "It
is widely believed that we are excellently informed about the music of India," then
proceeds to criticise Jones, in particular because he does not deal with the essence of
Indian religious music.
Then there is a monographic study of Philip Spitta about Sperontes' Singende
Muse an der Pleisse, an eighteenth century collection of popular or vernacular music; an
article by George Ellinger on Handel's "Admetus" and its sources; and one by Paul Graf
Waldersee, about Vivaldi's violin concertos as arranged by Bach. Mathis Lussy's article
on correlation between meter and rhythm sets out problems in the analysis of the use of
time that are still with us and, it is particularly significant, criticises the emphasis on
harmony and neglect of rhythm by theorists. There is a large study by Carl Stumpf on
psychology of music in England, dealing in large measure with origin theories, and
summarising contributions by Herbert Spencer, James Sully, Charles Darwin and
Edmund Gurney. Then we have a study of the life and works of du Fay by Franz Xavier
Haberl. This table of contents shows the broad view of musicology that the editors
Chrysander, Spitta and Adler intend to pursue, and represented better than in the typical
contents of any periodical today. To summarise, the volume has articles on the
methodology of the field, on theory, psychology of music, sources, processes (the
arrangements by Bach), biographic, popular music, and non-western music. You can see
why this quarterly is often properly regarded as the centrepiece of a period in which
musicology as a discipline began.
Let me now turn briefly to the beginnings of ethnomusicology as a way of
studying the relationships of cultures, mentioning three important events. One was the
monographic article by Carl Stumpf about the music of the Bella Coola Indians,[38][ in
1886. It is often said to be the first article about a non-Western music, which isn't true;
or about a tribal music, which also isn't. It is so often referred to as a seminal work in
ethnomusicology principally, it seems to me, because it uses a procedure that then
began to be followed by Stumpf himself for various cultures, and eventually by
Hornbostel and Abraham, and others. Four areas of method in this article are worth
mentioning: a) It is centred on a set of transcriptions presented in the article. b) There is
element-by-element discussion of the musical style. c) Stumpf tells in detail how he
preceded in interviewing and transcribing something later scholars usually avoided. d)
He discusses his relationship to Nutsiliska, his singer, again something in which he
preceded general custom by a great deal. At the end is a statement placing Sumpf
squarely in the intellectual framework of ethnomusicolgy, but also in his own culture of
19th century Germany.
"On the eve of one of the days on which my friend Nutsiluska sang for me, I
heard in Leipzig a performance of Bach's B-minor Mass. It is doubtful that Nutsiluska
would have found enjoyment in that. I however had found my way into some of his
melodies and for days listened to them without discomfort. That is an advantage our
culture gives us. But still, we should not, even in musical matters, speak of wild,
uncultivated peoples. For in order to have a tone system with specific intervals, in order
to have expressive musical gestures, a degree of mental development must have
preceded, and no one has yet credibly described its external stages or its inner essentials.
The range of human development can perhaps be measured by the difference between
Bach and Nutsiluska." [39].
The second event is so obviously essential to the development of
ethnomusicology that one need hardly mention it. It is the first field recording of
American Indian music, and of any non-western music, by Walter Fewkes, in 1889.[40] I
don't have to talk about the importance of recording in the history of music and
musicology, and it is curious that historical musicologists haven't done more with it.
Fewkes recorded songs of the Passamaqoudy of Maine, and of the Zuni of Arizona.
Soon everybody was recording, and by 1901, two important archives had been
established, in Vienna and Berlin.
It's no surprise that musicology participated in the development of technology of
the time. But the 1880s were exceptional even in an exceptional period. After all, the
three-year span 1884-86 included the following: The first practical phonograph was
manufactured in 1885, and the fountain pen. Pasteur manufactured a vaccine for rabies;
George Eastman developed coated photographic paper, Galton proved the individuality
of fingerprints. The London tube and golf I've already mentioned. And so, the final
event of the 1880s draws on both technological and intellectual developments of the
1880s. If the true centrepiece of one end of our musicological table was the 1885 article
by Adler, at the other end we must place "On the Musical Scales of various Nations" by
Alexander John Ellis,[41] a large monograph often described as the first major study
providing comparative study. When he wrote it, Ellis was seventy and had made major
contributions to psychology, physiology, acoustics, and mathematics. In this study, Ellis
introduced the cents system as a device for universal measurement of tones. He
examines a large variety of tone systems and tunings, exhibiting the universe of scales,
and he approaches this variety with an essentially relativistic, not a normative or
evolutionist attitude. Each of the three events or publications seems to me to illustrate
the new approach to interrelationship of cultures in its own way, through intensive field
study, technology, and comparative material.
 Let me, in closing, return briefly to the two figures whose publications of 1885
we celebrate. What they said still rings true. Ellis begins his monograph:
"The title of this paper was meant to be 'On the Musical Scales of All Nations.' 'All' is a
big word, and I have had to withdraw it, and ... this term is too comprehensive."
But he concludes:
"...the Musical Scale is not one, not 'natural,' ...but very diverse, very artificial, and very
capricious."
Adler begins,
"Musicology began simultaneously with music. . . All peoples who can be said to have
music have a system of musical thought, even if this is not always a fully developed
musicological system".
Both statements move us in the direction of an appreciation of music as a
universal phenomenon, and in that of a culturally pluralistic view of music. I imagine
that these two men, Adler the innovative junior scholar and Ellis the distinguished man
of many accomplishments, looked to a future in which their principles were followed.
Each outlined a method whereby his aims could be carried out. It is because of their
concern with general principles of research, with the basic assumptions that underlie it,
and with method, that they deserve to be celebrated as representatives of the seminal
1880s, a period in which scholarship sowed the seeds of much that has taken place in
the century that followed.