The Anthropology of Music - Jazz: Beyond the Sound

Etnoantropološki Problemi, 2019

With the idea of popularizing the study of music in the local anthropological community, the national academic conference Anthropology of music was held at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade, on March 23, 2018. At the conference, 24 papers were presented. In the second and fourth issues of the journal Issues in Ethnology and Anthropology for the year 2018 thirteen papers were published from the above-mentioned conference. In this thematic issue we publish third and last part of articles concerning music: Ana Banić Grubišić and Nina Kulenović – Turbotronik – on the Border between the Local Music Scene and a Genre in the Making; Nina Kulenović and Ana Banić Grubišić – "Turbo-folk rocks!": new readings of turbo-folk; Marija Ajduk – Representing the Yugoslav New Wave in the Documentary Film "The New Wave in Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia as a Social Movement"; Ana Dajić and Sonja Radivojević – Radio "On the Cloud": New Author Approaches in C...

Toward a Sound Ecology, 2020

Ethnomusicology is the study of people making music. People make sounds that are recognized as music, and people also make “music” into a cultural domain. This 1989 conference paper defined ethnomusicology and contrasted music as a contingent cultural category with earlier scientific definitions that essentialized music as an object. It was published for the first time in Musicology Annual (2015). Here it is as reprinted, with a new introduction, in my book Toward a Sound Ecology: New and Selected Essays (Indiana University Press, 2020). The book is available from IU Press, the usual online sources, and your favorite independent bookstore.

Music has accompanied the development of every stage of human society since prehistoric times, reflecting the beliefs, problems, utopias and every type of meaning and thought that is part of a civilization. This presence and its impact throughout our evolution have turned it into the first subject of study for many areas of knowledge such as socio-musicology, psycho-musicology, musicology and ethnomusicology, where answers to many questions are meant to be found by means of researching every relationship of music with mankind and society, making the function of music itself one of the most important questions.

The study of jazz has been part of ethnomusicology since the 1940s, contributing meaningfully to the discipline's core theories and methodologies. In turn, ethnomusicological studies have profoundly colored jazz scholarship at large. This article surveys the literature of jazz ethnomusicology and its place within the contemporary Western academy, arguing that jazz studies is increasingly interdisciplinary. I offer the sanguine conclusion that in fact this interdisciplinarity has been precisely the goal of ethnomusicologists since the 1960s, and that accomplishing it allows for a broader conversation to take place between jazz scholars of various sorts and between scholars and practitioners. This is particularly important because, as this article contends, jazz ethnomusicologists-more than most other specialists in the discipline--commonly work in settings in which jazz performance is accorded a place of high value.

The syllabus for semester one of the UCLA Herb Alpert School of Music "core" class, 2010. Instructors: Fink, Rees, Bourland.

2002

German-language reader; other authors include Christian Broecking, Wolfram Knauer, Ursel Schlicht, Ingrid Monson, George E. Lewis, Peter Niklas Wilson, Ekkehard Jost. English-language version attached.

Topics in Cognitive Science, 2012

The vast majority of experimental studies of music to date have explored music in terms of the processes involved in the perception and cognition of complex sonic patterns that can elicit emotion. This paper argues that this conception of music is at odds both with recent Western musical scholarship and with ethnomusicological models, and that it presents a partial and culture-specific representation of what may be a generic human capacity. It argues that the cognitive sciences must actively engage with the problems of exploring music as manifested and conceived in the broad spectrum of world cultures, not only to elucidate the diversity of music in mind but also to identify potential commonalities that could illuminate the relationships between music and other domains of thought and behavior.

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