SEM History Post

A first look at the first issue of "Ethnomusicology" yields some surprising results. Because it began as a newsletter out of the ashes of the American Society for Comparative Musicology, the initial purpose of "Ethnomusicology" was to create a network or community of people interested in this field of study. To this end, most of what is featured in early versions of the journal can be categorized as resources and requests - lists of people and what they are working on, lists of books to read, lists of available courses, lists of places in need of ethnomusicologists, and lists of musical cultures recommended for study. An interesting, but separate, topic of discussion would be how much simpler this all would have been to establish in a time like now, where the internet thrives.

The states of individual projects mirrored the state of the field of ethnomusicology as a whole. There were lots of people and projects waiting for resources, like flowerbuds waiting for the right time to bloom, and there were lots of works in progress steadily gaining momentum. It was well-established that this was a pivotal time for the field; F.A. Cuttner writes in the second issue, "I have come to believe that the whole system of comparative methods is obsolete and inadequate, and that something else and much better will have to replace it if we are going to expect any significant progress in the future." This foreshadowed the changes in approach to ethnomusicological methods, but also demonstrated that the newsletter was a way to spread sentiments like these across a large group of researchers.

Interesting points of emphasis in these early project descriptions were quantities of material recorded (probably because one can't actually include the recordings themselves in the newsletter), technologies used in recording (possibly as advice / setting a standard), and Native American study subjects (probably convenient cultures to study). The structure of the content being presented is questionable at points, with concise summaries of a project and the hypotheses involved sometimes being all too general. The tone, at points, seems like the main purpose of "Ethnomusicology" was to record all these people and projects for posterity's sake. There are also examples of ethnomusicologists trying or hoping to extrapolate their specific studies to universal truths about music too quickly, one of my pet peeves in the world of ethnomusicology.

As the decade progressed, "Ethnomusicology" changed its format greatly, to that of a journal. Content was emphasized much more, featuring full articles on specific topics. Why wasn't it this way in the first place? I would say that by this time, one of the original goal of the newsletter, establishing a community network of ethnomusicologists, had been accomplished. Now the content of the journal could move past "resources useful in establishing a community" to "resources useful to an established community." "Ethnomusicology" seems to have done a good job keeping in step and evolving with the state and the needs of both the field and those who studied it in the 1950's.