Art & MusicGreek → English
Ethnomusicology
/ˌɛθnoʊmjuːzɪˈkɒlədʒi/noun
The study of music as a social and cultural practice, usually through fieldwork.
The Greek roots
ἔθνος
éthnos
nation, people
μουσική
mousikḗ
art of the Muses
-λογία
-logía
study, discourse
Literally: “study of the music of peoples”
The story of the word
Jaap Kunst coined the word in 1950 to replace comparative musicology, a label that had acquired a bad name because the comparison always ran outward from a European standard. The replacement names a discipline built on fieldwork rather than transcription at a distance. ἔθνος means a people or a nation, the same word inside ethnic and ethnography, and in the New Testament it is the standard word for the gentiles.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific coinage → English
- First recorded
- 1950
Same family
ethnicethnographymusicologyethnocentric
In a sentence
Her ethnomusicology fieldwork was two years of village weddings and a great deal of tape.